Ben Williamson

A few notes on man­ag­ing highly stress­ful news and situations

ESH—A guide to form­ing habits you’ll keep

Effec­tive Self-Help is hiring for a Re­searcher or Digi­tal Me­dia Lead

• Ben WilliamsonJan 21, 2022, 9:36 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ChanaMessinger’s comment on: A Men­tal Health Pod­cast Directory

  Edited! And thanks, most of these I haven’t listened to but I can personally recommend
  ’Clearer paths and sharper ideas’ (Spencer Greenberg) and ‘Creatures of Habit’ (Making Sense with Sam Harris), as well as the 80k, Ezra Klein show, The Tim Ferriss Show, and Planet Money more generally.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 21, 2022, 9:29 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Andres Jimenez Zorrilla 🔸’s comment on: A Men­tal Health Pod­cast Directory

  Thanks! I haven’t come across anything specific to work addiction I’m afraid. Just had a quick search though and this looks relevant and likely a high quality discussion: https://​​hbr.org/​​podcast/​​2018/​​04/​​you-may-be-a-workaholic-if
  
  Also personally found the LessWrong articles about taking a Sabbath very useful as motivation to protect time for rest and recovery.

[Question] What self-help top­ics would you like bet­ter re­search/​ re­sources on?

• Ben WilliamsonJan 12, 2022, 10:22 AM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Mo­men­tum 2022 up­dates (we’re hiring)

  This sounds like an exciting and very high-potential project! I’d be curious if you’ve thought about the potential for impact through directing new people to EA (in terms of work as well as donations).
  
  It seems plausible that people might discover EA organisations, and ultimately the community as a whole, through the effective charities listed and the background info of the app. Expanding the community in this way might further increase the overall impact and also make it valuable if funding remains a relatively low constraint in the community.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 11, 2022, 4:46 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Misha_Yagudin’s comment on: Stress—effec­tive ways to re­duce it

  Hi Misha, I’d say a quick breathing exercise and PMR might be particularly helpful, especially as you can pretty much do them at any time/​ location. Otherwise, it’s maybe worth experimenting with things you particularly enjoy as a way of quickly relaxing—
  e.g. personally, I find it surprisingly effective to spend even just 5 minutes strumming on my ukulele if I’m feeling quite highly stressed

• Ben WilliamsonJan 10, 2022, 10:30 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Effec­tive Self-Help

  Thank you! Feel free to reach out about getting involved at any point when you have more capacity. These are some great points that I’ve mostly started working on but there’s (always) a lot more to do.
  
  I have many more people I want to reach out to about the project and certainly I’m now working on building a wider community/​ collaboration team for moving forward. And absolutely, I want each review to be a living document and for the recommendations to be consistently improved and updated over time. I think I’ll add a note on the stress and sleep articles to reflect that.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 10, 2022, 10:23 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: markov_user’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Effec­tive Self-Help

  That’s a great point! I definitely intend to review what evidence is available for the size of individual differences in benefit from a given intervention. As you point out, if there are ways of accounting for this in how to select/​ prioritise interventions, that could be particularly useful.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 10, 2022, 10:20 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Max_Carpendale’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Effec­tive Self-Help

  Thanks!

• Ben WilliamsonJan 10, 2022, 10:19 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: nathan98000’s comment on: Stress—effec­tive ways to re­duce it

  There’s definitely room for improvement with the rigour of the research analysis. I’ve discussed some of these areas in my reply to David Moss so I won’t repeat it all but to note a few quick things:
  
  - There’s a lot more time that could be spent collating and reviewing evidence here but I’d expect that the effect sizes and recommendations would not change drastically. I definitely hope to come back and improve this article in future; as this is an early stage project I have no doubt there are improvements to be made.
  - I have combined different measures of interventions. Using a single measure would produce a more accurate result but would make it hard to find much evidence that presents effect sizes and enables prioritisation. In general, as I’ve noted in the article a lot of the evidence available is thin and poor quality, leaving somewhat of a choice between including interventions with poor quality evidence or leaving them out. I’ve combined measures on the assumption that this wouldn’t skew the results to a large degree but this may be wrong.
  - There is no direct measure for stress. Subjective stress reports are perhaps the closest but an individual’s perception of their stress levels may not correlate with their physical stress and this means they’d still likely suffer significant health effects from ongoing high stress.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 10, 2022, 10:06 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Cienna’s comment on: Stress—effec­tive ways to re­duce it

  Plant/​ green space exposure definitely has a significant effect on its own, possibly in part through the smell given off.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 10, 2022, 9:49 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: Stress—effec­tive ways to re­duce it

  I appreciate the detailed notes/​ feedback on the research process. I think the points you make are very reasonable and definitely helpful.
  
