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 đ¸
Karma: 1,244
I think if I end up writing something thatâs particularly EA-aligned, e.g. a cost-benefit analysis of some intervention, Iâd do that. as is Iâm happy to err on the side of not annoying people when promoting my stuff đ
Hi Sarah,
In general Iâm grateful that youâve 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 itâs easy for users to revert.[1]
As to churned forum users who forget the forum existsâEA is not for everyone. Itâs ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know itâs 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 weâre looking for.
We face an unavoidable sensitivity/âspecificity 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. Iâd be less likely to contribute to a forum with a wider reach but a lower average quality of conversation.
- ^
Also I unironically like that youâve changed the default but preserved the âWarning: Immediate karma updates may lead to over-updating on tiny amounts of feedback, and to checking the site frequently when youâd rather be doing something else.â
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-offsâwho in the world is going to watch Dominion a second timeâbut op-eds, EA forum posts, etc. are more a a ârepeated, spaced exposureâ model of behavioral change. And thatâs going to mean a very different evaluation strategy.
As to personal connection to the material, you might enjoy
Alblas 2023 âMeatâ Me in the Middle: The Potential of a Social Norm Feedback Intervention in the Context of Meat Consumption â A Conceptual Replication 10.1080/â17524032.2022.2149587 Which basically tells people how much meat theyâre eating in comparison to a norm, and then gives them a đ or a :( depending on whether theyâre above or below average. So thatâs 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
đ I have joined the modern world and am writing a Substack about research on ending factory farming đ
Hereâs a post on a strong study about the effects of watching an especially upsetting documentary.
đ thanks for all you do!
Regarding âThere are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitterâ â I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say âengage,â I hear âtry to elicit compulsive behavior from.â I know thatâs 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 whatâs 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 donât think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the sirenâs call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group. (Likewise I hope the forum doesnât move to Reddit.)
I see this issue as:
youâre 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 youâre 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. Iâd be interested in more discussion of this assumption, which I think is part of the âimplicit curriculumâ 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, itâs a total prisonersâ dilemma: everyone else is pushing the boundaries, so if you donât, you get left behind. I donât 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 weâre 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 donât 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 charityâdefined 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 theyâre 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 donât work.) If the average social utility gain of a given nonprofit America is zero, then I donât know how weâre going to say some other cause is X or Y times âbetterâ than that. The seeing eye dog vs curing blindness comparison is a lot more coherent, I think.
- ^
Seth Ariel Green âs 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 thatâs a good ideaâor just post as yourself (?)
(Ofc I think I and others understand that things are in flux and this is all NBD)
đ Looks interesting! What do you think about having the title reflect its origins, e.g. âlinkpost: Climate Change Is Worse Than Factory Farmingâ, or âsuggested reading: [X]â 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/âthe broader drive to improve the forum experience, I have been thinking about your other post a bit lately and hope to respond soon)
The HuÂmane and SusÂtainÂable Food Lab is lookÂing 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/âyear/âtitle):
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 âvegetarian curry stewâ or just a âcurry stewâ? â 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, Iâll find other, similar issues.
Sorry for such a meta answerâŚ
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 didnât 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 â***â 0.001 â**â 0.01 â*â 0.05 â.â 0.1 â â 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 itâs a 24 hour food recall X number of days after treatment is administered (the last part of it), in others itâs a continuous outcome measurement in a cafeteria (the entire period of delay).
I donât 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 Iâd say, think âabout 2 weeks on average with some lengthy outliersâ. Also thereâs 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
I worry that the pro-AI/âslow-AI/âstop-AI has the salient characteristics of a tribal dividing line that could tear EA apart:
âI want to accelerate AIâ vs âI want to decelerate AIâ is a big, clear line in the sand that allows for a lot clearer signaling of oneâs tribal identity than something more universally agreeable like âmalaria is badâ
Up to the point where AI either kills us or doesnât, thereâs basically in principle no way to verify that one side or the other is ârightâ, which means everyone can keep arguing about it forever
The discourse around it is more hostile/âless-trust-presuming than the typical EA discussion, which tends to be collegial (to a fault, some might argue)
You might think itâs worth having this civl war to clarify what EA is about. I donât. I would like for us to get on a different track.
This thought prompted by discussion around one of Matthew_Barnettâs quick takes.