What honest arguments could the blind person use?
This sounds like motivated cognition. "How can I use EA to justify what I already want to do?"
In response to
December Monthly Bragging Thread
Designed a new musical instrument and played it live at two dances.
In response to
[Link] Good Judgment Project, Season Three
I started partecipating, but got turned off by the ridicolously detailed questions outside my area of expertise. Do I think a sack of rice will fall over when the Ethiopian delegation visits Ecuador in March? How sure am I about my prediction? It doesn't seem to help me to achieve better calibration. I'm curious if people that are partecipating are getting value out of it, and what kind of value.
I also stopped participating (partway through season 1) because the questions weren't the sort of thing I was interested in.
The main thing that I personally think we don't need as much of is donations to object-level charities (e.g. GiveWell's top picks). It's unclear to me how much this can be funged into more self-reflection for the general person, but for instance I am sacrificing potential donations right now in order to write this post and respond to criticism...
I think in general, a case that "X is bad so we need more of fixing X" without specific recommendations can also be useful in that it leaves the resource allocation up to individual people. For instance, you decided that your current plans are better than spending more time on social-movement introspection, but (hopefully) not everyone who reads this post will come to the same conclusion.
I think "writing blogposts criticizing mistakes that people in the EA community commonly make" is a moderate strawman of what I'd actually like to see, in that it gets us closer to being a successful movement but clearly won't be sufficient on its own.
Why do you think basic fact-finding would be particularly helpful? Seems to me that if we can't come to nontrivial conclusions already, the kind of facts we're likely to find won't help very much.
we don't need as much of is donations to object-level charities
These donations are useful for establishing credibility as a real movement and not just "people talking on the internet".
In response to
A critique of effective altruism
Effective altruists often express surprise that the idea of effective altruism only came about so recently. For instance, my student group recently hosted Elie Hassenfeld for a talk in which he made remarks to that effect, and I’ve heard other people working for EA organizations express the same sentiment. But no one seems to be actually worried about this—just smug that they’ve figured out something that no one else had.
I do think this is worrying, or at least worth looking into. This is part of why I've been looking into the history of earning to give (I, II, III).
The issue is whether people like the OP and myself, who are interested in reducing worldsuck, but not necessarily in the same kind of way as utilitarians, belong in the EA community or not.
I'm quite confused about this. I think my values are pretty compatible with Yudkowsky's, but Yudkowsky seems to think he's an EA. On the other hand, my values seem incompatible with those of e.g. Paul Christiano, who I think everyone would agree clearly is an EA. Yet those two seem to act as though they believed their values were compatible with each other. Now both of them are as intelligent as I, maybe more. So if I update on their apparent beliefs about what sets of values are compatible, should I conclude that I'm an EA, despite my non-endorsement of utilitarianism or any other kind of extreme altruism, or should I instead conclude that I don't want Yudkowskian FAI after all, and start my own rival world-saving project?
Could you expand more on the incompatibility you see between Yudkowsky and Christiano's values?
In response to
2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Surveyed.
The IQ question should, like with the SAT/ACT, make it clear you should leave it blank if you've not been tested. And the same with the follow-up in calibration.
In the history of medicine, 5 valuable facts about the causes of disease have been established by correlation: smoking => lung cancer, heart disease; sun => skin cancer; HPV is STD; alcohol => rectal cancer. The claim with the 6th most correlation evidence is that alcohol protects from heart disease, but this is controversial.
I'll leave it to you to compute the denominator.
Also, the number 5 is itself controversial. Some people put it at 2.
Thinking about why things do or don't belong on your list, and I think they basically have to be very harmful. If they're good we do an experiment and find out, but if they're bad we just declare it established with a correlation. For example I think Thalidomide could go on your list, in that the evidence was basically "people who took Thalidomide were far more likely to have babies with major birth defects." Probably lead (paint, fuel)? Our sense of what's a safe dose of radiation?
the initial correlational observation
It seems to me that you want to call all observational data "correlations".
I think so. If you want to separate them how would you say "people who get pustules from working with cattle are less likely to catch smallpox" differs from "people who give blood are less likely to have heart disease"?
View more: Next
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Oh. Fair enough! I started the monthly posts as a trial run for seeing whether I could handle a monthly summary or not, before I tried starting up a mailing list. It seemed to go pretty well so I decided to open one up this December.
I thought about it in the past, and was actually why I volunteered for them shortly. I never did write that up, did I? In any case, at the time I had no particular credentials for them or real statistical skills so it didn't go anywhere. Part of the problem was that they put an emphasis on their employees being physically present at their Chinatown, IIRC, offices in NYC. At the time I was not very near NYC, and I'm even further away now. And considering the idea at the present, Givewell seems to be moving away from statistical approaches. So... It's not a bad idea, but events seem to be conspiring to render it ever more remote an outcome.
Minor: GiveWell is in SF now.