CEA’s “guiding principles of effective altruism” were an attempt at this.
Julia_Wise
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That might be called an “advisory board.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advisory_board
My first question was “Why the assumption that all deaths are as cheap to prevent as the marginal one?” which I see AGB has already raised there. I’ll be interested to see an answer.
Grief was previously considered different from depression, but with the DSM-5 it’s no longer a reason to rule out a depression diagnosis. It’s unclear how much antidepressants help with grief (and people have mixed feelings about whether medical treatment for grief is appropriate).
Greg Lewis’s piece “Beware surprising and suspicious convergence” has some relevant ideas.
I’m in favor of evaluating which belongings/uses of time/other aspects of lifestyle are important to one’s happiness, but I don’t think the verdict will often be so straightforwardly in favor of minimalism across the board.
I’d be interested in whether clothes minimalism really reduces time/attention spent on clothes. My guess is that some minimalist principles are good here (having a number of clothing staples so you don’t put a lot of thought into getting dressed each morning) help, while times maximalism (having a larger number of these staples so you don’t have to do laundry that often) is the way to go. Personally, I found having a small number of “dearly loved” clothes items increased the amount of mental energy that went toward my clothing, while moving toward feeling less attached to any given piece has been good for having less of my attention taken up here.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time in smaller living spaces (e.g. sharing a bedroom with my partner and our baby/toddler), I think larger spaces (at least more bedrooms) can have a lot of benefit for quality of sleep. Needing to lie silently until everyone else is awake, or waking them earlier than they wanted to be woken, is a real cost to either time or wellbeing.
I believe if you save something as a draft and then re-publish it, it changes the publication date. Darius, is that maybe what happened? If you know the original publication date, the moderators can change it to the original.
To the extent that ethnography is anonymized, I could imagine people speaking more freely than they do in blog posts, interviews where they’re identified, etc.
No particularly strong reason. I guess it seems strange that given that it would be low cost for public health systems to issue advice about this, it’s not already happening more. Maybe the fact that no one really opposes it and it might be cheap to improve means that it’s ripe for more attention, but maybe the fact that it hasn’t already been done means EAs who aren’t already working in public health can’t do a lot.
It’s not totally neglected—there are a ton of results for “sleep deprivation epidemic,” the CDC describes sleep deprivation as a serious national problem, and my local schoolyard has a banner telling children to get 9 hours of sleep. But obviously more progress could be made.
Copenhagen Consensus is usually the first place I look for things like this. https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/conflictandviolence
They cite some interventions (reduction of infanticide in UK, reduction of “severe physical violence as a method of child discipline” in US) but the notes are “unlikely that developing countries have the capacity to rollout early child discipline intervention programmes” and “difficult to generalize to low and middle income countries.”
Poverty is correlated with child abuse, I would guess mostly because of parental stress.
I looked at the evidence on preventing child sexual abuse (in developed countries) a while ago: https://thewholesky.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/preventing-child-sexual-abuse/ Children are safer from sexual abuse if they live with both parents, if their parents do not have substance abuse, and if their mother does not have mental illness.
So my not very informed guess is that anti-poverty interventions, maternal health interventions (to reduce maternal mortality), and pro-mental-health interventions are likely a good way to go here.
I don’t think this is a particularly good area for EAs to tackle, but I do suspect that new parents should be more informed/reminded of the dangers of driving while sleep-deprived. I remember borrowing a car to drive to a meetup for new parents and and some point realizing, “This is ridiculous. I’m so exhausted I don’t always feel confident in my ability to walk downstairs. I shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery.” Not like isolation is great for new parents either, but I needed to find ways to get out without driving.
“If you look at where, for example, EA Funds spends their money, it seems like most of the funds are just going to safe bets”
I notice that this link is to the August 2018 disbursement, which was indeed all to established orgs. The two disbursements since then have included at least some grants to less established projects (November 2018, March 2019).
The accusation of sexual misconduct at Brown is one of the things that worried us at CEA. But we approached Jacy primarily out of concern about other more recent reports from members of the animal advocacy and EA communities.
My advice on how to decide the pots of money is basically in this post: http://www.givinggladly.com/2012/03/tradeoffs.html
TL;DR: spend some time noticing how much other people and let that inform your budget, but don’t try to pay attention them every day, because you probably can’t go around powered by guilt forever.
That advice was written at a time when I thought of donation as basically the only path to impact, at least for myself. I do think it’s worth seriously considering whether other paths are viable for you and not committing to a level of donation that will seriously reduce your ability to pursue other things. This probably won’t be surprising coming from the person running Giving What We Can, but I think something like 10% is a level that’s both significant and also compatible with, for example, working for a nonprofit.
I find the upside of deciding annually on my donation budget is that I can then make all the other decisions the way everyone else does. Vacation? Lunch with a friend? Donation to friend’s fundraiser? They’re all in the “stuff that will enrich my life” category, so I can trade them off against each other however I think will be best for me.
I’d also expect people to do a thing of taking high-paying jobs with the expectation that it benefits their children more than their own happiness. I don’t know if there’s evidence on that.
You have more than one goal, and that’s fine
This is not a question that anyone has an objective answer to.
I’m surprised and impressed by that BBC vertical! I wonder how much their sense of “long term” will overlap with the sense used in EA. It seems the Vox vertical on EA has needed to churn out so much content that they tend to include material that I don’t see as a great fit for the theme. I hope BBC will be more relaxed about the quantity of material they need to produce, so that the material can be more on-topic.
Rafa_fanboy, I’ve written to you but I’m not sure if you saw the message. You consistently make comments that aren’t helpful, and people regularly report them. Please try to keep your comments in the realm of “friendly and productive.”
This is the data moderators of the main FB group have collected about number of members over time: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pOiVv6q2dW6IcEHvGxp4TLKjUtOVkxX6GjqZ_91Vv7E/edit?usp=sharing