Bob Jacobs

Karma: 1,614

I’m a student of moral science at the university of Ghent. I also started and ran EA Ghent from 2020 to 2024, at which point I quit in protest over the Manifest scandal (and the reactionary trend it highlighted). I now no longer consider myself an EA (but I’m still part of GWWC and EAA, and if the rationalists split off I’ll join again).

If you’re interested in philosophy and mechanism design, consider checking out my blog.

I co-started Effectief Geven (Belgian effective giving org), am a volunteer researcher at SatisfIA (AI-safety org) and a volunteer writer at GAIA (Animal welfare org).

Possible conflict of interests: I have never received money from EA, but could plausibly be biased in favor of the organizations I volunteer for.

Bob Jacobs Jan 16, 2023, 1:44 AM
−2 points
5 ∶ 5
in reply to: MissionCriticalBit’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
This list is a good example of the sort of arguments that look persuasive to those already opposed to HBD, but can push people on the fence towards accepting it, so it may be net-negative from your perspective. This is what has happened to me, and I’ll elaborate on why – so that you may rethink your approach, if nothing else.
Even if you think my reasons failed, why would that push you towards accepting it? HBD is a hypothesis for how the world works, so the burden of proof is on HBD and giving a bad reason not to believe in HBD is not evidence for HBD. To give a very clear example, if someone says ‘I believe in unicorns’, and I say ‘no unicorns do not exist because 1+1=3’ that would fail to be evidence for unicorns not existing, but that does not mean it counts towards evidence for unicorns existing.
Disclaimer: I am a non-Western person with few traits worth mentioning. I identify with the rationalist tradition as established on LW, feel sympathy for the ideal of effective altruism, respect Bostrom despite some disagreements, have donated to GiveWell charities on EA advice, but I have not participated more directly. Seeing the drama, people expressing disappointment and threatening to leave the community, and the volume of meta-discussion, I feel like clarifying a few details that may be hard to notice from within your current culture, and hopefully helping you mend the fracture that is currently getting filled with the race-iq stuff.
Thank you for donating to GiveWell! Unimportant nitpick that has always bothered me: LW has an empiricist tradition, the term ‘rationalist’ is a misnomer.
All else being equal, people who hang around such communities prefer consistent models (indeed, utilitarianism itself is a radical solution to inconsistencies in other ethical theories). This discourse is suffused with intellectual inconsistency, on many levels of varying contentiousness.
I wouldn’t say other ethical theories are internally inconsistent. They might have other attributes or conclusions that you think are bad, but the major ethical theories don’t have any inconsistencies as far as I can tell. Do you have an example?On the other hand I do think Eliezer has some inconsistencies in his philosophy, although it’s hard to tell because he’s quite vague, doesn’t always use philosophical terminology (in fact he is very dismissive of the field as a whole) and has a tendency to reinvent the wheel instead (e.g his ‘Requiredism’ is what philosophers would call compatibilism). Now usually I wouldn’t mind it that much, but since philosophy requires such precision of language if you don’t want to talk past each other, I do think this doesn’t work in his favor.
- On the faint level of moral intuitions, there’s the strange beeline from the poorly supported prior that normalization of beliefs like Bostrom’s will lead to bad effects like discrimination, to the consequentialist decision against entertaining them.
I would like to point out that my comment was not about Bostrom.
- It is not clear that Bostrom’s beliefs are harmful in this way, or more likely to encourage a net increase in discrimination than their negation. Arguments from historical precedent have big problems with them: they do not address the direction of causality
I mean even if you don’t know which way the arrow of causality points, that’s still an unnecessarily big risk. It’s not particularly altruistic to make statements that have that big a chance of helping racists. You could also spend your time… not doing that. Also even if you reject arguments from historical precedent there is still the entire field of linguistic racism.
- As it is not considered normal in the modern culture to equate moral worth and ability for individuals of any group, it can be expected that the same will hold should the difference in ability between groups be acknowledged.
Just because people won’t publicly state it doesn’t mean it doesn’t influence their thinking. Take for example the stereotype of the welfare queen. While not everyone will explicitly state ‘this person has a lower moral worth’ (although some will) the racist stereotyping does lead to black people being harmed both socially and economically. The myth of meritocracy is strong, and people who are seen as unable to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ are looked down upon.
- Arguments from personal distress of users are valid points with regard to community health, but obviously (I hope) incommensurate with the question of global utility, and do not directly weigh on it.
What global utility? Racists want us to talk about this stuff, there are other correlations that are both on firmer ground, have more global utility and aren’t fulfilling the desires of racists.
- Perhaps the most obvious level is that specific failings Bostrom is credibly accused of (racist attitude, belief in the racial IQ difference, belief in the validity of IQ measurement) do not depend on HBD. (He has done himself no favors by bringing up eugenics). So it’s bizarre to see many people denounce his beliefs in toto, but support this denunciation with environmentalist explanations of the IQ gap
If you had read my comments you would’ve seen that I both didn’t respond to Bostrom, did respond to HBD and did support the environmental explantation of the IQ gap.
- – in effect, conceding the specific factual claim in Bostrom’s old email, or at least demonstrating that it is not beyond the pale by their own standard. To be clear: it is not in doubt that the IQ gap between Black and White Americans exists; and that it is as predictive of outcomes associated with cognitive capacity as IQ measurement is (which is to say, highly predictive – and this, too, is mainstream consensus). People who act indignant about such statements send a huge red flag, demonstrating either general unwillingness to educate themselves or irrational ideological bias on this specific matter. People who bring up irrelevant anti-HBD talking points demonstrate confused reasoning.
My comment didn’t deny the existence of an IQ gap and my comment was responding to sapphire who was talking about HBD specifically and so it wasn’t “irrelevant anti-HBD talking point”. If you’re not engaging with what I actually write I’m starting to think that spending hours on this comment wasn’t the best use of my time.
- what your list most reminds me of is polemics of sophisticated Creationists in the heyday of New Atheism. It’s a mix of true but irrelevant, misleadingly phrased, blatantly misinterpreting and patently false claims. Instrumentally they are gotchas
Very civil. It will not surprise you to learn that this does not motivate me to keep reading.
- So I won’t compete in citations
Yeah I’m out.
*I’m going to spend my time on something else now.

