Daenerys' Note: This is the last item in the LW Women series. Thanks to all who participated. :)

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post.  There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women replied, totaling about 18 pages. 

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Submitter E

I'm a girl, and by me that's only great.

No seriously. I've grown up and lived in the social circles where female privilege way outweigh male privilege. I've never been sexually assaulted, nor been denied anything because of my gender. I study a male-dominated subject, and most of my friends are polite, deferential feminism-controlled men. I have, however, been able to flirt and sympathise and generally girl-game my way into getting what I want. (Charming guys is fun!) Sure, there will eventually come a point where I'll be disadvantaged in the job market because of my ability to bear children; but I've gotta balance that against the fact that I have the ability to bear children.

In fact, most of the gender problems I personally face stem from biology, so there's not much I can do about them. It sucks that I have to be the one responsible for contraception, and that my attractiveness to men depends largely on my looks but the inverse is not true. But there's not much society can do to change biological facts, so I live with them.

 I don't think it's a very disputed fact that women, in general, tend to be more emotional than men. I'm an INFJ, most of my (male) friends are INTJ. With the help of Less Wrong's epistemology and a large pinch of Game, I've achieved a fair degree of luminosity over my inner workings. I'm complicated. I don't think my INTJ friends are this complicated, and the complicatedness is part of the reason why I'm an "F": my intuitions system is useful. It makes me really quite good at people, especially when I can introspect and then apply my conscious to my instincts as well. I don't know how many of the people here are F instead of T, but for anyone who uses intuition a lot, applying proper rationality to introspection (a.k.a. luminosity) is essential. It is so so so easy to rationalise, and it takes effort to just know my instinct without rationalising false reasons for it. I'm not sure the luminosity sequence helps everyone, because everyone works differently, but just being aware of the concept and being on the lookout for ways that work is good.

There's a problem with strong intuition though, and that's that I have less conscious control over my opinions - it's hard enough being aware of them and not rationalising additional reasons for them. I judge ugly women and unsuccessful men. I try to consciously adjust for the effect, but it's hard.

Onto the topic of gender discussions on Less Wrong - it annoys me how quickly things gets irrational. The whole objectification debacle of July 2009 proved that even the best can get caught up in it (though maybe things have got better since 2009?). I was confused in the same way Luke was: I didn't see anything wrong with objectification. I objectify people all the time, but I still treat them as agents when I need to. Porn is great, but it doesn't mean I'm going to find it harder to befriend a porn star. I objectify Eliezer Yukowsky because he's a phenomenon on the internet more than a flesh-and-blood person to me, but that doesn't mean I'd have difficulty interacting with a flesh-and-blood Eliezer. On the whole, Less Wrong doesn't do well at talking about controversial topics, even though we know how to. Maybe we just need to work harder. Maybe we need more luminosity. I would love for Less Wrong to be a place where all things could just be discussed rationally.

There's another reason that I come out on a different side to most women in feminism and gender discussions though, and this is the bit I'm only saying because it's anonymous. I'm not a typical woman. I act, dress and style feminine because I enjoy feeling like a princess. I am most fulfilled when I'm in a M-dom f-sub relationship. My favourite activity is cooking and my honest-to-god favourite place in the house is the kitchen. I take pride in making awesome sandwiches. I just can't alieve it's offensive when I hear "get in the kitchen", because I'd just be like "ok! :D". I love sex, and I value getting better at it. I want to be able to have sex like a porn star. Suppressing my gag reflex is one of the most useful things I learned all year. I love being hit on and seduced by men. When I dress sexy, it is because male attention turns me on. I love getting wolf whistles. Because of luminosity and self-awareness, I'm ever-conscious of the vagina tingle. I'm aware of when I'm turned on, and I don't rationalise it away. And the same testosterone that makes me good at a male-dominated subject, makes sure I'm really easily turned on.

I understand that all these things are different when I'm consenting and I'm viewed as an agent and all that. But it's just hard to understand other girls being offended when I'm not, because it's much harder to empathise with someone you don't agree with. Not generalising from one example is hard.

Understanding other girls is hard.

