Robert_Wiblin

• Robert_Wiblin 18 Apr 2019 20:56 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: cole_haus's comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ re­search that might help with job-search frustrations

  “The page it­self doesn’t seem to give any in­di­ca­tion of that.”

  As I pointed out it says at the top:

  “N.B. The re­sults from this quiz were last re­viewed in 2016 and the rank­ing may no longer re­flect our cur­rent views. Your top re­sults should be read as sug­ges­tions for fur­ther re­search, not recom­men­da­tions. … The quiz doesn’t tell you what you should do, but can give you ideas to re­search fur­ther.”

  We’ve been work­ing to get it down­graded from the Google search re­sults, but un­for­tu­nately we don’t have full con­trol over that.

• Robert_Wiblin 18 Apr 2019 18:05 UTC

  38 points

  on: Does cli­mate change de­serve more at­ten­tion within EA?

  I’ll just re­spond to point 3 as it refers to my opinions di­rectly. I don’t think one should read me say­ing “Wow okay” as an off-the-cuff re­sponse to some­thing some­one says as much ev­i­dence that I’ve changed my mind, let alone that other peo­ple should. At that point I haven’t had a chance to scru­ti­nise the re­search, or re­flect on its im­por­tance.

  I sus­pect I said ‘wow okay’ be­cause I was sur­prised by the claimed volatility of food sup­ply in gen­eral, not the in­cre­men­tal effect of cli­mate change.

  Tak­ing the figures Dave offers at face value, the in­crease is from 56% to 80% in the re­main­der of the cen­tury, which isn’t sur­pris­ingly large to me. Not hav­ing looked at it, I’d also take such mod­el­ling with a pinch of salt, and worry that it ex­ag­ger­ates things in or­der to sup­port ad­vo­cacy on the topic.

  There was a UK gov­ern­ment study on this that es­ti­mated right now, it might be around 1% chance per year, but with the slow cli­mate change… They were get­ting more like 80% chance of this cen­tury that some­thing like that would hap­pen.

  N.B. (1-0.99^81 = 56%)

• Robert_Wiblin 18 Apr 2019 15:44 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: lexande's comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ re­search that might help with job-search frustrations

  Hi lexande —

  Re point 1, as you say the ca­reer cap­i­tal ca­reer guide ar­ti­cle now has the dis­claimer about how our views have changed at the top. We’re work­ing on a site re­design that will make the ca­reer guide sig­nifi­cantly less promi­nent, which will help ad­dress the fact that it was writ­ten in 2016 and is show­ing its age. We also have an en­tirely new sum­mary ar­ti­cle on ca­reer cap­i­tal in the works—un­for­tu­nately this has taken a lot longer to com­plete than we would like, con­tribut­ing to the cur­rent un­for­tu­nate situ­a­tion.

  Re point 2, the “clar­ify­ing tal­ent gaps” post and “why fo­cus on tal­ent gaps” ar­ti­cle do offer differ­ent views as they were pub­lished three years apart. We’ve now added a dis­claimer link­ing to the new one.

  The “Which jobs help peo­ple the most?” ca­reer guide piece, taken as a whole, isn’t more pos­i­tive about earn­ing to give than the other three op­tions it high­lights (re­search, policy and di­rect work).

  I think your char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of the pro­cess we sug­gest in the ‘high­est im­pact ca­reers’ ar­ti­cle could give read­ers the wrong im­pres­sion. Here’s a broader quote:

  When it comes to spe­cific op­tions, right now we of­ten recom­mend the fol­low­ing five key cat­e­gories, which should pro­duce at least one good op­tion for al­most all grad­u­ates:

  1. Re­search in rele­vant areas

  2. Govern­ment and policy rele­vant to top prob­lem areas

  3. Work at effec­tive non-profits

  4. Ap­ply an un­usual strength to a needed niche

  5. Other­wise, earn to give

  You say that that ar­ti­cle ‘largely con­tra­dicts’ the ‘clar­ify­ing tal­ent gaps’ post. I agree there’s a shift in em­pha­sis, as the pur­pose of the sec­ond is to make it clearer, among other things, how many peo­ple will find it hard to get into a pri­or­ity path quickly. But ‘largely con­tra­dicts’ is an ex­ag­ger­a­tion in my opinion.

