For five years, my favorite subject to read about was talent. Unlike developmental psychologists, I did not spend most of my learning time on learning disabilities. I also did a lot of intuition calibration which helps me detect various neurological differences in people. Thus, I have a rare area of knowledge and an unusual skill which may be useful for assisting with figuring out what types of people have a particular kind of potential, what they’re like, what’s correlated with their talent(s), what they might need, and how to find and identify them. If any fellow EAs can put this to use, feel free to message me.
Kathy_Forth
I run an independent rationality group on Facebook, Evidence and Reasoning Enthusiasts. This is targeted toward people with at least some knowledge of rationality or science and halfway decent social skills. As such, I can help “build up this community and its capacity” and would like to know what specifically to do.
We need disentanglement research examples. I tried using Google to search intelligence.org and www.fhi.ox.ac.uk for the term “disentanglement” and received zero results for both. What I need to determine whether I should pursue this path is three examples of good disentanglement research. Before reading the study or book for the examples, I will need a very quick gist—a sentence or three that summarizes what each example is about. An oversimplification is okay as long as this is mentioned and we’re given a link to a paper or something so we can understand it correctly if we choose to look into it further. Additionally, I need to be shown a list of open questions.
If I am the only person who asked for this, then your article has not been very effective at getting new people to try out disentanglement research. The obstacle of not even knowing what, specifically, disentanglement research looks like would very effectively prevent a new person from getting into it. I think it would be a really good idea to write a follow-up article that contains the three examples of disentanglement research, the quick gists of what’s contained in each example, and the list of open questions. That information has a chance to get someone new involved.
I suspect a lot of this is due to people trying to save time on reading. There are too many articles to keep up, so we (myself included) choose the articles that seem most likely to have the information I need most, and some of this priority order is author based. An additional method for people who are doing this for efficiency reasons:
We could do an experiment to find out what percentage of high status people’s karma points are due to their status or getting a larger amount of attention overall than other posters. Then, us efficiency oriented people can mentally adjust the karma scores accordingly.
Great points! I’m going against the trend where community-building organizations focus on number of people rather than attracting people who might do high quality work. I’m intentionally growing Evidence and Reasoning Enthusiasts slowly and selecting for people who have demonstrated the ability to make an important update publicly, who have improved their rationality by reading books, etc. I am so glad to see this connection being made by someone other than me! I feel inspired! Thanks!
Oops! Thanks! I updated the article.
This post is long because:
There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about sexual violence. To have accurate ideas about the effective altruism potential of sexual violence reduction as a cause, one needs to be informed about a bunch of things at once. Given the complexity of the issue and the number of common misconceptions, a long length was the only way to do this topic justice.
This is a foundation article. Now that it exists, a series of short articles can be written based on the information and context contained in it to help raise awareness.
“Multiple types of sex offenders exist. We may not have a complete list of different types yet.”
This is a direct quote from the article, from a section covering a few different types of sex offenders. Section name: “Why we should not assume that effective altruism repels sex offenders”
I can’t cover every single sub-topic in entirety in every single spot where a sub-topic is mentioned. The article would repeat itself a ridiculous amount.
I also cannot remove all mentions of all sub-topics that have not yet been fully covered. That would ruin all the natural connections inherent in the information. The article would seem to leave out a huge number of obviously important things.
This is why I support the implementation of a social norm where one doesn’t argue with an author until after they’ve finished the article.
Great suggestion! “Are most acts of sexual violence committed by a select particularly egregious few or by the presumably more common ‘casual rapist’? Answering this question is relevant for picking the strategies to focus on. This is because it seems plausible that different types of people who commit rape require different strategies to stop them.”
I suspect political pressure has effectively prevented in-depth research on this specific topic from being done. There is a lot of political pressure to stigmatise rape as much as possible, no matter what kind it is, or how often it occurs, or any other factors. Without this pressure, there is a realistic concern that a significant minority of people would twist the information into a new rape myth.
For instance, a sufficiently twisted person might decide that the “real” rapists are the ones targeting 10 people or more, and then incorrectly conclude that “just” one rape doesn’t make you a rapist, therefore rationalizing committing an atrocity. :(
I think it’s great to use information-based leverage from research to prevent mayhem. Since you asked, I will check this if I can manage to fit it in somewhere. I’m just letting you know that the reason I didn’t already invest the time into looking into this is because I suspect political pressures would prevent that sort of study from being done in the first place.
Good point, Denise! Would you please direct me to the part of the article I should edit?
Edit: There is a table of contents now.
By the time the suggestion to create a table of contents came along, it was too late to do so. I agree. If I get some time today or tomorrow I will do that.
I couldn’t split this into multiple posts. There are multiple context reasons for doing it this way. I’m sorry that this is inconvenient. I accept that fewer people will read the entire article. That won’t stop me from making progress. Like I said, this article is a foundation. This is step 1. :)
I will probably write multiple shorter articles later.
