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Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
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TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...
Recent opportunities to take action
I'm trying out updating some of 80,000 Hours pages iteratively that we don't have time to do big research projects on right now. To this end, I've just released an update to https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-institutional-decision-making/ — our problem profile on improving epistemics and institutional decision making.
This is sort of a tricky page because there is a lot of reasonable-seeming disagreement about what the most important interventions are to highlight in this area.
I think the previous version had some issues: It was confusing, and it was common for readers to come away with very different impressions of the problem area. This seems like it is in part because the term "improving institutional decision making" is very very broad, and can include a lot of different things. We didn't do a great job of making clear our views about which sub-areas were most promising. This is partly because those views are not that strongly developed! Basically a lot of people who've thought about it disagree, and we're not confident about who's right. The previous version of the article, though, presented a confident-sounding picture that mostly highlighted forecasting, structured analytic techniques, and behavioral sciences. It was out of date. The opening felt a bit unrealistic.
In the update I sought to address (1)-(2) by just honestly writing that we aren't sure which focus(es) within the broad umbrella area are best, and going through a few of the options that seem most promising to us and some people we asked for advice. I sought to address (3) and (4) by doing a low-hanging-fruit edit to update the information and writing, and cut the opening.
The update was much quicker than most updates we'd make to our problem profiles. It will be far from perfect. I'd be very happy to get feedback — if you want to suggest changes you can do so here as comments or leave a comment on this thread. However, I probably won't respond to most comments — as I said above, people have very different views in this area, so I'd be surprised if there weren't a decent amount of disagreement with the update. That said, I still want to hear views (especially if you think perhaps I haven’t heard them before), and if there are smaller changes that seem positive I'd be very keen (e.g. "X is a bad example of the thing you're talking about.")