Henry Stanley 🔸

Karma: 1,766

Henry Stanley 🔸Jun 10, 2022, 12:55 PM
22 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Amber Dawn’s comment on: New cause area: Violence against women and girls
On a meta level, I’m surprised by how unpopular Sjlver and DukeGartzea’s comments are in this discussion relative to others’.
For me it was seeing arguments made from emotion (“It is very clear that violence against men is less of an issue than violence against women”, 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.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jun 10, 2022, 12:45 PM
18 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sjlver’s comment on: New cause area: Violence against women and girls
[am stepping back from this thread now as it’s getting a bit distant from the original post and I don’t 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 (“the constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain,” 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 UK’s 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 (‘it can’t be bad because it’s legal’). 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.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jun 9, 2022, 9:33 AM
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sjlver’s comment on: New cause area: Violence against women and girls
I’m 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 – involving making small nicks or pricks in the skin – 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).
There’s also the legal/societal/neglectedness comparison: FGM is widely condemned and illegal in most countries, with prohibitions extending across jurisdictions (in some countries it’s a criminal offence for citizens to have FGM done in another country). Compare male circumcision, which is legal nearly everywhere.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jun 9, 2022, 9:03 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Sjlver’s comment on: New cause area: Violence against women and girls
… which arguably gives circumcised males the benefit of longer sex ;-)
I guess if FGM had some possible sexual benefits, that would make it acceptable?

Henry Stanley 🔸Mar 16, 2022, 11:45 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Projects I’d Like to See
On the topic of starting a publishing house/imprint—I recall seeing a suggestion from Ben Pace that an EA could buy Blackwell’s in Oxford and steer it in an EA direction...

Henry Stanley 🔸Mar 12, 2022, 12:39 PM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: I’m Offering Free Coaching for Software Developers in the EA community
My brief review: I’ve had a handful of sessions with Yonatan and they’ve been great. He’s friendly and kind, and has a great way of getting you to think differently about problems you’re facing at work and in your career.
I’m the CTO of an early-stage startup, and have found that (contrary to my expectations) it’s the emotional/grit side of things that’s 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.

BBC News – Would you give 10% of your salary to charity?

Henry Stanley 🔸Dec 2, 2021, 4:49 PM

18 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

Henry Stanley 🔸Dec 2, 2021, 11:59 AM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The EA Animal Welfare Fund Has Significant Room For More Funding
To what extent does the Animal Welfare Fund take into account ACE’s recommendations?
I’m beginning to view ACE’s evaluation process as somewhat suspect after they delisted GFI seemingly over minor complaints about management, and would want to be confident that the Animal Welfare Fund is sufficiently independent.

Henry Stanley 🔸Dec 1, 2021, 10:57 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: A case for nonviolent protest
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
(I spotted that YouGov graph yesterday; agree that it’s pretty compelling evidence for XR increasing concern about the environment.)

Henry Stanley 🔸Nov 30, 2021, 6:22 PM
36 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A case for nonviolent protest
Thanks for putting this together. I haven’t had a chance to go through your cost-effectiveness estimate in detail, but I do plan to. However:
I would attribute XR 10-50% of the credit for shifting the previously agreed net-zero date from 2050 to 2030, due to their Overton Window-shifting demand of net-zero by 2025 and huge popularity in the UK
YouGov compiles a list of famous UK charities and their popularity; XR is the second-most disliked charity on the list (38% of people surveyed saying they dislike). The only more-disliked charity is the far-right English Defence League. The majority of Britons are against XR’s protests. If your estimate of 10–50% is based partly on them being popular, I would view that as suspect.
(As an aside, I think there could have been reputational risks to EA if we had publicly endorsed XR at the height of their power. Partly this is down to XR’s unpopularity and the divisiveness of their protest tactics, but also because their poor epistemic practices could have reasonably led others to question our own.)

