AGB 🔸

Karma: 3,904

AGB 🔸Mar 25, 2021, 12:16 AM
23 points
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in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”
+1. A short version of my thoughts here is that I’d be interested in changing the EA name if we can find a better alternative, because it does have some downsides, but this particular alternative seems worse from a strict persuasion perspective.

Most of the pushback I feel when talking to otherwise-promising people about EA is not really as much about content as it is about framing: it’s people feeling EA is too cold, too uncaring, too Spock-like, too thoughtless about the impact it might have on those causes deemed ineffective, too naive to realise the impact living this way will have on the people who dive into it. I think you can see this in many critiques.

(Obviously, this isn’t universal; some people embrace the Spock-like-mindset and the quantification. I do, to some extent, or I wouldn’t be here. But I’ve been steadily more convinced over the years that it’s a small minority.)

You can fight this by framing your ideas in warmer terms, but it does seem like starting at ‘Global Priorities community’ makes the battle more uphill. And I find losing this group sad, because I think the actual EA community is relatively warm, but first impressions are tough to overcome.

Low confidence on all of the above, would be happy to see data.

AGB 🔸Mar 23, 2021, 11:18 PM
16 points
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in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021
I think similar adjustments should be made if you are extrapolating to crimes with very different prevalence. For example, the US murder rate is 4-5x that of the UK, but I wouldn’t expect the US to have that many more bike thefts.

Proxy seems fine if you’re focused on which country/city/etc. has higher overall crime, rather than estimating magnitude.

(FWIW, attempt at Googling the above suggest ~300k bike thefts per year in UK versus 2m in US, US population 5x bigger so that’s only 1.33x the UK rate. A quick check on bicycle sales in the two countries does not suggest that this is because of very different cycling rates. No links because on phone, but above is very rough anyway. I’m left with somewhat greater confidence that the gap is in fact <<4x, like 1.2x − 2x, though.)

Similar comments could be made about extrapolating from the large number of US billionaires (way more per capita than any other country IIRC) to the relative rates of people earning more than $200k/$50k/etc. That case might be more intuitive.

AGB 🔸Mar 23, 2021, 7:56 PM
26 points
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in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021
(Arguably nitpicking, in the sense that I suspect this would not change the bottom line, posted because the use of stats here raised my eyebrows)
For some calibration, risk of drug abuse, which is a reasonable baseline for other types of violent behavior as well, is about 2-3x in adopted children. This is not conditioning on it being a teenager adoption, which I expect would likely increase the ratio to more something like 3-4x, given the additional negative selection effects.
Sibling abuse rates are something like 20% (or 80% depending on your definition). And is the most frequent form of household abuse. This means by adopting a child you are adding something like an additional 60% chance of your other child going through at least some level of abuse
For the benefit of those who didn’t click through the link, the rate on their chosen measure is very roughly 3.5% for adoptees versus roughly 1.5% for the general population, which I assume is where the 2-3x came from. I also buy that by adopting a teenager this number is going to be pushed up towards the foster child outcomes (~8%); a guess like 5% (“3-4x”) seems reasonable.
But you can’t directly extrapolate from the ratio on a rare outcome to a typical outcome, e.g. a 20% → 67% (67 = 20 * 5 / 1.5) change in the absolute likelihood of sibling abuse, which I think is basically what you are doing here, though do correct me if I’m wrong since there were some numbers you gave I couldn’t follow. The statistical intuition going into that is rough, but here’s a concrete, if technical, example:
A 1.5% bad tail outcome in a normal distribution means you are 2.17 standard deviations below the mean, a 5% tail outcome means you are 1.64 SDs below the mean, and so you would go 1.5% → 5% just by dropping the mean by 0.53 SDs. But this would only move a 20% likelihood outcome to 38%, well short of 67% or even your 60%. To get a 20% outcome to 60% you need a 1.1 SD move, which would be equivalent to a 1.5% outcome becoming 14%. The choice of normal distribution in the above is arbitrary, but I expect the pattern to hold among reasonable choices for this case.
In less technical language: you don’t have to move a distribution very much to change the probability of tail outcomes by a lot, whereas almost by definition you do have to move a distribution a lot to change the probability of typical outcomes by a lot.