I first wrote up the following post, then happened to run into Holden Karnofsky in person and asked him a much-shortened form of the question verbally.  My attempt to recount Holden's verbal reply is also given further below.  I was moderately impressed by Holden's response because I had not thought of it when listing out possible replies, but I don't understand yet why Holden's response should be true.  Since GiveWell has recently posted about objections to GiveDirectly and replies, I decided to go ahead and post this now.

A question for GiveWell:

Your current #2 top-rated charity is GiveDirectly, which gives one-time gifts of $1000 over 9 months, directly to poor recipients in Kenya via M-PESA.

Givewell tries for high standards of evidence of efficacy and cost-effectiveness.  As I understand it, you don't just want the charity to be arguably cost effective, you want a very high probability that the charity is cost-effective.

The main evidence I've seen cited for direct giving is that the recipients who received the $1000 are then substantially better off 9 months later compared to people who aren't.

While I can imagine arguments that could repair the obvious objection to this reasoning, I haven't seen yet how the resulting evidence about cost-effectiveness could rise again to the epistemic standards one would expect of Givewell's #2 evidence-based charity.

The obvious objection is as follows:  Suppose the Kenyan government simply printed new shillings and handed out $1000 of such shillings to the same recipients targeted by GiveDirectly.  Although the recipients would be better off than non-recipients, this might not reflect any improvement in net utility in Kenya because no new resources were created by printing the money.

There are of course obvious replies to this obvious objection:

(1)  Because the shillings handed out by GiveDirectly are purchased on the foreign currency exchange market using U. S. dollars, and would otherwise have been spent in Kenya in other ways, we should not expect any inflation of the shilling, and should expect an increase in Kenyan consumption of foreign goods corresponding to the increased price of shillings implied by GiveDirectly adding their marginal demand to the auction and thereby raising the marginal price of all shillings sold.  The primary mechanism of action by which GiveDirectly benefits Kenya is by raising the price of shillings in the foreign exchange market and making more hard currency available to sellers of shillings.  So far as I can tell, this argument ought to generalize:  Any argument that the Kenyan government could not accomplish most of the same good by printing shillings will mean that the primary mechanism of GiveWell's effectiveness must be the U.S. dollars being exchanged for the shillings on the foreign currency market.  This in turn means that GiveDirectly could accomplish most of its good by buying the same shillings on the foreign currency market and burning them.

(Or to sharpen the total point of this article:  The sum of the good accomplished by GiveDirectly should equal:

• The good accomplished by the Kenyan government printing shillings and distributing them to the same recipients;
• plus the good accomplished by GiveDirectly then purchasing shillings on the foreign exchange market using US dollars, and burning them.

Indeed, since these mechanisms of action seem mostly independent, we ought to be able to state a percentage of good accomplished which is allegedly attributed to each, summing to 1.  E.g. maybe 80% of the good would be achieved by printing shillings and distributing them to the same recipients, and 20% would be achieved by purchasing shillings on the foreign exchange market and burning them.  But then we have mostly the same questions as before about how to generate wealth by printing shillings.)

(2)  Inequality in Kenya is such that redistributing the supply of shillings toward the very poor increases utility in Kenya. Thus the Kenyan government could accomplish as much good as GiveDirectly by printing an equivalent number of shillings and giving them to the same recipients.  This would create inflation that is a loss to other Kenyans, some of them also very poor, but so much of the shilling supply is held by the rich that the net results are favorable.  Printing shillings can create happiness because it shifts resources from making speedboats for the rich to making corrugated iron roofs for the poor.

(It would be nice if the Kenyan government just printed shillings for GiveDirectly to use, but this the Kenyan government will not realistically do.  Effective altruists must live in the real world, and in the real world GiveDirectly will only accomplish its goals with the aid of effective altruists.  One cannot live in the should-universe where Kenya's government is taking up the burden.  Effective altruists should reason as if the Kenya government consists of plastic dolls who cannot be the locus of responsibility instead of them - that's heroic epistemology 101.  Maybe there will eventually be returns on lobbying for Minimum Guaranteed Income in Kenya if the programs work, but that's for tomorrow, not right now.)

