Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,083
Using different countries as cohorts introduces all sorts of confounding factors.
People will put forward a biased case even without a financial incentive. Maybe a person genuinely believes that the weight-loss or skincare regimen they followed worked, and they want to put the best case forward so other people benefit from it, so they use the worst Before and best After photo to be more convincing. People who saw no difference wonât post at all.
The reason RCTs exist is because time and time again weâve seen that looking at anecdotes and individual case studies leads to conclusions that turn out to be wrong when you RCT them. Might seem nitpicky but you just end up wrong half the time otherwise.
In 2016 I took part in a novel drug trial in Brisbane, Australia that injected me (and about 6 other men) with the Plasmodium falciparum strain of malaria and then treated us with a new medication called SJ733. The development of SJ733 was funded, I was told, through Bill Gatesâ Medicines for Malaria Venture. The paper about this trial (and some other trials) came out in 2020: https://ââpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ââ32275867/ââ
Results were positive!
Seems like work on it continues: https://ââpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ââ35598441/ââ
I gave the $2880 they gave me to the Against Malaria Foundation. Itâs one of the best things Iâve ever done.
I didnât see case-control studies or cohort studies. You should link to those.
Before and after photos are prone to manipulation and bias
Take a photo with your jaw pulled back for the before and then one with your jaw projected forward for the after. Use better lighting for after. Even if the person is not consciously intending to, these are so easy to manipulate.
Maybe surgery was done in some of those photos and the poster is not being forthcoming about that, if they have something to sell.
The evidence for mewing just doesnât seem to be there. You give a lot of theory and anecdote and before/âafter photos, which arenât worth much. The main proper source I see you list is https://ââacademic.oup.com/ââbioscience/ââarticle/ââ70/ââ9/ââ759/ââ5872832?login=false, which itself seems to admit that thereâs a lack of evidence for it
Another cost with a failed moonshot is damage to reputation. If I think that there is a 5% chance of another pandemic in the next 10 years and I spend the next 5 years working to mitigate it, there is a 95% chance that everyone who tells me I am crazy will end up looking like they were right.
Interesting I wasnât aware that The Life You Can Save and Founderâs Pledge had this fund going. Thanks. I donât have an an answer to your question.
Alternative response: If someone told me that there was somewhere between a 0.00001 and 0.5 chance that I was to be struck by lightning tomorrow, it would not be reasonable for me to say âwell almost everywhere within that confidence interval I have a >1% chance of being hit by lightning tomorrowâ
Almost everywhere within
Most of these CIs start at zero and they canât go below zero so shouldnât we consider these on a log scale? In which case the scale goes back to negative infinity and âalmost everywhere withinâ is meaningless.
seems to cause fewer side effects
Am reminded of this XKCD:
Reviews are good for short-term common side effects, not as good for rare or delayed severe ones.
Would an analysis of Reddit and Amazon reviews of thalidomide have revealed its negative effects? Bex powder? Diethylstilbestrol? Betel nut?
If these animal welfare analyses keep concluding that all human development has been net negative because of our terrible impact on animals, then, reductio ad absurdum, perhaps these analyses arenât useful.
This reasoning should go in the basket of âhard to say itâs wrong but leads to impractical absurd conclusionsâ along with Ted Kaczynskiâs manifesto and Antinatalism
The Rethink Priorities Welfare Ranges have absurdly wide confidence intervals. So wide that I would argue theyâre almost worthless.
Recurring issue I find with your posts is that you state expected values with huge uncertainty around them as if theyâre certainties.
E.g. âThe Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GWâs top charitiesâ
These estimates are built on other estimates each having their own error bars, sometimes with some assumptions thrown in. These EVs are houses of cards that shouldnât be taken very seriously at all.
Went in to reading this with a lot of skepticism because RCTs exist for a reason (anecdotal experiences are heavily prone to bias, so theyâre not good for determining effectiveness or side effect profiles)
I was disappointed. You justify this analysis of Reddit and Amazon reviews by saying:
âIf we only accept RCT evidence, but wonât conduct RCTs without prior evidence, how do new treatments ever get studied? There has to be a gradientâa sort of ramp up.âThis is a fair point but then at the end you donât just recommend high quality trials but you encourage people to take Chanca piedra without them. So rather than really thinking of this as a bootstrap to trials youâve actually just bypassed trials and are now recommending a herbal supplement based on Reddit and Amazon comments.
Feels like a Chestertonâs fence situation where youâve forgotten why RCTs are not just nice but necessary to determine effectiveness and side effect profiles.
My sister was a vegetarian for 15 years before I became one. She normalised it for me. I think Iâve normalised it for other people. This sort of ripple effect is impossible to measure but it gives us more reason to uphold admirable behaviour.
Thank you for your work Marie
AusÂtralian poliÂtiÂcian posts about shrimp welfare
Youâre doing incredible good by giving so much and youâre doing incredible good by inspiring others to give too
The calculations around shrimp welfare have very high uncertainty. Look at the confidence intervals on the rethink priorities welfare ranges. Why this uncertainty is workable and demodex mite uncertainty is not Iâm not clear on.
âBut those guys almost definitely arenât consciousâ. Based on what?
This sucks