  Re point 3, the re­place­abil­ity blog post from 2012 you link to as con­tra­dict­ing our cur­rent po­si­tion opens with “This post is out-of-date and no longer re­flects our views. Read more.”

  Our views will con­tinue to evolve as we learn more, just as they have over the last seven years, though more grad­u­ally over time. Peo­ple should take this into ac­count when fol­low­ing our ad­vice and make shifts more grad­u­ally and cau­tiously than if our recom­men­da­tions were already perfect and fixed for­ever.

  Up­dat­ing the site is some­thing we’ve been work­ing on, but go­ing back to re­view old pages trades off di­rectly with writ­ing up our cur­rent views and pro­duc­ing con­tent about our pri­or­ity paths, some­thing that read­ers also want us to do.

  One can make a case for en­tirely tak­ing down old posts that no longer re­flect our views, but for now I’d pre­fer to con­tinue adding dis­claimers at the top link­ing to our up­dated views on a ques­tion.

  If you find other old pages that no longer re­flect our views and lack such dis­claimers, it would be great if you could email those pages to me di­rectly so that I can add them.

• Robert_Wiblin 18 Apr 2019 15:13 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ re­search that might help with job-search frustrations

  Hi lexande, Habryka, Milan — As you note, the quiz is no longer cur­rent con­tent. It has been moved way down in the site struc­ture, and car­ries this dis­claimer:

  “N.B. The re­sults from this quiz were last re­viewed in 2016 and the rank­ing may no longer re­flect our cur­rent views. Your top re­sults should be read as sug­ges­tions for fur­ther re­search, not recom­men­da­tions. … The quiz doesn’t tell you what you should do, but can give you ideas to re­search fur­ther.”

• Robert_Wiblin 17 Apr 2019 13:36 UTC

  16 points

  on: Is Modern Mone­tary The­ory a good idea?

  It makes sense as a differ­ent way to con­cep­tu­al­ise the gov­ern­ment’s bud­get con­straint—limited by in­fla­tion (or the max­i­mum sus­tain­able level of seignor­age) rather than an abil­ity to bor­row per se.

  I just think analysing mat­ters that way won’t show that the gov­ern­ment can spend a sig­nifi­cant amount more than it does to­day, with­out higher taxes. There isn’t lots of la­tent pro­duc­tive po­ten­tial in the econ­omy right now that could be un­leashed, if only there were more spend­ing. If that’s cor­rect, that makes it a much less in­ter­est­ing idea.

• Robert_Wiblin 31 Mar 2019 0:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Global Priorities Institute's comment on: In­tro­duc­ing GPI’s new re­search agenda

  Won­der­ful, thank you! :)

• Robert_Wiblin 23 Mar 2019 5:46 UTC

  44 points

  on: Ter­ror­ism, Tylenol, and dan­ger­ous information

  This is an in­ter­est­ing is­sue.

  I re­mem­ber com­men­ta­tors dis­cussing the ques­tion of why we didn’t see i) ter­ror­ists shoot­ing peo­ple at shop­ping cen­tres, ii) knifing them, iii) run­ning pedes­tri­ans over with cars, etc, all the way back in 2001-2005.

  I find it sur­pris­ing that this ob­vi­ous idea would oc­cur to me and other ran­dom jour­nal­ists and blog­gers, but not to peo­ple who are ac­tu­ally try­ing to en­gage in ter­ror­ism. Re­gard­less, point­ing out these meth­ods didn’t have any no­tice­able effect at the time.