AGB 🔸Mar 23, 2021, 5:20 PM
4 points
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in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Responses and Testimonies on EA Growth
I agree with a lot of this, and I appreciated both the message and the effort put into this comment. Well-substantiated criticism is very valuable.
I do want to note that GWWC being scaled back was flagged elsewhere, most explicitly in Ben Todd’s comment (currently 2nd highest upvoted on that thread). But for example, Scott’s linked reddit comment also alludes to this, via talking about the decreased interest in seeking financial contributions.
But it’s true that in neither case would I expect the typical reader to come away with the impression that a mistake was made, which I think is your main point and a good one. This is tricky because I think there’s significant disagreement about whether this was a mistake or a correct strategic call, and in some cases I think what is going on is that the writer thinks the call was correct (in spite of CEA now thinking otherwise), rather than simply refusing to acknowledge past errors.

AGB 🔸Mar 19, 2021, 5:51 PM
3 points
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on: What do you make of the doomsday argument?
With low confidence, I think I agree with this framing.
If correct, then I think the point is that seeing us at an ‘early point in history’ updates us against a big future, but the fact we exist at all updates in favour of a big future, and these cancel out.
You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God:
“I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it.
If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box.
To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?”
You think briefly, and decide you should bet your eternal soul on tails. The fact that you woke up at all seems like pretty good evidence that you’re in the big world — if the coin landed tails, way more people should be having an experience just like yours.
But then you get up, walk outside, and look at the number on your box.
‘3’. Huh. Now you don’t know what to believe.
If God made 10 billion boxes, surely it’s much more likely that you would have seen a number like 7,346,678,928?

AGB 🔸Mar 19, 2021, 4:10 PM
6 points
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on: Politics is far too meta
Weirdly, I found this post a bit ‘too meta’, in the sense that there are a lot of assertions and not a lot of effort to provide evidence or otherwise convince me that these claims are actually true. Some claims I agree with anyway (e.g. I think you can reasonably declare political feasibility ‘out-of-scope’ in early-stage brainstorming), some I don’t. Here’s the bit that my gut most strongly disagrees with:
A good test is to ask, when right things are done on the margin, what happens? When we move in the direction of good policies or correct statements, how does the media react? How does the public react?
This does eventually happen on almost every issue.
The answer is almost universally that the change is accepted.
***
This is a pure ‘they’ll like us when we win.’ Everyone’s defending the current actions of the powerful in deference to power.
I agree this is a good test. But I have the opposite gut sense of what happens when this test has been carried out. In general, I think there is backlash. Examples:
After Obama was elected, did the people who were not sold on a Black person being president disappear ‘in deference to power’? Not exactly.
After Trump was elected on the back of anti-immigration statements and enacted anti-immigration policies, support for immigration rose.
In the UK, there has also been a sharp rise in support for immigration since 2010 (when the Conservatives came to power with a mandate to reduce immigration), including during the Brexit referendum campaign and Brexit itself; i.e. while the UK’s effective policy on immigration has been becoming tighter, public opinion has been moving in the exact opposite direction. While I don’t have the data to hand, I’m fairly sure the opposite happened during the high-immigration years of the 2000s; as public policy got looser, public opinion got tighter. So this is a case where regardless of whether you think the good policy is ‘reducing immigration’ or ‘increasing immigration’, it seems clear that your favoured path being taken did not lead to a virtuous cycle of more support for the good thing.
A less talked-about example: some politicians in the UK traced the Brexit vote to a conservative backlash after the legalisation of gay marriage; this is the clearest ‘good policy/right thing’ of the bunch in my personal view, and yet still it was not accepted once implemented.
***
There are more examples, but you get the idea. I’d be interested in any attempt to make the opposite case, that people do generally fall in line, on the object-level.
I have noted this happening a lot with COVID specifically, but I considered it an anomaly that probably has something to do with the specifics of the COVID situation (at a guess, the fact that it hasn’t been going on for that long, so a rather large number of people don’t have settled and hard-to-change views, instead they just go along with whatever authority is doing), rather than a generalisable truth we can apply in other areas.

AGB 🔸Mar 17, 2021, 11:18 AM
24 points
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on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
This has been a philosophical commitment since the early days of EA, yet information on how we (or the charities we prioritize) actually confirm with recipients that our programs are having the predicted positive impact on them receives, AFAICT, little attention in EA.

