Denise_Melchin

Karma: 3,610

Denise_Melchin 4 May 2021 18:38 UTC
10 points
in reply to: saulius’s comment on: Rodents farmed for pet snake food
There’s something about this exchange I find super charming, thank you for sharing. Maybe how kind you both are, trying to help each other, with both of you earnestly motivated by completely different target audiences—you trying to do well by rats and mice, and the snake owner by snakes.

Denise_Melchin 21 Apr 2021 18:23 UTC
27 points
in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Launching a new resource: ‘Effective Altruism: An Introduction’
I like this comment! But I think I would actually go a step further:

I don’t dispute the expertise of the people you listed.

I haven’t thought too hard about this, but I think I do actually dispute the expertise of the people Ryan listed. But that is nothing personal about them!

When I think of the term ‘expert’ I usually have people in mind who are building on decades of knowledge of a lot of different practitioners in their field. The field of global priorities has not existed long enough and has not developed enough depth to have meaningful expertise as I think of the term.

I am very happy to defer to experts if they have orders of magnitude more knowledge than me in a field. I will gladly accept the help of an electrician for any complex electrical problem despite the fact that I changed a light switch that one time.

But I don’t think that applies to global priorities for people who are already heavily involved in the EA community—the gap between these EAs and the global priorities ‘experts’ listed in terms of knowledge about global priorities is much, much smaller than between me and electrician about electrics. So it’s much less obvious whether it makes sense for these people to defer.

Denise_Melchin 13 Apr 2021 14:29 UTC
8 points
on: My personal cruxes for focusing on existential risks / longtermism / anything other than just video games
Thank you for writing this! I’m currently drafting something similar and your post gave me some new ideas on how to structure it so it would be easy to follow.

Denise_Melchin 7 Apr 2021 8:37 UTC
9 points
on: Getting a feel for changes of karma and controversy in the EA Forum over time
This is really cool, thank you! :-)

One thought: it is much easier now than it used to be to look at highly upvoted posts. In the old forum old popular posts simply fell by the wayside, now you can sort by them. We also now have the favourites section which encourages people to read highly upvoted posts they haven’t read yet.

So I think highly popular posts now look more popular than they really are compared to the past even according to your metric.

Also, I’m proud to say I guessed the most well received forum post according to your metric correctly!

Denise_Melchin 6 Apr 2021 20:43 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Jakob_J’s comment on: Jakob_J’s Shortform
I was thinking of a salary in the mid £40k range when I said that I feel like I need a higher salary to be able to afford living in London with children as it is my salary as a civil servant. :-) That is significantly above median and average UK salary. And still ~20% above median London salary, though I struggled to quickly find numbers for average London salary.

I think if you have two people earning £40k+ each having kids in London is pretty doable even if both are GWWC pledgers. I think I’d feel uncomfortable if both parents brought in less than £30k, though it would be fine in different areas of the UK.

Only few people in the UK can earn above £80k. Most people have kids anyway. I personally wouldn’t think the trade-off you are suggesting is worth it on selfish/child benefiting grounds alone (ignoring EtG potential). But different parents want to make different trade-offs for their children, they value different things.

If you are surrounded by people who think £80k salaries are a necessity to raise children, maybe you would find it helpful to surround yourself more with many different kinds of families of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Their kids can be happy too :-)

Denise_Melchin 6 Apr 2021 15:15 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Possible misconceptions about (strong) longtermism
When this post went up, I wrote virtually the same comment, but never sent it! Glad to see you write it up, as well as your below comments. I have the impression that in each supposed example of ‘simple cluelessness’ people just aren’t being creative enough to see the ‘complex cluelessness’ factors, as you clarify with chairs in other comment.

My original comment even included saying how Phil’s example of simple cluelessness is false, but it’s false for different reasons than you think: If you try to conceive a child a day later, this will not in expectancy impact when the child will be born. The impact is actually much stronger than that. It will affect whether you are able to conceive in this cycle at all, since eggs can only be fertilized during a very brief window of time (12-24 hours). If you are too late, no baby.
What links here?
- Max_Daniel's comment on Possible misconceptions about (strong) longtermism by jackmalde (13 Apr 2021 21:51 UTC; 4 points)

Denise_Melchin 4 Apr 2021 17:21 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Jakob_J’s comment on: Jakob_J’s Shortform
This depends on where you live. But for Europe and the US, usually the biggest expense factors are housing (bigger place required, particularly in the long term) and childcare (both in terms of paid childcare for young children as well as lost wages). In some countries, childcare is subsidized however, sometimes heavily so, reducing the costs.

If just having lots of time was most important for being “successful” in raising a family, it would still cost a lot of money—it is time you cannot spend working.

When I lived in Germany with heavily subsidized childcare, I never felt like I needed to earn a lot of money to have children. Living in the UK now, particularly in London, with very little subsidized childcare, I feel more forced to have a higher earning job.

Julia has written about her experience here.

