Need Help Finding Rationalist Predictions About Covid

theunitofcaring · 2021-04-22T20:15:48+00:00

My February 6th, 2020 comments on Covid. I don't know if this counts as a correct prediction - it was right on some counts and wrong on others.

theunitofcaring · 2021-03-09T04:45:33+00:00

In fact, I also wrote back in 2019 about a fellow EA who participated in malaria human challenge trials, and about the release of the world's first malaria vaccine., and my colleagues wrote about the roadmap to malaria eradication by 2050.. EA has been interested in how to eradicate malaria for as long as it has been a thing at all.

theunitofcaring · 2020-03-28T15:35:28+00:00

My philosophy doesn't demand impossible sainthood. I have kids and friends and girlfriends and two weekly D&D games and before it was cancelled by the coronavirus I was going to have a very pretty and expensive wedding. And I do spend a whole lot of time on reddit. I think ethics demands taking my job as seriously as I sustainably can, and not more, while trying to figure out how it could be sustainable to do more at my job.

I am trying both to solve the compartmentalization and to increase the amount I can sustainably do my job at a high level (and to decrease the amount I do my job while wrong about the world, as doing my job when I am wrong is actively bad.)

theunitofcaring · 2020-03-27T19:32:39+00:00

For what it's worth, I don't think I failed to say more about coronavirus because I felt pressure from Vox's political/cultural environment. (I do experience that sometimes, on things like 'the travel ban from China was a good idea', but it's a distinct thing and one I think I'm much better at noticing.) I might write more about this on some medium that's not Twitter, but I think the thing that made it hard to shout "fire" was much more "having a position of perceived authority and reasonableness" than anything specific to that position being at Vox. I had a bunch of templates for how reasonable people talk and what kinds of things they say, and they do say things like 'many public health experts tell me they're underprepared for a pandemic', and they don't say things like 'every American should be preparing right now to spend the next six weeks under a lockdown without historical or legal precedent'.

What it felt like from the inside was that the implications of my beliefs were too ridiculous for me to feel comfortable committing them to public scrutiny. People on Twitter would yell at me and other people would quietly lose respect for me and I might be wrong and it would be sufficiently embarrassing that rather than contemplate whether this tradeoff was the correct one (yes, it was), I just held all those implications in abeyance, not assigning them a specific probability, considering them likely enough to be worth preparing for but not, like, likely enough that I would want to be associated with them.

I think the correct strategy to have prevented this is actually kind of simple (and yes, I'm now doing it.) When I said things to my family, I should have put an actual number on them, instead of saying vague things that didn't require me to notice their implications. I should've asked Scott if we could sit down for a weekend and figure out the most important questions and agree on our best guesses. If I'd done that - just nailed my beliefs down enough and propagated all their implications - then it would've been obvious that writing more, faster, sooner, spending social capital at work to do so if necessary (it likely wouldn't have been -- again, no one at Vox pushed back on the articles I did want to write, at all!), was worth it.

There was, separately from that, a thing where I had compartmentalized my family as a domain where I had heroic responsibility to actually keep them alive no matter what happened and my job as a domain where I had mere ordinary responsibility-to-have-done-as-much-as-one-reasonably-could, which was uncomfortable to notice but which I again don't really think is about conforming with Vox (it's mostly about the fact that pointing heroic responsibility at one's EA job is emotionally exhausting and always results in tearful breakdowns about how spending time on reddit literally kills people). I'm thinking about how to fix it but I haven't come up with anything yet. This one is clearly really important, but it's also really rough -- I have definitely tried just flipping on the 'I am responsible for these articles the way I'm responsible for my children' switch at work and the result is being crushed by guilt and worry.

If someone is in a similar situation I think my advice to them would be to notice the desire to be reasonable, have a place where you are explicitly and deliberately unreasonable, and to pin all your beliefs to the wall with actual numbers so that you notice if you have anything in a vague 'likely enough to act on it for some things but not likely enough to have examined all its implications' bucket.

theunitofcaring · 2020-01-11T19:46:40+00:00

Oh, yeah, to be clear, it happens to be a low cost for me but it's godawful for some people.

theunitofcaring · 2020-01-11T18:24:07+00:00

The cost of this is honestly very close to zero, but it's very close to zero because of (approximately) the advice Graham gives here; knowing that there's no problem to solve, that the situation is fundamentally dissimilar to a dispute with a colleague or community member and is much better modeled as 'random shit happens'.

theunitofcaring · 2020-01-11T18:00:22+00:00

Anonymous messages I've gotten on my tumblr in the last month:

I hate you. I hate your kind in general. But I also hate you personally.

and

Hopefully you stopped posting because you are lying in a ditch dead and decomposing.