[Within footnote] As an example, after ten minutes of searching I could not find information on GiveWell’s overall view on this subject on their website.
FWIW, the most closely related Givewell article I’m aware of is How not to be a “white in shining armor”. Relevant excerpts (emphasis in original):
We fundamentally believe that progress on most problems must be locally driven. So we seek to improve people’s abilities to make progress on their own, rather than taking personal responsibility for each of their challenges. How can we best accomplish this?...
A common and intuitively appealing answer is letting locals drive philanthropic projects...At the same time, we have noted some major challenges of doing things this way. Which locals should be put in charge?...
Another approach to “putting locals in the driver’s seat” is quite different. It comes down to acknowledging that as funders, we will always be outsiders, so we should focus on helping with what we’re good at helping with and leave the rest up to locals...
It’s not that we think global health and nutrition are the only important, or even the most important, problems in the developing world. It’s that we’re trying to focus on what we can do well, and thus maximally empower people to make locally-driven progress on other fronts.

AGB 🔸Mar 17, 2021, 10:51 AM
9 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Why do so few EAs and Rationalists have children?
Worth noting that you might get increased meaningfulness in exchange for the lost happiness
FWIW, I think this accidentally sent this subthread off on a tangent because of the phrasing of ‘in exchange for the lost happiness’.
My read of the stats, similar to this Vox article and to what Robin actually said, is that people with children (by choice) are neither more nor less happy on average than childless people (by choice), so any substantial boost to meaning should be seen as a freebie, rather than something you had to give up happiness for.
I think there’s a related error where people look at the costs of having children (time, money, etc.) and conclude that it’s not worth it if the children aren’t even making you happy at the end of all that. But this doesn’t make sense, at least from a selfish perspective: the parents in these studies were also paying all those costs, their childless counterparts were not, and yet the bottom line was essentially no overall effect, suggesting that children are either providing something which makes up for these costs or that the costs are not as big as people sometimes make out (my suspicion as a father of two is that it’s a bit of both). And so as Vox put it:
Bottom line: The evidence we have suggests having children doesn’t affect a person’s happiness much one way or another. But that evidence is limited by people selecting into the path they think is best for them. So: If you want to have kids, have kids. If you don’t want to have kids, don’t have kids. The happiness literature isn’t going to make the decision for you.

AGB 🔸Mar 17, 2021, 9:40 AM

21 points

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AGB 🔸Mar 16, 2021, 4:19 PM
15 points
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in reply to: Cullen 🔸’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
But also, I think a lot of people that end up at HLS don’t think in those sort of Marxist/socialist class terms, but rather just have a sort of strong Rawslian egalitarianism commitment.

I also think many people at HLS are hilariously unaware of their class privilege.
FWIW, I strongly agree with both of these statements for Oxbridge in the UK as well.
The latter I think is a combination of a common dynamic where most people think they are closer to the middle of the income spectrum than they are, plus a natural human tendency to focus on the areas where you are being treated poorly or unfairly over the areas where you are being treated well.

AGB 🔸Mar 15, 2021, 12:36 AM
15 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Why do so few EAs and Rationalists have children?
To this I would add:

Beware of the selection effect where I’d expect people with kids are less likely to come to meetups, less likely to post on this forum, etc. than EAs with overall-similar levels of involvement, so it can look like there are fewer than is actually the case, if you aren’t counting carefully.

For EA clusters in very-high-housing-cost areas specifically (Milan mentioned the Bay), I wouldn’t be surprised if the broader similar demographic is also avoiding children, since housing is usually the largest direct financial cost of having children, so you may need to control for that as well.

(I think I agree there’s still some difference here, just flagging some confounders beyond what Buck mentioned.)

AGB 🔸Mar 10, 2021, 10:23 PM
21 points
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on: How to make people appreciate asynchronous written communication more?
Writing is just a lot more time-consuming to cover equivalent ground in my experience. I occasionally make the mistake of getting into multi-hour text conversations with people, and almost invariably look back and think we could have covered the same ground in a phone call lasting <25% as long.

