This doesn’t sound right… Surely all recreational drugs would be legal Europe-wide in that case?
HenryStanley
Best of luck! I’m skeptical of the neglectedness/tractability aspect of this – after all, there’s a long history of groups trying to legalise psychedelics of various kinds – but tide seems slowly to be turning (in the US at least) [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/how-ecstasy-dance-drug-mdma-one-step-away-being-licensed-us-1636822].
I’ve written up some notes from EA Global London – anyone who attended (or indeed spoke at) the conference should feel free to add/edit!
So I think that if you identify with or against some group (e.g. ‘anti-SJWs’), then anything that people say that pattern matches to something that this group would say triggers a reflexive negative reaction
Agreed. I’m not sure how we escape from that trap, except by avoiding loaded terms, even at the expense of brevity.
A small nitpick – putting tables in as images makes the post harder to read on mobile devices, and impossible for blind/visually impaired people to consume with a screen reader.
I think this forum supports HTML in posts, so it shouldn’t be hard to put HTML figures in instead. Thanks! :)
I personally don’t really think the EA community should be seen as a place for dating/relationships—the same way workplaces are not seen this way.
15% of Americans met their partner/spouse at work, so I’m not sure your claim about workplaces is correct.
I’m also not sure the comparison is fair. Workplaces have specific regulations about how people can interact; an EA meetup is not your workplace and attendees probably shouldn’t be held to the same standard of conduct.
I also know of a number of happy EA relationships. I think it would be a shame if we decreed that they were off-limits.
If the data for these surveys didn’t come from Lisak … then it’s just nonsensical to presume that the data is skewed because it’s feminist
Agreed—but I still think we should be concerned about the quality of the data. The linked article suggests that Lisak’s study was assembled from other studies which he’s apparently unable to cite, which weren’t especially careful about the data they collected, and which probably aren’t representative of most college campuses.
Researching treatments for sexual offending has a chance to be the most cost effective option
I’m not convinced.
The Cochrane review on psychological treatments for sex offenders mentions a number of studies, each including hundreds of participants, that still weren’t sufficiently well-designed to tease out a signal from the noise. Suffice it to say that this doesn’t seem like a neglected area. It’s not clear what low-hanging fruit there are re. psychological treatments; I doubt that the EA community is going to be able to run randomised controlled trials on hundreds of people at a cost of tens of millions of dollars given that many other scientists have failed to do so.
The other Cochrane review, on drug treatments for sex offenders, which shows that there’s basically no evidence that e.g. testosterone-reducing drugs are useful and that there haven’t been any RCTs published in two decades. So the fruit there are lower-hanging, but again, studies are going to be very costly.
As a meta-level aside, I’m also a bit worried about being too blasé about suggesting very radical interventions. From the Cochrane review:
It is a concern that, despite treatment being mandated in many jurisdictions, evidence for the effectiveness of pharmacological interventions is so sparse and that no RCTs appear to have been published in two decades.
So basically a bunch of places inject people with powerful hormonal drugs, against their will, with no evidence this will treat their problem. This is a clear human rights violation, and likely a violation of medical ethics too[1].
Given that we don’t have any good evidence that testosterone-reducing drugs help sex offenders, I think it’s a huge leap to then suggest investigating “testosterone reduction surgery” – by which I presume you mean castration. (You also say that sex offenders are likely to be willing to pay for their own treatment; something tells me most men aren’t going to be willing to pay to be castrated.)
On an object level, this seems like a suggestion not worth taking seriously (there are a whole bunch of studies on testosterone-reducing drugs we’d need to do first before advocating sex offenders get castrated). And on a meta-level, I think outsiders with even the remotest sense of the unfairness of the criminal justice system would think us incredibly naïve to see us seriously suggesting performing surgery on sex offenders.
[1] http://jaapl.org/content/31/4/502.long—“When the promise of freedom is predicated on mandated treatment, the clinician must carefully assess the validity of informed consent.”
Consensual sex with individuals under the age of consent is not rape—it’s consensual sex with individuals under the age of consent.
Wait, hang on—
consensual sex with individuals under the age of consent
You can see that this is an oxymoron, surely? That people under the age of consent cannot give their consent (hence the name “age of consent”)?
Agreed that Denise’s comment didn’t equate enthusiasm and consent, but in UK law at least:
So someone’s enthusiasm during sex can legitimately portray consent – insofar as it would make it reasonable to believe they were consenting.
Yes – that’s top of my list!
Thanks for putting this together!
Given that most EA groups don’t have websites, and that only 6 out of 10 of those that do said that the website was ‘significantly useful’, should we just get rid of websites altogether? Having a domain name that forwards to a Facebook group might be enough, and (beyond renewing the domain name) has basically no overhead at all.
Heh yes, was intended as a way for people to gauge how much interest there is in a given project. Will try and make the UI clearer. If you click the star you can upvote.
genuflects
Yes, that’s the idea. Have chatted to Richard at 80K; we’ll see what happens in terms of “official” adoption. But with a bit of automated scraping (and manual work) I don’t see why this shouldn’t end up being a superset of the 80K jobs board listings and those in the Facebook group.
Nothing in that article suggests that the data was low quality
I think the fact that Lisak literally cannot remember where his data comes from should be concerning.
That’s irrelevant here, because the number here is being used as a representation of men in EA, not men on college campuses.
Good point—I’ll instead say then that these numbers are likely specific to the particular population of that college and are even less likely to be useful for making inferences about the EA community as a whole. Lisak himself says of the study:
“Because of the nonrandom nature of the sampling procedures, the reported data cannot be interpreted as estimates of the prevalence of sexual or other acts of violence.”
Figures comparing direct suffering caused by various animal foods (h/t Brian Tomasik)
I’ll ask; will reply here when I get an answer.
I think this definitely makes sense – though I wonder to what extent the fund manager has the discretion to appoint other fund managers?
(Okay, it’s a rhetorical question – they most likely have full discretion to do so – but it would be good if this was more clearly set out in the terms of the fund.)
One issue is that the longer the fund holds on to donations, the more likely it is for the donor’s intention and the fund’s direction to diverge.
I might donate to the Animal Welfare fund expecting the money will be handed out to vegan advocacy and clean meat charities (and trust the fund manager to pick the best ones amongst these), but if the money isn’t disbursed for two years, well, maybe wild animal suffering research will be the new hotness by then, and that’s where my donation will end up going.
If I just want my donation to go to the expert’s choice, then that might be fine. But if I had something more specific in mind (and in line with what the fund had recently donated to), this might not be ideal.
I disagree, and a quick Google for “english universal language” seems to suggest the phrase is in common use… What would you suggest instead?