  An al­ter­na­tive ex­pla­na­tion might be that we saw this spate of ter­ror­ism—as far as I know all com­mit­ted by peo­ple who are sym­pa­thetic to ISIS—be­cause ISIS had a differ­ent ide­ol­ogy that re­garded these at­tacks as more worth­while. My im­pres­sion is that ISIS was more mo­ti­vated by pure bloodthirsty re­li­gious zealotry, with less of an em­pha­sis on shift­ing the for­eign policy of the US and coun­tries in the Mid­dle-East.

  It wouldn’t sur­prise me if ISIS—with its in­dis­crim­i­nate en­thu­si­asm for all forms of mur­der—was push­ing these meth­ods ag­gres­sively, while Al-Qaida and other pre­de­ces­sor groups would have re­garded run­ning over a few pedes­tri­ans as an in­suffi­cient rea­son for one of its sup­port­ers to die. Per­haps be­cause it’s not strik­ing enough, em­bar­rass­ingly unim­pres­sive com­pared to 9/​11, not fo­cussed on the right sym­bolic tar­gets, or for some other prac­ti­cal rea­son.

  The copy-cat ex­pla­na­tion is also slightly differ­ent from giv­ing peo­ple ‘ideas’. ISIS sup­port­ers may not have been mo­ti­vated by a blog post men­tion­ing the method—only by see­ing some­one else ac­tu­ally pull it off. One might think of these meth­ods not only com­ing to peo­ple’s at­ten­tion, but also be­com­ing ‘fash­ion­able’ among a par­tic­u­lar group of fa­nat­ics.

  ISIS, with its quasi-coun­try sta­tus, may also sim­ply have been un­usu­ally effec­tive at at­tract­ing sup­port­ers in Europe or the US, and con­vinc­ing them to at­tempt ter­ror­ist at­tacks. We would nat­u­rally see more ex­per­i­men­ta­tion of all kinds when 1,000 peo­ple are ac­tively work­ing to kill their fel­low civili­ans than when only 100 are.

  I agree with your con­clu­sion though—say­ing things that are ‘ob­vi­ous’ can ab­solutely speed up how many peo­ple no­tice them. If only be­cause there are many many pos­si­ble ‘ob­vi­ous’ thoughts, but with one stream of con­scious­ness, each of us only has time to stum­ble on a tiny frac­tion.

• Robert_Wiblin 12 Mar 2019 21:18 UTC

  48 points

  on: SHOW: A frame­work for shap­ing your tal­ent for di­rect work

  This is great. One thing I’d add is ‘De­mon­strate’. (Or dare I say.… Show.)

  If you think your skills are bet­ter than peo­ple can cur­rently mea­sure with con­fi­dence, you need to find a way to cred­ibly sig­nal how ca­pa­ble you are, while de­mand­ing as lit­tle time as pos­si­ble from se­nior peo­ple in the pro­cess.

  You can do that in a lower level role, or by pul­ling off some im­pres­sive, scrutable and visi­ble pro­ject. Or get­ting a more clas­sic cre­den­tial. Maybe other things as well.

  One rea­son so many promi­nent EAs have been writ­ers in the past is not only that it’s a very broadly use­ful skill. It’s also a skill which is un­usu­ally pub­lic and easy for oth­ers to eval­u­ate you on. It also gives you a chance to demon­strate your gen­eral rea­son­ing abil­ity, which is one of the most widely val­ued char­ac­ter­is­tics.

• Robert_Wiblin 5 Mar 2019 4:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Global Priorities Institute's comment on: In­tro­duc­ing GPI’s new re­search agenda

  Can you put up a plain text ver­sion of this? PDFs aren’t ab­sorbed nicely by other soft­ware (e.g. Face­book for shar­ing, In­stapa­per for sav­ing to read later, etc.)

