I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
huw
Karma: 270
FWIW I find the self-indulgence angle annoying when journalists bring it up, it’s reasonable for Sam to have been reckless, stupid, and even malicious without wanting to see personal material gain from it. Moreover, I think leads others to learn the wrong lessons—as you note in your other comment, the fraud was committed by multiple people with seemingly good intentions; we should be looking more at the non-material incentives (reputation, etc.) and enabling factors of recklessness that led them to justify risks in the service of good outcomes (again, as you do below).
G’day Marissa! I’m admittedly not the best-versed in psychiatry specifically, since I’ve focused more on psychotherapy in the past. My general vibe from reading & research I’ve done is that (for pharmacotherapy only, can’t speak to crisis care):
Pharmacotherapy is robustly effective in the short-term with minimal deterioration
It’s no more effective than therapy, and is likely worse than therapy in the long-term
Pharmacology & psychotherapy combined is better than both individually
People might adapt to it, requiring higher and higher doses
We don’t know how it works, nor do we know how depression works (‘chemical imbalance’ is marketing)
There is probably a meaningful difference between common-or-garden depression & anxiety, and all other psychiatric conditions (ex. bipolar, schizophrenia); the latter may require sustained treatment
My personal theory is that drugs are good for preventing people from doing harm to themselves for a short period, and in many cases the causes of the underlying depression go away on their own. But they probably shouldn’t be used to permanently improve someone’s mood, at which point we should focus on improving their environmental conditions and retraining their learned responses to stimuli.
But in a more general sense, I haven’t come across a lot of general reviews assessing the effectiveness one way or the other in a deliberately unbiased way, but I haven’t looked hard. I think it’s likely that the role split between psychologists and psychiatrists, and the industrial split in funding between the two, is likely to make this research very hard. Anecdotally, I liked Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, which begins with a pop-science assessment of the evidence against psychiatry while remaining balanced enough to describe when it’s valuable, but I wouldn’t call it unbiased.
Thank you! I framed it as a question for this reason ❤️
Based on the timing, how likely is it that this was a partial consequence of Bostrom’s personal controversies?
Two points there:
It is $35. You can spend $35 and offset a year’s worth of carbon emissions. It is not the case that ‘the climate cost per ton is higher currently’.
Because it’s so cheap, you can offset CO2 without caring.
If you want to put a mental block on not emitting, you’re welcome to do so, but it would be incorrect to deliberately pay more than the actual cost of offsetting those emissions. (This is what I personally do; I try to avoid emitting because I think it’s generally morally good to not be excessively wasteful, but I am under no illusions that it wouldn’t be very cheap for me to offset it). Frankly, at the end of the day, the biggest emitters in rich countries are industrial organisations and no amount of personal cutting-back is really going to prevent them from changing their behaviour anyway.
Yeah I’m Aussie so I think both are pretty deranged
Hey there & thanks for asking a great question. I don’t have any particularly fresh insights, but I wanted to join in & note that I went through the same thing a couple years ago, and concluded that I should donate a little bit each year offset my emissions.
I generally agree with the calculations leading to the $35 figure above; it does genuinely seem like the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) are extremely effective per dollar. In some sense, no matter who you offset with, you’re always offsetting in expectation—if you’re worried about risk, you should offset at the lower credible bound for effectiveness. But to address your points above, these organisations can only absorb so much funding. The German government couldn’t donate billions of euros a year in a cost-effective way—but you can donate a hundred. So I think it’s not unreasonable for governments to have higher estimates of the long-term per-capita burden of carbon emissions, at the same time as it being possible for your donation to be orders of magnitude cheaper. (In an EA context, compare saving a life via GiveWell against a government saving thousands of lives by building a hospital).
All of this generally assumes offsetting is possible. CO2 emissions are easier, you can plant vegetation which will directly absorb some amount of carbon over its lifecycle. In the CfRN’s case, they save vegetation which preserves its future absorption ability. Other greenhouse cases such as nitrogen have a trickier theory of change; it mostly seems like it’s best to prevent future emissions and wait for the existing gases to decay. And that’s where the CATF come in.
