I am a Research Scientist at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford and a nonresident fellow at the Kahneman-Treisman Center at Princeton. By trade, I am a meta-analyst.
Here is my date-me doc.
Seth Ariel Green šø
Karma: 1,227
Thatās funny, I was just writing an email to a colleague about the difference between one-offs and repeated exposure. Just speculating here, but documentaries kind of are one-offsāwho in the world is going to watch Dominion a second timeābut op-eds, EA forum posts, etc. are more a a ārepeated, spaced exposureā model of behavioral change. And thatās going to mean a very different evaluation strategy.
As to personal connection to the material, you might enjoy
Alblas 2023 āMeatā Me in the Middle: The Potential of a Social Norm Feedback Intervention in the Context of Meat Consumption ā A Conceptual Replication 10.1080/ā17524032.2022.2149587 Which basically tells people how much meat theyāre eating in comparison to a norm, and then gives them a š or a :( depending on whether theyāre above or below average. So thatās kind of an attempt to get people personally connected to the broader mission.
For more on this literature in general, see Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis
š I have joined the modern world and am writing a Substack about research on ending factory farming š
Hereās a post on a strong study about the effects of watching an especially upsetting documentary.
š thanks for all you do!
Regarding āThere are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitterā ā I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say āengage,ā I hear ātry to elicit compulsive behavior from.ā I know thatās not what you mean, but for twitter and Reddit in particular, engagement looks like addiction for a lot of folks, as well as a profit model driven by outrage & slop. I would not like to see the forum imitate them.
Put differently, a lot of platforms are designed at the outset for specialists & connoisseurs, and when they get (pressured to become) big, they lose whatās special about them and just end up shoving short-form video content in an endless scroll in front of an undifferentiated mass of users. I donāt think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the sirenās call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group. (Likewise I hope the forum doesnāt move to Reddit.)
I see this issue as:
youāre trying to gain traction among EAs
EAs have a norm of reaching out to groups for comment before publishing criticism of them
By not following that norm, you are alienating yourself from the community youāre trying to woo
As to whether this norm is good or not, that ultimately boils down to the assumption of good faith. EAs tend to make that assumption about people who talk the talk, sometimes to our discredit. Iād be interested in more discussion of this assumption, which I think is part of the āimplicit curriculumā of joining the community. But adopting a more adversarial stance, and expecting the community to get onboard without actually litigating the underlying point, seems unlikely to succeed and therefore inconsistent with your goals.
Another thought: I also object to the maximalist marketing that nonprofits often adopt when they solicit donations. But from their POV, itās a total prisonersā dilemma: everyone else is pushing the boundaries, so if you donāt, you get left behind. I donāt see how criticizing one group, or even a handful of them, is going to change that dynamic. It would require culture change, which is a hard problem.
I think for the purposes of this comparison, non-profit and charity are probably not interchangeable, in the sense that a marginal donor with 5K to spend is almost certainly not going to donate that to Kaiser Permanente (although $1M does get you naming rights at a smaller chain!). So I guess whatever weāre defining the average charity as, the distribution should probably exclude these big institutions that are nonprofit for a bunch of tax code reasons but in reality are just providing goods and services to clients in exchange for money.
(colleges are an edge case here)
What is the average charity? I donāt have a good intuition for what it looks like, is, how big it is, what it works on etc.[1] I think pinning this down will help make the comparison clearer. Will, how do you think about this?
- ^
Sidenote: At least in the US, I would be open to the argument that the average charityādefined as being the midpoint of some multidimensional array of size, cause area, staffing, location, etc. -- produces literally zero charitable benefit on net, and might even be doing harm. You might not share this intuition, but we have a long list of mostly null effects for pro-social interventions once theyāre evaluated rigorously (enterprise zones in California, medicaid enrollment in oregon, head start, etc. -- any of which you might take issue with but I think the broader point is defensible that on average, interventions donāt work.) If the average social utility gain of a given nonprofit America is zero, then I donāt know how weāre going to say some other cause is X or Y times ābetterā than that. The seeing eye dog vs curing blindness comparison is a lot more coherent, I think.
- ^
Seth Ariel Green ās Quick takes
Anyone else get a pig butchering scam attempt lately via DM on the forun?
I just got the following message> Happy day to you, I am [X] i saw your profile today and i like it very much,which makes me to write to you to let you know that i am interested in you,therefore i will like you to write me back so that i will tell you further about myself and send you also my picture for you to know me physically.
[EMAIL]
I reported the user on their profile and opened a support request but just FYI
I think thatās a good ideaāor just post as yourself (?)
(Ofc I think I and others understand that things are in flux and this is all NBD)
š Looks interesting! What do you think about having the title reflect its origins, e.g. ālinkpost: Climate Change Is Worse Than Factory Farmingā, or āsuggested reading: [X]ā or something like that?