Henry Stanley 🔸Nov 24, 2021, 4:29 PM
26 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Announcing our 2021 charity recommendations
Of note: “ACE is not able to share any additional information about any of the anonymous allegations”, and yet ACE turned down GFI’s offer to investigate the complaints further:
GFI would be happy to participate fully in an investigation of the complaints to better understand and address them, and we offered to hire an external investigator. ACE declined
Which makes is sound as though GFI were willing to make efforts to resolve/investigate these anonymous complaints but ACE were not willing to pursue this.
As Pablo noted, concerns over the uncertain impact of cell-cultured products aren’t new, so it would be surprising if that was the real reason GFI was stripped of their title. Feels like ACE is burying the lede here.
What links here?
- Henry Stanley 🔸's comment on The EA Animal Welfare Fund Has Significant Room For More Funding by kierangreig🔸 (Dec 2, 2021, 11:59 AM; 11 points)

Henry Stanley 🔸Nov 24, 2021, 1:58 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Donating crypto on EA Funds: more coins, low fees
Fantastic work!

Henry Stanley 🔸Aug 9, 2021, 11:03 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: An evaluation of Mind Ease, an anti-anxiety app
I could believe that mHealth/iCBT/online therapy is very cost-effective, but the claims here seem to be about Mind Ease in particular. As such the meat of the report is likely to be found in chapter 4, the actual evaluation of Mind Ease – but this section is inaccessible.
Is there a reason this was omitted from the public report?

Henry Stanley 🔸Apr 10, 2021, 3:08 PM
22 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The EA Forum Editing Festival has begun!
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like the wiki isn’t labelled as such—as in, there isn’t a part of the site called the ‘wiki’. There’s also the ‘tags portal’ which refers to the ‘EA Forum Wiki’, but as I understand it that page essentially is the wiki. The language is confusing.

Should there be a section of the site called the ‘wiki’ that lists all these pages? Or maybe even consider renaming tags to wiki—where posts on the forum can be ‘tagged’ with a wiki article.

(The URLs for tags should probably more conventionally be in the format /tags/<tagname>, not /tag/<tagname>. Going to /tag gives a 404.)

Henry Stanley 🔸Jan 4, 2021, 3:15 PM
13 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 10 Habits I recommend (2020)
Seconding the Replacing Guilt series (and podcast); it’s fantastic.

Henry Stanley 🔸Dec 15, 2020, 11:35 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: Bored at home? Contribute to the EA Wiki!
Thanks for flagging—that’s now approved. Still need to do some fiddling with the MediaWiki setup I think, both to ward off spam and to get email alerts for pending approvals.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jul 6, 2020, 8:04 PM
27 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: Slate Star Codex, EA, and self-reflection
My response to (b): the word is probably beyond rehabilitation now, but I also think that people ought to be able to have discussions about bioethics without having to clarify their terms every ten seconds. I actually think it is unreasonable of someone to skim someone’s post on something, see a word that looks objectionable, and cast aspersions over their whole worldview as a result.

Reminds me of when I saw a recipe which called for palm sugar. The comments were full of people who were outraged at the inclusion of such an exploitative, unsustainable ingredient. Of course, they were actually thinking of palm oil (palm sugar production is largely sustainable) but had just pattern-matched ‘palm’ as ‘that bad food thing’.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jul 6, 2020, 9:42 AM
28 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Slate Star Codex, EA, and self-reflection
Much of this argument could be short-circuited by pulling apart what Scott means by ‘eugenics’ - it’s clear from the context (missing from the OP’s post) that he’s referring to liberal eugenics, which argues that parents should have the right to have some sort of genetic choice over their offspring (and has almost nothing in common with the coercive “eugenics” to which the OP refers).

Liberal eugenics is already widespread, in a sense. Take embryo selection, where parents choose which embryo to bring to term depending on its genetic qualities. We’ve had chorionic villus sampling to check an embryo for Down syndrome for decades; it’s commonplace.

Just dropping the word “eugenics” again and again with no clarification or context is very misleading.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jun 20, 2020, 7:01 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Investing to Give Beginner Advice?
Leveraged ETFs are meant for short-term investing I believe—they’re rebalanced daily which reduces their value over time.

Henry Stanley 🔸Jun 20, 2020, 5:33 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: [unknown]
I could be wrong but aren’t leveraged ETFs intended to be held only for short periods of time (because the ETF is reindexed daily)?

Henry Stanley 🔸

BBC News – Would you give 10% of your salary to char­ity?

BBC News – Would you give 10% of your salary to charity?