All of Jodika's Comments + Replies

Judging by some of the attitudes I have heard from my friends about getting a flu jab (similar to Lumifer's comment), I have found that it is actually more effective to encourage people to get flu jabs for the benefit to others via herd immunity, rather than by emphasising the benefit to them.

I don't know if this is maybe some kind of ego-bias in that healthy people underestimate their chances of getting sick, or that doing something for you doesn't get you fuzzies, whereas doing it to help sick people and babies does.

Of course I am in a country that won't... (read more)

These days having few friends frequently signals maturity or coolness - someone who doesn't add everyone they've ever met to look like they have lots of friends.

I think the sweet spot is between 10 and 200 - go over that and people tend to imagine 'there's no way he could actually have that many friends, he just adds people at random and cares too much about popularity'.

Edit: Having said that, I just went back to my fb, which I no longer really use, and I'm on over 350. But largely that's because I've had it for a long time and not removed people I no longer see or have any real intention of seeing, so I don't only have actual friends as friends either.

The secret to that is clothes that are simple and fit well.

So well-fitted dark jeans with shirt, no tie or a nice sweater/cardigan is a good look. Even 'jeans and a t shirt' can be a really nice look if the jeans fit you well and the t shirt is something classic like plain white (this also works well with a shirt partly or wholly unbuttoned over the top). There's also chinos which can work (just don't get them in too light or bright a colour if you're not confident about pulling off that look). If you live somewhere cold, peacoats and longer, slightly fitt... (read more)

In ambiguous environments, it is best to determine ok-ness on the basis of the people.

Good situations: You are both doing the same thing - looking at the same genre of books in a bookstore, the same exhibit in a museum or zoo, both walking dogs in a park etc. This makes it easier to talk as you already have one thing in common and you can comment on that to see if they are receptive to conversation.

Something unusual happens - a delay on public transport, something wacky is going on in the quad etc

If you mean quad as in university, you already have a thing... (read more)

I don't think that's true? I think that, in practice, people value themselves more. But I think that it's a fairly common tenet of normal peoples' moralities that people are equal in value, and that if you asked random people, most of them would not say that they consider themselves to be more valuable or important than everyone else.

Which, yes, means that there's a discrepancy between what people say they believe and what their actions say they believe, but that's pretty normal too.

Thanks for the link and advice; I was basically looking for a review like that but lacking the studies-savvy to find it.

Yeah I had a quick look and that's about right for the price over here - certainly not doable for me, anyway.

I'm not sure it's possible to just get a blood panel on the NHS. My instinct is that I'd need to actually show symptoms of a vitamin deficiency.

Thanks anyway though.

It's really difficult to 'shut up and multiply' in some cases.

I mean, I'm going to get personal here because it feels like the best way to articulate my problems with mathematical utilitarianism. But right now, I don't produce anything like what I cost my society (in terms of socialized medicine, and support I receive from my parents).

I feel very strongly that I shouldn't value myself more than a random African. But there are charities that claim I could save at least one life with what I spend on prescription fees every month. In terms of pure utilitarian... (read more)

I don't know how many people here have medical or nutritional expertise, but for those who do, I have a question.

The benefits and risks of multivitamins have been discussed a little in the media, but as a layperson I find it difficult to look at the conflicting studies online and come to any particular conclusion as to what I should do.

Specifically, I am looking at this as a person with a chronic illness who finds it difficult to feed myself a diet as healthy as I would like due to money and time/energy constraints. I am therefore looking at supplementing ... (read more)

People, however, (as shminux said) do try kink all the time. It would not be unethical to do a study on people who are already kinky and see if they get kinkier over time.

Anecdotally, they start doing kink, they either decide it isn't for them and stop, or they do get kinkier for a while - because they're exploring what they like and it makes sense to start at the less extreme end of things.

Then they figure out what they like, which is often a range of things at differing levels of 'kinkiness/extremeness', and do that.

I mean, it's almost trivially obvious... (read more)

Thanks for the link; very helpful and interesting.

It's a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it's a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?

No, but they might know things like the scale of diminishing returns in terms of spending money on yourself, or at what minimum level of wealth do an acceptable majority of people (in x culture or x country) report being satisfied with their lives?

They might have a personal anecdote about how they earn a million dollars a year and live in a ditch and have never been happier, and they might know the psy... (read more)

But I'll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income >because of ill health isn't terribly large.

Well another complicating factor - in my particular case - is that with chronic and especially mental health conditions, it's actually very difficult to separate 'preventative healthcare' from frivolous spending. A lot of the things someone with my mental health might buy and do to keep them sane doesn't look like healthcare spending at all. A lot of things that it is considered normal and even... (read more)

Is this a thing we should be asking if someone who is an expert on Effective Altruism and economics and similar could have a go at answering?

Do you have a link? I'm just not sure that it's that obvious that pumping my (hypothetical) money overseas is a utilitarian good if I end up costing my own society more than I give away (which is pretty likely - to use a US example, hypothetical-me might end up costing orders of magnitude more to treat in an emergency room when I get sick because I didn't spend my own money on preventative healthcare).

Obviously the money hypothetical-I save the government isn't automatically going to go to good causes, but by doing my bit to make the society poorer, am I reducing people's overall tendency to have extra money to give away?

I dunno, probably need an economist and a lot of time to properly answer that question...

Thanks gjm, that's a really helpful comment. (And yes, quotation marks indicate 'this is the word I can think of but it is not necessarily the right word.)

I think points number 1 and 3 are especially relevant for me right now, and I have found talking it through on here to be very helpful in defeating an entirely non-useful lingering sense of guilt for not giving more when I really can't afford to, yet.

4 and 5 are anecdotally true for me, as a trained practitioner of two artforms (music and theatre); I often find that I can appreciate something greatly for its technical expertise and novelty of style or content at the same time as acknowledging that some things that achieve greatly in those areas actually fail at being accessibly entertaining.

I also definitely think 2 and 3 come into play a lot, especially when it comes to considering the monetary difference people are willing to pay artists (in terms of the price of paintings/sculptures, ticket prices, ... (read more)

That's it, basically; it's about how much of a buffer I'm 'allowed' to give myself on 'reasonably comfortable'; I'm supporting myself and full-time student partner and not in permanent full-time employment so my instinct whenever I have a sniff of an excess is to hoard it against a bad month for getting work rather than do anything charitable with it (or it all goes on things we've put off replacing for monetary reasons, like shoes that are still wearable but worn out enough to no longer be waterproof).

I think Lumifer articulated better than I could what I... (read more)

I have yet to find any thoughts on Effective Altruism that do not assume vast amounts of disposable income on the part of the reader. What I am currently trying to determine are things like 'at what point does it make sense to give away some of your income versus the utility of having decent quality of life yourself and insuring against the risk that you end up consuming charitable resources because something happened and you didn't have an emergency fund'. Does anyone know of any posts or similar that tackle the effective utilitarian use of resources when you don't have a lot of resources to begin with?

I fail to see from this review how the idea that raising kids effectively is less difficult than commonly assumed (or at least that many of the stressful and time-consuming things parents do are less effective than assumed) necessarily leads to the conclusion that one should have more kids. Surely the conclusion ought to be 'you should have more kids if you want to have more kids'.