AGB 🔸Mar 10, 2021, 7:46 PM
11 points
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on: Why Hasn’t Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?
Scattered thoughts on this, pointing in various directions.
TL;DR: Measuring and interpreting movement growth is complicated.
Things I’m relatively confident about:
1. You need to be careful about whether the thing you are looking at is a proxy for ‘size of EA’ or a proxy for a derivative, i.e. ‘how fast is EA growing’. I think Google Trends searches for ‘Effective Altruism’ are mostly the latter; it’s something people might do on the way into the movement, but not something I would ever do.
2. After correcting for (1), my rough impression is that EA grew super-linearly up to about 2016, and then approximately linearly after that up to about March 2020. Intepretation of many metrics since COVID is complicated by, well, COVID. One salient-to-me way to think about linear growth is that each year some fraction of the new crop of university students discover EA and some fraction of them take to it.
3. Givewell money moved is obviously going to be impacted by a shift away from global poverty/health as a focus area within the movement. We have survey data which suggests this has happened over the time period in question. In that context, a 93% increase in non-Open-Phil money moved to the shrinking cause area between 2015 and 2019 is pretty good.
  - OTOH, when looking at any kind of money moved over time you need to remember that EA’s non-Open-Phil financial power should increase regardless of the number of people increasing. The movement is young and full of the types of people who have had large income increases between 2015 and 2020. For example, while I couldn’t find the data quickly, I believe >>50% of GWWC members were students in 2015 and <50% are now.
  - Also on that hand, I expect most of Givewell’s donors don’t self-identify as EAs. Whether this matters is unclear, makes it a bit of a weak proxy though.
4. I really don’t think it makes sense to treat Alienation/Demandingness as a constant. Scott’s response to this matches my impressions, and one of the things it flags is how the level of demands on proto-EAs have increased, in my opinion by a lot. I think this is true in both the ‘level of dedication required’ sense and the ‘level/specificity of skills required’ sense.
  - This is particularly salient, perhaps too salient, to me for personal reasons. I am a top-third Maths graduate from a top university who has donated roughly half of my income to date, but I don’t quite hit the type and level of dedication/skill that I perceive is desired, and partly as a result I doubt I would have gotten involved in the movement if I had been born 6 years later. I want to be explicit that this isn’t necessarily a problem—that judgement is very sensitive to beliefs about relative values of different types of individuals—I’m just providing a personal anecdote that if it generalises would serve as partial explanation for the tailing off of growth rates.
Things I am less confident about:
1. While the level of demands has increased, I think EA’s online spaces are actually less supportive than they used to be, creating a gap that can easily leave people disillusioned, especially if they are geographically distant from major movement hubs. Many in-person spaces seem to be healthier, but are always going to grow less rapidly.
2. The other gap leaving people disillusioned is the lack of actual things to do, especially at ‘entry levels’ of dedication but also at higher levels if you strike out on job applications. I chuckle sadly every time I read this piece, in particular the paragraph quoted below.
3. I do actually agree a lot of people who get seriously involved (say >20% dedication, including anyone who has changed their career path for EA reasons) in EA seem to have liked it as soon as they hear about it. But:
  1. I think this is at best a partial account of why growth has stalled, because as of now my impression is that essentially nobody (<10% of university students) has heard about it.
  2. If you lower the dedication bar at all I get a lot more positive on the possibility of convincing people. Partly this is for personal reasons, my closest friend from university has taken the GWWC pledge and I’m >50% confident he would not have done so if it weren’t for me talking about EA. I just don’t expect him to ‘go beyond’ that pledge or otherwise engage with the community.
  3. If I do check my own path, I was introduced to EA or Rationality at least three times before something stuck: I saw Toby Ord give an interview, was nudged into reading parts of the Sequences by my first job, then a university friend pointed me to HPMOR, then finally a different university friend interned at GWWC. So on the one hand it does seem with hindsight like these communities kept knocking on my door, but on the other I didn’t actually do anything with the first few points of contact. For me it was when I was asked to do something concrete, achievable and valuable that I switched my attention. I know others’ mileage varies a lot here; some people are particularly drawn to the intellectual aspect for example. But it means that even ‘innate’ EAs might need exposure to the representation of EA that matches what they are looking for.
  4. Finally, there are at least two candidate explanations of ‘many people who are seriously involved with EA liked it as soon as they heard about it’, if true. EA could be innate, or we could suck at providing the incentive gradients/incremental support necessary to turn less-committed people into more-committed people. Both would create that pattern.
Hey you! You know, all these ideas that you had about making the world a better place, like working for Doctors without Borders? They probably aren’t that great. The long-term future is what matters. And that is not funding constrained, so earning to give is kind of off the table as well. But the good news is, we really, really need people working on these things. We are so talent constraint… (20 applications later) … Yeah, when we said that we need people, we meant capable people. Not you. You suck.

