KatieHartman
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KatieHartman has not written any posts yet.
KatieHartman has not written any posts yet.
I'm up for committing to the first week and then continuing if it seems useful. :)
It actually seems pretty difficult to see how having children would, on average, be anywhere near as strong an option if your outcome measures are (1) number of children who would otherwise would not exist/reach adulthood and (2) number of children produced using your (presumably much better than donor-average) genetic material.
There are a lot of factors that influence the cost to raise a child (e.g. family income, number of children in a single household), but the USDA's figures suggest that even a relatively low-income family ($0-60k combined household earnings) will be spending ~$175k per child. It's no question that you could redirect that money toward organizations that would save the lives... (read more)
Is there any good reason for having children you don't particularly want to have rather than (a) donating lots of high-quality gametes and (b) giving some or all of the money you would've spent on child-rearing to an organization that prevents the premature deaths of other children?
This could be changed by promoting efficient altruism, creating local meetups of efficient altruists, etc. It's not only to find new altruists, but to give some social bonus (= warm fuzzies) to both existing and the new ones.
There's a significant difference between selling effective altruism to non-EAs and selling a specific effective charity to non-EAs. I suspect that the former is both more valuable (in the long term) and more difficult. Upping the warm-fuzzies seems to me like it would work toward both (as well as EA retention, although I know of no significant existing problem with that), which is why I find it surprising that there's not more work being done... (read more)
Yes!
Tangentially related: I've wondered whether there might be high expected value for creating an organization (perhaps a temporary one, or one existing within a larger existing org) dedicated to figuring out how to sell EA charities effectively. There is already a growing body of research on charitable giving, but the opportunities are hardly tapped out. There seems to be an understanding that donating to EA charities tends to provide fewer warm-fuzzies than giving to their (most successful) non-EA counterparts, but few people talking about it seem to consider this very dire or changeable.
It's an interesting theory, but I'm hesitant to give much weight to weakly-supported hypotheses intended to explain very broad and inclusive phenomena, like "murders (or a lack thereof) occurring within these arbitrary geographical borders." This is especially true when there's no shortage of plausible theories and a lot of potentially-useful information is missing.
The changeling myths seem to serve the purpose of guilt-relief only insofar as they also aid shame-relief, so I''m not sure they're all that helpful. (Am I missing something?)
Basically, this reads to me like an interesting but not particularly credible just-so story.
This seems irresponsible and unwise when you have substantial fixed costs, all necessary for core activities, and not much in the way of back-up resources. I can see it feasibly leading to a bunch of problems, including (a) the incentive to save up financial resources rather than put them to use toward high-EV activities and (b) difficulty hiring staff smart enough to realize that the resources from which their salaries are paid out will be highly variable month-to-month.
I just googled it. I suspect that the "refined" in "refined carbohydrates" is a stand-in for "bad, for reasons left unspecified."
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it's worth, I can't think of an organization I'd trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they're pushing fundraising, I'd estimate with high confidence that it's because that's where the bottleneck is.
I think donating x hours-worth of income is, with few exceptions, a better route than trying to donate x hours of personal... (read more)
I'm much less (emotionally) motivated to try new things/deviate from my routine than I'd like to be, especially when an intervention's purpose is to improve something I'm currently not doing very well at. For example, I feel a lot more motivated to try something that might further improve a project that's already going very well than I am to try something that might turn around a project that's failing. I suspect that this is related to ugh fields. Any suggestions?