This seems like generally a bad precedent to setâlots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. Iâm not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.
Henry Stanley đ¸
Karma: 1,733
Fine on chrome for me
This all seems very sensible and reasonable. But at the time of writing this comment, your post still makes all of the âbaileyâ claims I mentioned, which rather proves the point that youâre using a central reasonable claim to justify a bunch of related but unreasonable/âpoorly-evidenced ones. I suspect this muddled thinking is why youâre getting downvoted.
(Iâm sorry your experience has been so bad.)
It feels like thereâs a motte and bailey here.
Motte: powerful men who wield control over EA money shouldnât use that power for sexual gain. Baileys, as I see them: EAs shouldnât get into relationships with one another, we should implement strict rules to enforce this, women who are âredpilledâ have basically been brainwashed by polyamorous EAs, EAs sleeping together somehow contributed to the FTX debacle(?).
Your point about Title IX seems especially strangeâas I understand it Title IX has led to universities dealing with sexual misconduct claims internally, the opposite of your proposal to have the police deal with them (which I totally agree with).
This seems to be ânot even wrongââFTXâs business model isnât and never was in question. The issue is Sam committing fraud and misappropriating customer funds, and there being a total lack of internal controls at FTX that made this possible.
Surely itâs at least implied that people shouldnât earn to give through fraud/âcriminal behaviour?
(The image at the bottom of the post is broken, btw)
This is wonderful â thank you so much for writing it.
Mutual dedication to one anotherâs ends seems like a thing commonly present in religious and ethnic communities. But it seems quite uncommon to the demographic of secular idealists, like me. Such idealists tend to form and join single-focus communities like effective altruism, which serve only a subset of our eudaemonic needs.
Agree about secular, single-purpose communities â but Iâm not sure EA is quite the same.
Iâve found my relationships with other EAs tend to blossom to be about more than just EA; those principles provide a good set of shared values from which to build other things, like a sense of community, shared houses, group meals, playing music together and just supporting each other generally. Then again, I donât consider EA to be the core of my identity, so YMMV.
(I ask not just for selfish reasons as a fellow depressive, but also because making EAs happier probably has instrumental benefits)
Huge congratulations on the book!
My question isnât really related â it was triggered by the New Yorker/âTime pieces and hearing your interview with Rob on the 80,000 Hours podcast (which I thought was really charming; the chemistry between you two comes across clearly). Disregard if itâs not relevant or too personal or if youâve already answered elsewhere online.
How did you get so dang happy?
Like, in the podcast you mention being one of the happiest people you know. But you also talk about your struggles with depression and mental ill-health, so youâve had some challenges to overcome.
Is the answer really as simple as making mental health your top priority, or is there more to it? Becoming 5â10x happier doesnât strike me as typical (or even feasible) for most depressives[1]; do you think youâre a hyper-responder in some regard? Or is it just that people tend to underindex on how important mental health is and how much time they should spend working at it (e.g. finding meds that are kinda okay and then stopping the search there instead of persisting)?
We should at least strive to get it above The Very Hungry Caterpillar (#21).
FGM is distinguished (beyond the forms in which it occurs) in that there are no medical reasons for doing it, nor does it have any health benefits for women
A small aside on this, which I found interesting:
if anti-FGM campaigners and organizations such as the WHO continue to play the âno health benefitsâ card as a way of deflecting comparisons to male circumcision, it will not be long before medically-trained supporters of the practice in other countries begin to do the necessary research. âŚ
I suggest, therefore, that by repeating the mantraâin nearly every article focused on female genital cuttingâthat âFGM has no health benefits,â those who oppose such cutting are sending the wrong signal. The mantra implies that if FGM did have health benefits, it wouldnât be so bad after all.
But that isnât what opponents really think. Regardless of health consequences, they see nontherapeutic genital cutting of female minors as contrary to their best interests, propped up by questionable social norms that should themselves be challenged and changed.
On a meta level, Iâm surprised by how unpopular Sjlver and DukeGartzeaâs comments are in this discussion relative to othersâ.
For me it was seeing arguments made from emotion (âIt is very clear that violence against men is less of an issue than violence against womenâ, no evidence provided) when responding to comments that contained data on men being the majority of victims of violence. When challenged they performed a bait-and-switch by offering stats for sexual assault (which is indeed more common in women, and a deeply serious issue, but is a subset of assault generally).
Agreed that FGM is horrifying beyond belief. But the flippancy from Sjilver around male circumcision and its purported sex benefits to men (which are not backed by the evidence), accompanied by a winky face, were enough to earn a downvote from me.
[am stepping back from this thread now as itâs getting a bit distant from the original post and I donât wish to derail it]
Quite horrifying, I agree. But scale is notable here: 6 times as many men are circumcised, so if the quality of life lost was 0.5% then the total lost utility is the same between the two groups.
And given that some number of circumcisions go wrong, leading to loss of sensation, pain during sex, rarely partial or total amputation and other forms of suffering (âthe constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain,â writes one individual with PTSD from the suffering from his botched circumcision), 0.5% overall seems really not hard to fathom.
The benefits are minor (your comments elsewhere about better sexual performance are not supported by the literature), and not justified by the harms. This position has broad agreement from public health bodies. The UKâs National Health Service, and many other like it, made the decision decades ago to stop funding neonatal circumcisions for this exact reason.
circumcision is probably legal nearly everywhere because these effects are small.
This just seems like post-hoc rationalisation (âit canât be bad because itâs legalâ). I could just as easily say that laws on circumcision are thirty years behind laws on FGM.
More likely is that the practice plays a prominent role in Abrahamic religions and attempts by countries to outlaw it (there have been a few) fall foul of laws around freedom of religion. Several such examples here, see e.g. Iceland and Denmark.
Iâm touching the third rail here, but I think there probably is a nuanced comparison to be made that considers the different forms of FGM (including the prevalence of the most minor forms â involving making small nicks or pricks in the skin â which are less invasive than male circumcision) along with its prevalence globally (30% of men are circumcised while 5% of women have been subjected to FGM).
Thereâs also the legal/âsocietal/âneglectedness comparison: FGM is widely condemned and illegal in most countries, with prohibitions extending across jurisdictions (in some countries itâs a criminal offence for citizens to have FGM done in another country). Compare male circumcision, which is legal nearly everywhere.
⌠which arguably gives circumcised males the benefit of longer sex ;-)
I guess if FGM had some possible sexual benefits, that would make it acceptable?
On the topic of starting a publishing house/âimprintâI recall seeing a suggestion from Ben Pace that an EA could buy Blackwellâs in Oxford and steer it in an EA direction...
My brief review: Iâve had a handful of sessions with Yonatan and theyâve been great. Heâs friendly and kind, and has a great way of getting you to think differently about problems youâre facing at work and in your career.
Iâm the CTO of an early-stage startup, and have found that (contrary to my expectations) itâs the emotional/âgrit side of things thatâs the most tricky to navigate, rather than anything technical. So our conversations have focused on co-founder relationships, hiring and onboarding new employees, and general thoughts around startup life.
Came here to post this same articleâI think it does a good job outlining all the ways in which this really was a fraud and not some sort of accounting mistake as seems to be presented by some media outlets.