My pos­i­tive ex­pe­rience tak­ing the an­tide­pres­sant Wel­lbutrin /​ Bupro­pion, & why maybe you should try it too

• Robert_Wiblin 22 Jan 2019 23:15 UTC

  4 points

  on: EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

  Do peo­ple who try to give huge amounts run the risk of the trans­ac­tion be­ing re­jected by their bank (as fraud­u­lent), and then not giv­ing in time to be matched?

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• Robert_Wiblin 12 Dec 2018 2:20 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Giv­ing more won’t make you hap­pier

  I don’t know if it’s more or less re­li­able than past re­search sug­gest­ing a lower sa­ti­a­tion point, but tak­ing the pa­per Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% in­crease in in­come, from $40k to $105k:

  

  In North Amer­ica, life satis­fac­tion goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on pos­i­tive af­fect (effects on pos­i­tive af­fect/​hap­piness are always lower and it’s the mea­sure I think is more re­li­able, which is why we chose the term hap­piness in that quote). Nega­tive af­fect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.

  Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.

  Whether this counts as “ex­tra in­come con­tin­u­ing to af­fect hap­piness quite a bit” or “ex­tra in­come not af­fect­ing hap­piness that much” I guess is for read­ers to judge.

  For my­self, I would re­gard those gains to be suffi­ciently small that I would think it ir­ra­tional for an ego­ist to fo­cus much of their at­ten­tion on earn­ing more money at that point, rather than fos­ter­ing strong re­la­tion­ships, a sense of pur­pose, or im­prov­ing their self-talk.

  Per­son­ally, I also ex­pect even those cor­re­la­tions are over­es­ti­mates of the ac­tual effect of higher in­come on hap­piness, be­cause we know the re­verse is also hap­pen­ing: for var­i­ous rea­sons hap­piness it­self causes peo­ple’s in­comes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both hap­piness and higher in­comes, in­creas­ing the cor­re­la­tion with­out in­creas­ing the cau­sa­tion. (Though as I de­scribe in my in­come and hap­piness ar­ti­cle, if you have a differ­ent causal di­a­gram in mind, you could also try ar­gu­ing that it’s an un­der­es­ti­mate.)

• Robert_Wiblin 11 Dec 2018 19:06 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Giv­ing more won’t make you hap­pier

  Thanks, much ap­pre­ci­ated Milan! :)

• Robert_Wiblin 10 Dec 2018 23:52 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Gregory_Lewis's comment on: Giv­ing more won’t make you hap­pier

  While that piece on in­come and hap­piness seems solid, Milan might not like the vibe of this sec­tion in our ar­ti­cle No mat­ter your job, here’s 3 ev­i­dence-based ways any­one can have a real im­pact. I’ve just tin­kered with the word­ing to make it harder for any­one to mi­s­un­der­stand what we’re claiming:

  “How much sac­ri­fice will this in­volve?

  Re­gard­less of which ca­reer you choose, you can donate 10% of your in­come.

  Nor­mally when we think of do­ing good with our ca­reers, we think of paths like be­com­ing a teacher or char­ity worker, which of­ten earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the pri­vate sec­tor, and may not al­ign with your skills or in­ter­ests. In that sense, giv­ing 10% is less of a sac­ri­fice.

  More­over, as we saw in an ear­lier ar­ti­cle, once you start earn­ing more than about $40,000 a year as an in­di­vi­d­ual, any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much, while acts that help oth­ers like giv­ing to char­ity prob­a­bly do make you hap­pier.

  To take just one ex­am­ple, one study found that in 122 of 136 coun­tries, if re­spon­dents an­swered “yes” to the ques­tion “did you donate to char­ity last month?”, their life satis­fac­tion was higher by an amount also as­so­ci­ated with a dou­bling of in­come.5 In part, this is prob­a­bly be­cause hap­pier peo­ple give more, but we ex­pect some of the effect runs the other way too.

  (Not per­suaded? Read more on whether giv­ing 10% is bet­ter or worse for your hap­piness than not donat­ing at all.)”