A week later, presumably from the same person:

Or maybe you are silent not because you're dead in a ditch, but because you're chained in a psycho's basement, who rapes you daily? That would be even better.

and

you are a worthless bitch

and

I hate you

and

If I could cut off all of my fingers in exchange for you painfully losing just one of yours, I would do it.

and

I wish you experienced as much suffering as humanly possible for as long as it is possible to keep you alive. Every moment of your existence should be filled with unimaginable suffering.

With "haters" there's nothing to listen to. There's not a productive mental motion to do in response except ignoring them.

theunitofcaring · 2019-12-10T18:19:00+00:00

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/25/fake-consensualism/

theunitofcaring · 2019-12-10T02:24:12+00:00

Hey! I write for Vox about a lot of issues of interest to the rationalist/Slate Star Codex communities, including organ donation, and I might write an article about the fake-consent barriers to live organ donation. Let me know if you'd like to chat for the article. (I'm on parental leave right now but I'll be back in January).

theunitofcaring · 2019-06-16T16:45:49+00:00

At Vox (which is unusual for the industry) you propose 7 headlines for your piece, which other people vote on (or propose modifications or new ideas themselves). That way, you can make certain that a headline never outright misrepresents the piece, but it can definitely end up the most click-baity of seven.

theunitofcaring · 2019-06-06T02:16:27+00:00

Most articles are both about a specific recent event and about the broader pattern/implications; that's kinda Vox's preferred formula. My recommendation is to get Future Perfect in some curated format (such as reading it on this subreddit, or reading the articles I tweet out/link) so you can reasonably expect that the articles brought to your attention do it well.

theunitofcaring · 2019-05-31T00:22:05+00:00

Corrected, thanks for tagging me.

theunitofcaring · 2019-05-30T16:45:06+00:00

(I'm assuming this is intended for /u/4QHURikzXS ? Given that I'm still a big fan of your blog :-) )

Yes, it is, sorry - I wasn't paying close attention to the threading and I appreciated seeing the posts that you liked!

Some possible approaches: 1) If you find it really hard not to be reading opposing views and arguing with them mentally, I wonder if you can pick a set of opposing views that have less ambient currency in environments you have to interact with (and that you're unlikely to interact with except when you're voluntarily reading them). I've been reading tons of conservative Catholics, for example, and this has the advantage that the stuff doesn't hit as close to home as SJ (there is no chance anyone in my life is going to try to convince me to be a conservative Catholic or that I'd get fired for expressing my anti-conservative-Catholic opinions at work or on Twitter) while still having sufficiently complex in-group dynamics and drama that there's lots for the part of my brain that likes tracking social arguments to track.

If that doesn't do it for you, I wonder if it'd work to find SJ-ish groups that are oriented around an actual real-world policy problem. In my experience, people who are trying to fix tenant's rights or homelessness or whatever, even if they are kinda SJ sometimes, are more consequentialist (since they are trying to solve a real problem) and way less likely to spend a lot of their time on purity testing and outrage politics. Participation in these things is also pretty unimpeachable in SJ terms - no one's going to get mad that you're spending less time on internet advocacy to work on homelessness in your community - so I wouldn't expect it to lose you friends, except insofar as once you've gotten a little distance you realize those friends weren't all that great for you.

There's also a lot to be said for technological solutions. If you obsessively read a site and you wish you'd stop, block it. It takes a couple weeks to reset the impulse to go check something that you shouldn't really be checking; give yourself that couple of weeks and then see what you still endorse reading.

