I’m begging you to just get a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howard
Karma: 855
I don’t like this post and I don’t think it should pinned to the forum front page.
A few reasons:
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The general message of: “go and spread this message, this is the way to do it” is too self-assured, and unquestioning. It appears cultish. It’s off-putting to have this as the first thing that forum visitors will see.
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The thesis of the post is that a useful thing for everyone to do is to spread a message about AI safety, but it’s not clear what messages you think should be being spread. The only two I could see are “relate it to Skynet” and “even if AI looks safe it might not be”.
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Too many prerequisites: this post refers to five or ten others posts as a “this concept is properly explained here” thing. Many of these posts reference further posts. This is a red flag to me of poor writing and/or poor ideas. Either a) your ideas are so complex that they do indeed require many thousands of words to explain (in which case, fine), or b) they’re not that complex, just aren’t being communicated well or c) bad ideas are being obscured in a tower of readings that gatekeep the critics away. I’d like to see the actual ideas you’re referring to expressed clearly, instead of referring to other posts.
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Having this pinned to the front page further reinforces the disproportionate focus that AI Safety gets on the forum
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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.
The “terrible trifecta” of: trouble getting started, keeping focused, and finishing up projects seems universally relatable. I don’t know many people who would say they don’t have trouble with each of these things. Drawing this line between normal and pathological human experiences is very difficult and is why the DSM-V criteria are quite specific (and not perfect).
It might be useful to also interview people without ADHD, to differentiate pathological ADHD symptoms from normal, universal human experiences.
The risks of overdiagnosis include:
People can develop unhealthy cognitive patterns around seeing themselves as having a “disease” when they’re actually just struggling with the standard human condition
They might receive harmful interventions that they don’t need
It adds unnecessary burden to health systems.
Looking at preventative health as a cost-effective global health measure is great! Haven’t read this report in full but some problems stick out to me at a glance:
1. I don’t think hypertension is neglected at all. Some of the world’s most commonly prescribed drugs are for hypertension (Lisinopril, Amlodipine, Metoprolol are no. 3,4,5 per Google). I also don’t think salt reduction is a neglected treatment: Almost every person presenting to a doctor with hypertension will be recommended to reduce their salt intake.
2. It doesn’t seem very effective:
sodium intake significantly reduces resting systolic blood pressure (n.b. Aburto et al: −3.39 mm Hg)
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every 10 mm Hg fall in BP sees a reduction in risk of major cardiovascular disease events given a relative risk – RR – of 0.8
3.39 mmHg doesn’t seem like very much, given that a 10mmHg fall is required for a 20% risk reduction if cardiovascular disease risk.
3. People hate being taxed for doing things they like
I don’t find your analysis of the reduction of freedom of choice to be very convincing. You dismiss the reduction of freedom of choice because:
food people are eating will be largely the same in terms of macro ingredients, and will taste subjectively the same given reduction within a range as well as gradual implementation
I don’t think this is true. Salt is yummy and people know it. Most people with hypertension are already told to reduce their salt intake and many choose not to. They make that choice for a reason, and forcing them or taxing them for doing so would, I think, lead to significant resentment, resistance and distrust of government. People are already suspicious of over-regulation and of the WHO, and I think even a campaign for this sort of thing might cause more trouble than the small chance of success is worth.
This seems to rest heavily on Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Estimates. While their expected value for the “welfare range” of chickens is 0.332 that of humans, their 90% confidence for that number spans 0.002 to 0.869, which is so wide that we can’t make much use of it.
Seems to be a tendency in EA to try to use expected values when just admitting “I have no idea” is more honest and truthful.
Hi! My name is Henry Howard. I’m a doctor in Australia. I’m giving 50% of my income to charity all 2021 to normalise taking only what we need and Giving What We Can. You can find me at:
website: henryach.com/workathon
twitter: @henryachoward
I love the principle of doing altruism effectively but I am hesitant to align myself with the Effective Altruism movement.
I’m worried about the Effective Altruism movement’s shifting focus to longtermism which I suspect is a “Pascal’s mugging” by a utility monster (the monster being the theoretical quintillions of future humans) and which I worry is making the movement look unhinged, impractical and is limiting its appeal and impact.
I’m mostly vegan but I’m concerned about overemphasis on animal welfare. I feel that the Effective Altruism movement overvalues animal well-being vs human well-being. I also feel it ignores that improving human welfare is an avenue to improving animal welfare (people who are struggling don’t have room to think about whether their chickens are free range).
“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
Very impressive work. I haven’t heard of DCP3 before and if I had I wouldn’t have read 4000 pages of it. Thank you for making this summary.
I’m skeptical of these impact estimates ($1-20 per life saved with pneumococcal vaccines!!) but I hope they’re right
Great post
What are we going to spend this on? There seems to be a shortage of evidence-based global development causes. Current GiveWell charities are growing as fast as they can but the funding pool is growing faster (which is great! But it is already making me hesitant to give or encourage others to)
Should we not be working with and giving to orgs like Innovations for Poverty Action and JPAL to help us find new causes? Our cause discovery rate seems very slow as it is. The only new GiveWell cause in the last few years has been New Incentives, which is already fully-funded.