I think I have a bit more of a deontological streak than other EAs, so for me it feels important than I’m not doing any harm myself. I can’t easily make an argument that would suggest a pure utilitarian should donate that ~$35 to carbon offsetting over saving lives. But for me it was cheap enough (the price of a nice dinner, say) that any hand-wringing over it would be a waste of time.
not an answer but what the hell is going on over there
Hey there! I wrote up my thoughts in another comment here.
I haven’t done an extensive search, but the ones that seem the best to me would be Thought Saver, UpLift, and Clarity CBT Journal. All three of these are from EA-aligned people and seem to be very evidence-based; Clarity is also very popular.
Meditation might be more approachable for people & is less medicalised. Headspace is the most-used and has the most evidence, but if your hypothetical friend wants something a bit less mushy both 10% Happier and Waking Up are really good (and are both doing something a bit different).
Under some frameworks, you’d be depriving them of many years of happy life; but then again, if you didn’t kill them as children they probably would never have been born for food. Here we’d be getting too deep into the moral philosophy for me to have a confident take 😅. Interesting nonetheless.
Yes! This came up in a different way in some of the Step-By-Step studies. Beneficiaries only had to take a phone call, but since it was during the work day this might’ve had a selection effect on recruitment (many of the participants in those studies were housewives).
What’s your theory for why the status quo tends to be wastewater?
I’m always surprised to see sheep get lumped in with cows in discussions of farmed animal welfare (ex. the SSC Adversarial Collaboration). Sure, it’s not a terrible proxy, but sheep are often freer, need to be regularly shorn to avoid overheating, and usually die of natural causes. There are definitely some practices which are awful, but sheep are quite hard to optimise in the same way we’ve done with pigs & chickens, or even cows.
However, we eat them when they’re babies so maybe it swings in the absolute other direction.
Thank you! It’s easy to get lost in the myopia of a good investigation. I’ve added a section to the intro, but in essence, the definition in the literature is very broad and essentially includes any self-learned psychotherapy, regardless of the evidence base for it! Anything that comes up when you type ‘mental health’ in an app store counts, and as such, effectiveness varies wildly.
The ones that tend to get studied are usually more evidence-based and adhere more strictly to the canonical forms of their associated therapies, which might explain why that difference isn’t wider. That’s a long-winded way of saying that yes, Waking Up and Thought Saver would both count (what I have in mind is something pretty close to Thought Saver).
Therapy without a therapist: Why unguided self-help might be a better intervention than guided
Dumb question: Why are Joe Biden and Donald Trump not centrists?
(I feel like I can make a stronger case for the latter, would be more interested in your take on the former)
On your specific theory of change—Perdue falsely marketed OxyContin as non-addictive, and the FDA, government, doctors, etc lapped up their slow-release coatings & other measures, when they probably should’ve known that addicts would find ways to break them. This kind of ignorance is, in my eyes, only explainable by their salaries depending on them not thinking about it, for example through industry lobbying.
If your theory of change relies on lobbying, how would you out-gun the pharmaceutical companies? And even if not all pharmaceutical companies are bad actors, how would you tackle the ones that are?
On (2), while it’s obviously rhetorically slanted, isn’t that a fair framing of longtermism? They do care more about the gazillions of future lives than the smaller number of present ones and they seem to understand that this is not aligned with popular intuitions on the subject.
I am not sure longtermism is compatible with good PR or having ordinary people immediately grok its conclusions on intuition alone…
(Or was your problem more that this misrepresents the actual funding allocations, in which case I wholeheartedly agree 💙)
A meta thing that frustrates me here is I haven’t seen much talking about incentive structures. The obvious retort to negative anecdotal evidence is the anecdotal evidence Will cited about people who had previous expressed concerns who continued to affiliate with FTX and the FTXFF, but to me, this evidence is completely meaningless because continuing to affiliate with FTX and FTXFF meant a closer proximity to money. As a corollary, the people who refused to affiliate with them did so at significant personal & professional cost for that two-year period.
Of course you had a hard time voicing these concerns! Everyone’s salaries depended on them not knowing or disseminating this information! (I am not here to accuse anyone of a cover-up, these things usually happen much less perniciously and much more subconsciously)