My girlfriend and I disagreed about focussing on poor vs richer countries in terms of doing good. She made an argument along the lines of:

'In poorer countries the consumer goods are targeted to that class of poor people so making difference in inequality in places like Australia is more important than in poor countries because they are deprived of a supply of goods because the consumer culture is targeted towards the wealthier middle class.'

What do you make of it?

I agree figuring out whether this might collapse ecosystems is important, (and what this collapse would entail, it would probably go beyond mosquitos and lead to some species rebalancing, but pretty darn sure not "destroy everything" either)

Thanks a lot; I'll this it into account, and think how to improve this in next versions.

Though with the "next day" button, it would be a hard tradeoff - you might not have had this experience, but sometimes you travel and your timezone settings get messed up, or your phone's clock is reset etc. It's possible to design something that would avoid these problems, but it's a pretty big change in the internals of the app.

The temptation to delay clicking it and catch up the next day is strong.

This is surprising to me - the algorithm in the app makes it strictly easier to catch up when you click the button first, and then do the tasks rather than the other way around. Is it not enough incentive to make you want to click the button, rather than "cheat"?

But roughly only a half of accidents could be blamed on each car driver, so even safest driver would get only 50 per cent reduction in accident rate. Other reckless drivers could rear-end him or even t-bonned.

the benefit of jobs, net of pay

Compared to what?

Doesn't this suffer from a similar problem as group selection?

Imagine that the first mutant gets lucky and has 20 children; 10 of them inherited the "help your siblings" genes, and 10 of them did not. Does this give an advantage to the nice children over the non-nice ones? Well, only in the next generation... but then again, some children in the next generation will have the gene and some will not... and this feels like there is always an immediate disadvantage that is supposed to get balanced by an advantage in the next generation, except that the next generation also has an immediate disadvantage...

Uhm, let's reverse it. Imagine that everyone has the "help your siblings" gene, in the most simple version that makes them take a given fraction of their resources and distribute it indiscriminately among all siblings. Now we get one mutant that does not have this gene. Then, this mutant has an advantage over their siblings; the siblings give resources to mutant, not receiving anything in return. Yeah, the mutant is causing some damage to the siblings, reducing the success of their genes. But we don't care about genes in general here, only about the one specific "don't help your siblings" allele; and this allele clearly benefits from being a free-rider. And then it reproduces with some else, who is still an altruist, and again 50% of the mutant's children inherit the gene and get an advantage over their siblings.

So we get the group-selectionist situations where families of nice individuals prosper better than mixed families, but within each mixed family the non-nice individuals prosper better. This would need a mathematical model, but I suspect that unless the families are small, geographically isolated, and therefore heavily interbreeding, the nice genes would lose to the non-nice genes.

EY was attempting to spread his ideas since his first post on overcomingbias. This pattern was followed through entire Sequences. Do you regard this as different from then?

Ok, this is something I have been thinking every time I see an Outreach Thread, and now I can't resist asking it:

When did LW become a proselytizing community?

And are we sure that it is a good idea to do a lot of outreach when the majority of discussion on the site is about why LW sucks?

Even then, the system is opt-out. Anyone can become a renunciate who are beyond caste.

Can you give me a source for this? I've never heard of anyone renouncing their caste, and I have heard about many instances of lower-caste people lying about their caste, and I can't reconcile the two.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.