Denise_Melchin 29 Mar 2021 12:47 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”

I personally think the EA community could plausibly grow 1000-fold compared to its current size, i.e. to 2 million people, which would correspond to ~0.1% of the Western population. I think EA is unlikely to be able to attract >1% of the (Western and non-Western) population primarily because understanding EA ideas (and being into them) typically requires a scientific and prosocial/altruistic mindset, advanced education, and the right age (no younger than ~16, not old enough to be too busy with lots of other life goals). Trying to attract >1% of the population would in my view likely lead to a harmful dilution of the EA community. We should decide whether we want to grow more than 1000-fold once we’ve grown 100-fold and have more information.

I meant this slightly differently than you interpreted it I think. My best guess is that less than 10% of the Western population are capable of entering potentially high impact career paths and we already have plenty of people in the EA community for whom this is not possible. This can be for a variety of reasons: they are not hard-working enough, not smart enough, do not have sufficient educational credentials, are chronically ill, etc. But maybe you think that most people in the current EA community are very well qualified to enter high impact career paths and our crux is there?

While I agree that government jobs are easier to get into than other career paths lauded as high impact in the EA Community (at least this seems to be true for the UK civil service), my impression is that I am a lot more skeptical than other EAs that government careers are a credible high impact career path. I say this as someone who has a government job. I have written a bit about this here, but my thinking on the matter is currently very much a work in progress and the linked post does not include most reasons why I feel skeptical. To me it seems like a solid argument in favour has just not been made.

I would feel excited about a project that tries to find out why donation rates are low (lack of money? lack of room for more funding? saving to give later and make donations more well-reasoned by giving lump sums? a false perception that money won’t do much good anymore? something else?) and how we might increase them. (What’s your guess for the reasons? I’d be very interested in more discussion about this, it might be worth a separate EA Forum post if that doesn’t exist already.)

I completely agree with this (and I think I have mentioned this to you before)! I’m afraid I only have wild guesses why donation rates are low. More generally, I’d be excited about more qualitative research into understanding what EA community members think their bottlenecks to achieving more impact are.

Denise_Melchin 26 Mar 2021 20:48 UTC
24 points
in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”

The EA community would probably greatly increase its impact if it focused a bit less on personal donations and a bit more on spending ODA budgets more wisely, improving developing-world health policy, funding growth diagnostics research, vastly increasing government funding for clean meat research, etc.

I think I disagree with this given what the community currently looks like. (This might not be the best place to get into this argument, since it’s pretty far from the original points you were trying to make, but here we go.)

Two points of disagreement:

i) The EA Survey shows that current donation rates by EAs are extremely low. From this I conclude that there is way too little focus on personal donations within the EA community. That said, if we get some of the many EAs which are donating very little to work on the suggestions you mention, that is plausibly a net improvement, as the donation rates are so low anyway.

Relatedly, personal donations are one of the few things that everyone can do. In the post, you write that “The longer-term goal is for the EA community to attract highly skilled students, academics, professionals, policy-makers, etc.”, but as I understand the terms you use, this is probably less than 10% of the Western population. But maybe you disagree with that?

Accordingly, I do not view this as the longer-term goal of the EA community, but only one of them. Most of the other people who cannot have high-flying high-impact careers, which is most people, should focus on maximizing donations instead.

ii) I think the EA community currently does not have the expertise to reliably have a positive impact on developing world policy. It is extremely easy to do harm in this area. Accordingly, I am also sceptical of the idea to introduce a hits-based global development fund, though I would need to understand better with what you are intending there. I would be very keen for the EA community to develop expertise in this area and some of the suggestions you make e.g growth diagnostics research should help with that. But we are very far from having expertise right now and should act accordingly.

Denise_Melchin 24 Mar 2021 10:09 UTC
29 points
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021
So despite the fact that I spent quite a while thinking about adopting vs. having biological children a few years ago and came out in favour of having biological children for now based on similar concerns you (and Dale) raise about more adverse outcomes in adopted children, I find your conclusion to strongly dissuade from adopting very surprising.

You thinking that adopting might likely be a life-destroying mistake does not seem to line up with the adoption satisfaction data Aaron linked. Maybe you meant this specifically for adopting teenagers? It was not clear from your comment.

In many ways, I prefer more awareness about difficulties in adopting over the naive ‘why don’t you just adopt?!’ do-gooders who want to have children often hear. So I am grateful that this topic is brought up, I would just prefer a more clear pointing out of trade-offs, as well as more emotional sensitivity on the topic.

When I looked into this, I looked more at qualitative accounts (and also tried to answer a slightly different question—does demand from potential parents for low-risk adopted children outstrip how many such children there are?) and less at quantitative data. While this seems like a clear oversight in retrospect, apparently this led me to a more negative impression than is warranted now looking at the data you linked. If you had told me that 1,5% of biological children have substantial drug abuse problems as defined in the paper and asked me to guess the percentage for adopted children, I would have guessed way more than 3,5%. I was also surprised by the adoption satisfaction data Aaron linked. So if anything, you are leaving me with a more positive impression of adoption, and are motivating me to look into the topic again.

