Dicentra

Karma: 538

Dicentra Dec 13, 2023, 6:30 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Vaipan’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
sounds like it’s also below Zurich minimum wage (not totally sure if that minimum wage is currently in effect or not) and similar to the London “living wage” (which isn’t a required thing)

Dicentra Sep 2, 2023, 2:43 PM
8 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: How much do EAGs cost (and why)?
I currently work at a large EA-ish org that allows me to fully expense EAG travel and I (like some of the other commenters) am pretty strongly in the “prefer hub” camp. Like lots of EAs, I try to intensely optimize my time, and I’d prefer to optimize for work and play separately (so I would prefer to focus on work when going to EAGs, then separately take vacations optimized for being fun for me, e.g. by being in a place that’s a great fit for me and my primary partner). I am happy to travel occasionally if there’s a strong impact justification, but don’t want CEA trying to influence me to do travel for fun at a location and time it picks. In my experience, EAs in general are more intense about their time and possibly less into travel than most people in academia.
Even if you assume everyone would go, I don’t think it’s a clear win. I think a lot of professionals in the space place a lot of value on an hour of their labor; if they value it at $100/hour (i.e. equivalent to $200k/year in donations), and you make them travel e.g. 12 hours roundtrip to get to a conference location, and that affects 300 attendees who would otherwise have had reasonable in-city daily commutes, that’s $360k-equivalent added (though in reality I agree many just wouldn’t go, and some would also do the vacation thing so this would funge against hours they’d spend traveling for vacation anyway). Then additionally, you have EA orgs paying the travel costs themselves, which maybe looks better for CEA but is the same to EA funders (though maybe some people can also expense it to non-EA orgs?). If the orgs are paying $1000 per person (let’s say $400 on travel, $450 for 3 nights of hotel rooms at $150/night, the rest for meals and other incidental expenses) and 300 more people need to travel than otherwise would if the EAG were in a hub area, that’s another $300k.
Also, CEA staff probably benefit from specialist knowledge of cities they often run EAGs in, so either they are stuck in the same non-hub city repeatedly, or they probably suffer costs of trying to run conferences in cities they aren’t used to.
It’d be partly counterbalanced, in addition to being less expensive to CEA, by being less expensive for the people that would need to travel either way (lower hotel and meal costs in lower cost-of-living cities), to get to the EAG, so I don’t think it’s an obvious call.

Dicentra Feb 22, 2023, 4:55 PM
64 points
15 ∶ 12
in reply to: HaydenW’s comment on: Consider not sleeping around within the community
I strongly disagree with this. I’ve dated ~ 10 people in my life. I have also been sexually assaulted (not by someone in the community). I would quickly and without hesitation take a trade to experience 1 rape like the one I experienced (non-violent) in return to keep any of my happy relationships I’ve had in my life (about half of which I think wouldn’t have formed absent what the author is calling “sleeping around”). For my best relationship (which initially formed via “sleeping around” and I don’t think could easily have done so otherwise, and is now the love of my life), I would trade dozens of rape, easily, for the joy and love my partner brings me.
For sexual harassment, the ratio is even more skewed (obviously). Maybe I’m unusual, but this doesn’t feel personally like a hard trade at all on the current margin.

Dicentra Feb 14, 2023, 8:53 PM
7 points
6 ∶ 6
on: Plans for investigating and improving the experience of women, non-binary and trans people in EA
Why is this not listed as a ‘Community’ post? (And thereby blocked by default?)
Sorry to the authors, it’s not their faults presumably, I’m just tired of this insular/naval-gazing stuff, was excited to see this more out of my feed

Dicentra Dec 10, 2022, 6:54 PM
11 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Maya D’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.
Hi Maya, glad to hear that that was the outcome of your deeper dive. If you’re comfortable, I think it might be good if you edited in a comment about this to your top-level post (and maybe that’s what Constance meant?), because a lot of people read posts but then don’t read the comments, and so they might not otherwise know you updated about this (very important-seeming, to me) question (like something like “Edit: after checking out some of the claims raised in the comments, I now think the situation was more like [whatever you think]”)

