I also want to note that there are wide-reaching societal effects of abortion access; this paper makes the case that the legalization of Roe V Wade in the 70s accounted for a 10% decrease in crime in the 90s (a quarter of the total crime decrease that happened in the 90s) https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf
ruthgrace
Karma: 721
My only disagreements with this post is that
Suspend our support for charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people until we can systematically review the effect of the above moral considerations on the morality of the charities’ interventions.
Would involve involuntary abortion reduction.
I also agree with Denise that if you cared about reducing voluntary abortion or just unwanted pregnancies generally, long acting contraceptives seem the most effective way to do that. But it seems that you’re not sure if unwanted pregnancies are a bad thing.
Finally I know there’s a greater demand for baby adoption than supply in high income countries but I would guess that this isn’t true in low income countries.
I would like to see much more discussion on how the burden of having kids could be spread better over more people (not just mothers but fathers, grandparents, professional caregivers) and also society generally. As it stands, an unwanted pregnancy, and especially a decision to keep the baby, places outsized burden on the mother, and I think that’s part of why this is such a difficult issue. As examples,
Matt Yglesias’ book one billion Americans has lots of ideas on how everything from housing supply to public transportation could be made better to support more people.
I also really like this piece from 99% invisible about how Japan’s city infrastructure is made safe enough that toddlers can run errands by themselves. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
this piece explaining why universal child payments is better than universal childcare is also pretty good. https://criticalscience.medium.com/on-the-science-of-daycare-4d1ab4c2efb4
I could get on board with “Climate change is not neglected, but humanity is still terrible at dealing with it with pretty severe consequences, so it makes sense for EAs who are interested or have a comparative advantage to work on it”. I’m not sure if I understand the focus on Canadian policy and voters, either. I think it’s because there’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle between voters caring about climate change (and I think most of them do!) and humans being good at reversing climate change. For example, what does good policy look like? Does it exist already or does it need to be made? How can a voter tell what is good? And then zooming out from that: Are the proper industry supports in place to fully reap the benefits of good policy? Are the proper technological research, R&D, entrepreneurial energy, removal of red tape for building things, and investment dollars there to flesh out the industry?
ah, i guess it depends on the reliability of your health care… when i was thinking the most about this i was not in the USA. thanks, this is a good and balanced point.
Upvote for getting more people trained in biosecurity! Thanks for sharing
thank you, really love this post! i see that some of your recommendations hinge on using the bipolar diagnostic questionnaire as a diagnostic tool. I think that the questionnaire is actually part of the problem. I suspect that many people with treatment-resistant depression don’t become obviously hypomanic or manic enough for the doctor to be able to diagnose bipolar type II even if they have it, and so they keep trying wrong meds for years.
I suspect that the solution to this is to update the diagnostic questionnaire to check for differences in how people react to low sleep. The author of Unquiet Mind also wrote a textbook about this, and bipolar is super related to sleep. Most people feel terrible on low sleep, but bipolar people tend to feel great, and can get hypomanic or manic from low sleep. For example, I bet that guy who wrote that debunked post on the LessWrong forum about how people need less sleep has bipolar (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HvcZmKS43SLCbJvRb/theses-on-sleep).
For those trying to hack treatment-resistant depression who suspect they have bipolar, the right thing to do might be to ask to try Lamotrigine, if you’ve already tried a few other drugs that didn’t work. I’m less sure about this, but if your physician isn’t willing to do that for you, you could ask for something like Effexor which can trigger a hypomanic episode, and then get your bipolar type II diagnosis so that you can get lamotrigine.
hehe no worries at all. it’s confusing, but ruth grace has better SEO than just ruth :D
I’m super happy I finally published something substantial! I had gotten a grant to write a paper on philanthropy-driven movement building (how rich people can change public opinion and policy strategically with their money) in February. I’m still working on that paper but I got side tracked in wanting to write a better critique of open philanthropy’s criminal justice reform efforts. It took SO much longer than I thought it would, but I think it turned out well. It’s my first serious research-paper-like publication on this forum. Would love to hear your feedback if you get a chance to read it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7ajePuRKiCo7fA92B/evaluating-large-scale-movement-building-a-better-way-to
THIS. IS. LIFE. CHANGING. thank you thank you thank you
I think that the greatest value that this post serves is in giving young people some pause when they are relying on CEA-governed resources to try to determine how to live their life. Thank you.