I agree and I love to see this being said.
Giving to charity does good twice: once through the charity then again when it inspires others to be more giving.
A movement of people who are doing effective giving and therefore normalising selflessness and kindness is potentially very powerful and the pivot away from effective giving and towards careers-based EA risks giving up a lot of this positive influence.
This post relies heavily on the claim that on average, US women want more children than they have.
I was skeptical of this claim because it’s not in line with my personal experience or common sense (it seems like most people could have more children if they really wanted)
Stone 2018 seems to be the only reference for this. It’s a non-peer reviewed blog post on the Institute for Family Studies website. IFS seems to be a conservative think-tank with a strong agenda.
You don’t need to have a PhD to give a portion of your income to effective charities and do a lot of good. That’s part of what makes effective giving such a powerful idea.
Don’t forget the benefits of normalising vegetarianism/veganism for the people around you. This makes the impact of being vegetarian/vegan bigger than just the number of chickens you don’t eat.
My sister has been vegetarian since she was 6 and has passively inspired many of the rest of our family to either become vegetarian/vegan or at least reduce our meat consumption. I have in turn inspired other people to make changes. My sister’s impact is much more than just the animals she hasn’t eaten.
I think we tend to forget that large-scale social changes result from lots of people making “insignificant” individual choices which gently pressure others to change. It’s a snowball effect that is hard to measure and predict, so it’s easy to feel like our personal choices don’t matter.
This is great. I’m a doctor in Aus. I’ve been giving 50% of my income to effective charities all year. I think one of the most valuable things a doctor can do is give part of their income to charity. It both a) normalises the idea for other doctors and b) restore some faith in the medical profession by proving that they’re not just in it for money.
A couple of problems I have with this analysis:
Excluding everything except the longtermist donations seems irrational. There is a lot of uncertainty around whether longtermist goals are even tractable, let alone whether the current longtermist charities are making or will make any useful progress (your link to 80,000 Hours’ 18 Most Pressing Problems is broken, but their pressing areas seem to include AI safety, preventing nuclear war, preventing great power conflict, improving governance, each of which have huge question marks around them when it comes to solutions). I think you’re overestimating the certainty and therefore value of the projects focusing on “creating a better future”
You should account for the potential positive sociopolitical effects that might come from a large bloc of professionals openly pledging a portion of income to effective charity. It has a potential to subtly normalise effective charity in the public consciousness, leading to more people donating more money to more effective charities and governments allocating more aid money more effectively. This theory of change is difficult to measure or prove, as for any social movement, but I don’t think it should be ignored.
I think this is a great question. The lack of clear, demonstrable progress in reducing existential risks, and the difficulty of making and demonstrating any progress, makes me very skeptical of longtermism in practice.
I think shifting focus from tractable, measurable issues like global health and development to issues that—while critical—are impossible to reliably affect, might be really bad.
Good point with the comparison to personal carbon footprints.
I think you’re underestimating the value of “social contagion” as you call it (alternatively “role-modelling” or “normalising”). I became a vegetarian because vegetarians around me were making me question my beliefs and were showing me it was possible. Also, I think people are very dismissive of opinions that feel are hypocritical. I think the animal welfare message loses a lot of power if it’s not coming from a vegetarian/vegan or, even better, a large group of vegetarians/vegans
I question your economic analysis of meat-eating:
your reduction in demand for meat makes them cheaper for others, which will lead some to increase in their consumption...
Following this logic the amount of consumption of any given non-essential good would never change. If I refuse to buy seal fur then the amount of seal fur gets cheaper so someone else buys a little more. More likely there will be a net reduction in supply.
In some cases, such as a party, a fixed quantity of meat has already been prepared and some may simply be discarded if it is not all consumed
The “fixed quantity” is based on a prediction of how much meat will be needed at the party. If an organiser knows there will be vegetarians there, they’ll probably order less salami.
My takeaway from this is that we should reduce our animal product consumption AND decrease our personal carbon footprint, primarily for the social contagion/normalising/non-hypocrite effect, secondarily for the drop-in-the-bucket direct effects.
Aside from impossibility of quantifying fetal suffering with any certainty and the social and political intractability of this idea: potassium chloride is often directly injected into the fetal heart, not the veins, so the comparison to lethal injection or animal euthanasia might be wrong
Inspiring to see someone taking such an organised, systematic approach to their health. Inspiring also to see someone sharing their mental health struggles openly and in a constructive way.
I feel like I can’t draw many conclusions from this data because of the big risk of confounding factors (maybe an external event happened while you were on one medication and not when on another), because drugs tend to work quite differently in different people, because N=1 and because there didn’t appear to be blinding.
Anectodal evidence has its place, though. Please keep up the good work.