Something along the lines of.… “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman some cash, and she’ll pay for her kids’ education and their fishing rods.”
But, like, snappier.
firinn
Karma: 26
I just want to write that I really appreciate how you’ve set this up.
I see a lot of EA essay contests that offer large cash prizes for the best essay. This strikes me as insane for a movement founded and based upon the principle that we should fund only the best interventions based on RCTs and good evidence. Where is the good evidence that essays are a cost-effective way of improving the world? Where is the justification for these huge cash prizes?
Winning a video call seems far more appropriate, in line with the potential work done / value created, and selects for submissions from people who care enough about GD (and are aligned enough) that they’re actually interested in such a prize.
This post is great!
“First, I think a fairer point of comparison isn’t between best and worst but rather between the best measurable intervention and picking randomly. And if you pick randomly, you expect to get the mean effectiveness (rather than the worst or the median).”
I’m not sure if this is fair if you’re trying to communicate the amount of value that could be created by getting more people to switch strategies.
Let’s say everyone picks their strategy randomly. Then they read some information that suggests that some strategies are far more effective than others. Those who are already executing top-10% interventions conclude that they should stick with their current strategies, while some fraction of the other 90% are persuaded to switch. If everyone who switches strategies comes from that bottom-90% group, then the average change in value will look closer to 100x rather than 10x—because if you exclude the positive outliers then the mean will look much lower, and in fact closer to the median.
If you’re trying to suggest that choosing the correct cause area is more important than choosing the correct strategy, because there’s “only” a 10x value difference in choosing the correct strategy, I think you’d need to show why this mean-over-median approach is correct to apply to strategy selection but incorrect to apply to cause area selection. Couldn’t you equally argue that regression to the mean indicates we’ll make errors in thinking some cause areas are 1000x more important or neglected than others?
You don’t actually have to be famous in order to experience this; it’s sufficient to be the kind of person who is easy to tell lies about. For instance, when I was in high school, other kids spread some really wild rumours about me, including that I had gotten in a fistfight with my English teacher and got away with it (without even getting detention), or that I cheated on all my tests. I did judo outside of school, and other kids apparently found that implausible enough that the majority of my school peers believed I was making it up and couldn’t possibly actually do judo. I think this rumour got started just because I was pretty bad at the sports we played in school, like netball and hockey, so people told each other I was clearly lying about being good at judo.
When I was like twelve I identified as asexual, and I remember a group telling me that they’d heard I just pretended to be asexual in order to cover up being a sex addict. As far as I can tell, this just happened because other kids didn’t think twelve was old enough to know my identity was asexual (and apparently they found the sex addict thing more plausible somehow). I assure you I was not famous, neither was that rumour true (I was twelve).
I really don’t have a good model of why that happens. Being famous will definitely increase the amount that false things are said about someone, but being autistic seems to cause lots of this too. Being unusual or weird in many ways makes it easy to misrepresent you, since the truth can feel less plausible than the fiction. This happens a lot to me in social contexts where I’m very weird, and a lot less in social contexts where I fit in better.
But also, we have to be very careful about how we extrapolate these anecdotes to sexual ethics. As an adult, someone tried to spread the rumour that I was deeply in debt and lost my job for financial crimes (I’ve never taken out a substantial loan in my life, let alone not paid it back, and I’ve certainly never committed any major financial crimes). I know why they did it (I refused to sell them something that they wanted after a long and frustrating negotiation) and I also know that nothing bad happened to them due to spreading this untrue rumour, and there was no cost to doing so. It makes sense as to why they’d lie. Similarly, when people lied about me fistfighting my English teacher, there was basically no drawbacks; at worst somebody might decide that they’re an unreliable source of juicy gossip. There’s no reason not to repeat a funny or exciting rumour if you just want to be a popular kid. I think that’s a very very different thing from when a woman comes forward with a personal firsthand allegation of sexual misconduct against a man in a position of power, since often she faces massive harassment and professional consequences for doing so. I think that means that those kinds of allegations are much less likely to be lies, and definitely much less likely to be passed around as the “fun” kind of gossip.
I enjoy doing this kind of thing and would enter several entries if you removed the requirement for a .svg file. It creates a pretty significant amount of unnecessary hassle—I’d understand if it was for a finished product, but I’m not going to use vector for sketches.