A phrase that I really like to describe longtermism is “altruistic rationalty” which covers activities that are a subset of “effective altruism”
People working in producing and moving physical goods, to be able to have more impact on the physical world. I would guess that is kind of work, and starting companies to provide this kind of work is the most likely activity to bring low income countries to middle income
I love GatherTown. It’s awesome to have an effective altruism space to hang out and bump into people and be inspired by chance. As if we were neighbors in real life. Agree that it’s a perfect place to host intro events.
I added a new point to the main article relevant to the “skip the landline” model:
Innovations developed in high-income countries may have more impact in low-income countries. For example, renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro, etc) was developed in high income countries. But because of energy scarcity, investment in renewable energy has actually been higher in low and middle income countries than in high-income countries, since 2015. (see the Wikipedia article on renewable energy in developing countries)
I’m a bit confused on where you stand on this: on the one hand, you seem to be suggesting that it’s not possible to derive a decent estimate on the likelihood of success, but on the other hand you are still suggesting that you think it is worth funding.
i think any estimate would have a confidence interval so wide that it would be useless. (I said “variance” before; maybe that’s a less well known term)
how often do these kinds of social movements/reforms work
I think I’ve cited a pretty good example with the conservative legal movement. My belief is that with a good strategy and the right movement, it will work IF there are people obsessed with getting it done over their lifetime. This is obviously a difficult belief to prove true or false.
I especially take issue with the idea of “luck” being factored into the model… it’s exactly this kind of question/uncertainty (e.g., the likelihood that the environment will be favorable or that people will be in the right place at the right time) that needs to be made more explicit.
This is difficult for me to swallow because “luck” is a huge factor in how getting things done in politics works. Something happens in the news and suddenly your cause area becomes super easy or super hard to advance. I’m not sure how this can be made more explicit in a model. Here’s an example in criminal justice reform that I was recently reading about: ALEC is a big conservative think tank. You would never think that they would be for criminal justice reform. But some outreach from pro-reform conservatives over time PLUS media outrage about their “Stand your ground” law that people blamed for the killing of Trayvon Martin made it possible.
Curious where the crux of our disagreement is: Would you agree that some things that can’t be measured are still worth doing? And is your belief also that pushing the abundance agenda can’t possibly be more cost-effective than donations to AMF?
I don’t think it’s possible to do an analysis that makes sense at all, given that outcomes are so high variance and depends so much on the skill and strategy and luck of the people working on it. That doesn’t mean no one should work on it. Open Philanthropy and the FTX future fund are uniquely positioned to be able to get effective at this kind of work and drive the kind of results no one else can
And I think they know this and have been trying; OpenPhil has done work in land use reform and criminal justice reform, for example. I’m not complaining about what people choose to do or not do, but I think my original statement about EA being biased against difficult-to-measure things is correct and makes sense with an evidence-based ideology
the only organizations I know that are trying to get low-income countries to become high-income countries are the World Bank, IMF, and Growth Teams
I think I’m convinced that getting low-income countries to develop into high-income countries is more important than the abundance agenda. OpenPhil has so much money that I’m pretty sure they should do both. As far as I know, they aren’t doing either. A country is not going to develop through malarial net donations.
Yes, this is an interesting problem with new smart/planned cities! Probably not a problem with New York, San Francisco, and San Jose though
I’m pretty sure that in the way that increasing sentence lengths isn’t effective for deterring crime, reducing access to abortion isn’t effective for reducing STD transmission. And I’m pretty sure less family planning is related to more poverty, not less.