helmetedhornbill

Karma: 94

helmetedhornbill 3 Dec 2023 18:27 UTC
4 points
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on: I donated $35 to offset my carbon footprint for this year
Thank you for sharing and hopefully encouraging others to considering offsetting.
I have taken a subscription with Carbon Neutral Britain which is at just under £7/$9 per month which works great for me because it minimizes the cognitive cost but makes it a more regular part of my life: https://carbonneutralbritain.org/pages/become-carbon-neutral
That said the Vox list is great and I’ll be looking into their recommendations as well.

helmetedhornbill 6 Oct 2022 13:58 UTC
8 points
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on: Notes on supporting Happier Lives Institute
A lot of this posts reads as an intro to HLI, what they do, why wellbeing matters. And this is important and I also agree, neglected.
At the same time, you write that this post is about why HLI should receive a grant for a specific proposal of theirs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zANITg1HuKAn5uEe7nzepTZXxyMDy44vowsdVcMFiHo/edit
And it seems to me you do not really address the value or specifics of this proposal? Your post reads to me more as ‘we should fund HLI’s research’ but the proposal asks for funding for a grants specialist and seed money. And it’s strange to me that you mostly recommend funding them based on prior work (which again, I also see as work of quality and importance) rather than also evaluating the proposal at hand.
For instance, HLI are requesting $100,000 as a seed fund to e.g. ‘make some early-stage grants’. This would effectively be a regrant of a regrant. People in the comments have expressed skepticism of this (e.g. Nuño’s comment: “FTX which chooses regrantors which give money to Clearthinking which gives money to HLI which gives money to their projects. It’s possible I’m adding or forgetting a level, but it seems like too many levels of recursion, regardless of whether the grant is good or bad.”) There’s a lot of dilution and I wonder what you think of this?
Other people on Manifold (John and Rina) have pointed out how non-specific this proposal is, how lacking of a plan it appears in the current way it’s written, that there might be harm risks that aren’t considered at all. I understand there might have been word limits but other proposals are much more concrete.
It would be great if Clearer Thinking publish more information on how they evaluated all of these final proposals.

helmetedhornbill 24 Sep 2022 15:04 UTC
3 points
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on: Announcing the Future Fund’s AI Worldview Prize
Would you be able to say a little more about why part of your criteria seems to be degree of probability shift (“We will award larger prizes for larger changes to these probabilities, as follows...”). It seems to me that you might get a case where you could get analyses that offer larger changes but are less robust than some analyses that suggest smaller changes. I didn’t understand how much of your formal evaluation will look at plausibility, argumentation, soundness?
(asking as a curiosity not as a critique)

helmetedhornbill 20 Sep 2022 19:28 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: helmetedhornbill’s comment on: $13,000 of prizes for changing our minds about who to fund (Clearer Thinking Regrants Forecasting Tournament)
Ah sorry I see on Manifold Markets the tournament closes on the 30th, my bad!

helmetedhornbill 20 Sep 2022 19:18 UTC
2 points
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on: $13,000 of prizes for changing our minds about who to fund (Clearer Thinking Regrants Forecasting Tournament)
Really awesome to see this.
Could I ask whether the deadline is Sept 28? Sorry if I’ve missed it.

helmetedhornbill 12 Sep 2022 15:31 UTC
2 points
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on: Neuroscience of time perception?
This paper came out today and may be relevant as well, The neural bases for timing of durations at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00623-3

helmetedhornbill 5 Sep 2022 18:21 UTC
3 points
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on: Forum ranking system prototype: Cause Prioritsation Contest posts ranked by prediction markets
Seems that sorting by top posts somewhat tracks with the highest % forecasted (right now the top 3 top posts are the highest %).

helmetedhornbill 4 Sep 2022 7:44 UTC
4 points
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on: Neuroscience of time perception?
My first thought was also David Eagleman (How to Slow Down Time) but really most of his lectures and ted/google talks are fascinating, even those outside time perception.

