Henry_Stanley

Karma: 1,737

I’m a software engineer in London, earning to give to animal welfare charities (but open to doing something else some day).

I started EA Work Club [https://eawork.club], a job board for effective altruists. With Hauke Hillebrandt, I co-founded Let’s Fund [https://lets-fund.org], a site for crowdfunding high-impact (but high-risk) EA projects.

I write at henrystanley.com.

Henry_Stanley 10 Apr 2021 15:08 UTC
22 points
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 4 Jan 2021 15:15 UTC
12 points
on: 10 Habits I recommend (2020)
Seconding the Replacing Guilt series (and podcast); it’s fantastic.

Henry_Stanley 15 Dec 2020 23:35 UTC
3 points
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 6 Jul 2020 20:04 UTC
26 points
in reply to: BenMillwood’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 6 Jul 2020 9:42 UTC
27 points
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 20 Jun 2020 19:01 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Carl_Shulman’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 20 Jun 2020 17:33 UTC

2 points

on:

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Henry_Stanley 24 May 2020 18:21 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Henry_Stanley’s comment on: Climate Change Is Neglected By EA
Though I’m not entirely sure the comparison is fair. The kind of global poverty interventions that EAs favour (for better or for worse) tend to be near-term, low-risk, with a quick payoff. Climate change interventions are much less certain, higher-variance, and with a long payoff.

Henry_Stanley 24 May 2020 17:58 UTC
10 points
in reply to: mchr3k’s comment on: Climate Change Is Neglected By EA

A huge amount is already spent on global health and development, and yet the EA community is clearly happy to try and find particularly effective global health and development interventions. There are definitely areas within the hugely broad field of climate change action which are genuinely neglected.

This is true. To steelman your point (and do some shameless self-promotion) - at Let’s Fund we think funding advocacy for clean energy R&D funding is one such intervention, so they do exist.

Henry_Stanley 23 May 2020 20:31 UTC
32 points
on: Climate Change Is Neglected By EA
Thoughtful post!

I don’t agree with your analysis in (3) - neglectedness to me is asking not ‘is enough being done’ but ‘is this the thing that can generate the most benefit on the margin’.

For climate change it seems most likely not; hundreds of billions of dollars (and likely millions of work-years) are already spent every year on climate change mitigation (research, advocacy, or energy subsidies). The whole EA movement might move, what, a few hundred million dollars per year? Given the relatively scarce resources we have, both in time and money, it seems like there are places where we could do more good (the whole of the AI safety field has only a couple hundred people IIRC).

Henry_Stanley 5 May 2020 8:27 UTC
4 points
in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Racial Demographics at Longtermist Organizations
Gotcha. I actually meant to reply to Hauke (who thought the poster was talking about diversity of any kind, rather than racial diversity).

Henry_Stanley 3 May 2020 13:40 UTC
14 points
in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Racial Demographics at Longtermist Organizations
Agreed—though many of the more successful diversity efforts are really just efforts to make companies nicer and more collaborative places to work (e.g. cross-functional teams, mentoring). My personal preference is to focus on making companies welcoming to all rather than specifically targeting racial minorities.

I’m also a little sceptical of the huge gains the HBR article suggests—do diversity task forces really increase the number of Asian men in management by a third? It suggests looking at Google as an example of “a company that’s made big bets on [diversity] accountability… We should know in a few years if that moves the needle for them”—it didn’t.

Henry_Stanley 2 May 2020 17:28 UTC
20 points
in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Racial Demographics at Longtermist Organizations

How do you think cohorts like the self-identified conservatives in western democracies or the US intelligence community would view ideas coming from that hypothetical think tank?

I suggest this is a bad example; I imagine they’d be sceptical but more because of the involvement of a Chinese state actor (see e.g. concerns over Chinese government influence over Huawei) than because of their race.

Henry_Stanley 2 May 2020 17:15 UTC
42 points
on: Racial Demographics at Longtermist Organizations

Promote formal diversity and inclusion programs

I’m sceptical; diversity programs often don’t work (Google spent $300m+ on diversity programs and didn’t move the needle) and in many cases reduce diversity.

Henry_Stanley 2 May 2020 17:06 UTC
25 points
in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Racial Demographics at Longtermist Organizations

Larks’ view that they “do not place any value on diversity.”

I assume Larks means ‘racial diversity’ in the context of this thread (and based on their comment, which talks about increasing diverse viewpoints through other means).

Henry_Stanley 1 May 2020 14:25 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Denis Drescher’s comment on: Bored at home? Contribute to the EA Wiki!
I’ve not attempted to consolidate other wikis—I think the LessWrong and Cause Prioritisation wikis are best kept separate. Concepts also hasn’t been touched in a long time as far as I can see. My hope is that simply by not going offline or being unavailable this wiki will be the default Schelling point!

I also think the fact that this is run on MediaWiki (the same platform as Wikipedia) makes it more familiar/easier to get started, but I could be wrong.

Your point about reputation is very right—need to think more about ways I can surface people’s contributions.

Bored at home? Contribute to the EA Wiki!

Henry_Stanley1 May 2020 10:58 UTC

15 points

6 comments1 min readEA link

Henry_Stanley 12 Apr 2020 13:10 UTC
6 points
in reply to: markus_over’s comment on: Why I’m Not Vegan
Interesting—I would definitely not pick the 50 months as a pig on a factory farm.

Henry_Stanley 12 Apr 2020 13:09 UTC
2 points
in reply to: markus_over’s comment on: Why I’m Not Vegan
.

Henry_Stanley 10 Apr 2020 22:29 UTC
15 points
on: Why I’m Not Vegan
Your claim that 1 year of human life is equivalent to 1,000 years of factory farming for chickens (or 100,000 years for fish) seems extraordinary. You don’t provide a justification for this in the piece, despite the whole argument hinging on this number—do you have one?

(I also downvoted the post—I think it’s lazily argued and doesn’t add much to the debate. As abrahamrowe says, you could assign an arbitrary weight to anything, like a year of life for a person in the developing world being ‘worth’ 1/100th of a year of life for a Westerner, and call it done.)

Henry_Stanley

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Bored at home? Con­tribute to the EA Wiki!

Bored at home? Contribute to the EA Wiki!