Joseph

• JosephApr 7, 2025, 11:40 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform

  I’m wondering if the idea of the Thucydides Trap could be considered an info hazard. The idea is that a rising power/​country/​nation naturally tends to cause military conflict with an established power/​country/​nation. Graham Allison popularized the idea. If he had chosen to not popularize the term, would fewer people hold the perspective that violent conflict is inevitable between the US and China. Is this somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy?

  Hard to state with any confidence, but considering how widespread the idea is (among foreign policy folks in the USA and China, at least), it at least strikes me as a reasonable hypothesis: as a result of learning about the Thucydides Trap people think that war is more likely, which in turn makes war more likely.

• JosephApr 3, 2025, 3:05 PM

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform

  As a single data point: seconded. I’ve explicitly been asked by interviewers (in a job interview) why I left a “higher title job” for a “lower title job,” with the implication that it needed some special justification. I suspect there have also been multiple times in which someone looking at my resume saw that transition, made an assumption about it, and choose to reject me. (although this probably happens with non-EA jobs more often than EA jobs, as the “lower title role” was with a well-known EA organization)

• JosephApr 1, 2025, 1:43 AM

  7 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: The EA Univer­sity Groups’ Pri­soner’s Dilemma!

  I think you get the prize for the first April Fools post of 2025! Here is a cookie: 🍪

• JosephApr 1, 2025, 1:42 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform

  Could you describe a bit more what you mean here by “standoffishness?” Is it just that people aren’t very friendly and welcoming in a social sense?

• JosephMar 31, 2025, 1:57 PM

  8 points

  2 ∶ 1

  on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform

  For a crowd of people that often doesn’t take time off because there is more work to do, or thinks of triage in terms of deaths averted, it can be nice to see people have fun and be silly. I’m mentally preparing myself to see a dozen or more April’s fools posts with wordplay, teasing, and snark from various people.
  
  If anybody wants to have serious discussions on the EA Forum, I recommend postponing for a few days.

• JosephMar 30, 2025, 1:25 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: yz’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform

  Sure. What I want to do is get input to figure out if there are any ideas in the draft (or versions of those ideas) that are worth sharing, which I would then make into a post. Some of the ideas in the draft are probably just ramblings or otherwise not really worth sharing

• JosephMar 27, 2025, 12:38 AM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform

  I actually have a draft of an EA Forum post that I’ve been sitting on for a while about this. So far I’m labelling the idea as something like “privileging the fortunate.” If anyone reading this would like to poke around my Google Doc and give me feedback, please let me know. I’d be very happy to have some help in transforming a rough collection of ideas into an EA Forum post.

EA Pro­fes­sional Devel­op­ment Book Club: Get­ting Things Done

• JosephMar 24, 2025, 10:04 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes

  Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.

  • One critique of the United States’s drug policy is that it doesn’t halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).

  • When a jurisdiction bans chicken farmers from using small cages, (such as California’s Proposition 2 from 2008) then it might just shift production elsewhere.

  • Regarding immigration from Mexico to the USA, Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to discourage illegal immigration into the USA near Tijuana. But it actually just caused immigrants to shift from from crossing the border in one place to crossing in a different place. It also may have increased the number of illegal immigrants in the USA, because previously people came and left cyclically, but with stricter border control people instead came and stayed. While we could certainly argue that this isn’t altruistic, the general idea of taking action to reduce/​halt a behavior actually resulting in that behavior continuing elsewhere applies.

  • More mundane: a parent doesn’t want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven’t read the research on this).

  • A little bit different, but a classic example of this kind of “poor reasoning about second order effects” is the cobra effect (or any similar incentive for extermination)

  • Welfare traps

• JosephMar 22, 2025, 3:04 PM

  15 points

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  on: “Ac­tu­ally lo­cal groups”—an easy way to meet fel­low EAs from your neighborhood

  I also want to give a shout out to the EA Anywhere community for those of us that don’t have neighborhoods. EA Anywhere’s Slack workspace isn’t as nice as living within walking distance of friends or getting together for lunch, but it is a really nice little community for those of us that would otherwise require a bus, two flights, and a train to meet in-person.

  An additional upside: people from a variety of countries and cultures are there. If I recall correctly, the people who founded and ran EA Anywhere were from three very different countries.