Bob Jacobs Jan 16, 2023, 12:45 AM
1 point
4 ∶ 2
in reply to: Kaspar Brandner’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
The topic is extremely taboo
And with good reason, out of the billions of possible correlations to talk about this is one of the very few that will help racists.
Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career
True, but most people can’t cut it in academia and if one fancies themselves a researcher this path will allow you to continue to keep doing that without a lot of intellectual competition. Plus you can still get funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund (I call them shady because they funded the distribution of ‘Erbkrank’-a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics- as one of their first projects and because they have ties to white supremacists groups, so their impartiality is suspect)

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 11:05 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
but I also think it’s a bit unfair to point this out in the context of Kaspar Brandner sharing a lot of links after you did the same thing first
Yeah that’s fair. I mean I did give summaries, but it’s still fair. If I could go back in time I would’ve posted that comment first and I would’ve tried to explain my emotions/reasoning process to the HBDers on this forum more.
I would have said: I get the allure of taboo studies. I want to be a moral philosopher, but moral philosophers are very smart and they don’t get a lot of funding. So even if I work very very hard, I probably won’t get to be one. I need a way to stand out, to make people notice I would be a good researcher… oh what’s this? Everyone is avoiding these taboo studies. So researching them makes me both stand out and makes me a comparatively high quality researcher since almost no one is competing with me.
It’s competition/capitalism/moloch that is driving me towards these subjects and even knowing this doesn’t make the allure go away. But ultimately I care about people more, and there are often good reasons these taboo’s were put in place.
Perhaps the readers of this comment feel the same way. I empathize. The smart thing to have done was unpack these mental prioritizations immediately instead of grabbing my research. But I didn’t think of it, probably because I wanted to show that I could be a good researcher. Moloch got me. Please don’t spend your limited time on this subject, please don’t let moloch get you too.

