EA Forum Reader

Hi! Felt like I should give an update here.

This probably sounds strange, but the time I spent writing that post and designing that presentation I gave was one of my lowest points.

I spent too much time talking about my idea, and too little time actually programming it this last winter. The situation was made worse by the fact that I started having too many ideas to write them all down coherently. At some point I had a 50+ page document full of research and charts but that didn’t make much sense. That was all a waste of time. My EA Forum post was pretty much a boiled down version of that initial document, which I posted so that I could once and for all forget about it and go do other things :P

Writing text is strange, compared to writing software. You have ideas, and you write them down, and yet they don’t instantly materialize. It didn't feel very right.

Since around spring started I have gone back to programming. It is SO much more fun than researching or writing very long texts. It also feels like a more oblique, and therefore less terrifying, way of tackling big problems.

SmartMood is now in the AppStore, and I have been updating it frequently.

Charles Babbage designed The Analytical Engine, that was a mechanical general purpose (Turing complete) computer, in 1837. This is remarkable, because it came a century before all the theory that was put in place by Turing, which inspired, and is at the heart of, today's computers. You can find a description of The Analytical Engine in Babbage's biography: "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher". His apprentice Ada Lovelace wrote some programs for it, becoming the first programmer in history.

This fact inspired a lot of Steampunk fiction, reasoning along the lines of: "What if the Analytical Engine was actually built and improved upon at that time? What if other non general purpose mechanical calculators like The Difference Engine followed the same development of the ones based on circuits we saw during the twentieth century?"

To explicitly separate out two issues that seem to be getting conflated:

• Long-term-focused EAs should make use of the best mental health care available, which would make them more effective.
• Some long-term-focused EAs should invest in making mental health care better, so that other long-term-focused EAs can have better mental health care and be more effective.

The former seems very likely true.

The latter seems very likely false. You would need the additional cost of researching, advocating for and implementing a specific new treatment (here, psilocybin) across some entire geography to be justified by the expected improvement in mental health care (above what already exists) for specifically long-term-focused EAs in that geography (<0.001% of the population). The math for that seems really unlikely to work out.

I continue to focus on the claims about this being a good long-term-focused intervention because that's what is most relevant to me.

-----

Non-central notes:

• We've jumped from emotional blocks & unhelpful personal narratives to life satisfaction & treatment-resistant depression, which are very different.
• As you note, the two effects you're now comparing (life satisfaction & treatment-resistant depression) aren't really the same at all.
• I don't think that straightforwardly comparing two Cohen's d measurements is particularly meaningful when comparing across effect types.

Thanks for this post! You might be interested in the podcast Humanise Me, which is primarily focused around this idea of learning lessons from organised religion about how to build better secular communities. It's not exactly information-dense, but I think there's some good nuggets in there. I started listening to it a few years ago when I first became a local EA group organiser.

Thanks for posting about this! The experiences I've had with art feel like a big part of what motivates my altruism.

One of the ways art can encourage altruism is by rendering real the life of another person, making you experience their suffering or joy as your own. Many pieces of art have this effect on me, too many to name -- indeed I think of it as a defining quality of good art.

Another way art can encourage altruism is by taking a zoomed-out perspective and engaging with moral ideals in the abstract. This you might call "humanistic". I've listed mostly these below, as art of the other type is too numerous to name.

Books

- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin is very meaningful to me as a vision of what a society where we cared "sufficiently" about others might look like.

- All Kurt Vonnegut, a very humanistic writer. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is explicitly about a philosophically-minded billionaire who decides to give his wealth away to the poor, and the consequences of that decision.

- George Saunders, another very humanistic writer. Tenth of December is great. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-semplica-girl-diaries is a great one of his about the banality of evil.

Poems

- https://www.pw.org/content/akhmatova_by_matthew_dickman

- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/11/trouble-poem-matthew-dickman (Content warning: suicide)

- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52173/what-work-is

Movies

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Jackson_Heights (a long, quiet, slice-of-life documentary that jumps between people)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_Hanging (the Japanese police botch an execution, causing the criminal to lose all his memories of the crime; the police, panicking, try to jog his memory so they can execute him like they're supposed to)

First, I'm not referring GD as our best charity, but just as a minimal standard for EA causes. Second, last time I checked (please, update if I'm wrong):

• GD was considered to be saving 1 life per U$7000 on nov 2016 by GW: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KiWfiAGX_QZhRbC9xkzf3I8IqsXC5kkr-nwY_feVlcM/edit#gid=1034883018
• GW considered 1 life = 35 QALY. So, I estimate GD results in U$200/QALY (Actually, there are huge uncertainties over this estimate, and GW is not conclusive about GDs effectiveness in terms of lives and QALY. But one could pick AMF or SCI instead as a standard)
• I'm assuming DALY = 1 - QALY
• Enthea's estimate of psychedelics liberalization is of $472/DALY.

I do agree that QALY is biased towards some interventions, and that mental health is usually underestimated by healthy people (I suspect they are unduly led by the lack of physical and apparent symptoms). I do think we should find out how to treat depression properly (maybe some neglected, cheap and scalable solution end up becoming an EA-like charity). However, I don't believe Enthea poll is free of biases, either; particularly, it seems to me that people in developed countries consistently underestimate the burden of disease and poverty in the 3o world, screwing the comparison in the opposite way. Notwithstanding, my main point is not so much about impact, but about neglectedness; 32 million people had experimented with psychedelics only in US by 2010 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917651/). If each of them donated an average of U$ 1 for this cause, they would match all of GDs transfers in 2017. I do believe we should liberalize psychedelics - and probably we will, eventually,since many people with considerable purchase power are interested in it.

Great post by the OP. But one thing I wished it touched more upon was the need for internationalism.

Under our current liberal capitalist world economy, countries are incentivised to weaken labour laws, safety conditions, environmental standards, taxes etc to remain competitive.

Both socialism and capitalism do have remedies to prevent/ temper this "race to the bottom" phenomenon. But I think socialists have a good argument to make that a socialist system might be better able to do this by lifting international standards. And this would be of great consequence to Effective Altruists.

Does the OP have any thoughts on this?

Got it, thanks!

Curious whether "No clinical evidence on NLP for the treatment of adults with PTSD, GAD, or depression was identified" is an update for you re: NLP's efficacy.

I don't know whether it has been published. I heard it from Rick Schwall (http://shfhs.org/aboutus.html).

This is exactly what p-values are designed for, so you are probably better off looking at p-values rather than effect size if that's the scenario you're trying to avoid.

Yes, this is a better idea.