(3)  Like the European Union, Kenya is not printing enough shillings under standard economic theory.  (I have no idea if this is plausibly true for Kenya in particular.)  If the government printed shillings and gave them to the same recipients, this would create real wealth in Kenya because the economy was operating below capacity and velocity of trade would pick up.  The shillings purchased by GiveDirectly would otherwise have stayed in bank accounts rather than going to other Kenyans.  Note that this contradicts the argument step in (1) where we said that the purchased shillings would otherwise have been spent elsewhere, so you should have questioned one argument step or the other.

(4)  Village moneylenders and bosses can successfully extract most surplus generated within their villages by raising rents or demanding bribes.  The only way that individuals can escape the grasp of moneylenders and rentiers is with a one-time gift that was not expected and which the moneylenders and bosses could not arrange to capture.  The government could accomplish as much good as GiveDirectly by printing the same number of shillings and giving them to the same people in an unpredictable pattern.  This would create some inflation but village moneylenders or bosses would ease off on people from whom they couldn't extract as much value, whereas the one-time gift recipients can purchase capital goods that will make them permanently better off in ways that don't allow the new value to be extracted by moneylenders or bosses.

If I recall correctly, GiveDirectly uses the example of a family using some of the gift money to purchase a corrugated iron roof.  From my perspective the obvious objection is that they could just be purchasing a corrugated iron roof that would've gone to someone else and raising the prices of roofs.  (1) says that Kenya has more foreign exchange on hands and can import, not one more corrugated iron roof, but a variety of other foreign goods; (2) says that the resources used in the corrugated iron roof would otherwise have been used to make a speedboat; (3) says that a new trade takes place in which somebody makes a corrugated iron roof that wouldn't have been manufactured otherwise; and (4) says that the village moneylenders usually adjust their interest rates so as to prevent anyone from saving up enough money to buy a corrugated iron roof.

The trouble is that all of these mechanisms of action seem much harder to measure and be sure of, than the measurable outcomes for gift recipients vs. non-recipients.

To reiterate, the sum of the good accomplished by GiveDirectly should equal the good accomplished by the Kenyan government printing shillings and distributing them to the same recipients, plus the good accomplished by GiveDirectly purchasing shillings on the foreign exchange market using US dollars and then burning them.  It seems to me to be difficult to arrive at a state of strong evidence about either of the two terms in this sum, with respect to any mechanism of action I've thought of so far.

With respect to the second term in this sum:  GiveDirectly buying shillings on the foreign exchange market and burning them might create wealth, but it's hard to see how you would measure this over the relevant amounts, and no such evidence was cited in the recommendation of GiveDirectly as the #2 charity.

With respect to the first term in this sum:  Under the Bayesian definition of evidence, strong evidence is evidence we are unlikely to see when the theory is false.  Even in the absence of any mechanism whereby printing nominal shillings creates happiness or wealth, we would still expect to find that the wealth and happiness of gift recipients exceeded the wealth of non-recipients.  So measuring that the gift recipients are wealthier and happier is not strong or even medium evidence that printing nominal shillings creates wealth, unless I'm missing something here.  Our posterior that printing shillings and giving them to certain people would create net wealth in any given quantity, should roughly equal our prior, after updating on the stated experimental evidence.

When I posed a shortened form of this question to Holden Karnofsky, he replied (roughly, I am trying to rephrase from memory):

It seems to me that this is a perverse decomposition of the benefit accomplished.  There's no inflation in the shilling because you're buying them, and since this is true, decomposing the benefit into an operation that does inflationary damage as a side effect, and then another operation that makes up for the inflation, is perverse.  It's like criticizing the Against Malaria Foundation based on a hypothetical which involves the mosquito nets being made from the flesh of babies and then adding another effect which saves the lives of other babies.  Since this is a perverse sum involving a strange extra side effect, it's okay that we can't get good estimates involving either of the terms in it.

Please keep in mind that this is Holden's off-the-cuff, non-written in-person response as rephrased by Eliezer Yudkowsky from imperfect memory.

