All of ClaireZabel's Comments + Replies

[As is always the default, but perhaps worth repeating in sensitive situations, my views are my own and by default I'm not speaking on behalf of the Open Phil. I don't do professional grantmaking in this area, haven't been following it closely recently, and others at Open Phil might have different opinions.]

I'm disappointed by ACE's comment (I thought Jakub's comment seemed very polite and even-handed, and not hostile, given the context, nor do I agree with characterizing what seems to me to be sincere concern in the OP just a... (read more)

I’ll consider it a big success of this project if some people will have read Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset next time I check.

It's not out yet, so I expect you will get your wish if you check a bit after it's released :) 

Seems to be working now!

The website isn't working for me, screenshot below:

Just a personal note, in case it's helpful for others: in the past, I thought that medications for mental health issues were likely to be pretty bad, in terms of side effects, and generally associated them with people in situations of pretty extreme suffering.  And so I thought it would only be worth it or appropriate to seek psychiatric help if I were really struggling, e.g. on the brink of a breakdown or full burn-out. So I avoided seeking help, even though I did have some issues that were bothering me.  In my experience, a lot of other people ... (read more)

Scott's new practice, Lorien Psychiatry, also has some resources that I (at least) have found helpful. 

Also, I believe it's much easier to become a teacher for high schoolers at top high schools than a teacher for students at top universities, because most teachers at top unis are professors, or at least lecturers with PhDs, while even at fancy high schools, most teachers don't have PhDs, and I think it's generally just much less selective. So EAs might have an easier time finding positions teaching high schoolers than uni students of a given eliteness level. (Of course, there are other ways to engage people, like student groups, for which different dynamics are at play.) 

Me too!

Huh, this is great to know. Personally, I'm the opposite, I find it annoying when people ask to meet and don't  include a calendly link or similar, I am slightly annoyed by the time it takes to write a reply email and generate a calendar invite, and the often greater overall back-and-forth and attention drain from having the issue linger. 

Curious how anti-Calendly people feel about the "include a calendly link + ask people to send timeslots if they prefer" strategy. 

Some people are making predictions about this topic here.

On that link, someone comments:

Berkeley's incumbent mayor got the endorsement of Bernie Sanders in 2016, and Gavin Newsom for 2020. Berkeley also has a strong record of reelecting mayors. So I think his base rate for reelection should be above 80%, barring a JerryBrownesque run from a much larger state politician.

https://www.dailycal.org/2019/08/30/berkeley-mayor-jesse-arreguin-announces-campaign-for-reelection/

I just wanted to say I thought this was overall an impressively thorough and thoughtful comment. Thank you for making it!

I’ve created a survey about barriers to entering information security careers for GCR reduction, with a focus on whether funding might be able to help make entering the space easier. If you’re considering this career path or know people that are, and especially if you foresee money being an obstacle, I’d appreciate you taking the survey/forwarding it to relevant people. 

The survey is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScEwPFNCB5aFsv8ghIFFTbZS0X_JMnuquE3DItp8XjbkeE6HQ/viewform?usp=sf_link. Open Philanthropy a... (read more)

[meta] Carl, I think you should consider going through other long, highly upvoted comments you've written and making them top-level posts. I'd be happy to look over options with you if that'd be helpful.

I would guess the bottleneck is elsewhere too, think the bottleneck is something like managerial capacity/trust/mentorship/vetting of grantmakers. I recently started thinking about this a bit, but am still in the very early stages.

(Just saw this via Rob's post on Facebook) :)

Thanks for writing this up, I think you make some useful points here.

Based on my experience doing some EA grantmaking at Open Phil, my impression is that the bottleneck isn't in vetting precisely, though that's somewhat directionally correct. It's more like there's a distribution of projects, and we've picked some of the low-hanging fruit, and on the current margin, grantmaking in this space requires more effort per grant to feel comfortable with, either to vet (e.g. because the ca... (read more)

I'm not sure where I picked it up, though I'm pretty sure it was somewhere in the rationalist community.

