ruthgrace

Karma: 722

ruthgrace Aug 5, 2022, 2:31 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸’s comment on: Open Philanthropy should fund the abundance agenda movement
Thank you Vaidehi! I worked really hard on this and I’m glad it shows :)

ruthgrace Aug 5, 2022, 2:20 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Open Philanthropy should fund the abundance agenda movement
appreciate your comment! Thanks for posting

I agree on the natural areas point; I would hope that we can increase density without decreasing the density of parks and playgrounds (though I would definitely be okay with decreasing the size of big ones that don’t serve that many people)

I am wary of arguments that we need to do other difficult to do things like improving transit before we can build housing because the practical result is that nothing is going to be done at all, which is worse than if we build more housing and then people had to campaign or lobby to get the transit fixed to accommodate.

ruthgrace Aug 5, 2022, 2:16 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Eevee🔹’s comment on: Open Philanthropy should fund the abundance agenda movement
What do you think of what I wrote in the post about the USA being like a low income country within a high income country when it comes to health and poverty? I think there’s value in making that not happen in high income countries , and it seems more tractable to me than developing a low income country because of the money is already there to do it

ruthgrace Aug 5, 2022, 1:02 PM
4 points
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in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: Open Philanthropy should fund the abundance agenda movement
thanks for your comment! I’m sure a lot of people reading this are thinking the same thing. Effective altruism in general is biased against systemic change due to it being difficult to measure and outcomes being diffuse. From my post

Pushing an abundance agenda means working towards a world where everyone expects business and government decisions to prioritize the supply of essential goods and services.

This isn’t a list of policies, this is a cultural shift. Sure, I’ve listed a bunch of directly positive effects in my examples, but if this goal was actually achieved, it would mean a restoration of democracy^[1] and trust in government. This is mitigating future harm done when business interests propose policy that stalls innovation and leads to shortages. And lack of trust in government and other public institutions is one of the big reasons it has been so difficult to fight this pandemic. You would never be able to calculate the value of building the kind of movement that reflects a change in public opinion in of QALYs. But I think it’s really important that this work be done, especially in the context of people who are doing large scale movement building for non altruistic reasons, continually eroding democracy and trust in government. Without willingness to accept these kinds of diffuse outcomes, the scale of change that effective altruism can accomplish is limited.
1. ↩︎
  legislators disproportionality responsive to economic elites and business lobby that influence of average citizen is zero. Paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B Washington Post article responding to criticisms: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/23/critics-challenge-our-portrait-of-americas-political-inequality-heres-5-ways-they-are-wrong/

ruthgrace Jul 20, 2022, 3:25 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: It’s OK not to go into AI (for students)
I disagree with 2) because I think the movement will be able to get more done with more diverse backgrounds of people who are really good at different things. Even if AI is the most important thing, we need people who understand communications, policy, organizing grassroots movements, and also people who are good at completely unrelated fields who can understand the impact of AI on their field (manufacturing, agricuture, shipping logistics, etc) though there aren’t those opportunities to do that work directly in AI right now.

ruthgrace Jul 15, 2022, 4:44 AM
1 point
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on: Survey: Legal needs in EA and longtermism
Is the survey for people who work at EA orgs? People who work at organizations that identify as being EA aligned? Or any person doing some kind of direct work (for example at an organization that may not identify with effective altruism even if the individual who works there does)?

ruthgrace Jul 15, 2022, 2:32 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Hawk.Yang’s comment on: It’s OK not to go into AI (for students)
Yes! Also I suspect that people who think that AI is by far the most important problem might be more concentrated in the san Francisco bay area, compared to other cities with a lot of effective altruists, like London. Personally I think we probably already have enough people working on AI but I was worried about getting downvoted if i put that in my original post, so I scoped it down to something I thought everybody could get on board with (that people shouldn’t feel bad about not working on AI)
What links here?
- Leaning into EA Disillusionment by Helen (Jul 21, 2022, 5:06 PM; 432 points)

ruthgrace Jul 14, 2022, 7:28 PM
10 points
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in reply to: Michael_Wiebe’s comment on: It’s OK not to go into AI (for students)
Yes that’s exactly it! Even if a lot of people think that AI is the most important problem to work on, I would expect only a small minority to have a comparative advantage. I worry that students are setting themselves up for burnout and failure by feeling obligated to work on what’s been billed as some as the most pressing/impactful cause area, and I worry that it’s getting in the way of people exploring with different roles and figuring out and building out their actual comparative advantage

ruthgrace Jul 13, 2022, 5:18 AM
3 points
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on: Seven (more) learnings from LEEP
It’s my understanding that in places like Malawi, the paints are oil based and can be manufactured without advanced equipment, whereas in developed countries the paints are latex based and require more complicated equipment to produce the proper emulsion. I’m curious if the manufacturers that you are working with are simply replacing the pigments and continuing with oil-based manufacturing?

ruthgrace Jun 1, 2022, 3:08 PM
14 points
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on: Hiking: an analogy for sustainable work
Love this post!

In software engineering culture, “forced vacation” is not done so much for the good of the person taking it, but the good of the team to make sure that they are set up to reliably cover the person taking the vacation as practice in case anything happens to that person (they might leave or fall ill). It’s probably easier for software engineers to substitute for each other than for you to figure out all the different people that would need to cover different aspects of your leadership role though.

ruthgrace Apr 27, 2022, 1:05 AM
4 points
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on: EA coworking/lounge space on gather.town
i love this and have been using it a bunch! the cuckoo coworking timer has been down today, though :(

ruthgrace Apr 2, 2022, 5:06 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DavidNash’s comment on: State of the land: Misinformation and its effects on global catastrophic risks
Yes, I agree! I think “too much information and people have a difficult time telling what to trust” is a more accurate and nuanced descriptor than “misinformation”! and that your point about

more general improvements in communication strategies/governance/economic growth could be more important.

would go a really long way.