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 8:35 PM
6 points
9 ∶ 4
in reply to: Kaspar Brandner’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Given my priors and respect for my leisure time I’m not going to read those giant threads. I won’t downvote you since I haven’t actually read it, but let me ask you a related question:
Do you think that out of the billions of possible correlations in the social sciences, the best use of our finite time on earth is to study this one?
The incredibly flawed measure of ‘low iq’ is correlated with the arbitrary socially-contingent western category of ‘black people’ (almost certainly because of environmental factors). But there are millions of things correlated with the western category of ‘black people’ and there are millions of things correlated with ‘iq’.
Furthermore, there are so many more variables to study that are less flawed and less arbitrary, why should we focus on the one correlation out of billions that racist people –who want to make the world worse for out fellow human beings– want to us to talk about?

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 10:28 AM
0 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: MikhailSamin’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Oops! Sorry, I only discovered the second link
It’s fine.
Studies don’t just use identical twins but twins in general. You are equating my two claims and attacking claims that I haven’t even made, I never talked about “whether or not some disease has a genetic component to it, when a twin study shows that there is?”. I made a claim that twins, even identical twins, don’t share exactly the same DNA and provided a link to an article that gave more information, and I made a second claim that twin studies were flawed and provided that claim with a link to an article with more information about that. All this stuff about that it can’t help us find diseases or that twin studies “shouldn’t be used” are claims I never made.
EDIT:
I’m not a biologist and will probably defer to any biologist entering this thread
For the record my study has some biostatistics, but it isn’t my strongest field and I’m mostly leaning on stuff my professors have explained:
I will also probably defer to a biologist/biostatistician.

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 9:00 AM
0 points
3 ∶ 5
in reply to: MikhailSamin’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
These are two separate links for two separate claims. ‘Twin studies are flawed in methodology.’ and ‘Twins, even identical twins, simply do not have exactly the same DNA.’, both of which are true. The confidence in the proposed HBD conclusions is simply not warranted by the evidence.
Many twin studies have the assumption that they share 100% of their DNA (which is false) and that they share the exact same environment (which is also false). This leads to underestimating environmental factors and underestimating non-genetic biological factors.
Furthermore, separated twin pairs, identical or fraternal, are generally separated by adoption. This makes them unrepresentative of twins as a whole and there can be some issues of undetected behaviors in the case of behaviors that many people keep secret presently or in their earlier lives.

Bob Jacobs Jan 13, 2023, 11:59 PM
37 points
20 ∶ 18
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Okay, if there’s anyone here who actually believes in HBD, here’s a couple reasons why you shouldn’t:
Human biodiversity is actually pretty low. Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks.
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn’t die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates “Africans” from other groups is going to be suspect.
Race isn’t a valid construct, genetically speaking. It’s not well defined. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered “black” in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered “white”.
Intelligence is not well defined. There’s no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree.
IQ has a number of flaws. It is by definition Gaussian without having appeared empirically first and the g construct itself has almost certainly no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
Twin studies are flawed in methodology . Twins, even identical twins, simply do not have exactly the same DNA.
Evolution isn’t just mutations and natural selection. Not every trait is an adaptation.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells.
We don’t mate randomly, which is an assumption in many genetics studies.
HBD is not generally accepted in academia.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighboring countries’ IQ in order to derive “data” from a country’s unknown national IQ.
^{Special thanks to}^these^threads^{for compiling most of the information}
Now you might want to attack one of these (and feel free to send me a message), but even if you’re right, that would still leave more than enough reasons to stay away from HBD.
What links here?
- harfe's comment on EA should unequivocally condemn race science by JSc (Aug 1, 2024, 3:14 PM; 20 points)