Dicentra Aug 11, 2022, 10:52 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing: the Prague Fall Season
When will people hear back about their applications? I think if I were to do something like this, I’d want to plan it well in advance, so hear back soon

Dicentra May 23, 2022, 7:16 PM
28 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker
The weirdness Linch points at makes sense to me. Other kinds reactions that channel enthusiasm that seem good to me
“This is very cool, I’m excited other people also see promise in this work, and I can’t wait to get started”
“I’m honored by the trust that’s been placed in me, I take it seriously and will strive to live up to it”
Or/and you could just generally thank everyone in EA who seems to be doing important jobs well

Dicentra Jan 29, 2022, 12:29 AM
54 points
0 ∶ 0
on: It’s ok to leave EA
[Edit: this whole comment makes less sense after Julia’s edits. Thanks for helping out with my questions, Julia.]
I’m not trying to be oblivious or facetious, but I don’t really understand what it means when Julia and other people say “it’s okay to leave EA” or “it’s fine to leave if you need to” or conversely for someone else to say, perhaps to themselves “it’s not okay to leave EA”. It doesn’t feel… concrete enough? For me to make sense of. I want to taboo the words “fine” and “okay” to try to understand better.
Sometimes EA is hard for me and I want to leave and I’m like “is it fine? Is it okay?” And like, damn, that seems like a really hard question.
I directionally agree with “My guess is that if you feel like you’re drowning, you need to disrupt something about your circumstances, and you’ll eventually be more able to do good work (in EA or outside EA) than if you’d continue struggling in the same place.”, especially if people have felt like they’re drowning for months instead of e.g. hours.
Some things people could interpret this post as meaning:
- Julia thinks you shouldn’t feel bad about yourself if you leave EA (because it wouldn’t be healthy or productive). (Idk if this is true, I feel like the fact that I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t do EA stuff drives me to do actually valuable EA stuff, do we know that self-punishment is always eventually counterproductive?)
- Julia Wise won’t hate you if you leave EA (probably true)
- Julia Wise wants to send care and warm feelings towards EAs who leave and EAs who are struggling (probably true)
- Julia Wise thinks that in general, people who want to leave EA probably feel more negative about having that desire than is healthy? Useful? Productive?
- Julia Wise claims no one will resent you leaving EA if you want to (probably false)
- Julia Wise thinks EA will be better off if it has a culture of not resenting people who leave EA (probably?)
- It’s guaranteed to not be true that if you leave EA, some sentient beings have a horrible time instead of a good time (probably false)
- In expectation, more sentient beings will have a good time instead of a horrible time, if you leave EA contingent on you wanting to leave EA (?? sounds like Julia agrees it’s unclear)

Dicentra Jan 4, 2022, 5:09 AM
28 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The phrase “hard-core EAs” does more harm than good
Huh, I don’t feel very sold on this point.
Regarding your (1), the idea that the term is unwelcoming and hierarchical, it doesn’t really seem that way to me (and certainly doesn’t seem that way to me). I hear people talk about hardcore gamers, Christians, sports fans, Republicans, rock and roll enthusiasts, and tons of other things, including both the people in these groups and outsiders looking in on them, all without sounding like they think the hardcoreness is necessarily good, admirable, or high-status. So the term doesn’t really feel connotated the way you suggest, and thus doesn’t really seem unwelcoming or hierarchical to me. (And this is related to the below point; you seem to think the term is more positive than I think it is so think it does more to make all the different aspects of what people mean by the term sound better than I think it does).
I think people feel excluded by it being highlighted to them that other people are more hardcore than them (or, if you prefer, any of “Are actually having a significant positive impact on the world” “Are deeply committed to overarching EA principles, e.g. impartiality, cost effectiveness, cause prioritization, etc.” “Are deeply embedded in the current EA community, e.g. buying into the community’s specific priorities/frameworks, spending lots of time with other EAs, etc.” “Work themselves extremely hard to try to maximize impact”) if they don’t believe themselves to be the same way and think others see that thing as good. And you know, it’s the case that some people aren’t hardcore EAs (or aren’t far in the directions you suggest make up the term), and other people in the community maybe think that’s worse than if they were more hardcore, but I think getting rid of the term just (somewhat) obscures an important facet of reality (that people vary on these dimensions, that some people think it’s good to move farther in one direction on the relevant dimensions), and will only make people feel better inasmuch as it obscures reality from them.
And on the second point, about distorting thinking… it’s always the case that using categories obscures some detail about within-category differences. I guess the relevant thing is whether they are useful/carves nature at its joints. I happen to think “hardcore EA” does (e.g. I think your sub-points 1-4 are pretty correlated), but that’s debatable. But just saying that there are different dimensions at play (including positive and negative ones) doesn’t mean the category isn’t useful.
Finally, sorry, but I kind of don’t believe you actually don’t think the term “hardcore EA” or the category/cluster it refers to is useful, otherwise it seems weird to suggest alternate terms (“Super bought-in EAs.” or “Drank the kool-aid EAs.”) instead of lobbying for abolishing the category entirely.