I wonder that if people could more generally feel like they had a say and a stake in the way that the country is run, to the point where a regular person could advocate for improvements for themselves and their communities, that there would be more understanding and trust in government and public health institutions. I suspect that when people feel like they’re screwed, it makes the situation more ripe for misinformation to affect people. Here’s a paper that talks about how sharers of misinfo are more likely to express existentially based needs (e.g. fear of death or other threats). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.10560.pdf

ruthgrace Mar 10, 2022, 6:35 AM
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: How be productive before your baby turns one
I assumed they were talking about situations where the young toddler was being breastfed still.

ruthgrace Mar 10, 2022, 4:25 AM
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in reply to: spreadlove5683’s comment on: How be productive before your baby turns one
I would like to push back on the points in your comment. I think parents in this forum are familiar with the concept of weighing a for sure benefit against much more uncertain risk. Caffeine, White noise, and temperature control can have a very significant and immediate benefit to parental and child well-being. For caffeine, I think most parents would report that it helps for thinking straight and staying calm to have that kind of cognitive boost in the morning. Maybe things would be different if we were 50 years into the future, and caffeine became a scheduled drug based on its addictive properties, but given that caffeine usage is so common, and the benefits are so great, I don’t think it makes sense to be advising parents to avoid caffeine at this time—It’s not going to make your kid worse off than other kids in any meaningful way (unless you are having an unreasonable amount of caffeine). If you are worried about your child’s brain development, there are many other interventions that have much less of a negative effect on the parent that I would advise doing instead, like iron and vitamin D fortification, and filtering flouride out of tap water. Similarly for white noise and temperature control. If baby is not sleeping that’s probably much worse for their development, and also much worse for everyone’s well-being, than any risks associated with white noise and temperature control.

Overall, I would say that this level of worrying and research about these kinds of details is counter to my parenting goal of trying to enjoy the experience of being with my kids. Anything you Google related to parenting will come up with risks. The only reliably helpful parenting advice I’ve found is stuff by Emily Oster, an economist who looks at the data and writes about what is actually worth worrying about, and what isn’t.

ruthgrace Feb 24, 2022, 10:08 PM
1 point
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in reply to: sjsjsj’s comment on: How be productive before your baby turns one
I’m glad you liked it! My kids are still pretty young, but I’m told it gets much easier as they get older, at least in terms of having enough time and sleep to do things you want to do. Anyone who has older kids—I’d love to hear how your productivity potential has changed based on how old your kids are.

ruthgrace Feb 24, 2022, 5:42 PM
12 points
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on: Donations and budgeting, 15 years in
It’s very cool to hear your and Jeff’s inner thoughts and motivations on how much to give, and how you converge on something that works for you both. Thanks for sharing.

Also I got so much joy from the surprise super adorable baby in the middle of your post!! Congrats!

ruthgrace Jan 17, 2022, 5:53 AM
4 points
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in reply to: brb243’s comment on: doing more good vs. doing the most good possible
Hmmm, I think this is not quite what I am after. If I understand correctly, what you’re saying is that we should normalize people having a limited allotment for their “third bucket” budget for saving the world. What I am saying is that we should normalize anyone doing any kind of altruism who is mindful of effectiveness within the work that they are doing.

ruthgrace Jan 5, 2022, 2:28 AM
7 points
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in reply to: aog’s comment on: doing more good vs. doing the most good possible
Yes, it’s very common to fall into this pit of EA burnout and have to dig yourself out! I wish it was less common because it can a really draining experience. And I wonder if it’s possible to do things a little differently so that it becomes less common. Sasha Chapin describes this as a “toxic social norm”: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/your-intelligent-conscientious-in

It’s true, people in EA talk about how you shouldn’t feel guilty and burn out, but burn out still happens because the “toxic social norm” is that in EA we keep thinking about maximizing impact, and that’s just difficult to keep optimizing on without burning out.

ruthgrace Jan 5, 2022, 2:17 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Miranda_Zhang’s comment on: doing more good vs. doing the most good possible
The interesting thing about the strategy described in “How to create a vegan world” is that it would encourage people who don’t think about morality at all to start eating more plant-based foods. I think if EA really executed on the content of my post, this could happen with charitable giving. Imagine if we were able to get 10% of the population of developed countries to think of effectiveness when they thought about charities or charitable giving, within their chosen cause area. Maybe it would shift the funding landscape just enough so that more effective charities within a cause area have better SEO and show up first on a Google search. That’s what I would love to see.

ruthgrace Jan 5, 2022, 2:08 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: doing more good vs. doing the most good possible
I wish that the effective altruism movement was instead called altruistic rationality. I can’t think of a better term than “effective altruism” for optimizing any kind of charitable giving or volunteering that most people in developed countries participate in, but it’s difficult to integrate that with the current effective altruism community, given that trying to get people to switch cause areas up front is ineffective and makes people think poorly of the movement. I support both types of activities but the fact that altruistic rationalist activities are called effective altruism, and the fact that most causes are commonly called “non-EA causes” in this movement prevents a broader effective altruism movement from forming.