helmetedhornbill 2 Sep 2022 21:05 UTC
2 points
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on: Oxford / Cambridge Union Societies
Other than the first Guardian article you reference, I would also recommend this piece and the book it is about: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/01/chums-how-a-tiny-caste-of-oxford-tories-took-over-the-uk-by-simon-kuper-review
It made the potential political impact of the Oxford Union much more salient and clearer to me. Talks about a range of things like the history of the Union, political connections, debating styles, the inception of Brexit.
Maybe it should also be mentioned both Student Unions are also likely high impact opportunities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University_Student_Union#List_of_Presidents_and_Executive_Members
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Students%27_Union#Former_Officers

helmetedhornbill 2 Sep 2022 20:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eli_Nathan’s comment on: Open EA Global
Thanks, that’s a helpful clarification. Upvoted.

helmetedhornbill 1 Sep 2022 10:38 UTC
9 points
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on: Open EA Global
Why not make ordinary attendees pay a little extra, and subsidize even more travel reimbursements?
I think more tweaking might be needed in terms of reimbursements. I’m based in an area that has a large EA student hub. Most EAs are very connected and most of the people I interact with go to each single EAxWherever and apply for reimbursements. They’ve told me it’s not that hard to get money for expenses based on the prestige of the university and the fact that they’re students. It seems a partial motivation is also travel and time off. It sounds to me that people who don’t live near such hubs and are less connected to other people and resources will benefit more.

helmetedhornbill 18 Aug 2022 11:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Vanessa’s comment on: To WELLBY or not to WELLBY? Measuring non-health, non-pecuniary benefits using subjective wellbeing
Thanks so much for replying, I learned a lot from your response and its clarity helped me update my thinking.

My claim is, I suspect that cultural factors cause people to choose different numbers for reasons orthogonal to what they actually want.
Thanks, the specificity here helped me understand your view better. I suppose with the examples you give—I would expect these to be exceptions rather than norms (because if e.g. wanting to have a career was the norm, over enough time, that would tend to become culturally normative and even in the process of it becoming a more normative view the difference with a SWB measure should diminish). And more broadly, interventions that have large samples and aim for generalizability should be reasonably representative and also diminish this as a concern.

I suppose I’m also thinking about the potential difference in specific SWB scales. Something like the SWLS scale or the single item measures would not be very domain specific but scales based around the e.g. Wheel of Life tradition tell you a lot more different facets of your life (e.g. you can see high overall scale but low for job satisfaction), so it seems to me that with the right scales and enough items you can address culture or other variance even further.

I’m guessing you are not talking about things like, how much free time you would exchange for an additional $1? Because that’s consistent with constant preferences? So, Alice has $5 and Bob has $10, they are asked to choose between X and Y, and they have predictably different preferences despite the fact that post-X-Alice has the same wealth (and other circumstances) and post-X-Bob and the same for Y? And this despite somehow controlling for confounders are correlated both with the causes for Alice’s and Bob’s wealth and with their preferences?
Thanks again for responding with such precision. What I was unable to articulate well is that your individual preferences are not stable (or I suppose: per person, rather than across people), i.e. Alice when she has $5 will exchange a different amount of free time for an extra $1 then when Alice has $10.

I agree with everything else you’ve said and especially with:
I would still rely more on asking people directly how much this intervention helped them / how much their life improved over this period (as opposed to comparing numbers reported at different points of time)
I think this is a hugely underappreciated point. I think some of the SWB measures target this issue somewhat but in a limited fashion. I’d love to see more qualitative interviews and participatory / or co-production interventions. I am always surprised by how many interventions say they cannot ascertain a causal mechanism quantitatively and so do not attempt to… well, ask people what worked and didn’t.