• JosephMar 21, 2025, 12:51 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Bridg­ing Wor­ld­views: Tantric Re­treat Cen­tre Goes Earn­ing to Give

  Tantra and yin/​yang are definitly not things I expected to read about on the EA Forum today, but bravo for managing to adapt the ideas and build bridges across cultural differences. This is a lovely example of tailoring communication to the intended audience. I think that a lot of us interested in and involved in effective altruism could learn from this.

• JosephMar 19, 2025, 8:18 PM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: I made an in­fo­graphic for the In­tro­duc­tion to Effec­tive Altru­ism post (feed­back wel­come!)

  I love seeing this kind of initiative, and it is great that the skills you have allow you to contribute in such a clear way.

• JosephMar 18, 2025, 6:24 PM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDick­ens’s Shortform

  I think it is admirable to strive for that. I also notice the tendency within myself to be uselessly nitpicky with well actually. Recurse Center’s social rules have provided some small inspiration for me: https://​​www.recurse.com/​​social-rules

• JosephMar 14, 2025, 2:51 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why do EA longter­mists not dis­cuss the alleged prob­lem of cog­ni­tive de­cline?

  My best guess is that most EAs have never heard of this argument, and that the few who have heard of it think that it isn’t accurate. It conflicts with their informal impressions/​anecdotes, and it also conflicts with what they’ve learned about the world and society changing during the past few years.

  If I did think it was accurate and really believed that human intelligence was getting worse over time, here are some thoughts that would probably come along with that:

  • Does average/​mean intelligence even make sense?

  • Maybe we should do something about public schooling?

  • Anything relating to restricting dumb people from having babies feels pretty unpalatable to me, so even if it was completely convinced that was the right choice, I’m not confident I would pursue it. I’m willing to accept sub-optimal results along some metric in exchange for having rights; I don’t want to naively optimize.

  • We probably shouldn’t look at a trend of a decade or two and assume that it will continue in a linear fashion. (relevant XKCD)

  • People were on average dumber 50 years ago (and 100, and 500), and human civilization still managed to survive, thrive, and develop. So maybe it would just be a yo-yo effect over the course of a couple centuries, and humans get smarter, then dumber, then smarter again, repeatedly? I can’t say this with any confidence, but it does seem accurate that if the human average went down by 5 IQ points over the next few decades, it wouldn’t cause civilization to collapse.

  • Maybe this is somewhat similar to poor people having lots of kids, and as they get wealthier they have fewer kids? So maybe as people get more education they have fewer children also? So we should make sure that kindergarten and elementary schools are good quality.

• JosephMar 14, 2025, 2:36 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Why do EA longter­mists not dis­cuss the alleged prob­lem of cog­ni­tive de­cline?

  The phrasing here is a bit tricky, since Bouke De Vries seems to be stating (from my brief skim of his article and of) not that people are getting less smart, but that less smart people are reproducing faster than smart people.

  Overall, this seems like the kind of social science issue where most of us haven’t read the research and barely grasp the meaning, and yet people tend have opinions on it anyway. I’d take a more cautious approach and wait either A) until I’ve read through some of the literature to have sufficient context to actually understand it, or B) until someone with good contextual knowledge of the research can write a summary.

  As an example of how our ignorance of the research can lead us astray, some of the sources Bouke De Vries cites (Egeland, 2022, Lynn and Harvey, 2008) don’t seem to fully support the argument that “residents of many Western countries as well as high-income non-Western ones are becoming less intelligent.” Even the book he cites (Dutton and Woodley of Menie, 2018) seems to have overly simplistic and fallacious arguments, such as claiming that the Concord no longer flies between London and New York because we are too dumb to figure out how to make it fly, rather than the decision to stop it due to high operating costs.

  But maybe the facts really do support Bouke De Vries argument and my quick skim of a dense academic article is leading me astray, because I don’t have the context to fully understand.

• JosephMar 11, 2025, 2:44 PM

  2 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Avoid­ing some 1:1 Pit­falls at EA Global/​x

  “we had nothing in common, they couldn’t explain why they chose to set up a meeting with me.”

  To add on to this: even without any non-platonic vibe, I had a few people (single digits, maybe between 2 and 6 people?) reach out to me on Swapcard without any reason/​justification and without any explanation. People requested a meeting without any context about what they want to meet about. In my mind, this is very similar to strangers attempting to add me on LinkedIn without any message; they are just “collecting contacts” through a kind of fear of missing out, or they think being connected to me might be useful someday. I try to respond with a polite way of figuring out what they want, such as “can I help you?” or “what can I do for you?”, but I do wish that people would be more clear about why they are requesting a meeting (or a connection).