Bob Jacobs Jan 12, 2023, 1:58 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The case against degrowth
The consumption-based per capita CO2-emissions in almost all high-income countries (e.g. EU, US,...) dropped by about 25% the past 15 years (since 2005)
I would argue that we shouldn’t look at “per capita” but CO2 emissions as a whole, since the climate isn’t going to be more lenient just because we have more people. Most countries haven’t been able to decouple their overall consumption-based CO2 emissions from their GDP, including our country:
And the world as a whole:
Now a couple countries have managed to decouple it so it is technically possible, but given how quickly we need to act I don’t think we have enough time.
GDP can still grow by an extremely huge amount before hitting these limits.
But why do we need to grow right now? If we slow down for a couple of decades to make our economic systems more sustainable we can still grow to reach these limits later. And slowing down now might very well mean preventing a catastrophic risk.
I’m also curious as to your thoughts on the other types of environmental damage. Let’s say we innovate our way into replacing all combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles. EV’s require lithium for their batteries whose manufacturing is very bad for the environment independently of CO2 emissions (also human rights are often violated) and they’re heavier which is worse for our infrastructure.
New technologies require more rare metals whose industry causes violations of human rights / degradation of the environment / wars. And it’s not a little bit more either, 1kWh of renewable energy requires ten times more metals than 1kWh of fossil energy. Perhaps tech-based solutions let us only play a game of whack-a-mole, replacing manure externalities with CO2 externalities and now rare metals externalities.
In contrast, degrowthers believe in the feasibility of another kind of decoupling, between economic wealth and human well-being or life satisfaction. But there are no countries that show an increase in well-being (e.g. an increase in living standards or flourishing) and a decrease in GDP or resource use. There is strong evidence that GDP is positively correlated with measures of well-being.
GDP is subject to Goodhart’s law. Countries lie about their GDP and also change what GDP measures, just so they can increase it.
Also, according to this study, the relationship between GDP and life satisfaction is ‘hump shaped’, life satisfaction seems to peak at around $30,000-$33,000 and then slightly but significantly decline among the richest countries. (This could potentially be an explanation for the Easterlin paradox)

I have two more degrowth policies which you haven’t mentioned, which might be more to your taste:
1. Tariffs on polluting goods, which would have a negative effect on growth, but a positive effect on the environment. And since most countries are protectionistic this should be politically feasible.
2. High severance taxes. This would also have a negative effect on growth, but also have positive impact on the environment. And since most governments like having a higher budget this should also be politically feasible.
More drastic population reduction measures, for example by unvoluntary sterilization, are unethical and politically unfeasible. [...] For example, some highly productive people are willing to work more hours and employers are willing to pay them for those extra hours, but they would be prevented from doing so. This is an infringement on liberty.
Your proposed tech based solutions are achieved through ‘soft’ policies such as taxes instead of ‘hard’ policies such as banning, why couldn’t the other policies be achieved the same way? E.g replace sterilizing people with giving them less child care subsidies, or replace banning people from working over a certain number of hours with taxing them more? You are correct to warn of side-effects, but these policies can have positive side effects too, for example this (admittedly non-causal) study which found that working less hours is associated with higher life satisfaction.
However, a rebound effect is mitigated if a pollution tax (or a tax on dirty technologies) is introduced
I would like to point out that carbon taxes are regressive, so it would need to be paired with a climate income if we don’t want to exacerbate the rising wealth inequality.
There are negative ethical aspects of population reductions. Having fewer happy people is problematic according to some reasonable population ethical theories, such as total utilitarianism
It will arguably have negative ethical aspects if total utilitarianism is right, but it arguably won’t have negative ethical aspects if one of the following ethical theories is right:
Negative utilitarianism argues that minimizing suffering has greater moral importance than maximizing happiness.
Contractarianism argues that morality is arrived from mutual agreement, and unborn children cannot agree to be born.
Kantian ethics argues “A man should never be used as merely a means to an end, but always be treated as an end in himself”. A child can be created for the sake of other people, but not for their own good and should therefore not be created.
Libertarianism argues you shouldn’t take nonconsensual actions toward other people, and people cannot consent to being created.
Positive utilitarianism argues it’s immoral that humans slaughter, experiment and destroy the habitats of billions of animals. An argument could be made that even positive utilitarianism wants us to reduce the number of humans.
There are many possible answers for contractualism and virtue ethics, so no definite conclusion there.
Counter-arguments could be made of course, but overall a (surprisingly) large number of ethical theories could be seen as in favor of reducing the human population.
EDIT: Thanks for the response, I’ll look more into it!

