SamiM

Karma: 290

Announcing the EA Virtual Group*

SamiM25 Jun 2020 22:02 UTC

108 points

4 comments1 min readEA link

SamiM 26 Jun 2020 21:00 UTC
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in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Announcing the EA Virtual Group
Hey Ozzie,
The name is perhaps sup-optimal in communicating the purpose of the group, but it was better than the alternatives we considered.
I made this because there wasn’t a space for EAs who don’t t have access to local groups, not for all EAs. And if it gets too large, we could have subgroups.
The attendees will not be homogeneous, but I don’t think we will experience problems re differences in opinions and/or knowledge by a much greater degree than a local group might.
Thank you for taking the time to write this, any other considerations welcome.

Twenty Year Economic Impacts of Deworming

SamiM22 Aug 2020 0:40 UTC

13 points

2 comments1 min readEA link

Announcing: Progress Studies Reading Group

SamiM30 Aug 2020 10:14 UTC

12 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

SamiM 18 Sep 2020 20:39 UTC
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on: Tax Havens and the case for Tax Justice
Hey Alex, excellent post.
Two caveats:
(1) You said
Tax Justice Network is a highly effective charity: consider donating.
And then
Tax Justice Network is laying the foundation for developing countries to become self-sufficient. Based on their work on tax havens alone, TJN is a highly-effective charity. Once we consider their role in curbing illicit financial flows, we may see TJN rise to a top charity for poverty alleviation and governance.
I think there is a part missing in the middle, because I couldn’t find an argument why TJN is a good place to donate except this part,
Tax Justice Network has started changing the narrative on tax havens. For example, in 2007, with help from TJN, The Guardian published the first major story on multinational tax avoidance
which doesn’t strike me as a strong reason. Maybe I missed something?
(2) Did you make the table that ranks the interventions. (AEOI, UBO, CbCR)? If yes, can you provide details on the methodology?

SamiM 21 Sep 2020 19:49 UTC
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on: Estimation of probabilities to get tenure track in academia: baseline and publications during the PhD.
This is helpful, thanks.
The information is probably here somewhere, but is that the probability of getting tenure given you finish your Ph.D.? I.e. Does this account for dropping out?
Somewhat tangential, but I think accounting for the chance of working on AI safety (or something comparably effective) outside of academia will help. I think this is more common in Economics (e.g. World Bank). But I guess OpenAI or similar institutions hire CS PhDs and working there possibly has a similar impact to working in academia.

SamiM 28 Sep 2020 16:40 UTC
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on: SamiM’s Shortform
In Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With A Single Training Intervention they found that a 30-minute video reduced confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and bias blind spot, by 19%.
The video is super cheesy, and that makes me suspicious.
It should be noted that playing a 60-minute “debiasing” game debiased people more than the video.

The rest of this short form is random thoughts about debiasing.

I tried finding tests for these biases so that I can do it myself, but I didn’t find any. This made me worry that we don’t have standardized tests for biases, which strikes me as bad. Although I didn’t spend too much time looking into it. (More on this here)

I don’t think training people to reduce 3 biases a time is a good way to go, since we have 100s of biases. If we use a taxonomy of biases like Arkes (1991) (strategy-based, association-based, and psychophysical errors). maybe we could have three interventions for each type of bias? But it’s not clear how you would teach people to avoid say association-based biases by lecturing about it.
You could nudge them in small ways. From Arkes (1991)