E.g. from What epistemic hygiene norms should there be?:

Explicitly separate “individual impressions” (impressions based only on evidence you've verified yourself) from “beliefs” (which include evidence from others’ impressions)

Thank so much for the clear and eloquent post. I think a lot of the issues related to lack of expertise and expert bias are stronger than I think you do, and I think it's both rare and not inordinately difficult to adjust for common biases such that in certain cases a less-informed individual can often beat the expert consensus (because few enough of the experts are doing this, for now). But it was useful to read this detailed and compelling explanation of your view.

The following point seems essential, and I think underemphasized:

Modesty can lead to d

Flaws aren't the only things I want to discover when I scrutinize a paper. I also want to discover truths, if they exist, among other things

[random] I find the survey numbers interesting, insofar as they suggest that EA is more left-leaning than almost any profession or discipline.

(see e.g. this and this).

The incentive gradient I was referring to goes from trying to actually figure out the truth to using arguments as weapons to win against opponents. You can totally use proxies for the truth if you have to(like an article being written by someone you've audited in the past, or someone who's made sound predictions in the past). You can totally decide not to engage with an issue because it's not worth the time.

But if you just shrug your shoulders and cite average social science reporting on a forum you care about, you are not justified in expecting good outc... (read more)

To be charitable to Kelly, in most parts of the internet, a link to popular reporting on social science research is a high quality argument.

I dearly hope we never become one of those parts of the internet.

And think we should fight against every slip down that terrible incentive gradient, for example by pointing out that the bottom of that gradient is a really terribly unproductive place, and by pushing back against steps down that doomy path.

Kelly, I don't think the study you cite is good or compelling evidence of the conclusion you're stating. See Scott's comments on it for the reasons why.

(edited because the original link didn't work)

Ah, k, thanks for explaining, I misinterpreted what you wrote. I agree 25 hours is in the right ballpark for that sum (though it varies a lot).

Personally, I downvoted because I guessed that the post was likely to be of interest to sufficiently few people that it felt somewhat spammy. If I imagine everyone posting with that level of selectivity I would guess the Forum would become a worse place, so it's the type of behavior I think should probably be discouraged.

I'm not very confident about that, though.

An Open Phil staff member made a rough guess that it takes them 13-75 hours per grant distributed. Their average grant size is quite a bit larger, so it seems reasonable to assume it would take them about 25 hours to distribute a pot the size of EA Grants.

My experience making grants at Open Phil suggests it would take us substantially more than 25 hours to evaluate the number of grant applications you received, decide which ones to fund, and disburse the money (counting grant investigator, logistics, and communications staff time). I haven't found that... (read more)

I think it would be useful to frontload info like 1) the number of people to took this vs. previous surveys, 2) links to previous surveys.

I think I would also prefer mildly strongly if all of the survey results were in one blog post (to make them easier to find), and prefer it strongly to have all the results for the demographic info in the demographics post. But is seems like this post doesn't include information that was requested on the survey and that seems interesting, like race/ethnicity and political views.

The proportion of atheist, agnostic or no

[minor] In the sentence, "While more pilot testing is necessary in order to make definitive judgements on SHIC as a whole, we feel that we have gathered enough data to guide strategic changes to this exceedingly novel project." "exceedingly novel" seems like a substantial exaggeration to me. There have been EA student groups, and LEAN, before (as you know), as well as inter-school groups for many different causes.

Note though that ACE was originally a part of 80k Hours, which was a part of CEA. The organizations now feel quite separate, at least to me.

Additionally, I am not paid by ACE or CEA. Being on the ACE Board is a volunteer position, as is this.

Generally, I don't feel constrained in my ability to criticize CEA, outside a desire to generally maintain collegial relations, though it seems plausible to me that I'm in an echo chamber too similar to CEAs to help as much as I could if I was more on the outside. Generally, trying to do as much good as possible is t... (read more)

I found the formatting of this post difficult to read. I would recommend making it neater and clearer.