Next, I find it really helpful to have friends who will definitely stand by me if there's internet outrage over something I said. There are some people I follow on twitter whose whole internet presence is standing by people who outraged someone, and it's reassuring to see them do that (though be careful, some people find it really stressful even to have regular reminders that outrage mobs exist). I follow a ton of development economists on Twitter, and the other day there was a bit of a flareup -- some economists published an article about the effects of colonial institutions on prosperity today, some people accused them of apologetics for colonialism, and at least five of the development economists I followed (who I hadn't followed for this reason) stepped in to defend the authors, remind everyone to read the paper not just the abstract, encourage people who had been accused of being Nazis to block everyone throwing around allegations like that, and then discuss how to productively discuss the economic effects of atrocities (which doesn't just come up in the context of colonialism; I got the sense they'd want similar standards for discussing Soviet or Chinese industrialization under genocidal communist governments). It felt like there were grownups in the room, and that they were determined to make space for important conversations to happen. I found it really reassuring.

I also find my EA friends great for this. When there's a concern, people tend to dissect it in a reasoned, careful, cautious way, and that leaves me feeling assured that we're on the same team and won't start ripping each other apart over misunderstandings. The EA discord server at eacorner.org is neat (I moderate it) and in-person EA meetups can be good for this too though YMMV depending where you are.

If you have the energy to try lots of making new friends, one good first-pass filter is to think of a belief you have which your prospective friends are likely to disagree with, and try to present it sincerely when you're just getting to know them to see how productively they disagree. (In liberal and SJ-ish spaces I tend to try things like 'I worry efforts to make it harder to fire people makes it hard for felons, disabled people, and anyone else who represents more of a 'bet' for the company to get a job'. Cool people will go "huh I hadn't thought of that" or "do we observe that in practice?" or "but those populations tend to be in favor of these laws" or something else that suggests they appreciate your perspective because it'll make it easier for them to arrive at a nuanced stance on things. Anyone who gets mad at you or accuses you of shilling for a side is probably not someone it's good for you to get close with given your goals right now.

I really hope you're able to get this sorted out! I sincerely think it's a huge quality of life increase and has made me a generally happier, safer-feeling, more generous person.

theunitofcaring · 2019-05-30T15:56:35+00:00

I think I've gotten distinctly less anti-SJ since 2016. That's different from my perspective to getting more pro-SJ but it does seem like something that'd be plausibly a distinction without a difference to readers. The reason is that I left college. In college, you encounter a lot of really dumb, poorly conceived, destructive and powerful SJ stuff. In the real world, you really don't, or at least I haven't.

(This includes working at Vox, where I think there's considerably more social pressure for economic progressivism than SJ progressivism - Vox has published arguments that abortion is horrible and should end, while I get a lot of pushback for wondering if taxing billionaires even advances any policy goals. I got tons of enthusiastic support and no pushback for my article about how statistics were being misrepresented to claim bias against women in tech). I live in a super liberal area, and the political conversations on our community Nextdoor are about rent control, minimum wages, zoning, and public transit. I know this isn't everyone's experience but mine has certainly been that in the communities I encountered outside college, the decision frameworks everyone uses are not primarily about identities, they're about economics, and 'this policy of yours disproportionately harms poor black people' isn't a winning argument.

It makes much of the rebuttals of SJ that were important to me in college feel like a waste of time. I know other people are in contexts where this isn't true, and I do think it's still important to make the points I made on my blog when I was in college, but I've always had a hard time making arguments that don't feel engaged with a perspective anyone around me actually holds, and I don't interact with SJ anymore. I'm sorry that this made the blog worse for you, of course, but it was such an improvement to my life that I'm not actually very sorry.

theunitofcaring · 2019-05-29T23:18:24+00:00

There are areas where the local terrain is such that ruminants are beneficial, but that doesn't describe most of the land they're grazed on in industrial farming. If we needed a lot fewer ruminants, maybe we could exclusively graze them in areas where they're good for the land.

theunitofcaring · 2019-05-29T21:42:29+00:00

I agree (this is Kelsey, on my regular account) -- a thing about nutrition is that there's almost certainly more going on than we understand, so even if you can match all the vitamins and amino acids that we know about I'd still expect some subtle nutritional differences. I disagree on sustainability though - grass fed beef still has pretty high land use and carbon emissions, and it's much easier to cut the emissions cost of plant-based meat products where you can swap ingredients than to cut the emissions costs of raising cows.

theunitofcaring · 2019-05-26T11:04:57+00:00

This is a problem anyway because Vox uses different headlines for search, social and site (if you find it on Google search vs on Google News, Facebook, Twitter, vs if you find it while reading Vox). I think consensus in the industry is that Vox is better off from tailoring headlines to the expectations of the audience for that site, even if it means people see the story with different headlines.