At a glance right now, the UX here looks like the EA Forum Team is itself endorsing this pretty radical position. (FWIW I appreciate the drive to cross-post interesting material/āthe broader drive to improve the forum experience, I have been thinking about your other post a bit lately and hope to respond soon)
The HuĀmane and SusĀtainĀable Food Lab is lookĀing for collaborators
Hi Ruben, I am not expert on that strand of research, but here a few papers that may be of interest (lead author/āyear/ātitle):
Rosenfeld 2018 The psychology of vegetarianism: Recent advances and future directions Dagevos 2021 Finding flexitarians: Current studies on meat eaters and meat reducers Salehi 2023 Forty-five years of research on vegetarianism and veganism: A systematic and comprehensive literature review of quantitative studies Cramer 2017 Characteristics of Americans Choosing Vegetarian and Vegan Diets for Health Reasons Hielkema 2022 A āvegetarian curry stewā or just a ācurry stewā? ā The effect of neutral labeling of vegetarian dishes on food choice among meat-reducers and non-reducers Barr 2002 Perceptions and practices of self-defined current vegetarian, former vegetarian, and nonvegetarian women
My implicit knowledge on the topic of knowledge production (rather than of veganuary) is that rosy results like the one you are citing often do not stand up to scrutiny. Maya raised one very salient objection to a gap between the headline interpretation and the data of a past iteration of this work here.
I believe that if I dig into it, Iāll find other, similar issues.
Sorry for such a meta answerā¦
No meaningful relationship! (see code below.) However, big caveat here that we had to guess on some of the samples because many studies do not report how many subjects or meals were treated (e.g. they report how many restaurants or days were assigned to treatment and control but didnāt count how many people participated)
> summary(lm(d ~ total_sample, data = dat)) Call: lm(formula = d ~ total_sample, data = dat) Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -0.59897 -0.13702 -0.01868 0.12322 0.75767 Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 0.06330835 0.02664964 2.376 0.0193 * total_sample -0.00002876 0.00004690 -0.613 0.5410 --- Signif. codes: 0 ā***ā 0.001 ā**ā 0.01 ā*ā 0.05 ā.ā 0.1 ā ā 1 Residual standard error: 0.2474 on 110 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.003407, Adjusted R-squared: -0.005653 F-statistic: 0.376 on 1 and 110 DF, p-value: 0.541
Delay indicates the number of days that have elapsed between the beginning of treatment and the final outcome measure. How outcomes are measured varies from study to study, so in some cases itās a 24 hour food recall X number of days after treatment is administered (the last part of it), in others itās a continuous outcome measurement in a cafeteria (the entire period of delay).
I donāt know this, sorry, and not every study reports enough location data to begin to estimate this (e.g. studies that recruit an online sample from multiple countries)
This I can say more about!
The median delay, in days, is 14, and the mean is 52 (we have a few studies with long delays, the longest is 3 years (Jalil et al. 2023).
So Iād say, think āabout 2 weeks on average with some lengthy outliersā. Also thereās basically no relationship between delay and effect size.
to replicate in R (from the root directory of our project):
> source('./scripts/libraries.R') > source('./scripts/load-data.R') > summary(dat$delay) Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. 4.00 11.50 14.00 52.05 60.00 1095.00 > source('./functions/sum-lm.R') # this is a little function we wrote that puts summary(lm()) into a dplyr-friendly pipe > dat |> sum_lm(y = d, x = delay) Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 0.05312 0.02552 2.08181 0.03968 delay 0.00005 0.00019 0.23166 0.81723
Hi Vasco, Iām afraid not, sorry. The diversity of outcome measures makes this all but impossible, e..g one study measures āservings of meat per weekā, others it by the gram, others count how many meals are served in a given time period, etc.
Thank you David! We will post any updates to https://āādoi.org/āā10.31219/āāosf.io/āāq6xyr
The paper is currently under submission at a journal and we likely wonāt modify it until we get some feedback.
Hi Sarah,
In general Iām grateful that youāve put a lot of thought into this, I think it shows in a high-quality forum experience. A few observations:
I agree that changing the default Karma settings is fine, in part because itās easy for users to revert.
As to churned forum users who forget the forum existsāEA is not for everyone. Itās ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know itās your job to worry about this, but for my money, I do not think that such folks were likely to have generated the kind of content weāre looking for.
We face an unavoidable sensitivity/āspecificity tradeoff in terms of attracting users. Right now things are slanted towards specificity rather than sensitivity. I like that because I am unapologetically picky about how I spend my time. Iād be less likely to contribute to a forum with a wider reach but a lower average quality of conversation.