Hi EA Community, I’d like to introduce my high-impact startup and spark a conversation. I’m also seeking potential co-founders or funders to help get our idea off the ground. I introduced myself last week. * Summary - The Logical Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit startup founded in 2022. Its mission...
Hi, LessWrong Community. I'd like to introduce myself! My name is Michael Simm. I am passionate about disruptive systems (eg, understanding and using emerging technologies to make the future better). I'd been interested in EA principles long before I learned about the movement, so once I read What We Owe...
Our organization is not big enough to hire a statistician, although we will for sure get one when we are able to build a sufficiently large study / program. I'd be happy to refer you to the people that do have a ton of statisticians:
https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/
https://basicincome.stanford.edu/research/ubi-visualization/
https://www.penncgir.org/research
Let's use a different analogy. Let's say that you are in exactly the same situation you are in right now, and some random organization decided to start giving you $1,000 checks every month for one year. All they want, is periodic updates on how you're doing, and they tell you that your answers are anonymized and will not affect the payments. Would you go out of your way to lie to them?
We are not trying to be anyone's parents, and have no desire for the weird inter-personal shame dynamics that would be going on in your analogy.
Good thing I'm not particularly interested in being a charity, I'm interested in building a tool for funders and fundraisers that maximizes their impact against poverty. So bring on the criticism.
That said, I think you're being excessively negative towards surveys in general. There are two primary reason why surveys are (seemingly) the only way to go about getting decent data, and not nearly as unreliable as you're suggesting.
I do not agree that hospital visits and incarceration statistics, (although I'd love to have those numbers), are foundational to measuring the impactfulness of a homeless intervention:
Overwhelming demographic data as well as medical analysis make it evident that living on the streets directly accounts for most, though not all, of the massive mortality rate increase. There is a causal relationship between living on the streets and high death rates, especially in Arizona due to the high summer heat.
I'd be happy to hear why you might disagree, but I believe it's well-established ^ that having to live on the streets directly results in almost all of the complications, hospital visits, incarceration, and other service... (read more)
Those people are trying to persuade the whole public at first and then moving. With this apporoach we first move and then show it was a good thing. Sure need to get funders on board but private money pushing ahead of public policy is a "shoot first, ask permission later" approach.
You're pretty much right. I started my journey writing about UBI policy and its potential to improve society, but I got fed up with politics. I do think the danger isn't quite as bad at first. We basically have permission to 'shoot' because guaranteed income pilots are very common nowadays and tons of cities and private organizations have launched guaranteed income pilots.... (read 517 more words →)
Thanks for reading this 30-minute thing. I first wanted to make a short 5-minute read but I realized that many of you would probably really want all of the evidence laid out clearly, and our plan explained in excruciating detail. - so you can point out the super obvious reason why this has a 0% chance of success, that I've completely overlooked - despite my search for fundamental issues since I came up with the idea, and asking all of the experts I can find.
The EA community is probably the most knowledgeable community in the world about helping people. Considering the world-changing impact potential I've outlined, even a 1% chance of success... (read more)
Taking out at scale the most extractive labour globally will both do a lot of good and draw the ire of the most aggressive economic players. Making a chair taller by chopping of a leg for building materials is not a repeatable strategy. One may not like what is going on in the kitchen, but serving unprocessed ingredients will improve nutrition and will drive down patreonage.
I think I'm missing your point. UBI is a long way off, but there are a lot of (mostly economic theory) writings about how guaranteed income at a large scale would drastically shift power in our economy/society in a positive way for people across the wealth spectrum.... (read 552 more words →)
First, thank you for your rigor in analyzing the homelessness part of the post! I most certainly agree with you that cash transfers - explicitly relating to homeless individuals - need more studies and more rigorous RTCs from independent sources.
According to surveys given to the participants. Even if you tell them that the payments aren't contingent on positive results, they don't necessarily believe you. And even if they do, they'll still feel obliged to give you the results you're after. This is a commonly known effect in psychology and sociology, but it was never addressed.
Thanks for pointing this out, I completely agree. I'll add this to the document as an important disclaimer.
That... (read 764 more words →)
I think at first, definitely not. I see it playing out like this:
So we've got two major types of guaranteed income experiments, those on homeless individuals, and those on the general (impoverished) public.
I agree with you that the New Leaf Project experiment (that I cited quite a bit) was quite positive, and also that the problem is still getting worse. Although It's important to note that that experiment only had 115 participants, so it covered only a drop in the bucket.
The real question is, "If guaranteed income was scaled up to cover the entire population in homelessness or in danger of becoming homeless, would the results of the experiment stay true?". Would it eradicate (mostly at least) homelessness? This has never been done so... (read more)
Hi EA Community, I’d like to introduce my high-impact startup and spark a conversation. I’m also seeking potential co-founders or funders to help get our idea off the ground. I introduced myself last week.
Hi, LessWrong Community. I'd like to introduce myself!
My name is Michael Simm. I am passionate about disruptive systems (eg, understanding and using emerging technologies to make the future better). I'd been interested in EA principles long before I learned about the movement, so once I read What We Owe The Future, I jumped right into an In-depth EA Virtual Program and started reading a lot of EA literature. Shout-out to my In-Depth EA group, you all are awesome!
I’m working to establish an extremely high-impact charity with game-changing potential, and I’m working on a forum post to introduce it by the end of the week.
With any luck, you’ll be seeing me around a lot,... (read 409 more words →)
We need to take a bit of a step back here. I am just as keen as you are to get good unbiased data that can be relied upon to know precisely how impactful cash transfers - and other interventions - are at helping people. And I'd like to acknowledge that you're correct that we should not rely solely on unchecked survey data when trying to figure out impact results.
So I did a bit of a deep dive into meta-analyses and systematic reviews of cash transfer studies. It turns out that while surveys are generally one part of the data collected, researchers have been able to use objective measures and collect data... (read 526 more words →)