AGB 🔸Mar 5, 2021, 11:46 PM
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gregory Lewis🔸’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
How to manage deep uncertainty over the long-run ramifications of ones decisions is a challenge across EA-land—particularly acute for longtermists, but also elsewhere: most would care about risks about how in the medium term a charitable intervention could prove counter-productive
This makes some sense to me, although if that’s all we’re talking about I’d prefer to use plain English since the concept is fairly common. I think this is not all other people are talking about though; see my discussion with MichaelStJules.
FWIW, I don’t think ‘risks’ is quite the right word: sure, if we discover a risk which was so powerful and so tractable that we end up overwhelming the good done by our original intervention, that obviously matters. But the really important thing there, for me at least, is the fact that we apparently have a new and very powerful lever for impacting the world. As a result, I would care just as much about a benefit which in the medium term would end up being worth >>1x the original target good (e.g. “Give Directly reduces extinction risk by reducing poverty, a known cause of conflict”); the surprisingly-high magnitude of an incidental impact is what is really catching my attention, because it suggests there are much better ways to do good.
Although I don’t see this with AMF, I do see this in and around animal advocacy. One crucial consideration around here is WAS, particularly an ‘inverse logic of the larder’ (see), such as “per area, a factory farm has a lower intensity of animal suffering than the environment it replaced”.
I think you were trying to draw a distinction, but FWIW this feels structurally similar to the ‘AMF impact population growth/economic growth’ argument to me, and I would give structually the same response: once you truly believe a factory farm net reduced animal suffering via the wild environment it incidentally destroyed, there are presumably much more efficient ways to destroy wild environments. As a result, it appears we can benefit wild animals much more than farmed animals, and ending factory farming should disappear from your priority list, at least as an end goal (it may come back as an itself-incidental consequence of e.g. ‘promoting as much concern for animal welfare as possible’). Is your point just that it does not in fact disappear from people’s priority lists in this case? That I’m not well-placed to observe or comment on either way.
b) Early (or motivated) stopping across crucial considerations.
This I agree is a problem. I’m not sure if thinking in terms of cluelessness makes it better or worse; I’ve had a few conversations now where my interlocutor tries to avoid the challenge of cluelessness by presenting an intervention that supposedly has no complex cluelessness attached. So far, I’ve been unconvinced of every case and think said interlocutor is ‘stopping early’ and missing aspects of impact about which they are complexly clueless (often economic/population growth impacts, since it’s actually quite hard to come up with an intervention that doesn’t credibly impact one of those).
I guess I think part of encouraging people to continue thinking rather than stop involves getting people comfortable with the fact that there’s a perfectly reasonable chance that what they end up doing backfires, everything has risk attached, and trying to entirely avoid such is both a fool’s errand and a quick path to analysis paralysis. Currently, my impression is that cluelessness-as-used is pushing towards avoidance rather than acceptance, but the sample size is small and so this opinion is very weakly held. I would be more positive on people thinking about this if it seemed to help push them towards acceptance though.
Given my fairly deflationary OP, I don’t think these problems are best described as cluelessness
Point taken. Given that I hope this wasn’t too much of a hijack, or at least was an interesting hijack. I think I misunderstood how literally you intended the statements I quoted and disagreed with in my original comment.

AGB 🔸Mar 3, 2021, 11:22 PM
3 points
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in reply to: tae 🔸’s comment on: Brainstorm: What questions will the general public find most interesting about charities and causes?
Your comment reminded me of this post, whose ideas I like as a starting point for handling this type of question:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DYr7kBpMpmbygBiEq/the-privilege-of-earning-to-give

AGB 🔸Feb 19, 2021, 11:01 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Milan Griffes’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
Not sure if you were referring to that particular post or the whole sequence. If I follow it correctly, I think that particular post is trying to answer the question ‘how can we plausibly impact the long-term future, assuming it’s important to do so’. I think it’s a pretty good treatment of that question!
But I wouldn’t mentally file that under cluelessness as I understand the term, because that would also be an issue under ordinary uncertainty. To the extent you explain how cluelessness is different to garden-variety uncertainty and why we can’t deal with it in the same way(s), it’s earlier in your sequence of posts, and so far I think I have not been moved away from the objection you try to address in your second post, though if you read the (long) exchange with MichaelStJules above you can see him trying to move me and at minimum succeeding in giving me a better picture of where the disagreements might be.
Edit: I guess what I’m really saying is that the part of that sequence which seems useful and interesting to me—the last bit—could also have been written and would be just as important if we were merely normally-uncertain about the future, as opposed to cluelessly-uncertain.

