ruthie

Karma: 100

ruthie 19 May 2015 21:21 UTC
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in reply to: Nekoinentr’s comment on: Should I be vegan?
It changed for medical reasons, so unrelated to how I felt the policy was working for me in terms of balancing temptation with my reasons for doing it. I’d like to go back to it, or something like it, but I don’t know how to do it without spending a lot more energy thinking about food than I want to right now.

ruthie 17 May 2015 14:20 UTC
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on: Should I be vegan?
I was 95% vegetarian for about 5 years and found it worked pretty well, even without specific rules.

In general, I ate meat at major family holiday gatherings, when I was traveling and there were no filling vegetarian options, occasionally when there was particularly ethical meat available, and when the meat in question was clearly headed to the trash can if I didn’t eat it. I think overall I ate meat about once a month, but I didn’t keep close track, and the times I ate meat were pretty clustered, so it’s hard to estimate. I certainly felt that I was achieving my goals in being vegetarian.

One thing that helped me not decide that every friend’s birthday was a special occasion was that I just told everyone around me that I was vegetarian. Since upsetting people’s expectations makes me uncomfortable, I would only very rarely eat meat in social settings.

ruthie 20 Mar 2015 5:04 UTC
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in reply to: impala’s comment on: Tech job Q&A
I don’t know what the bare minimum to get hired anywhere is, but I know that most medium-sized and up places that you might want to work will hire an entry level employee who looks smart but has a very small amount of actual experience.

A good applicant can write a simple program on a white board and has a project on github, or a past internship, or a dynamic website that they run, to point at. If you think you’re on the edge now, these accomplishments shouldn’t be too far away.

ruthie 1 Feb 2015 2:26 UTC
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in reply to: kellyatlas’s comment on: EA Diversity: Unpacking Pandora’s Box
I really like the suggestion of encouraging people from minority groups to host events and do outreach. In general, making these people more visible might help combat the perception that they are absent from EA, so it might make sense to encourage them to, for instance, blog, post on the forum, or speak at EA events they aren’t hosting.

ruthie 29 Jan 2015 19:13 UTC
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on: Many winding roads: an EA origin story
Thanks for writing this! Your journey seems unusual and interesting in comparison to other narratives I’ve heard.

I’m especially interested in your experience with volunteering and activism. I read a lot on this forum about giving money to other organizations which help and not very much about how we can help people directly. I’d love to hear more about what you think the impact of your volunteer activities and professional work are and where you think good ones are available to others.

ruthie 22 Jan 2015 1:07 UTC
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in reply to: AnonymousFailure’s comment on: January Open Thread
I can totally sympathize. Job seeking sucks, especially if you’re not feeling like an awesome person who everyone would obviously want to employ. I also know from experience that telling you you’re awesome (I don’t know you, but you’re probably awesome) doesn’t necessarily make you feel that way.

I am not a career counselor, but this is the advice I would give you:
- Don’t go to grad school unless you’re really sure you want to. Grad school is a really crummy job, and the payoff in terms of career capital is dubious. Most other jobs you can get are better than grad school, even if they’re not in your field.
- It’s not too late for a career change. You sound not excited to enter CS, but if you decided that was your best option, coding bootcamps are a thing, and they seem pretty good at turning STEM oriented people into employable coders. There are a lot of other places you could go, and a lot of jobs that don’t have much more qualification than some college degree.
- Earning to give is not the only EA career option. If it won’t make you happy, you’ll probably just get burnt out on it and maybe resent EA for making you feel like you had to do that. http://www.benkuhn.net/career-ideas has a list of career ideas that aren’t earning to give, and it’s extremely incomplete.
- Also don’t feel like you have to be passionate about the first job you take (or the second or the third). If you don’t know what you want to do, you try things until something works. I also think that a lot of people start jobs that they don’t feel passionate about, and then grow passionate about them over time, so not feeling like there’s anything exciting for you right now doesn’t mean that you’ll never have a job you’re excited about.
- Lots of people graduate without a job or a plan. As long as you have some savings or someone you can stay with for a while, waiting until you’re out of school and have time and space to think about your life is a totally reasonable plan.
I’m happy to talk more or help you brainstorm ideas besides grad school or industry in something your not excited over PM if you think that will help.

hugs and good luck!

ruthie 31 Dec 2014 19:43 UTC
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: The perspectives on effective altruism we don’t hear
There are also intelligent, thoughtful people outside of LW.