For example, subjects in their third study were presented with the story of David, a high school senior who had to choose between a small liberal arts college and an Ivy League university. Several of David’s friends who were attending one of the two schools provided information that seemed to favor quite strongly the liberal arts college. However, a visit by David to each school provided him with contrary information. Should David rely on the advice of his many friends (a large sample) or on his own 1-day impressions of each school (a very small sample)? Other subjects were given the same scenario with the addition of a paragraph that made them “explicitly aware of the role of chance in determining the impression one may get from a small sample” (Nisbett et al., 1983, p. 353). Namely, David drew up a list for each school of the classes and activities that might interest him during his visit there, and then he blindly dropped a pencil on the list, choosing to do those things on the list where the pencil point landed. These authors found that if the chance factors that influenced David’s personal evidence base were made salient in this way, subjects would be more likely to answer questions about the scenario in a probabilistic manner (i.e, rely on the large sample provided by many friends) than if the chance factors were not made salient. Such hints, rather than blatant instruction, can provide routes to a debiasing behavior in some problems
In Sedlmeier & Gigerenzer they taught people Bayes by using frequencies rather than probabilities. E,g. Instead of saying (1% of people use drugs and they test positive 80% of the time while non-users 5% of the time), you say From 1000 people, 10 use drugs, 8 drug users test positive, while 50 non-users test positive).
It seems to work.

If it’s really hard, we should target really bad, really harmful biases.
From here
...many of the known predictors of conspiracy belief are alterable. One of these predictors is the tendency to make errors in logical and probabilistic reasoning (Brotherton & French, 2014), and another is the tendency toward magical thinking (e.g., Darwin et al., 2011; Newheiser et al., 2011; Stieger et al., 2013; Swami et al., 2011). It is not clear whether these tendencies can be corrected (Eckblad & Chapman, 1983; Peltzer, 2003), but evidence suggests that they can be reduced by training in logic and in probability specifically (e.g., Agnoli & Krantz, 1989; Sedlmeier & Gigerenzer, 2001). The current findings suggest that interventions targeting the automatic attribution of intentionality may be effective in reducing the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.
Perhaps finding out which are the worst biases, and what are the best interventions for them are would be useful. But increasing the effectiveness of changing beliefs is potentially dangerous, so maybe not.

SamiM 12 Oct 2020 17:04 UTC
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in reply to: Prabhat Soni’s comment on: Prabhat Soni’s Shortform
I just googled your question.
Here are the top 3 links.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/malaria/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20351190
https://www.terminix.com/pest-control/mosquitoes/behavior/malaria-in-united-states/
https://www.who.int/malaria/areas/treatment/overview/en/

SamiM 12 Oct 2020 17:06 UTC
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform
Yes, it’s free.

SamiM 3 Nov 2020 13:55 UTC
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on: Things I Learned at the EA Student Summit
Hi Akash, great post.
The link to the Nanda post isn’t working. (It links back to your post)

for more about the benefits of blogging, see this post by Neel Nanda

SamiM 30 Nov 2020 20:06 UTC
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in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Introducing High Impact Athletes
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.

SamiM 2 Dec 2020 11:56 UTC
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on: A brief look at reducing the efficiency of genocides
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.

SamiM 4 Apr 2021 20:57 UTC
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in reply to: Rwoehrle’s comment on: Open and Welcome Thread: March 2021
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.

SamiM 21 Apr 2021 23:02 UTC
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on: Immigration reform
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.

SamiM 23 May 2021 19:32 UTC
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on: Using Subjective Well-Being to Estimate the Moral Weights of Averting Deaths and Reducing Poverty
“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.

SamiM 5 Aug 2021 16:04 UTC
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in reply to: notarealusername’s comment on: Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people
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 2019
Taking 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.

SamiM 6 Aug 2021 12:45 UTC
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in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people
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.

SamiM 9 Aug 2021 19:20 UTC
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in reply to: Vaidehi Agarwalla’s comment on: AMA: We organize EA Anywhere. Ask Us Anything!
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.

SamiM 11 Sep 2021 12:28 UTC
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on: First vs. last name policies?
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.

SamiM 17 Sep 2021 19:30 UTC
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on: [Creative Writing Contest][Referral][Mostly Fiction] - The Parable of the Heartstone
I thought the parable was fine, but I greatly enjoyed the rest of the FAQ. Thanks for sharing.

SamiM

An­nounc­ing the EA Vir­tual Group*

Twenty Year Eco­nomic Im­pacts of Deworming

An­nounc­ing: Progress Stud­ies Read­ing Group

Announcing the EA Virtual Group*

Twenty Year Economic Impacts of Deworming

Announcing: Progress Studies Reading Group