The great thing about having all the context in one place is that when I write multiple shorter articles, I can refer to the big article a bunch of times! :D
That will help me keep the short articles short!
There are a lot of ways in which sexual violence has an impact on effective altruism, so reducing sexual violence will help us reach our effective altruism goals in various different ways. Because it will help us do more effective altruism, and the cost-benefit ratio looks good, I believe that gives it a lot of potential to be an effective altruism cause. It seems like you may not have read the entire impact section. Here is a table of contents for the impact section:
Impact
Estimating the number of sexually violent people.
Why we should not assume that effective altruism repels sex offenders:
About 6% of men are rapists and an unknown percentage of women.
A rough estimate of rapists in EA:
Sexual violence reduction as a life saver:
Sexual violence reduction as suffering reduction:
Sexual violence reduction for diversity and disadvantage reduction:
Comparing sexual violence rates by gender:
Greatly multiplied risk to women due to the gender ratio in EA:
Gay and bisexual people have around twice the sexual violence risk:
List of specific disadvantages that EA women, bisexuals and homosexuals face:
Potential of sexual violence reduction to prevent productivity loss:
The low estimate:
The high estimate:
Sexual violence reduction as part of movement building:
The male sex offenders studied are shockingly prolific:
Sex offenders increase turnover in workplaces:
Sexual violence reduction for lawsuit prevention:
The study on the left will say race A commits more crimes while the study on the right will say it’s race B. Do people of a particular race commit more crimes, or are they just more likely to be convicted due to prejudice? As I said, incorporating all these other factors would be very complicated.
“It could easily require an article of the same length as this one, just to create an estimate which takes all known relevant factors into account. To ensure enough time for the other parts of this article, a simple rough estimate has been created based on information about the overall population. Please remember that this is an estimate.”
I feel like you didn’t read the quoted part there.
While some people are so uninvolved that they would not take the EA survey, others are so very busy that they might not take the EA survey either, even though they should be counted.
Unless research is done to determine what percentage of EA takes the EA survey, we cannot assume that it is accurate.
For that reason, I am using the total number of EAs from the survey as the low estimate. For the high estimate, I am using the EA Facebook group.
The exact number of EAs is unknown but probably lies between these two figures. So, as an estimate, there are probably between 2,352-13,861 people in the effective altruism movement, like I mentioned.
“Note 3: We cannot assume that EA rapists target only other EAs. Sometimes, they might target people outside the social network. We cannot assume that EAs are targeted only by EA rapists. Sometimes they might be targeted by people outside the social network. Depending on how much of an EA’s social life consists of contact with other EAs and also depending on how sociable they are, their individual risk will vary. There is not enough lifestyle information available on EAs for me to include numbers on this into the estimate.”
I am beginning to wonder if you read carefully because it looks like you missed multiple things that were already addressed.
“There are a lot of options that have a chance to succeed. The impact could be many times greater than the effort it takes to use the options explored herein. Testing is needed to determine the effectiveness of the options. Given the human rights concerns and the potential for a large productivity impact, testing options could turn out to be very worthwhile.”—from my conclusion section.
This is my honest conclusion, which I made as accurate as possible. We do not know how effective all the methods are, but it looks like it’s worth testing them to find out.
Having this information is a valid kind of progress.
It’s not clear that spending hundreds of hours updating this estimate to include dozens of factors is worthwhile. We could instead do our own undetected rapist study on the EA population with that kind of time. Do you have a few hundred hours for this, and the research background needed? Do you want to fund a researcher to do it?
I am using estimates to make other estimates. I clearly labelled each estimate as an estimate.
It would be nice to have high-quality data, such as from doing our own studies. First, someone needs to do an estimate to show why the research questions are interesting enough to invest in studies.
I am doing the sorts of estimates that show why certain research questions are interesting. These estimates might inspire someone to fund a study.
Actually, to avoid bias when adjusting a prior, we really need to include as many adjustments as possible all at once.
Otherwise, unscrupulous people can just come along and say “Let’s adjust these three things!”, which all make the risk look smaller, thereby misleading people into thinking that the risk is negligible.
Or an ordinary biased human being could come along and accidentally ask for ten things to be adjusted which all just so happen to make the risk look super exaggerated.
We’ll have a lot of vulnerability to various biases if we adjust stuff without careful consideration.
Also, if we think it is always better to chuck in arbitrary adjustments, then this creates an incentive for people to come along with a pet political belief and try to have everyone include it everywhere all the time, just for the sake of promoting their pet belief constantly.
One arbitrarily selected adjustment is not better.
I run a group for creatives on Facebook called Altruistic Ideas. In it, I have worked to foster a creative culture. I’ve also written about the differences between the EA and rationality cultures vs. the culture creatives need. If this might be useful for anyone’s EA goals, please feel free to message me.