With that said, I've thought about (what I think was) Holden's answer and I feel like I'm still missing something.  I agree that if U.S. dollars were being sent directly to Kenyan recipients and used only to purchase foreign goods, so that foreign goods were being directly sent from the U.S. to Kenyan recipients, then improvement in measured outcome for recipients compared to non-recipients would be an appropriate metric, and that the decomposition would be perverse.  But if the received money, in the form of Kenyan shillings, is being used primarily to purchase Kenyan goods, and causing those goods to be shipped to one villager rather than another while also possibly increasing velocity of trade, remedying inequality, and enabling completely different actors to buy some amount of foreign goods, then I honestly don't understand why this scenario should have the same causal mechanisms as the scenario where foreign goods are being shipped in from outside the country.  And then I honestly don't understand why measured improvements for one Kenyan over another should be a good proxy for aggregate welfare change to the country.

I may be missing something that an economist would find obvious or I may have misunderstood Holden's reply.  But to me, my sum seems like an obvious causal decomposition of the effects in Kenya, neither of whose terms can be estimated well.  I don't understand why I should expect the uncertainty in these two estimates to cancel out when they are added; I don't understand what background causal model yields this conclusion.

To be clear, I personally would guess that the U.S. would be net better off, if the Federal Reserve directly sent everyone in the U.S. with income under $20K/year a one-time $6,000 check with the money phasing out at a 10% rate up to $80K/year.  This is because, in order of importance:

• I buy the analogous market monetarist argument (3) that the U.S. is printing too little money.
• I buy the analogous argument (2) about inequality.
• (However, I also somewhat suspect that some analogous form of (4) is going on with poor people somehow systematically having all but a certain amount of value extracted from them, which is in general how a modern country can have only 2% instead of 95% of the population being farmers, and yet there are still people living hand-to-mouth.  I would worry that a predictable, universal one-time gift of $6K would not defeat this phenomenon, and that the gift money will just be extracted again somehow.  In the case of Minimum Guaranteed Income, I would worry that the labor share of income will drop proportionally to small amounts of MGI as wages are just bid down by people who can live on less.  Or something.  This would be a much longer discussion and the ideas are much less simple than the above two notions, probably also less important.  I'm just mentioning it again because of my long-term puzzlement with the question "Why are there still poor people after agricultural productivity rose by a factor of 100?")

What I wouldn't say is that my belief in the above is as strong as my belief in, say, the intelligence explosion.  I'd guess that the printing operation would do more good than harm, but it's not what I would call a strong evidence-based conclusion.  If we're going to be okay with that standard of argument generally, then the top charity under that standard of reasoning, generally and evenhandedly applied, ought to work out to some charity that does science and technology research.  (X-risk minimization might seem substantially 'weirder' than that, but the best science-funding charities should be only equally weird.)  And I wouldn't measure the excess of happiness of gift-recipients compared to non-recipients in a pilot program, and call this a good estimate of the net good if a Minimum Guaranteed Income were universally adopted.

So to reiterate, my question to Givewell is not "Why do you think GiveDirectly might maybe end up doing some good anyway?" but "Does GiveDirectly rise to the standards required for your #2 evidence-based charity?"

Very brief summary of main themes

1)    “Follow your passion” is terrible advice for most people. Don’t try to find your “true calling” because it’s a false concept.

2)    The craftsman’s mindset: build skills through deliberate practice.

3)    The importance of control: use your career capital to ask for and obtain autonomy, and other things that make jobs pleasant.

4)    Have a mission: once you have skills, use them to explore options and find something that can be your life’s work and driving motivation.

Introduction 

This book came to me highly recommended, and didn’t quite live up to its reputation. It’s not that I disagree with anything, but Newport seems to be trying to claim that his point is more new and exciting than I think it actually is. The style reeks of self-help manual. (This isn’t a thing wrong with the book itself, just a fact about my personal taste). Still. It has some points that would be new to me if not for LW/CFAR, and it frames them all together in a tidy package, which may not have happened before. I would definitely recommend it to the average smart high school student.

