I’m very glad that people feel reluctant to express some of those opinions, especially in the unexplained, offensive format that they were expressed in those answers.
Also, some of the comments have very similar wording, which makes me suspect that someone/some people inputted multiple entries.
The way this was presented I would expect that people state their thesis but not the explanation. It’s “what is unpopular opinion” thread, not a “explain your unpopular opinion” thread.
Even though it may be presented this way, I think it would be valuable if people explained their statements more. E.g., three people wrote that “we should evaluate reducing abortions as an EA cause” or something along those lines, but none of them explained why they think it’s promising. If someone could write an elevator pitch for it as an answer to the form (or this comment), I’d be interested to read.
I would expect that apart from contraception global health interventions to be most helpful in reducing deaths of unborn humans. Miscarriages and stillbirths are a much bigger deal than abortions, and in developing countries there is still a lot of room for health interventions to help for little money.
I would be surprised if other interventions to reduce unborn deaths were very cost-effective, even if you have a worldview which values embryos as much as newborns.*
I’d just be curious to see a writeup, especially of the impact of contraception access. Unborn humans don’t feature in traditional QALY-based effectiveness analyses and I’d be interested how the results would change if they were included, even if at a discounted rate. I am not expecting this to be a promising area for most people interested in effective altruism.
*An exception might be if you value pre-implantation blastocysts as much as born humans, in which case your priority could well be to sterilize everyone. See also Toby Ord’s paper The Scourge.
Yeah I think you have to view this exercise as optimizing for one end of the correctness-originality spectrum. Most of what is submitted is going to be uncomfortable admitting in public because it’s just plain wrong, so if this exercise is to have any value at all, it’s in sifting through all the nonsense, some of it pretty rotten, in the hope of finding one or two actually interesting things in there.
Also, some of the comments have very similar wording, which makes me suspect that someone/some people inputted multiple entries.
The post also didn’t specify one submission per person, so I wouldn’t really count this against anyone. In some cases, it’s clear that the submitter was making no attempt to hide it; at least one even referenced their previous submission.
I’m very glad that people feel reluctant to express some of those opinions, especially in the unexplained, offensive format that they were expressed in those answers.
Also, some of the comments have very similar wording, which makes me suspect that someone/some people inputted multiple entries.
The way this was presented I would expect that people state their thesis but not the explanation. It’s “what is unpopular opinion” thread, not a “explain your unpopular opinion” thread.
Even though it may be presented this way, I think it would be valuable if people explained their statements more. E.g., three people wrote that “we should evaluate reducing abortions as an EA cause” or something along those lines, but none of them explained why they think it’s promising. If someone could write an elevator pitch for it as an answer to the form (or this comment), I’d be interested to read.
The case for abortion in EA was defended in this Reddit post.
I would expect that apart from contraception global health interventions to be most helpful in reducing deaths of unborn humans. Miscarriages and stillbirths are a much bigger deal than abortions, and in developing countries there is still a lot of room for health interventions to help for little money.
I would be surprised if other interventions to reduce unborn deaths were very cost-effective, even if you have a worldview which values embryos as much as newborns.*
I’d just be curious to see a writeup, especially of the impact of contraception access. Unborn humans don’t feature in traditional QALY-based effectiveness analyses and I’d be interested how the results would change if they were included, even if at a discounted rate. I am not expecting this to be a promising area for most people interested in effective altruism.
*An exception might be if you value pre-implantation blastocysts as much as born humans, in which case your priority could well be to sterilize everyone. See also Toby Ord’s paper The Scourge.
Abortion was discussed a bit in the first version of this post.
Yeah I think you have to view this exercise as optimizing for one end of the correctness-originality spectrum. Most of what is submitted is going to be uncomfortable admitting in public because it’s just plain wrong, so if this exercise is to have any value at all, it’s in sifting through all the nonsense, some of it pretty rotten, in the hope of finding one or two actually interesting things in there.
I think there are more than “one or two” interesting things there.
The post also didn’t specify one submission per person, so I wouldn’t really count this against anyone. In some cases, it’s clear that the submitter was making no attempt to hide it; at least one even referenced their previous submission.