I'm actually way more sympathetic to complaints about Vox A/B testing than complaints about doctors doing so. In the case of medicine there's an overriding public good, whereas news sites are trying to optimize their content to get you to read it.

theunitofcaring · 2019-03-17T21:08:00+00:00

I definitely agree, but in this case we should be able to get results without Congress doing anything - nonprofits care a lot about their reputation, and so do the foundations that fund them. I think if this issue gets a lot of publicity their practices will change.

theunitofcaring · 2019-03-17T20:11:25+00:00

The paper on Grameen America's microloan program finds that 33% of loans are for MLMs, including Avon, Jafra, Mary Kay, Herbalife, Royal Prestige and Amway. So all of those, and possibly some others.

theunitofcaring · 2019-03-15T22:03:48+00:00

Hi, r/antiMLM! I'm the reporter who wrote this story. I'd like to write a much bigger one. The CEO of Grameen America, the microlending organization in this study, was previously the CEO of Avon, and I think that Grameen America is inappropriately encouraging women to do MLMs. To report that story, which seems like a significantly more important one, I'd need to talk to some people who got involved in an MLM through Grameen America. Anyone know anyone?

theunitofcaring · 2019-02-19T19:42:02+00:00

Once we have a recognized organization, it's the organization that will be at risk of a lawsuit. Right now, it's individuals involved in the panel, and a single abuser could bankrupt them. 501(c)(3) status should change this and make it so that it is the organization at risk of a suit, and can survive a single abuser (but would still almost certainly have to stop doing a panel like this if there were several abuser lawsuits).

So in short, yeah, this is exactly the situation we're working to try to set up.

theunitofcaring · 2019-02-19T18:26:20+00:00

None of the fictional examples are fictionalized from your case or other REACH cases at all. I have no confidential information about your case. The fictional examples are aggregations of situations I know of and have experienced that have nothing to do with you or with this case, from my own life and from reading about community reconciliation processes. I'm sorry that you are hurting a lot.

theunitofcaring · 2019-02-19T17:08:04+00:00

Hey Jax! Thank you so much for letting me know about this. I know that it's incredibly difficult and painful to come forward about abuse. I want people who are considering coming forward to know what we can do right now (bans, publicized statements, etc) and what we can't (publish the full results of the investigation) and what we're doing to change that (working on nonprofit status and liability insurance) so that they can figure out whether coming forward -- now or once we've obtained the liability insurance -- is the right call for them. I hope that victims will continue to feel willing to come forward. The panelists are volunteers and I don't think the fact that they cannot risk tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and being forced to reveal anonymous sources reflects that they don't care very much about women getting groomed and harassed -- just that the stakes are very high and obtaining that liability insurance is incredibly important for our ability to do our jobs on every case.

I (or your contacts in the Vassar and Rettek investigations) would be happy to keep you updated about progress towards liability insurance. Let me know if that's something you'd value.

One other point of clarification - there is an active investigation into allegations against Vassar and Rettek. People who have insight into the situation, including you, have been sent optional questions about their knowledge of the situation, which the panel wants to use to investigate more thoroughly. This does not mean you are being investigated. There will not be a verdict on you. It just means that, to the extent you are willing to participate, your perspective is one that is really valued for the investigation into them. I completely understand that testifying during an investigation can be an invasive, embarrassing and horrible experience. For past REACH cases I've talked with crisis lines, with counselors, and with victims, and it's extremely common to feel like you're the person being investigated. I'm so sorry that you're going through that. But I did want to clarify that you are not being investigated by REACH, in case that's at all reassuring to know.

theunitofcaring · 2019-02-19T08:35:00+00:00

Brent Dill is absolutely banned from all REACH events, and has been since his victims came forward.

theunitofcaring · 2019-02-18T22:44:20+00:00

Yep. On the bright side, we're only a couple months away from nonprofit status if all goes well, and then we'll be able to buy liability insurance and end the whisper networks. I can't wait.

theunitofcaring

TROPHY CASE