Thus I am surprised you are so confident in your position you would be willing to spend so much time on dissuading people to adopt. (You are welcome to try to dissuade me that this is even worth my time looking into it!) To me, the outcomes do not seem to be ‘very predictably bad’.

While on average adopted children have worse outcomes than biological children, this really does not need to be true for each individual making this choice. It is also not the only factor which matters. To name some examples which can tilt the decision: infertility, same-sex couples, previous difficult pregnancies or birth trauma, family history of genetic diseases like Huntington’s, more garden-variety heritable risk factors for issues like ADHD, autism and depression, how high risk the potential adoptive children actually are, e.g. based on their age and previous history, etc.

Denise_Melchin 20 Mar 2021 9:39 UTC
25 points
in reply to: Dale’s comment on: Please stand with the Asian diaspora

Despite the lack of good data, I suspect that it is indeed the case that anti-asian crimes have risen significantly this year. We known that violent crime in general has increased significantly since the BLM protests/riots of last summer, and that attacks on asians are disproportionately caused by blacks (28% for 2018, the last year we have data, vs just 15% for white and hispanic victims). So my guess is that reductions in policing as a result of the protests have left many asians exposed. Most races are primarily victimised by others of the same race (62% for whites, 70% for blacks), but this is far less true for asians (24%). Presumably it is these inter-racial crimes that asians disproportionately suffer from which either are, or at least are reported as, hate crimes.

Given the one source you give, I am wondering whether you are talking about the US only? If so, this is something you should clarify in this paragraph, as I would not necessarily expect patterns like this to generalize to other countries.

Denise_Melchin 17 Mar 2021 21:41 UTC
5 points
in reply to: BenMillwood’s comment on: AMA: Toby Ord @ EA Global: Reconnect
+1, very interested in this. I didn’t find the reasons in the Precipice that compelling/not detailed enough, so I’d be curious for more.

Denise_Melchin 15 Mar 2021 19:11 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Against neutrality about creating happy lives
Maybe this is just an ex post vs. ex ante distinction? If children with unfortunate lives think they just got unlucky and think their lives would have been positive in expectancy, they might not think that their parents did anything morally wrong. But they might feel differently if the parents knew their children would have a very serious genetic medical condition.

(But this is wild speculation, I have not checked for any empirical data on this.)

Denise_Melchin 15 Mar 2021 16:18 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Julia_Wise’s comment on: Why do so few EAs and Rationalists have children?
In my answer I was assuming that the children go to school (usually between 9am-3:30pm in the UK) and I’d guess Greg was assuming the same, therefore only having to cover 1-2 hours working while children are present each day.

Otherwise I agree, this is much harder if children don’t go to school!

Denise_Melchin 15 Mar 2021 10:14 UTC
15 points
in reply to: ateabug’s comment on: Why do so few EAs and Rationalists have children?
It seems to me Greg was talking about school-age children where I think having a WFH parent will often be sufficient. I agree having a WFH parent for small children isn’t much help, as taking care of them is usually a full-time job on its own.

That said, most of the childcare cost in the UK does seem to come from the first few years (as it is a full-time job) and not from when children are school-age.

Denise_Melchin 10 Mar 2021 12:28 UTC
8 points
in reply to: saulius’s comment on: Why Hasn’t Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?
I completely agree with this, thank you for writing it up! This is also an issue I have with some elements of the ‘drifting’ debate—I’m not too fussed whether someone stays involved in the EA community (though I think it can be good to check whether there have been new insights), I care about people actually still doing good.

Denise_Melchin 4 Mar 2021 20:54 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Anafromthesouth’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021
First of all, it’s great that you are considering this (or are already most of the way there?)!

Here was a discussion on the same topic that might interest you. If you have Facebook and would like to join the Parents in Effective Altruism group, there was also a discussion on this topic here.

Good luck!

Edit: I also really enjoyed the story of this couple which adopted over 20 children. They were featured in the book Strangers Drowning covering highly altruistically motivated people, which included stories about EAs as well.

Denise_Melchin 4 Mar 2021 20:38 UTC
29 points
in reply to: Dale’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021
I strongly disagree with this comment for various reasons, and for the sake of my nerves I won’t go through them all. Just one thing:

Usually the argument for adopting an older child is not that you can expect to raise their IQ points a bit or their income in adulthood. But twin adoption studies also show, and Caplan discusses that in his book, that treating your children well is something that will make a difference to them by how they remember and relate to you. The foster system is often a pretty awful experience to children, so you will make their life better by giving them a loving home, even if it will never show on their IQ tests. Feeling loved and cared for matters.

Denise_Melchin 19 Feb 2021 19:18 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Doing good is as good as it ever was
Hi Milan,

This was now quite a while ago but I have spent some time trying to figure out why I don’t find cluelessness arguments persuasive. After we spent a bunch of time deconfusing ourselves, Alex has written up almost everything I could say on the subject in a long comment chain here.

Denise_Melchin 18 Feb 2021 16:23 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Running an AMA on the EA Forum
Maybe a group AMA thread would be a good idea, where everyone can post a comment that they are happy to answer questions?