helmetedhornbill 17 Aug 2022 14:37 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Vanessa’s comment on: To WELLBY or not to WELLBY? Measuring non-health, non-pecuniary benefits using subjective wellbeing
Hi Vanessa, I really liked how specific and critical your comment was, which I think is ultimately how research can improve, so I’ve upvoted it :)
I’m not linked to this report but have an interest in subjective measures broadly so thought I would add a different perspective for the sake of discussion in response to the two issues your raise.
1. I am skeptical of using answers to questions such as “how satisfied are you with your life?” as a measure of human preferences. I suspect that the meaning of the answer might differ substantially between people in different cultures and/or be normalized w.r.t. some complicated implicit baseline, such as what a person thinks they should “expect” or “deserve”.
I think the fact that SWB measures differs across cultures is actually a good sign that these measures capture what they are supposed to capture. Cultures differ in e.g. values (collectivistic vs individualistic), social and gender norms, economic systems, ethics and moral. Surely some of these facets should influence how people see what a good life is, what happiness is, what wellbeing is. In fact, I would be more concerned if different people with different views and circumstances did not, as you say, ‘differ substantially.’
I think these differences, attributable to culture or individual variance, are not likely to be of concern for what I would imagine would be the more common ways WELLBYs could be used. Most cost effectiveness analyses rely on RCTs or comparable designs with pre and post measures. You could look at changes within the same group of people easily pre and post and compare their differences. Or even beyond such designs, controlling for different sources of variance that we think are important (like age and gender most commonly) is not that tricky. This doesn’t seem a big methodological concern to me but would be keen to hear more about how things look from your view.
1. I would be more optimistic of measurements based on revealed preferences, i.e. what people actually choose given several options when they are well-informed or what people think of their past choices in hindsight (or at least what they say they would choose in hypothetical situations, but this is less reliable).
What I like about the original post here is that there is caution about the uncertainties and challenges with SWB measures, e.g. comparability issues, neutral points. So I think it’s only fair to point out some of the challenges for revealed preferences. In my reading, there’s a long body of researcher suggesting these are stable, yet in practice your ‘revealed’ preference at $5 is likely to be different than at $10. Many scholars have now critiqued the notion of revealed preferences and instead suggested that we should be talking about constructed preferences. Most notably I am thinking of Itamar Simonson’s work, though this as a field can be traced back at least to Slovic in the 1950s (to my knowledge).
Constructed preferences are seen as constructed in the process of making a choice—different tasks and contexts highlight different aspects of the available options, thus focusing decision-makers on different considerations that lead to seemingly inconsistent decisions (Bettman, Luce, and Payne 1998). And I think there is an argument to be made that your wellbeing can influence your constructed preferences. For instance, negative appraisals and rumination are common for low levels of wellbeing, and there is evidence to suggest that perceived choice difficulty is linked to variances for preferences (Dhar and Simonson 2003; Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1992). Further, there is evidence broader metacognitive process influence constructed preferences, and those too can shift depending on your (lack of) happiness. So I wouldn’t be surprised that your preferences vary at e.g. low vs high SWB, in fact it sounds to me like it would be important to know SWB and be able to account for it.

Short action you can take: proposals for the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee

helmetedhornbill16 Aug 2022 12:38 UTC

15 points

1 comment1 min readEA link

helmetedhornbill 11 Aug 2022 13:09 UTC
1 point
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on: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Why we should work on preventing suicide
Immediate thought here was that suicidal ideation is comorbid with depression and that there’s some evidence that psychotherapy seems to be cost-effective: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/report/psychotherapy-cost-effectiveness-analysis/

helmetedhornbill 11 Aug 2022 13:03 UTC
2 points
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on: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Trust and Science
Super cool to see this write up. Broadly, it seems to me that a lot of related work here is being carried and developed already particularly within the open science movement, so thought I’d share some links for anyone interested.
PubPeer https://pubpeer.com is a great way to provide comments on any paper and this has successfully been used to raise concerns.
And there are researchers who already focus on potential research mis-firings: https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research
I’m also thinking of Elisabeth Bik who transitioned from a traditional academic role to a ‘science integrity’ consultant, e.g. https://scienceintegritydigest.com/about/ (her twitter is worth having a glance at, just scroll and see some of the really appalling image manipulations: https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest)
It seems to me that more should be done to unite and fund people working on this, as well as apply more pressure to journals and editors to prioritze retractions.
Anyway, great post and I’m glad you made the case for it.

helmetedhornbill 11 Aug 2022 12:58 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: trevor1’s comment on: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Trust and Science
Yeah, I agree with you strongly re: broader change. The dangers of large scale misinformation cannot be understated either.