Bob Jacobs Jan 11, 2023, 1:39 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Read The Sequences
True, here are the results you’re talking about:
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?
Accept or lean toward: scientific realism 699 / 931 (75.1%)
Other 124 / 931 (13.3%)
Accept or lean toward: scientific anti-realism 108 / 931 (11.6%)
His views are moderately popular in general with:
- 51.37% accept or lean towards correspondence
- 51.93% accept or lean towards physicalism
- 30.56% accept or lean towards consequentialism
- 53.64% accept or lean towards classical logic (although that doesn’t tell us whether the philosophers think it has normative force).
I will say that PhilPapers has a rather small sample size and mostly collects data on english speaking philosophers, so I find it probable that these results are not representative of philosophers as a whole.

Bob Jacobs Jan 11, 2023, 1:00 PM
14 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: Read The Sequences
I can’t speak to Yudkowsky’s knowledge of physics, economics, psychology etc, but as someone who studies philosophy I can tell you his philosophical segments are pretty weak.
It’s clear that he hasn’t read a lot of philosophy and he is very dismissive of the field as a whole. He also has a tendency to reinvent the wheel (e.g his ‘Requiredism’ is what philosophers would call compatibilism).
When I read the sequences as a teenager I was very impressed by his philosophy, but as I got older and started reading more I realized how little he actually engaged with criticisms of his favorite theories, and when he did he often only engaged with weaker criticisms.
If you want some good introductory texts on philosophy as well as criticism/alternatives to some of his/rationalists most central beliefs e.g physicalism, correspondence theory, scientific realism, the normativity of classical logic (all of which I have rejected as of the moment of this writing) then I highly recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Bob Jacobs Jan 6, 2023, 11:20 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Cause Suggestion: Econ Literacy
Thanks!
I’m aware that emission trading and carbon taxes could be higher and that this will help with production based emissions. All I’m saying is that without tariffs you give countries an incentive to become heavy polluters and free-ride on other countries climate efforts, all the while consumers import from said polluting countries because their products are cheaper.
Also, I think that a lot of market based solutions could have worked if we started immediately when climate change came to light, but given that companies successfully delayed action and we’re now already taking damage, it becomes much more prudent to consider non-tax based solutions. EA’s and orthodox economists tend to be dismissive of ideas like degrowth, but I think the case for degrowth is much stronger than it’s given credit for (although I don’t know whether Martin is against degrowth so I’m not going to make any arguments until he disagrees).
I would also be interested in hearing Martin’s thoughts on economics isolationist tendency that I outlined in my other comment.

Bob Jacobs Jan 5, 2023, 1:40 PM
4 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Cause Suggestion: Econ Literacy
I think that if we want to make people more like EA’s we have the most evidence that teaching them the field of philosophy yields the highest results.
Here is a post about it, but TLDR we have lots of studies that find it contributes to cognitive development and moral development.
Philosophy is also much more tightly integrated with other social studies like law, political science, history, sociology, gender studies… which in turn all make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economics meanwhile doesn’t associate itself with the other disciplines that much. Economists have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others starting papers with things like:
Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques.
In the paper “The Superiority of Economists” by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field. Furthermore they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:
This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al (though to be fair, it is getting better and psychology is even worse):

Given the complex interdisciplinary nature of societal issues (and the problem that teaching people a little bit of economics might make things worse as I outlined in my other comment) it seems logical to conclude that other social studies might be better suited, and we have a lot of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of philosophy.