Also, while I agree that keeping the tone among EAs thoughtful, I would be extremely sad if we didn’t encourage particular people or groups from being interested in EA because they aren’t “intelligent enough.”

ruthie 31 Dec 2014 3:48 UTC
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in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: The perspectives on effective altruism we don’t hear
Do you remember any of the questions/reactions you got from the non-EA students at those dinners?

ruthie 28 Dec 2014 19:32 UTC
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour
Hi Ryan!

My estimate of the value of a marginal hour in tech was based on my experience and pretty general reasoning, and I have pretty low confidence in it, so I think there’s plenty of room for disagreement. However, it’s still my best guess, and I have considerable certainty that a marginal hour in tech is worth less than an average hour. One place my intuition comes from is this: if I work 80 hours a week instead of 40 (or invest in career capital for that long), do I expect my lifetime expected earnings to double? This seems pretty unlikely to me. A typical senior software engineer salary is around $150K, so if I can get there working 40 hours a week, I would need to be earning at least $300K at the end of my 80 hours a week career (and probably more to make up for not immediately earning twice a typical junior salary now). Very few tech workers (or people who started their careers as tech workers) earn that much, and although working 80 hours a week may increase your probability of getting there, it certainly doesn’t increase that probability all the way to 1. That doesn’t prove that your 41st hour isn’t worth more than your 40th, but you have to hit diminishing returns at some point.

In general though, my main point is that marginal pay works differently from average pay, so you need to actually evaluate what you think a marginal hour of work is worth. Your right that for some people a marginal hour is worth more than the average hour, and for some people it happens to be basically the same, but that’s not true for most people. If you think that your marginal hour is worth the same as your average hour, you should by all means use that number when deciding how to use your time.

ruthie 28 Dec 2014 4:36 UTC
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in reply to: AGB’s comment on: The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour
Thanks for pointing out the broken links! They should be fixed now.

The relevant sentence from the first example:

There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen.

There’s some discussion between me and some others on the kidney donation post that I think is also pretty clear. http://effective-altruism.com/ea/ay/kidney_donation_is_a_reasonable_choice_for/1ex

I read both of these as discussing average salaries, although you’re right no one says so explicitly. If everyone is already thinking on the margin and occasionally writing in unclear ways, then great.

ruthie 28 Dec 2014 4:17 UTC
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour
That’s reasonable—I think some teachers probably can do this as a part-time thing on top of teaching. Keep in mind though, that tutoring work is highly variable by time of year, not very available in some places (I knew zero students with private tutors of any kind in my hometown in Kansas), and can have high transportation overheads. Another way to look at is that if an option that good were available to all teachers, you’d never see teachers getting food service jobs.

In either case, my main point is that the way someone earns marginal income can be completely different than the way they earn their average dollar.

The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour

ruthie26 Dec 2014 2:07 UTC

10 points

13 comments7 min readEA link

ruthie 24 Dec 2014 23:32 UTC
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on: Figuring Good Out—Launch Thread
My contribution is here: http://www.ruthiebyers.com/2014/12/24/an-hours-impact.html

ruthie 20 Dec 2014 18:50 UTC
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on: What should an effective altruist be committed to?
For better or for worse, I think it may be difficult to “police the door” on who should and shouldn’t call themselves an effective altruist. For example, a whole lot of people call themselves environmentalists, even if they’re doing little or nothing for the environment besides holding opinions positive to environmentalism. On the flip side, there are people doing more for the environment than the typical environmentalist.

In practice, I think that what words people use to describe themselves has more to do with what words their friends use to describe themselves. This applies to me too—like Peter, I’m a GWWC member, but I don’t self-identify as effective altruist, and I think this is because I don’t feel very connected to the community.

I think this works in reverse too. “Queer” is a word that naively seems well defined to exclude some people, but I know people who self-identify as queer even though they are both straight and cisgender. I’m not criticizing—these people are also usually careful to communicate clearly about what this means. I say this to point out how difficult it can be to clearly define group membership.

GWWC has a well defined criterion for membership, and there could be other similar organizations with well defined criteria, but I’m not sure that we could give the movement itself a well defined criterion even if we wanted to.

ruthie 20 Dec 2014 18:26 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: What should an effective altruist be committed to?
I have a different reason for thinking this is true, which involves fewer numbers and more personal experience and intuition.