  I expect that I will come back to this stress article, and the sleep one before that, to improve the quality of recommendations through a better research process. I can see a number of ways to do that including points that you bring up.
  - I’d like the evidence tables to cover 90+% of interventions that appear valuable from the outside/​ have been suggested elsewhere, which I agree is not a bar I think this article reaches.
  - Leaving out the ‘% of studies that were significant’ makes good sense, especially given it’s quite inaccurate as I’ve put it here in its treatment of meta-analyses.
  - I’d like to keep some form of prioritisation by effect size. I think there’s probably a better way of doing this than what I’ve done here but prioritising interventions seems particularly valuable to me in terms of increasing the practicality of the recommendations and the likelihood a reader starts doing something useful. Perhaps it would be better to include the effect sizes as a range and highlight the different measures used (e.g. subjective stress vs. cortisol) to make this issue clearer to the reader. More work to do though on figuring this out.

• Ben WilliamsonJan 7, 2022, 12:44 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Effec­tive Self-Help

  I appreciate these thoughts, good suggestions and I agree on both counts. Running a survey like that hadn’t come to mind but is definitely something I’ll do now (even just a basic initial version like asking it as a question post here on the Forum)

In­tro­duc­ing Effec­tive Self-Help

• Ben WilliamsonDec 31, 2021, 11:25 AM

  29 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: The case against degrowth

  I appreciate the detailed write-up but felt that this lacked a fair attempt to present the strongest arguments in favour of degrowth and then critique them (steelmanning).
  
  It’s been a few years since I studied degrowth in my undergrad degree so my understanding may be weak/​ rusty/​ simply wrong. All the same, my impression is that a pro-growth attitude is the majority opinion in EA which makes a fair presentation of the alternative argument particularly important as many readers may be predisposed to agree with you.

  I’m not an advocate for degrowth (more just have some sympathy for some its general principles but uncertain they can be applied very well) so other people can likely present a better case in its favour. Samuel’s comment goes into more detail than I intend to but to highlight a few points that stuck out for me:
  
  1) I don’t think reducing population is a universal, or even dominant, objective amongst people who support degrowth. e.g. this blog post which discusses the topic and highlights that population reduction is unnecessary given the majority of emissions come from a minority of people.
  2) It seems pretty clear that rich people produce a lot more emissions—e.g. reports like this or this highlighting huge disparity in emissions between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% globally.
  3) It’s quite possible capitalism has led to people working more, not less. While a chart like this shows a decline in working hours since the end of the Industrial Revolution, it’s quite plausible people worked far less before the Industrial Revolution—e.g. here

  I think it’s great to see engagement with ideas like degrowth on the Forum and appreciate anyone’s efforts to write up a more significant argument for what they think and then publish it, I would just encourage a more thorough engagement with the argument you’re critiquing in a post like this.

• Ben WilliamsonDec 30, 2021, 11:35 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Matt_Lerner’s comment on: The Altru­ist—Pro­posal for an EA Newspaper

  This is great! I appreciate the detailed response and the friendly but valuable critique. As much as anything, I wanted to start a conversation around how a project like this may work best and these are some really useful points.
  
  I think you’re right that there are competing goals in what I’ve laid out and also that a project reporting from an EA lens on general topics might be more impactful in the long term than one focused on reporting on EA topics.

• Ben WilliamsonDec 29, 2021, 5:10 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ines’s comment on: The Altru­ist—Pro­posal for an EA Newspaper

  I can see how it could come across like that. No particular attachment to The Altruist as a name—I’m sure there are likely better options with a bit more thought/​ crowdsourced feedback!

• Ben WilliamsonDec 29, 2021, 11:39 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: The Altru­ist—Pro­posal for an EA Newspaper

  That’s a fair point that the pitch is likely overly inward-looking. Perhaps weighting the reasons in favour of creating something like this may have been clearer (or ordering them by importance) but I view increasing community growth and improving outreach resources as most (say 80%) of the value from an EA newspaper.
  
  Looking at particularly popular previous topics for EA coverage and diving deeper into Future Perfect as a case study are both great suggestions for developing this. I’ll defend the B-tier interviews though. If something doesn’t yet exist, it’s hard to know how popular it may be but similar profiles of important figures/​ org leaders seem very common in journalism and are therefore likely reasonably popular. I think it’s reasonable to have guiding principles too about content that you want to put in front of people and that this is common to a lot of (even most) reporting (e.g. The Guardian’s added focus on climate change in the last year as an editorial decision).

  The pitch is meant as a semi-polished thing to gauge interest so there’s plenty of research and refining of ideas that would be valuable that I haven’t yet done so I appreciate the ideas on what might be useful to do.