Julia_Wise

• Julia_Wise 7 Aug 2019 17:16 UTC

  2 points

  on: Us­ing Ibo­gaine to Create Friendlier Opioids

  “but keep the eu­pho­ria, wouldn’t that be bet­ter?” Not if what you want is to re­store peo­ple’s abil­ity to work and study as usual—it’s prob­a­bly eas­ier to do those things if you can get pain re­lief but not feel high.

• Julia_Wise 19 Jul 2019 22:39 UTC

  18 points

  on: Want to Save the World? En­ter the Priesthood

  I keep think­ing about this post.

  How many EA would I like to see in the clergy? Not zero. I pretty much agree with the “port­fo­lio ap­proach” to ca­reers—I think there are likely un­ex­pected benefits of hav­ing EAs in a bunch of differ­ent ca­reers, even ones that don’t jump out as hav­ing ob­vi­ously EA ap­pli­ca­tions, and it’s good to have some spread.

  But who would I like to see in those not-ob­vi­ously-EA ca­reers? 8 years ago, no­body (in­clud­ing me) thought we needed so­cial work­ers in EA. But I stayed with so­cial work be­cause it was ba­si­cally the only thing I could imag­ine do­ing. It fit with so many of my in­ter­ests and skills. Later it turned out that there was a use­ful way to ap­ply those skills to EA. But if 8 years ago some­one had said, “We should get some so­cial work­ers in EA,” I wouldn’t have wanted ran­dom peo­ple say­ing, “Well, I don’t feel all that in­ter­ested in so­cial work, but if that’s the thing we need I guess I’ll do it.” I don’t think that would have been good ei­ther for them or for EA.

  So my best guess as to which EAs should en­ter the clergy is the ones who can’t imag­ine do­ing any­thing else, or at least ones who feel pretty ex­cited about it. If that’s not you, you shouldn’t try to force your­self into that mold.

• Julia_Wise 17 Jul 2019 2:28 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for May 2019

  I also thought that since both Larks and Khor­ton have pro­vided use­ful crit­i­cism of CEA’s work, and since the panel already has sev­eral CEA-af­fili­ated judges, one ad­van­tage of the two new judges is that this moves us away from any ex­ist­ing pro-CEA slant. Not that they’re the only peo­ple in this cat­e­gory, but we thought they were good rep­re­sen­ta­tives of peo­ple who have ex­pressed fair crit­i­cisms of CEA.

• Julia_Wise 18 Jun 2019 0:39 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Ben_Kuhn's comment on: EA Sur­vey 2018 Series: Do EA Sur­vey Tak­ers Keep Their GWWC Pledge?

  We’re definitely aware that Giv­ing What We Can’s 2015 anal­y­sis comes away with a more op­ti­mistic con­clu­sion than other more re­cent data sources like the EA Sur­vey in­di­cate (and I be­lieve the Slate Star Codex sur­vey, though I haven’t seen a care­ful anal­y­sis of that one as it bears on Giv­ing What We Can). We’ve just made some im­prove­ments to the dona­tion record­ing plat­form, and once a few last things are ironed out we’ll be send­ing out re­minders for mem­bers to record their dona­tions that may not have been recorded. Once peo­ple have had time to re­spond to those re­minders, we plan to do an up­date on our 2015 es­ti­mates of mem­bers’ fol­low-through.

• Julia_Wise 11 Jun 2019 16:45 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: JimmyJ's comment on: Is EA Grow­ing? EA Growth Met­rics for 2018

  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

• Julia_Wise 7 Jun 2019 14:06 UTC

  2 points

  on: What are the Prin­ci­ples (guideline, moral spirit, so­cial con­tract, or what­ever the name is) for Effec­tive Altru­ism?

  CEA’s “guid­ing prin­ci­ples of effec­tive al­tru­ism” were an at­tempt at this.

• Julia_Wise 29 May 2019 13:06 UTC

  10 points

  on: My state al­lows for a 1 mem­ber non­profit board and I like that idea in or­der to keep my vi­sion. How­ever I want to have a “board of di­rec­tors”, but have them as a body to give me ad­vice, as op­posed to the tra­di­tional gov­ern­ing board? How can I ac­tu­ally ap­ply this and what non mis­lead­ing ti­tle can I give to the “board of di­rec­tors”?

  That might be called an “ad­vi­sory board.” https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Ad­vi­sory_board

• Julia_Wise 29 May 2019 3:16 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Drown­ing chil­dren are rare

  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.

• Julia_Wise 24 May 2019 14:38 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Are there groups of med­i­cal symp­toms that could be im­pact­ful to be turned into a spe­cific di­ag­no­sis? I learned that PTSD was cre­ated as a re­sult of lob­by­ing, pre­vi­ously it was just dis­parate symp­toms.

  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).

• Julia_Wise 21 May 2019 19:39 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Julia_Wise's comment on: Min­i­mal­ism and Effec­tive Altruism

  Greg Lewis’s piece “Be­ware sur­pris­ing and sus­pi­cious con­ver­gence” has some rele­vant ideas.

• Julia_Wise 21 May 2019 19:09 UTC

  4 points

  on: Min­i­mal­ism and Effec­tive Altruism

  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.

• Julia_Wise 16 May 2019 15:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: saulius's comment on: Con­crete Ways to Re­duce Risks of Value Drift and Lifestyle Drift

  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.

• Julia_Wise 7 May 2019 19:57 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: I want an ethnog­ra­phy of EA

  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.

• Julia_Wise 7 May 2019 18:02 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: orenmn's comment on: Should we con­sider the sleep loss epi­demic an ur­gent global is­sue?

  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.

• Julia_Wise 7 May 2019 13:56 UTC

  19 points

  on: Is pre­vent­ing child abuse a plau­si­ble Cause X?

  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.

• Julia_Wise 7 May 2019 13:32 UTC

  3 points

  on: Should we con­sider the sleep loss epi­demic an ur­gent global is­sue?

  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.

• Julia_Wise 25 Apr 2019 15:25 UTC

  21 points

  on: EA is vet­ting-constrained

  “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).

• Julia_Wise 25 Mar 2019 15:08 UTC

  111 points

  in reply to: pton's comment on: Apology

  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.

• Julia_Wise 28 Feb 2019 18:27 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: You have more than one goal, and that’s fine

  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.

• Julia_Wise 20 Feb 2019 18:03 UTC

  5 points

  on: Time-se­ries data for in­come & hap­piness?

  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.