Perhaps youâve seen these things already if youâre thinking about having kids, but Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman have written about their decision to be parents and their experiences parenting extensively. The stuff I could find that addresses the question of making the decision:
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Karma: 644
Thanks for writing this post! I think promoting diversity in EA is incredibly important and I appreciate your contribution to it.
However, I get a feeling here that youâve started with an underlying assumption that âEA should cater to womenâ, which I donât see the argument for. Certainly, if thereâs a stark lack of women throughout EA, Iâd feel that thereâs a problem that needs to be specifically addressedâbut I donât think this is the case.
You present information about the academic fields that correlate with participation in EA, and note that thereâs a gender disparity that matches the one we seem to observe in EA. To me, this seems like evidence that there isnât a problem within EA, but a result of broader, more complicated dynamics elsewhere. On the other hand, the other demographic data you present on other minorities seems like a more significant issue.
For instance, the rest of the 80k article you cite is clear about the fact that the framework isnât applicable to everyone, and I think the choice of whether to have children is just one of many possible reasons the framework might not strictly apply to a person. And while demographic data shows that the work of having children affects women disproportionately, non-women who intend to parent would also need to consider the same unanswered questions.
Because of these dynamics, I donât think that the claim youâve made here, that more resources should be directed in a way that addresses the gender disparity, is substantiated.
Iâm curious to hear from where youâve gotten the sense that the EA community uses a âmale-default positionâ - Iâve never felt this.
(As a side note, if you havenât heard of them, thereâs magnifymentoringâpreviously WANBAM)
Thanks for this! It wouldnât have occurred to me to consider the decline of footbinding as a case study of moral progress,
I think youâve probably noted this and perhaps didnât mention it because itâs not directly relevant to the main questions youâre investigating, but I think itâs important to note for someone who only reads this post that having bound feet was a status symbolâit began among the social elite and spread over time to lower social classes, remained a status symbol because families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake in the practice, and in practice an incentive to do it was to increase marriage prospects.
A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/â+3, if they wish.
Thanks for writing this up!
Iâm not sure about the implications, but I just want to register that deciding to roll repeatedly, after each roll for a total of n rolls, is not the same as committing to n rolls at the beginning. The latter is equivalent in expected value to rolling every trial at the same time: the former has a much higher expected value. It is still positive, though.
I wanted to describe my personal experience in case it shifts anyone like me towards applying. I was accepted, received travel support, and went to EAG London last month.
Initially, I considered the likelihood that I would be accepted and be able to go very low: I didnât think I was involved enough in EA and I didnât think it made sense for me to receive travel support to go as I live very far from London. I also didnât think that I âdeservedâ to go: I reasoned that I shouldnât take a spot from someone more engaged in EA or could provide more value to other attendees. I probably wouldnât have applied if not for having a personal connection with someone else who applied.
Nearly every interaction I had at the conference was positive. Many people I spoke to were happy to share about their area even if I had little prior understanding, and I was surprised to find I had ideas and perspectives that were unique/âmight not have surfaced in conversation had I not been there.
As a young person, I have never felt more respected as a full person and equal with meaningful ideas to contribute. EAG is intenseâit can be near constant interaction with a lot of people, focused on the most important problems in the world. But going to EAG made me feel like a âpart ofâ EA, and gave me a lot more confidence to make decisions, to try things, to reach out to people.
If youâre like me and concerned about not being qualified or not having done enough, let the organisers judge, and consider the possibility that EAG might give you the ability to do more later.
Thanks for writing this up!
What are the use cases you envision for terms like these ones?
I appreciate the concern that people might feel deceived when finding out that the movement doesnât look quite like what they were expecting, but I think this might be better addressed by pointing out to new people EA is a broad group with a variety of interests, values, and attitudes.
Iâm concerned that splitting up EA according to aesthetics/âsubcultures might be harmful, and I think it should be handled with care. The human tendency to look for identity labels and subgroups to belong to is very strong, and subgroup identification can create insularity and group polarization, which are probably things we should avoid. It could also result in people altering beliefs in order to fit an identity framing as Lizka describes in the case of longtermism here.
Any large coalition will have variation across the group, and terms that describe subgroups can be helpful. However, while describing EA in terms of cause area or even terms like âlongtermistâ give me a strong idea what a person or group might be interested in and what might be valuable to them, Iâm not sure what information the aesthetic categories give me as a descriptor.
Thereâs also a lot of complexity in the connections between groups and ideas in EA, and I think this is an aspect of EA which should be encouraged and emphasized, not flattened into categories.
(disclaimer that I talked to Sasha before he put up this post) but as a ârandom EA personâ I did find reading this clarifying.
Itâs not that I believed that âorthogonality thesis the reason why AGI safety is an important cause areaâ, but that I had never thought about the distinction between âno known law relating intelligence and motivationsâ and ânear-0 statistical correlation between intelligence and motivationsâ.
If Iâd otherwise been prompted to think about it, Iâd probably have arrived at the former, but I think the latter was rattling around inside my system 1 because the term âorthogonalityâ brings to mind orthogonal vectors.
Iâve sometimes thought about if âimmortalityâ is the right framing, at least for the current moment. Like AllAmericanBreakfast points out, I think that anti-ageing research is unlikely to produce life extensions in the 100x to 1000x range all at once.
In any case, even if we manage to halt ageing entirely, ceteris paribus there will still be deaths from accidents and other causes. A while ago I tried a fermi calculation on this, I think I used this data (United States, 2017). The death rate for people between 15-34 is ~0.1%/âyear, this rate of death would put the median lifespan at ~700 years (Using X~Exp(0.001)).
Probably this is an underestimate of lifespanâaccidental death should decrease (safety improvements, of which self-driving cars might be significant given how many people die of road accidents), curing ageing might have positive effects on younger people as well, and other healthcare improvements should occur, and people might be more careful if theyâre theoretically immortal(?). However, I think this framing poses a slightly different question:
Do we prefer that more people:
Live shorter lives and die of heart disease/âcancer/ârespiratory disease*, or
Live (possibly much) longer lives and die of accidents/âsuicide/âhomicide
I donât know how I feel about these. I think in the theoretical case of going immediately from current state to immortality Iâd be worried about Chestertonâs-fence-y bad resultsânot that someone put ageing into place, but Iâd expect surprising and possibly unpleasant side effects of changing something so significant**.
*I inferred from the data I linked above that heart disease and cancer are somewhat ageing-related, Iâm not sure if this is true
**The existence of the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, implies that a form of immortality was evolvable, which in turn might imply that thereâs some reason evolution didnât favour more immortal things/âthings that tended slightly more towards immortality.
Iâm not sure how effectiveness-driven their work is, but might Project Drawdown be helpful to you?
Thank you!
Thanks for your list and please do!
I donât think ignoring animal feed makes sense here, I canât find the source at the moment but the vast majority of Peruvian anchoveta is reduced to fish meal and exported to countries like China to serve as feed for land animals and even species of larger fish, the incentive structure is such that factories that are supposed to produce anchoveta derivatives for direct human consumption illegally produce fish meal.
I think increased consumption of fish sauce over other animals would be moving down the food chain and result in a net decrease in animal suffering, not to mention advantageous for fishing-reliant economies there.
I think it would be better if agree/âdisagree voting didnât follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often donât know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesnât make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to âagree twice as muchâ as another with a comment.