Dicentra Dec 9, 2021, 4:22 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: What are some success stories of grantmakers beating the wider EA community?
Do you think MIRI at that time was exciting? Do you think other people should think that? (Genuinely asking, and not even necessarily from a MIRI-skeptical position. It seems possible that MIRI at the time was pretty unproductive and unpromising, and also that MIRI at different times was better, and that funding didn’t necessarily help that transition take place).

Dicentra Nov 1, 2021, 7:19 AM
17 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Is there anyone working full-time on helping EAs address mental health problems?
There is this thing, the EA Mental Health Navigator

Dicentra Oct 26, 2021, 9:38 PM
42 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: WSCFriedman’s comment on: Remove An Omnivore’s Statue? Debate Ensues Over The Legacy Of Factory Farming
Interesting! I totally didn’t interpret the story as being particularly supportive of cancel culture or indicating that the statue should be removed. I read it more as a straightforward meditation on what extrapolating various current trends might look like, without doing much to nudge the readers towards a particular stance on those trends or on that outcome.

Dicentra Jun 5, 2021, 3:23 AM
15 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: weeatquince’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations
OTOH my impression is that the Funds aren’t very funding-constrained, so it might not make sense to heavily weigh your first two reasons (though all else equal donor satisfaction and increased donation quantity seems good).
I also think there are just a lot of grants that legitimately have both a strong meta/infrastructure and also object-level benefit and it seems kind of unfair to grantees that provide multiple kinds of value that they still can only be considered from one funding perspective/with focus on one value proposition. If a grantee is both producing some kind of non-meta research and also doing movement-building, I think it deserves the chance to maybe get funded based on the merits of either of those value adds.

Dicentra May 13, 2021, 2:09 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Groups Survey 2020
In the ‘Number of New Groups’ chart, and where it says “It appears that growth has stalled since a dramatic surge in 2015, with roughly 30 groups starting per year since 2015.”, is this on net/does this take into account old groups disbanding? Or does it assume groups don’t disband?

Dicentra Mar 21, 2021, 7:05 PM
84 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Please stand with the Asian diaspora
What happened was a terrible tragedy and my heart aches for those involved. That said, I’d prefer if there wasn’t much content of this type on the Forum. 8 people died in that horrific shooting. If there was a Forum post about every event that killed 8 people, or even just every time 8 people were killed from acts of violence, that might (unfortunately, because there are ways in which the world is a terrible place) dominate the Forum, and make it harder to find and spend time on content relevant to our collective task of finding the levers that will help us help as many people as possible.
I agree that we should attend especially to members of our community who are in a particularly difficult place at a given time, and extend them support and compassion, but felt uneasy about it in this case because of the above, because of Dale’s point that the shooting might not have been racially motivated, because Asian EAs I know don’t seem bothered, and I think we should have a high bar for asking everyone in the community to attend to something/asserting that they should (thought, I’m not sure whether you were doing that/intending to do that).