• Robert_Wiblin 10 Dec 2018 23:20 UTC

  45 points

  on: Giv­ing more won’t make you hap­pier

  My own view here is:

  i) Like Greg I’ve only ever seen the claim that donat­ing some can be bet­ter for one’s own welfare, com­pared to a baseline of not giv­ing at all—not that the EA ap­proach to giv­ing is ac­tu­ally the op­ti­mal for hap­piness (!).

  Giv­ing small amounts reg­u­larly to a va­ri­ety of emo­tion­ally ap­peal­ing causes is more likely to be op­ti­mal for one’s self­ish welfare, at least if you don’t have an EA mind­set which would ren­der that dis­satis­fy­ing. As you say, ‘give 10% once a year to the most effec­tive char­ity’ is likely worse than that.

  ii) Un­for­tu­nately I don’t have time to look into whether your source on in­come sa­ti­a­tion points is bet­ter than the older one I used in my ar­ti­cle. Per­son­ally, I think a fo­cus on a ‘sa­ti­a­tion point’ at which in­come yields liter­ally zero fur­ther welfare gain is the wrong way to think about this. I am skep­ti­cal that the curve ever en­tirely flat­tens out, let alone turns back around. Rather I’d ex­pect log­a­r­ith­mic re­turns (or per­haps some­thing a bit sharper), up into the tens or hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars of in­come. Given the difficulty of mea­sur­ing satis­fac­tion, es­pe­cially in the up­per tail of in­come, I would trust this more com­mon sense model over em­piri­cal mea­sure­ments claiming oth­er­wise. Above ~$100,000, ad­di­tional gains in welfare are prob­a­bly just too small for our sur­vey meth­ods to pick up.

  For this rea­son 80,000 Hours use more mod­est lan­guage like “any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much”, rather than claiming the effect is noth­ing.

  Nonethe­less, at high lev­els of in­come, fur­ther rais­ing one’s in­come grad­u­ally be­comes a minor is­sue, be­fore it be­comes an en­tirely un­mea­surable one. At that point, many peo­ple will bet­ter ac­com­plish their life goals by fo­cussing on im­prov­ing the world—thereby giv­ing them­selves more com­mu­nity, higher pur­pose, sense of ac­com­plish­ment, and in­deed ac­tual ac­com­plish­ment—rather than ek­ing out what limited re­turns re­main from higher earn­ings, and this seems im­por­tant to point out to peo­ple.

  iii) So, while I say from an ego­ist per­spec­tive ‘give 10% once a year to the most effec­tive char­ity’ is prob­a­bly dom­i­nated by a ‘fuzzy-hack­ing’ ap­proach to char­ity, that’s not com­pletely ob­vi­ous.

  Giv­ing larger amounts, and giv­ing them to the best char­i­ties one can find, of­ten be­comes a core part of peo­ple’s iden­tity, prob­a­bly rais­ing their sense of pur­pose /​ satis­fac­tion with their work at all times, rather than just via a warm glow im­me­di­ately af­ter they donate a small sum. I don’t think any of the ev­i­dence we’ve looked at can ad­dress this is­sue, ex­cept the ob­ser­va­tional stud­ies, which are hope­lessly con­founded by other things.

  Fur­ther­more, be­ing part of effec­tive al­tru­ism or Giv­ing What We Can can provide par­ti­ci­pants with a com­mu­nity of peo­ple who they feel some con­nec­tion to, which many peo­ple oth­er­wise lack, and which seems to have a larger effect on hap­piness than money. Fi­nally, giv­ing to the best char­i­ties al­lows peo­ple to show off to them­selves about their un­com­mon in­tel­li­gence and so­phis­ti­ca­tion as a giver, which can also con­tribute to a pos­i­tive self-con­cep­tion.

  We know that in­volve­ment in a re­li­gious com­mu­nity is cor­re­lated with large gains in welfare, and in­volve­ment in any philo­soph­i­cal com­mu­nity like effec­tive al­tru­ism seems likely to bring with it some—though not all—of the same benefits.