Bob Jacobs Jan 5, 2023, 3:10 AM
7 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: lastmistborn’s comment on: Cause Suggestion: Econ Literacy
^{(I was originally going to add this reply to my own comment, but I think it works better here)}
You say:
Climate change: It could be efficiently addressed with carbon taxes.
But many countries already have a carbon tax and what actually happens is that while their production based emissions go down, their consumption based emissions don’t go down nearly as much (because other countries manufacturing industries will become polluters for them). These countries still pollute a lot despite these taxes. What might alleviate this is tariffs on polluting goods, but economists are against tariffs. As wikipedia says:
There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare, while free trade and the reduction of trade barriers has a positive effect on economic growth.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]
Taxes seem too little too late at this point, and I think much more radical actions should be considered.
You say:
Global health and wellbeing: If a country has problems caused by poverty, one great solution could be—make it more rich.
This won’t necessarily make wellbeing rise since the increase in riches might not be evenly distributed. If Kim Jong-Un makes a billion dollars tomorrow North Korea’s GDP will rise, but I don’t expect the wellbeing of the average North Korean to rise too. Orthodox economists tend to be very concerned with ‘growing the pie’, but less so with how that pie is distributed.
______
I think there are a few fields which actually have the potential to be harmful if you only learn a little bit about them. A little bit of behavioral economics might lead someone to dismiss other worldviews if they find evidence of bias in its adherence. A bit of metaphysics might leave you horribly confused/with the impression that metaphysics is itself confused as a field. And a little bit of psychiatry might make someone conclude too quickly that they have figured people out.
I think economics is also a field that has the potential to be harmful if you only learn a little bit (and I don’t think other social sciences like sociology and public health suffer from this).
Take for example GDP, if you only learn a little bit about economics you might not realize how many subjective/ideological judgement calls are made about what counts as contributing to GDP (should e.g finance be subtracted, ignored or added to GDP?). The fact that environmental impact is not important to GDP should already be seen as a red flag for the entire concept of measuring a countries wellbeing through the lens of GDP.
Or take supply and demand. The standard supply and demand model will tell you that having/increasing the minimum wage will increase unemployment. But if we look at actual empirical evidence it shows us that it doesn’t. Learning the basics of economics might mislead people about which policies will actually help people.

Bob Jacobs Jan 4, 2023, 11:05 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Cause Suggestion: Econ Literacy
Any reason you think we should focus on economics in particular and not other social sciences like e.g sociology or public health? Or even a combination of different sciences?

Bob Jacobs Dec 31, 2022, 4:06 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: 8 things I believe about climate change
I don’t know if anyone is still planning to research the relationship between (global) warming and increased aggression, but I found a lot of studies that link the two.
It’s unclear whether the relationship is linear or curvilinear and it might be that with enough heat the aggression actually decreases.
While the literature is very robust in confirming this link, it strangely doesn’t reach a consensus on what causes an increase in temperature to increase aggression.

Bob Jacobs Dec 29, 2022, 10:51 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Alexander de Vries’s comment on: Some Technical Problems With Measuring Happiness (and some solutions)
There seems to be some discussion as to whether the age-happiness U-shape is statistically significant. This study by Frijters and Beaton says that the U-shape becomes more pronounced when you allow for socio-economic variables. But this study by Bartram says that adjusting the data to compare people of similar wealth misses the point since people often become poorer during old age. He finds that if we omit that adjustment there is generally a decline in happiness during old age.
I still find it interesting that if we adjust for wealth and health people between the ages of 60 and 70 tend to report being the happiest. You mentioned in footnote 4 that it’s unclear whether ERS increases or decreases with age. My guess is that it’s mostly a cultural thing, which is why I find it so interesting that this study of 145 countries also found the U-shaped curve.

Bob Jacobs Dec 17, 2022, 5:59 PM
3 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Is there an ‘Apostates in EA’ group?
Hi Matt,
According to the 2019 EA Survey, 86% reported being agnostic/atheist/non-religious. Now some of these will of course be born into atheism, but you will probably find some apostates to talk to in your local EA group.