AGB 🔸Feb 19, 2021, 10:47 PM
11 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
I think if you reject incomparability, you’re essentially assuming away complex cluelessness and deep uncertainty.
That’s really useful, thanks, at the very least I now feel like I’m much closer to identifying where the different positions are coming from. I still think I reject incomparability; the example you gave didn’t strike me as compelling, though I can imagine it compelling others.
So, while I might just pick an option if forced to choose between A, B and indifferent, it doesn’t reveal a ranking, since you’ve eliminated the option I’d want to give, “I really don’t know”. You could force me to choose among wrong answers to other questions, too.
I would say it’s reality that’s doing the forcing. I have money to donate currently; I can choose to donate it to charity A, or B, or C, etc., or to not donate it. I am forced to choose and the decision has large stakes; ‘I don’t know’ is not an option (‘wait and do more research’ is, but that doesn’t seem like it would help here). I am doing a particular job as opposed to all the other things I could be doing with that time; I have made a choice and for the rest of my life I will continue to be forced to choose what to do with my time. Etc.
It feels intuitively obvious to me that those many high-stakes forced choices can and should be compared in order to determine the all-things-considered best course of action, but it’s useful to know that this intuition is apparently not shared.

AGB 🔸Feb 16, 2021, 8:15 AM
6 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
Thanks again. I think my issue is that I’m unconvinced that incomparability applies when faced with ranking decisions. In a forced choice between A and B, I’d generally say you have three options: choose A, choose B, or be indifferent.

Incomparability in this context seems to imply that one could be indifferent between A and B, prefer C to A, yet be indifferent between C and B. That just sounds wrong to me, and is part of what I was getting at when I mentioned transitivity, curious if you have a concrete example where this feels intuitive?

For the second half, note I said among all actions being taken. If ‘business as usual’ includes action A which is dominated by action B, we can improve things by replacing A with B.

AGB 🔸Feb 16, 2021, 6:24 AM
11 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Deference for Bayesians
I mostly agree with this. Of course, to notice that you have to know (2)/(3) are part of the ‘expert belief set’, or at least it really helps, which you easily might not have done if you relied on Twitter/Facebook/headlines for your sense of ‘expert views’.

And indeed, I had conversations where pointing those things out to people updated them a fair amount towards thinking that masks were worth wearing.

In other words, even if you go and read the expert view directly and decide it doesn’t make sense, I expect you to end up in a better epistemic position than you would otherwise be; it’s useful for both deference and anti-deference, and imo will strongly tend to push you in the ‘right’ direction for the matter at hand.

Edit: Somewhat independently, I’d generally like our standards to be higher than ‘this argument/evidence could be modified to preserve the conclusion’. I suspect you don’t disagree, but stating it explicitly because leaning too hard on that in a lot of different areas is one of the larger factors leading me to be unhappy with the current state of EA discourse.

AGB 🔸Feb 14, 2021, 12:01 PM
28 points
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on: Deference for Bayesians
A quibble on the masks point because it annoys me every time it’s brought up. As you say, it’s pretty easy to work out that masks stop an infected person from projecting nearly as many droplets into the air when they sneeze, cough, or speak, study or no study. But virtually every public health recommendation that was rounded off as ‘masks don’t work’ did in fact recommend that infected people should wear masks. For example, the WHO advice that the Unherd article links to says:
Among the general public, persons with respiratory symptoms or those caring for COVID-19 patients at home should receive medical masks
Similarly, here’s the actual full statement from Whitty in the UK:
Prof Whitty said: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.”
“The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around,” he added.
As for the US, here’s Scott Alexander’s summary of the debate in March:
As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points.
They agree that N95 respirators, when properly used by trained professionals, help prevent the wearer from getting infected.
They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others. Since many sick people don’t know they are sick, in an ideal world with unlimited mask supplies everyone would wear surgical masks just to prevent themselves from spreading disease.
So ‘the experts’ did acknowledge, often quite explicitly, that masks should stop infected people spreading the infection, as the video and just plain common sense would suggest.
This is mostly a quibble because I think it’s pretty plausible you know this and I do agree that the downstream messaging was pretty bad, it was mostly rounded off to ‘masks don’t work’, and there was a strong tendency to double-down on that as it became contentious, as opposed to (takes deep breath) ‘Masks are almost certainly worthwhile for infected people, and we don’t really know much of anything for asymptomatic people but supplies are limited so maybe they aren’t the priority right now but could be worth it very soon.’. Admittedly the first is much more pithy.
But it’s not entirely frivolous either; I’ve had many conversations with people (on both sides) over the past several months who appeared to be genuinely unaware that the WHO et al. were recommending infected people wore masks, they just blindly assumed that the media messaging matched what the experts were saying at the time. So I suggest that regardless of one’s thoughts on myopic empiricism, capabilities of experts, etc., one easy improvement when trying to defer to experts is to go and read what the experts are actually saying, rather than expecting a click-chasing headline writer to have accurately summarised it for you.