Having a high standard—either you make major changes in your life or your not an effective altruist—will probably fail because people aren’t used to or willing to make big, sudden changes in their lives. It’s hard to imagine donating half your income from the point of view of someone currently donating nothing; it’s much easier to imagine doing that if you’re already donating 20% or 30%. When I was first exposed to EA, I found it very weird and vaguely threatening, and I could definitely not have jumped from that state to earning to give. Not that I have since gone that far, but I do donate 10% and the idea of donating more is at least contemplatable. Even if you mostly care about the number of people who end up very highly committed, having low or medium standards gives people plausible first steps on a ladder towards that state.

As an analogy, take Catholics and nuns. There are many Catholics and very few nuns, and even fewer of those nuns were people who converted to Catholicism and then immediately became nuns. If there was no way to be Catholic except being a nun, the only people who could possibly be nuns would be the people who converted and then immediately became nuns.

ruthie 18 Nov 2014 19:50 UTC
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in reply to: Diego_Caleiro’s comment on: Open thread 5
There are more things to add to the benefits list:
- When I talk to friends about how to vote I get to exhibit some of the ways I think about policy which may influence their thinking in the future
- Becoming educated about local political issues helps you look educated and gain respect among other local people
- Learning about public policy might be enjoyable
Overall, though, none of this seems to justify either not voting if you want to vote, or voting if you don’t want to vote.

ruthie 17 Nov 2014 19:46 UTC
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in reply to: pappubahry’s comment on: Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it
I think Ben’s criticism is fair, in that a perfectly rational altruist wouldn’t make it. That is, if you are willing to give up three weeks of income to donate a kidney, you should be willing to work for three weeks and donate all of your income, not just whatever percentage you donate normally. This is not to say that it’s an unreasonable decision in all cases—taking three weeks off of work to donate a kidney has all sorts of other consequences (you probably get to do a lot of reading while you’re stuck in bed), but from a first order altruistic standpoint, at the income level I mentioned it still wouldn’t make sense.

ruthie 17 Nov 2014 3:41 UTC
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it
$2K in a couple of weeks is only the case for very high-earning people. With a more typical income, donating a kidney is probably worth the lost income.

It seems like by donating, you expect to lose a few weeks of life and a few weeks of work (which may or may not be paid, depending on your situation). I’m not sure I correctly remember the QALY/”life saved” ratio, but what I remember is 35 QALYs/saved life, which seems reasonable. If you’re making $55,000 and donating 10% of your income, it would take a little less than two months of lost income to make that much. It seems like you’re still ahead with the kidney donation at that rate.
What links here?
- ruthie's comment on The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour by ruthie (28 Dec 2014 4:36 UTC; 0 points)

ruthie 15 Nov 2014 19:09 UTC
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on: Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it
I agree that diversification would be good for the movement, and I’m excited to see a compelling suggestion of something EAs can do besides donate money. Thanks!

I think that there are potential EAs out there for whom the earning to give model is very costly or unrealistic (people who would have to develop unrelated new skillsets and/or move to new cities). For example, a schoolteacher is probably in a poor position to earn to give (although they can certainly donate money), but they could donate a kidney over their long summer break with no lost earnings.

ruthie 14 Oct 2014 19:54 UTC
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on: How can people be persuaded to give more (and more effectively)?
Thanks for writing this! I think we could use a lot more discussion of how to turn people who aren’t EAs or regular donors into EAs or regular donors. I especially like your point about letting people take their time changing their minds. I find a lot of my excuses for myself wear down over time, so I’m more likely to decide to donate more a month or two after someone tries to convince me than during the conversation.

I have one addition and one caution.

My addition is that one of the best techniques of persuasion I know is to present your own excitement about what you’re doing. A dry conversation or talk about moral obligations with numbers of lives saved is a lot less likely to cause people to change than one where you talk about how happy you are to be doing what you’re doing. This post (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/8h/effective_altruism_as_the_most_exciting_cause_in/) does a good job of this, and I love this letter (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/8/philosophy-is-awesome/) and honestly particularly the title that Ben Kuhn wrote in the Harvard Crimson.

You suggested starting a talk without telling your audience what your conclusion is. There’s a tactic that fits this description, that I don’t think is what you’re describing, but that I think bothers a lot of people. Sometimes presenters will start a talk by presenting non-controversial premises, and then make an argument that these premises imply a controversial conclusion, insisting that since the audience accepted the premises, they have to accept the conclusion. This tends to annoy me more than it convinces me, and although I think some (extremely virtuous) people may not have this experience, I suspect that they’re in the minority. If you’re going to give a talk (or have a conversation) where the main point is to try to convince people to donate more to charity, you should make that clear from the start, even if the first few things you talk about aren’t focused on your end goal.

ruthie

The Im­pact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour

The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour