lol, my bad. Thanks.
SamiM
Karma: 290
as Will stated in his earlier email to you, four of those five experts were consulted. I am happy to provide evidence for this.
Minor nitpick: Was one of them not consulted, or can evidence not be provided?
Hey Sean, happy Thanksgiving!
I was wondering why StrongerMinds focuses on women. Is it because women especially suffer from depression, or maybe helping women has better downstream effects? Another reason?
I’m guessing this was downvoted due to unclarity, maybe expand on what you mean?
I thought the parable was fine, but I greatly enjoyed the rest of the FAQ. Thanks for sharing.
Just a note, Michelle has a Ph.D. so in the formal message, “Dr.” would be more appropriate than “Ms.” People usually have their credentials on Linkedin, so that information might be easy to find.
I guess it depends on the reason they’re isolated. And the more “expensive” interventions in terms of inconvenience to regulars should be weighted by the excepted gain. A proxy for that might be the number of isolated EAs.
Examples of interventions would be diversifying meetup times/locations if it’s due to time/location conflicts. It might be easier to test this by adding online events and comparing the number of new attendees.
Marisa mentioned that 1-1’s (with the organizers or other members) would also be beneficial and would reduce the awkwardness of joining a meetup where everyone but you knows each other.Another idea might be to sponsor local groups by providing support or training, like how (I imagine) EA Philippines does to their local chapters. But seems easier for a country group to do this to a city/uni group, rather than a city group “sponsoring” another city.
I think you’re right. I guess I took Gwen’s comment at face value and tried to figure out how development aid will look different due to the “huge implications”, which was hard.
Hey, I thought this discussion could use some data. I also added some personal impressions.
These are the results of the 2020 SSC survey.
For the question “How would you describe your opinion of the [sic] the idea of “human biodiversity”, eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?”
20.8% answered 4 and 8.7% answered 5.Where 1 is Very unfavorable and 5 is Very favorable
The answers look similar for 2019Taking that at face value, 30% of Scott’s readers think favorably of “HBD”.
(I guess you could look at it as “80% of SSC readers fail to condemn scientific racism”. But that doesn’t strike me as charitable.)
From the same survey, 13.6% identified as EAs, and 33.4% answered sorta EA.
I should mention that the survey has some nonsensical answers (IQs of 186, verbal SATs of 30). And it appears that many answers lean liberal (Identifying as liberals, thinking favorably of feminism, and more open borders, while thinking unfavorably of Trump.)
A while ago, Gwern wrote“… If HBD is true, then all the existing correlational and longitudinal evidence immediately implies that group differences are the major reason why per capita income in the USA are 3-190x per capita income in Africa, that group differences are a major driver of history and the future, that intelligence has enormous spillovers totally ignored in all current analyses. This has huge implications for historical research, immigration policy (regression to the mean), dysgenics discussions (minor to irrelevant from just the individual differences perspective but long-term existential threat from HBD), development aid, welfare programs, education, and pretty much every single topic in the culture wars touching on ‘sexism’ or ‘racism’ where the supposedly iron-clad evidence is confounded or based on rational priors.”
I’m trying to imagine what global development charities EAs who believe HBD donate to, and I’m having a hard time.
Assuming this implies that some EAs (1-5%?) believe in this, I would reckon they’re more focused on X-risks or animal welfare. (I don’t think this is true anymore, see comment below) It would be helpful to see how the people who identify as EAs answered this question.
Finally, from Scott’s email (which I think sharing is a horrible violation of privacy), the last sentence is emblematic of the attitude of lots of people in the community (including myself). My Goodreads contains lots of books I expect to disagree with or be offended by (Gyn/Ecology, The Bell Curve), but I still think it’s important to look into them.
Valuing new insights sometimes means looking into things no one else would, and that has been very useful for the community (fish/insect welfare, longtermism). But unfortunately, one risk is that at least some people will come out believing (outrageously) wrong things. I think that is worth it.