Favourable Points

1) Promoting Hufflepuff. The world needs more people making hard work and conscientiousness look shiny.

2) The concept of deliberate practice, associated with a career. Deliberate practice doesn’t seem to be an obvious concept, and I’ll get behind any popular book that explains it. 

3) Pointing out that mastery can create its own enjoyment; that it’s possible to grow to love an arbitrary activity, if it’s challenging and you can take pride in your skill. Example: the author quoted a study¹ that asked people whether they considered their work to be a job (just a way to pay the bills), a career (a path towards better work), or a calling (a vital part of your life and identity.) Looking at a single occupation, college administrative assistants, the study found that the employees were roughly evenly split between calling it a job, career, or calling, and that the strongest predictive factor was time spent in the position. Although there’s a possible sample bias here (employees whose needs aren’t satisfied will keep looking for other opportunities and leave if they find them), it’s still an important point.

4) The fungibility of this thing called “career capital.” You don’t have to find the perfect dream job in order to be happy; you can find a job that provides value to society and is bearable, build up enough skill that you’re indispensable, and then bargain for the things that actually make jobs good over the long term.

5) Specific examples of people exploring opportunities and using their career capital in creative ways. For example, the book mentions a marketing executive, Joe Duffy, who wanted to work creativity into his working life–but instead of quitting and trying to make a living as an artist, he build skills and a reputation in brand icons and logos, until he was offered a job at a company that gave him the creative freedom he wanted. The anecdotes still aren’t that specific, but they feed the availability heuristic with examples.

Downvotes

The author disparagingly discusses the popular literature on career choice. I think that the “don’t follow your passion” point is less novel than he’s making it out to be. I read a lot of self-help career books as a young teenager, like ‘What Color is your Parachute’, and I wasn’t left with a belief that I ought to follow my passion. If I had been, I’d have gone into music or physics, not nursing. I don’t think that “do what you love, and the money will follow” is by any means the common sense advice peddled by life coaches.

I’m more prepared to believe that pop culture says there’s a tradeoff between doing a poorly paying job that you can love, or a well-paid job that will be boring; that you may have to make a choice about which one you want. There are solid economic reasons for this to be true.

I’m not sure to what degree the author cherry-picked his examples, but it would have been very easy to do, even without realizing. The examples break down into ‘naive, idealistic people who daydreamed about being famous and quit their jobs to pursue fantasies’, and ‘driven hard-working people who pursued ambitious careers and were lucky enough to succeed big.’

If he’s trying to make the point that drive and hard work matter more than idealism, I am the easiest person to make that point to...and I still don’t like the way he makes it. Where are the ambitious people who burned out and quit? The unambitious people who found steady jobs and raised families and had gardens in their backyards and lived happily ever after? The rest of the people in the world who don’t fit clearly into one category or another?

I guess maybe my true rejection is that none of the people profiled were nurses, or anything in that reference class. The book, however it claims not to, seems to implicitly reinforce the idea that there are “good” jobs–shiny high status jobs that anyone would find impressive–and then there are jobs like community centre manager and social worker and librarian and nurse, which aren’t even worth mentioning.  

Thoughts on learning coefficients, economic demand, and how the book applies to my life

This isn’t mentioned in the book explicitly, but it’s a thought that came to me afterwards and feels related.

The “career capital”, or bargaining power, that you have in your job depends on how valuable you are to your employer. This, in turns, depends on several things: one of them is your skill relative to the other people they could be employing, but another factor is the supply/demand balance of people with your qualifications.

I’m pretty good at writing, and I suspect I could get a lot better if I spent the time. But I’m by no means an above-average nurse, even for my reference class of nurses with just under a year of experience.

I still have a ton of bargaining power, probably much more than I’d have in any job that involved my writing skills. Being a writer is cool, and lots of people want to do it, but there’s not that much need in the world for writers...and so it’s hard to make a living, even if you’re a very good writer. Nursing, on the other hand, is unglamorous and hard, and the supply/demand mismatch is in the opposite direction. As a result, less than a year out of university, I have a lot of something like career capital. I’ve managed to bargain for a flexible part-time position that lets me work basically as many or as few hours as I want to (at the cost of a weird schedule), with arbitrary flexibility to take time off and travel. I could move to approximately anywhere in the world and have a job on a few months’ notice. And I happen to like my job a lot, so I win all around. The author doesn’t mention this type of career capital at all.

