I’m a doctor in Australia interested in doing the most good that I can.
Proponent of Earning to Give. Skeptical of longtermism.
Henry Howard
Karma: 559
Dean Karlan is now Chief Economist of USAID
My gut feeling is that LessWrong is cringe and the heavy link to the Effective Altruism forum is making the forum cringe.
Trying to explain this feeling I’d say some features I don’t like are:
Ignoring emotional responses and optics in favour of pure open dialogue. Feels very New Atheist.
The long pieces of independent research that are extremely difficult to independently verify and which often defer to other pieces of difficult-to-verify independent research.
Heavy use of expected value calculations rather than emphasising the uncertainty and cluelessness around a lot of our numbers.
The more-karma-more-votes system that encourages an echo chamber.
Can you say why you feel that longtermism suffers from less cluelessness that what you argue the GiveWell charities do? The main limitation of longtermism is that affecting the future is riddled with cluelessness.
You mention Hilary Greaves’ talk, but it doesn’t seem to address this. She refers to “reducing the chance of premature human extinction” but doesn’t say how.
Putting a hold on helping people in poverty because of concern about insect rights is insulting to people who live in poverty and epitomises ivory-tower thinking that gets the Effective Altruism community so heavily criticised.
Saying “further research would be good” is easy because it is always true. Doing that research or waiting for it to be done is not always practical. I think you are being extremely unreasonable if, before helping someone die of malaria you ask for research to be done on:
the long term impacts of bednets on population growth
the effects of population growth on deforestation
the effects of deforestation on insect populations and welfare
specific quantification of insect suffering
IPA and J-PAL are underrated. They’ve had a hand in producing the evidence for many of GiveWell’s recommendations. They seem to be significantly better at cause discovery than the Effective Altruism community.
The use of expected value doesn’t seem useful here. Your confidence intervals are huge (95% confidence interval for pig suffering capacity relative to humans is between 0.005 to 1.031). Because the implications are so different across that spectrum (varying from basically “make the cages even smaller, who cares” at 0.005 to “I will push my nan down the stairs to save a pig” at 1.031) it really doesn’t feel like I can draw any conclusions from this.
Re. 3, I prefer giving now. I think there’s a logic to giving later in that money can accrue interest and you can set yourself up to donate more later, but doing good accrues its own interest: helping someone out of poverty today is better than helping them 10 years from now, as it gives them an extra 10 years of better life and 10 years to pay it forward to their community.
A few things that stand out to me that seem dodgy and make me doubt this analysis:
One of the studies you included with the strongest effect (Araya et al. 2003 in Chile with an effect of 0.9 Cohens d) uses antidepressants as part of the intervention. Why did you include this? How many other studies included non-psychotherapy interventions?Some of the studies deal with quite specific groups of people eg. survivors of violence, pregnant women, HIV-affected women with young children. Generalising from psychotherapy’s effects in these groups to psychotherapy in the general population seems unreasonable.
Similarly, the therapies applied between studies seem highly variable including “Antenatal Emotional Self-Management Training”, group therapy, one-on-one peer mentors. Lumping these together and drawing conclusions about “psychotherapy” generally seems unreasonable.
With the difficulty of blinding patients to psychotherapy, there seems to be room for the Hawthorne effect to be skewing the results of each of the 39 studies: with patients who are aware that they’ve received therapy feeling obliged to say that it helped.
Other minor things:
- Multiple references to Appendix D. Where is Appendix D?
- Maybe I’ve missed it but do you properly list the studies you used somewhere. “Husain, 2017” is not enough info to go by.
Most of these seem intractable and many have lots of people working on them already.
The benefit of bed nets and vitamin A supplementation is that they are proven solutions to neglected problems.
“Subjecting countless animals to a lifetime of suffering” probably describe the life of the average bird in the amazon (struggling to find food, shelter, avoid predators, protect its children) or the average fish/shrimp in the ocean.
If you argue that introducing animals to other planets will cause net suffering then it seems to follow that we should eliminate natural ecosystems here on earth
I think this was a terrible idea
I think you’ve overestimated the value of a dedicated conference centre. The important ideas in EA so far haven’t come from conversations over tea and scones at conference centres but are either common sense (“do the most good”, “the future matters”) or have come from dedicated field trials and RCTs.
I also think you’ve underestimated the damage this will do to the EA brand. The hummus and baguettes signal an earnestness. Abbey signals scam.
I’m confident that this will be remembered as one of CEA’s worst decisions.
Strong agree. I think the EA community far overestimates its ability to predictably affect the future, particularly the far future.
Opportunities that development economists have missed?
The general ideas that Hauke suggests in the appendix are things like liberalisation, freeing trade, more open migration. They’re ideas that have been fiercely studied and debated before. Organisations like the World Trade Organisation and The World Bank are built around these ideas. The difficulty in testing and implementing these ideas is part of what drove the rise of the randomistas.
I think the “~4 person-years” idea is delusional and arrogant.
This is very inspiring. I think you’re making an incredibly positive impact on the world, not just through charity but also by inspiring those around you. Brilliant!
Really cool idea. I’ll be watching eagerly
Good portrait of the problem. The solution isn’t obvious to me.
I’m very skeptical of the suggestions from the Halstead and Hillebrandt post. It seems unlikely that a “~4 person-year research effort” could discover the key to economic growth in developing countries when the entire field of development economics has been trying to solve this problem for decades.
I agree with the general premise of earning to give through entrepreneurship.
I’ve never been very convinced by the talent-constraint concept. With the right wage you can hire talent. I think the push from earning to give has been a mistake.
Great!
I think that the allocation of government aid doesn’t get enough attention from effective altruists. Government aid budgets are an enormous pool of money and often don’t seem to be spent in an evidence-based way. Huge potential for positive change here.