On a personal note, I’m black, and a community organizer, and I haven’t encountered anything but respect and love from the EA community.
Edited for clarity
I can imagine such a low number if we’re talking about posthumous donations. According to this, only 3/1000 people die in such a way that their organs are useful. When you add that to the fact that deceased organs are less good than living ones, you can get something as low as this.
For example, this says that the QALY’s from a deceased kidney is 4.31. If only 3/1000 donors have such kidneys, you get 0.013 QALY’s. It will probably get higher when you account for all other organs. I should also mention that it’s not clear if all organs are damaged equally, so a less naive estimate would be useful.
“Clark notes that while the evidence indicates there is, in general, a relative income effect, it’s unclear how large it is and whether it functions differently for those in poverty, a topic which has not received much study.”
Hi Micheal, great post!
A tangential point I’m confused about.I’m not sure if we should even account for negative community spillovers, especially if for example we had a taxonomy of different emotions that influence well-being, we wouldn’t count all those as part of our felicifc calculus if they are motivated by e.g. Jealousy. They would be “ill-grounded” An example would be whether or not to account for beliefs about women’s inferiority in calculating the benefits (and costs) of suffrage, or disgust with blacks sharing pools when we’re deciding on desegregation. In those cases, I’m okay with ignoring ill-being based on these emotions. But I’m not sure how to deal with edge cases like this.
One way to go about it would be to hold a view where we judge emotions on the correctness of the beliefs they are based on. So in the misogyny and racism cases, the beliefs would be something like women being not smart enough to decide their leaders or that blacks are inherently dirty. And in the GiveDirectly case, we would be okay with the emotions if it’s based on the belief that higher wages for others in the community affect your own purchasing power. (I’m assuming this is true, but I’m not sure). But if the reduced SWB is caused by a false belief (e.g. their neighbors are unworthy), then I don’t think we should count them.
Note, that I’m mostly confused about the income spillover effects, the other ones you mention here (e.g. trust) strike me as less problematic. I can also see how only counting “good” emotions and ignoring less positive ones, even if people spend equal amounts thinking them through, would lead to biased results.
I might want to add Martha Nussbaum to this list. She is quite systemic and analytical while also engaging with a wide variety of philosophers (e.g. Aristotle, Marx, Mackinnon). Maybe Sex and Social Justice or Frontiers of Justice. (although I haven’t read the latter yet).
Hey Max, there is no link to the McCloskey paper.
Maybe merge (do we have merging?) with Open Borders.
EDIT: Although, I can see how they would be different in their fully fleshed-out forms.
Hey!
Re #4, I found this, but I’m not sure if they’re still active. If this doesn’t work, you very welcome to join us at EA Anywhere.
Hi, Nice post. I found this article and it had some criticism of the effect of the radio broadcasts.
It will be interesting to estimate the effect of genocide on future outcomes, like economic growth or political stability. For example, Somaliland, where the Isaaqs were killed, is currently more stable than other parts of Somalia, but that could be due to factors completely orthogonal to the genocide.
EDIT: I tried to find studies on the effects of genocide on the economy and a brief glance makes it seem that it’s very bad. I also found an interesting report on Somaliland. It looks like the situation in Somalia was worse than in Somaliland, which might explain their differences, but I’m very uncertain and I haven’t finished reading the report.
Hey Marcus, good job on taking the initiative!
I think we should keep in mind that if someone (an athlete in this example) was donating 5% to an average charity, and then was prompted by the pledge to merely give 2%, the difference in impact between charities might be enough to offset that.
Edit: I also endorse the option of giving more than 10%, it doesn’t seem to have many downsides, and the benefits were highlighted by Benjamin.
I came across this playlist about the end of the world, might be of interest.
I don’t think music affects my behavior a lot, but I really like this song.
I still think it works for some causes. I met people who thought it wasn’t just bad, but evil to do wild animal welfare stuff. I’m not sure why, maybe their introduction to the idea was about predator euthanasia or something.