I would prefer if the title of this post was something like "My 5 favorite EA posts of 2016". When I see "best" I expect a more objective and comprehensive ranking system (and think "best" is an irritatingly nonspecific and subjective word), so I think the current wording is misleading.

For EAs that don't know, if might be helpful to provide some information about the journal, such as the size and general characteristics of the readership, as well as information about writing for it, such as what sort of background is likely helpful and how long the papers would probably be. Also hopes and expectations for the special issue, if you have any.

This gets very tricky very fast. In general, the difference in EV between people's first and second choice plan is likely to be small in situations with many options, if only because their first and second choice plans are likely to have many of the same qualities (depending on how different a plan has to be to be considered a different plan). Subtracting the most plausible (or something) counterfactual from almost anyone's impact makes it seem very small.

Nice idea, Julia. Thanks for doing this!

Thanks Kathy!

No shame if you lose, so much glory if you win

I don't think incompetent and malicious are the only two options (I wouldn't bet on either as the primary driver of Gleb's behavior), and I don't think they're mutually exclusive or binary.

Also, the main job of the EA community is not to assess Gleb maximally accurately at all costs. Regardless of his motives, he seems less impactful and more destructive than the average EA, and he improves less per unit feedback than the average EA. Improving Gleb is low on tractability, low on neglectedness, and low on importance. Spending more of our resources on him unfairly privileges him and betrays the world and forsakes the good we can do in it.

Views my own, not my employer's.

I would recommend linking to Jeff's post at the beginning of this one.

But many of those people aren't earning to give. If they were, they would probably give more. So the survey doesn't indicate you are in the top 15% in comparative advantage just because you could clear $8k.

Have you experienced downvoting brigades? How do you distinguish them from sincere negative feedback?

To be clear, I'm saying that I think sometimes an organization's practices usefully reflect a community's values and that Linch was being overly dismissive of this possibility, not making a claim about this specific case.

If the "you" here is the Effective Altruism community, then the hiring practices of a single organization shouldn't be a significant sign that the community as a whole is elitist.

I don't think that's entirely right. I think that given that the community includes relatively few organizations (of which GiveWell is one of the larger and older ones) GiveWell's practices may be but aren't always a significant (and relatively concrete) reflection of and on the community's views.

(views are my own, not my employer's)

In fact, the team most likely to be growing EA, the Effective Altruism Outreach team was cautioning against growth. It seems reasonably clear that EA is growing virally and organically -- exactly what you want in the early days of a project.

Why do you want a project to grow virally and organically in the early days of a project? That seems like the opposite of what I'd guess; when a project is young you want to steer it thoughtfully and deliberately and encourage it to grow slowly, so that it doesn't get off track or hijacked, and so you have time to onboard and build capacity in the new members. Has the EAO team come to think that fast growth is good?

And: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/r5/threads_on_facebook_worth_being_able_to_refer/

Also: http://www.benkuhn.net/ea-reading

There is this: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/5f/effective_altruism_reading_list/

That's deeply kind of you to say, and the most uplifting thing I've heard in a while. Thank you very much.

You see the same pattern in Clockwork Orange. Why does making Alex not a sadistic murderer necessitate destroying his love of music? (Music is another of our highest values, and so destroying it is a lazy way to signal that something is very bad.) There was no actual reason that makes sense in the story or in the real world; that was just an arbitrary choice by an author to avoid the hard work of actually trying to demonstrate a connection between two things.

Now people can say "but look at Clockwork Orange!" as if that provided evidence of anything, except that people will tolerate a hell of a lot of silliness when it's in line with their preexisting beliefs and ethics.

Consider The Giver. Consider a world where everyone was high on opiates all the time. There is no suffering or beauty. Would you disturb it?

I think generalizing from these examples (and especially from fictional examples in general) is dangerous for a few reasons.

Fiction is not designed to be maximally truth-revealing. Its function is as art and entertainment, to move the audience, persuade them, woo them, etc. Doing this can and often does involve revealing important truths, but doesn't necessarily. Sometimes, fiction is effective because it affirms cu... (read more)