  Of course there are down­sides too. In the ab­sence of any ac­tual data, I would re­main ag­nos­tic, and act as though this were more or less a wash for some­one’s hap­piness. I wouldn’t want some­one to start be­ing al­tru­is­tic ex­pect­ing it to make their life bet­ter, but I’d also want to challenge them if they were con­vinced it would make their life worse.

  From this per­spec­tive, ar­ti­cles say­ing that giv­ing or other acts of al­tru­ism are not as detri­men­tal to some­one’s welfare as one might naïvely an­ti­ci­pate, seem to me to be ad­vanc­ing a rea­son­able point of view, even if fu­ture re­search may yet show them to be mis­taken.

• Robert_Wiblin 10 Dec 2018 22:10 UTC

  28 points

  on: Giv­ing more won’t make you hap­pier

  “EA some­times ad­vo­cates that giv­ing effec­tively will in­crease your hap­piness. Here’s an 80,000 Hours ar­ti­cle (a) to that effect. … This line of ar­gu­ment con­fuses the effect of donat­ing at all with the effect of donat­ing effec­tively.”

  This ar­ti­cle you link to (by me) does not men­tion giv­ing large amounts, or the effec­tive­ness of char­i­ties, or ad­vo­cate for giv­ing to char­ity, so it’s hard to see how it could be con­fus­ing that is­sue. I would ap­pre­ci­ate if you could edit the ar­ti­cle to clar­ify that.

  It also doesn’t claim that giv­ing nec­es­sar­ily makes you hap­pier than spend­ing the money on your­self, only that in a given case it is pos­si­ble—which it cer­tainly is—and that giv­ing likely pro­vides more satis­fac­tion than not hav­ing the money in the first place:

  “Giv­ing some money to char­ity is un­likely to make you less happy, and may well make you hap­pier. … donat­ing money could eas­ily make you hap­pier than spend­ing it on your­self… there’s good rea­son to think that giv­ing away money will lower your sub­jec­tive well-be­ing sig­nifi­cantly less than not hav­ing it in the first place.”

  In fact, the ar­ti­cle only tan­gen­tially dis­cusses dona­tions at all. Nonethe­less, I have added some fur­ther text to clar­ify my view.

• Robert_Wiblin 7 Dec 2018 3:08 UTC

  2 points

  on: Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.

  I think the link here has been ‘mis­copied’ and goes to a differ­ent un­re­lated ar­ti­cle:

  “80,000 hours goes into the mul­ti­tude of rea­sons you should do this here”

  I ex­pect you meant to link to this one:

  Why even our read­ers should save enough to live for 6-24 months by Ben Todd

• Robert_Wiblin 7 Dec 2018 2:54 UTC

  8 points

  on: Earn­ing to Save

  I largely agree with this though 12-36 months is per­haps a bit high. When I’ve told new­com­ers to save more and donate less, I’ve usu­ally got­ten the re­sponse that they re­ally want to donate now be­cause it makes them feel hap­pier and more fulfilled. That’s be­cause they want to do good, but don’t see an op­por­tu­nity to con­tribute through ‘di­rect work’ yet, so giv­ing is their main way to feel use­ful.

  Inas­much as the goal of giv­ing now is to make some­one feel good about them­selves and mo­ti­vated to con­tinue, my ob­jec­tion is weaker. Though per­haps they should try to get that sense of ac­com­plish­ment some other way while they save.

• Robert_Wiblin 7 Dec 2018 2:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Sanjay's comment on: Why we have over-rated Cool Earth

  I’ll just add that I always read it as a highly ten­ta­tive recom­men­da­tion that you’d ex­pect to be over­turned if se­ri­ous re­sources were put into in­ves­ti­gat­ing cli­mate change char­ity—though I’m un­usu­ally in-the-know.