Still, I guess the thing that I’m doing with my career capital–getting a flex schedule so that I can do shiny exciting things like volunteering for CFAR, without having to give up income and stability–is probably something that Newport would approve of would approve of.

References

1. Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, et al. “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work,” Journal of Research in Personality 31 (1997): 21?33.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup

In his recent excellent blog post, Yvain discusses a few "universal" (commonplace) human experiences that many people never notice they don't have, such as the ability to smell, see some colors, see mental pictures, and feel emotions.  I was reminded of a longstanding argument I had with a friend.  She always insisted that she would rather be blind than deaf.  I could not understand how that was possible, since the visual world is so much richer and more interesting.  We later found out that I can see an order of magnitude more colors than she can, but have subpar ability to distinguish tones.  And I thought she was just being a contrarian for its own sake.  I thought the experience of that many colors was universal, and had rarely seen evidence that challenged that belief.  

More seriously, a good friend of mine did not realize he suffered from a serious genetic disorder that caused him extreme body pain and terrible headaches whenever he became tired or dehydrated for the first three decades of his life.  He thought everyone felt that way, but considered it whiny to talk about it.  He almost never mentioned it, and never realized what it was, until <bragging> I noticed how tense his expressions became when he got tired, asked him about it, then put it together with some other unusual physical experiences I knew he had </bragging>

This got me thinking about when it is likely we might be having unusual sensory experiences and not realize for long periods of time.  I am calling these "secretly secret experiences."  Here are the factors that might increase the likelihood of having a secretly secret experience. 

1) When they are rarely consciously mentally examined: experiences such as the ability to distinguish subtle differences in shades of color are tested occasionally (when choosing paint or ripe fruit), but few people besides interior decorators think about how good their shade-distinguishing skills are.  Others include that feeling of being in different moods or mental states, breathing, sensing commonly-sensed things (the look of roads or the sound of voices, etc.)  Most of the examples from the blog post fall under this category.  People might not notice that they over- or under-experience or differently experience such feelings, relative to others.  

2) When they are rarely discussed in everyday life: If my experience of pooping feels very different from other peoples' I may never know, because I don't discuss the experience in detail with anyone.  If people talked about their experiences, I would probably notice if mine didn't match up, but that's unlikely to happen.  The same might apply for other experiences that are taboo to discuss, such as masturbation, sex (in some cultures), anything considered gross or unhygienic, or socially awkward experiences (in some cultures).

3) When there is social pressure to experience something a certain way: it may be socially dangerous to admit you don't find members of the opposite sex attractive, or you didn't enjoy The Godfather or whatever.  Depending on your sensitivity to social pressure (see 4) and the strength of the pressure, this could lead to unawareness about true rare preferences.  

4) Sensitivity to external influences:  Some people pick up on social cues more easily than others.  Some notice social norms more readily, and some seem more or less willing to violate some norms (partly because of how well they perceive them, plus some other factors). I can imagine that a deeply autistic person might be influenced far less by mainstream descriptions of different experiences.  Exceptionally socially attuned people might (perhaps) take social influences to heart and be less able to distinguish their own from those they know about.  

5) When skills are redundant or you have good substitutes:  For example, if we live in a world with only fish and mammals, and all mammals are brown and warm and all fish are cold and silver, you might never notice that you can't feel temperature because you are still a perfectly good mammal and fish distinguisher.  In the real world, it's harder to find clear examples, but I can think of substitutes for color-sightedness such as shade and textural cues that increase the likelihood of a color-blind person not realizing zir blindness.  Similarly, empathy and social adeptness may increase someone's ability both to mask that ze is having a different experience than others, and the likelihood that ze will believe all others are good at hiding a different experience than the one they portray openly.

What else can people think of?

Special thanks to JT for his feedback and for letting me share his story.