Dicentra Mar 10, 2021, 10:06 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Is pursuing EA entrepreneurship becoming more costly to the individual?
Sorry to say I had difficulty parsing what you were trying to say in the post here.

Dicentra Mar 10, 2021, 10:04 PM
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Tom Chivers, science writer, science editor at UnHerd
What are the best changes (in terms of tractability and importance) that you think could take place in the journalism industry in the next 20 years, and how can people help make them happen?
What’s the biggest bottleneck on the positive impact of your work?
How did you make the choice to go freelance?

Dicentra Dec 23, 2020, 1:52 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Wholehearted choices and “morality as taxes”
I like the reframing, but I don’t feel like it centrally addresses the problem of demandingness. With your example (and knowing a man was pinned under machinery) and seeing a drowning child, I imagine wanting to leap into action. If I dragged a child out of a pond, and I imagine being wet and cold but looking at the child and seeing that they’re okay, and maybe the parents are grateful and people around me are happy, I feel actively glad I jumped in the pond, and would feel similar regret if I passed by.
The unpleasant feeling of wondering if I can get away with doing less, with not looking, hoping too much won’t be asked of me, etc., is still triggered for me in your framing if I imagine that this scenario happens on every walk I went on, and every time I tried to take a walk in the woods I thought “oh geez, probably someone will be in trouble and I’ll have to help, and it will be the right thing, but can I ever just have a walk the woods in peace?” I imagine I would even gradually become inured to the situation, possibly feel impatience and not want to see the family’s panic, etc.
In other words, it’s mostly the near-omnipresence of opportunities to help that makes me feel the aversive demandingness reaction, and the temptation of self-deception. And I still feel unsure how to deal with that in a world where it does basically feel like people are drowning in every river, pond, and other body of water I see.

Dicentra Oct 9, 2020, 5:57 PM
19 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What is the increase in expected value of effective altruist Wayne Hsiung being mayor of Berkeley instead of its current incumbent?
I don’t have a quantitative estimate that isn’t extremely made up, but right now, I’m in favor of Wayne winning the Berkeley election. I know there were accusations of DxE being culty and fucked up in various ways, and I believe most of them, though I’m not particularly in the know. I also agree that it would have been better if Wayne had handled CEA’s reversal on serving meat at EAG more cooperatively. I don’t think DxE’s strategy is super compelling. I don’t think Wayne is a perfect candidate, but I don’t think his wrongdoings/level of uncooperativeness are out of distribution for a politician; they actually seem pretty middle-of-the-road in severity, though perhaps unusually lurid and interesting to discuss.
Those things just seem way way less important to me than his stance on farm animal welfare. It seems like one candidate is strongly against the mass torture and killing of sentient beings, and has worked hard to stop it, and as far as I can tell, the other doesn’t particularly have a stance. It feels directionally analogous to me to choosing between a vaguely sketchy candidate who is actively anti-racist before the civil rights movement, or pro women’s suffrage before women had the chance to vote, or in favor of letting in Jewish refugees during the Holocaust and one who isn’t (and who may or may not be sketchy). (I don’t expect this argument to resonate for people who don’t put a lot of moral weight on animal lives). I don’t know how he’d do good for animals as mayor (I know he wants to ban meat, don’t know how likely that is to work), and I’d be interested in arguments that it’s implausible he’d do much good, but by default it doesn’t seem crazy.
I don’t know much about the incumbent; I’d guess we know more about Wayne’s shortcomings than his, because Wayne has been more adjacent to EA. I also think Wayne has shown great energy and had some meaningful successes, e.g. in community organizing, and getting fur banned in Berkeley, that are indicative of him being an agenty person. My current silly guess based on not much at all is that electing him in expectation saves tens of thousands of farm animals from torture.
My biggest worry is that Wayne’s work will backfire and have a negative effect on efforts to help farmed animals, e.g. because he gets elected but handles things poorly.
[edited just to fix a typo]