Bob Jacobs Dec 12, 2022, 9:49 AM
4 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Democratizing the workplace as a cause area
I do think Bob is this person. He is motivated
You could forgive a man for losing motivation given the negative reaction this has received. I’m not too excited to spend this much effort on another post that will lose me karma/voting-power.
I really would like it if someone took it from here, perhaps an economist could do an impact analysis or a psychologist could look into the effect a higher average salary and a lower chance of being fired has on the families of the employees (my guess is it would be positive).
[LATE EDIT at 4 karma and −1 agreement:] The post and my comments now have positive karma thanks to Jobst’s intervention. So expressing socialist sentiment is not a guaranteed loss of karma but it’s still risky so my overall attitude remains the same.

Bob Jacobs Dec 11, 2022, 1:23 PM
19 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
I am the writer of the subthread Jan is responding to. You can find my reply here.

Bob Jacobs Dec 11, 2022, 1:21 PM
27 points
22 ∶ 6
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: ESPR should return the FTX-funded chateau
Thank you for your detailed addition of context, but I’m honestly slightly disappointed.
You accuse me of making false claims yet this response doesn’t say which claims in either my post or my comment are false. In fact, you don’t even quote my writing at all, and the comment is mainly about why you think this project is a good idea.
You say:
I am not trying to prevent people expressing their opinions, but would ask that any speculation (or, for example, digging for the physical addresses of vaguely related entities)
For the people who got the impression I digged through obscure messages for people’s private addresses, I didn’t. They are the addresses that are publicly listed on the respective websites contact pages. I did this initially to defend these organizations against the claim that they were buying a castle and this was a way to show concrete evidence that they weren’t castles. I only later discovered the purchase of this chateau.
You write:
The implication “you got a grant from a foundation that was sponsored by FTX” ⇒ “what you are doing is suspicious” is nonsense. [...]
1. Suggestive framing like “they got a grant not long before bankruptcy”. The implication is that grantees should have done – in addition to basic due diligence about the FTX Foundation being a legitimate entity and usual anti-money laundering – some sort of brilliant investigation to discover that FTX was going to go bankrupt in a few months because of fraud inside it.
But neither my comment nor my post made this claim. In fact I even wrote:
While she seems like a wonderful person I would urge her and ESPR, in light of recent information, to return the money. We already have a controversial estate purchase and it seems SBF admitted to fraud in this interview. [emphasis added]
It is the recent information about SBF and Oxford that makes it pernicious.
You write:
2. Ignoring causality. For example, Irena was working on the discussed project for years. It isn’t the case the SBF conceived this.
I never claimed SBF conceived of this, in fact I explicitly wrote:
Mrs. Kotíková claims that she applied to FTX for a grant for an international education center and simply received it. On the first attempt.
You continue:
Liability. Both the law and commonsense protect you if you took an action in good faith, as the grantees did. Mens rea is there for a reason: to hold off optics-based kneejerk judgments.
I never claimed nor implied that you did anything illegal. You write:
Buying a venue of this size takes time. In this case, it involved multiple checks by lawyers, accountants, and technicians. The grant agreement was signed in July, the transaction was not actually completed and visible in the registry until mid-October. It would have been odd to announce the purchase before the transaction was complete.
Even if you don’t want to talk about the project before the purchase, I still feel it could’ve been disclosed in October, November or December.
You write:
…also, to reiterate, contrary to rumour, the property is not owned by Irena Kotíková or Czech EA association or “EA Prague”. Also it’s probably worth understanding for people involved, the project is mostly a lot of work, not some sort of leisure spending.
I never claimed that it was leisure spending and I didn’t claim it was owned by Irena, Czech EA or EA Prague, the title of this post is “ESPR should return the FTX-funded chateau” and thats what my post talks about.

Accept or lean toward: scientific realism	699 / 931 (75.1%)
Other	124 / 931 (13.3%)
Accept or lean toward: scientific anti-realism	108 / 931 (11.6%)