  To be clear, this was only a few individuals. The majority of people that reached out to me seemed to do a fine job of providing justification for why they wanted to meet and providing context.

• JosephMar 10, 2025, 10:22 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: His­tory of di­ver­sity efforts and trends in EA

  I really appreciate that you consolidated all this. This is a really helpful overview.

• JosephMar 10, 2025, 10:20 PM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: His­tory of di­ver­sity efforts and trends in EA

  I’m not 100% confident, but I suspect that I’ve read more on diversity than most EAs, so I’ll venture a guess and share some musings. The goal of many diversity efforts is less about adding an additional condition, and more about removing a “hidden” condition that we weren’t really cognizant of. In fact, my impression is that it is incredibly rare to have sex, race, etc., as a condition for employment (although it may often be an unofficial condition in a social, non-professional context). I do think that often this is done poorly and it often fails, but I don’t think that is an EA-specific thing.

  Broadly speaking, my informal mental framework is that there tend to be two reasons for diversity and similar initiatives for an organization/​company: the justice/​fairness argument, and the innovation/​creativity argument. I’m at the risk of rambling here, so I’ll instead just leave a link to a Notion page that I put together a while back: Joseph’s notes on Diversity.

  I don’t have any data, but I hypothesize that most engaged EAs care about both instrumental diversity and diversity^[1]. Each of them has uses/​benefits, but it would be a bit foolish to naively assume that either of them is useful in all contexts, for all end goals. I do think that a diverse outlook (or experience, or knowledge) can be very helpful in certain contexts, but unfortunately we (I mean people in general) often use membership in a certain group as a sloppy and imperfect proxy for that outlook.^[2] When superficial diversity is what gets emphasized, then you end up with “All skin folk ain’t kinfolk.” I’m reminded of a quote from The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, from a Mexican student at Harvard College who “struggled to come to terms with the huge gap between himself and other people who looked like him.”

  I started realizing race and class didn’t always go hand in hand. There were minorities I thought I could relate to, but when they talk about money, I feel the distance.… Moving in, my floor posted our hometowns on the doors. I see Mexico City. I was like “Another Mexican? We’re about to be homies!” I was so excited. But he was an aristocrat from Mexico. He says, “Dallas Cowboys; they’re my favorite team. I have my dad fly me out to every home game.” Excuse me! Plane ticket, game tickets, hotel: Are you joking? That was shocking; my first introduction to the huge disparities… he has this Ralph Lauren velvet, beautiful bathrobe. He’s like, “I don’t want to pack this.” He’s going to throw it away. I took it.

  For a more light-hearted critique, here is a meme/​joke about diversity along Wall Street Analysts. (for anybody without the culture context, the snarky joke here is that these people are all from incredibly wealthy backgrounds, and are quite similar in all ways aside from superficial diversity).

  

  1. ^

     Although we might label them as something like the appearance of diversity and diversity of perspective. Both of them have value, but American pop-culture tends to focus much more on the former. I might also be engaged in too much sloppy generalization, assuming that my values and perspectives are widely shared. So take this all with a grain of salt.

  2. ^

     I’m reminded about hearing how many black Americans were very happy in 2008 when Obama was elected as president, but who also felt that in a certain sense he didn’t really represent them, because his childhood and his experiences were so different. The thought experiment that I occasionally use is to think of a stereotypical college brochures showing a group of students, and imagine which variation would be more diverse:

     • a group of students of the same race, gender, ethnicity, and disability status with radically different worldviews and life experiences (maybe one is a upper middle class American Marxist, one grew up in a slum and can barely read, one is a hardcore Buddhist who as taken a vow of silence, one was orphaned and then grew up in a series of short-term foster care homes), or

     • a group of students of a various races, genders, ethnicities, and disability statuses, all of whom had broadly similar life experiences (maybe they grew up in the same neighborhood, with similar family income levels, attended the same school, read the same books, etc.).

How to read more books

• JosephMar 1, 2025, 4:49 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: A small case for small events: EA Belgium Sum­mer Re­treat 2023 & 2024 analysis

  15-20 people sharing costs for a small EA weekend sounds really cozy. :)

  Could you describe the sleeping arrangements/​accommodations a little bit? Did the person who volunteered the house happen to have a large number of guest bedrooms? Did participants bring tents and sleeping bags?