Joseph
Bio
Participation7
I have work experience in HR and Operations. I read a lot, I enjoy taking online courses, and I do some yoga and some rock climbing. I enjoy learning languages, and I think that I tend to have a fairly international/cross-cultural focus or awareness in my life. I was born and raised in a monolingual household in the US, but I've lived most of my adult life outside the US, with about ten years in China, two years in Spain, and less than a year in Brazil.
As far as EA is concerned, I'm fairly cause agnostic/cause neutral. I think that I am a little bit more influenced by virtue ethics and stoicism than the average EA, and I also occasionally find myself thinking about inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in EA. Some parts of the EA community that I've observed in-person seem not very welcoming to outsides, or somewhat gatekept. I tend to care quite a bit about how exclusionary or welcoming communities are.
I was told by a friend in EA that I should brag about how many books I read because it is impressive, but I feel uncomfortable being boastful, so here is my clunky attempt to brag about that.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer's.
How others can help me
I'm looking for interesting and fulfilling work, so if you know of anything that you think might be a good fit for me, please do let me know.
I'm looking for a place to be my home. If you have recommendations for cities, for neighborhoods within cities, or for specific houses/communities, I'd be happy to hear your recommendations.
How I can help others
I'm happy to give advice to people who are job hunting regarding interviews and resumes, and I'm happy to give advice to people who are hiring regarding how to run a hiring round and how to filter/select best fit applicants. I would have no problem running you through a practice interview and then giving you some feedback. I might also be able to recommend books to read if you tell me what kind of book you are looking for.
Posts 22
Comments554
I actually have a draft of an EA Forum post that I've been sitting on for a while about this. So far I'm labelling the idea as something like "privileging the fortunate." If anyone reading this would like to poke around my Google Doc and give me feedback, please let me know. I'd be very happy to have some help in transforming a rough collection of ideas into an EA Forum post.
Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.
- One critique of the United States's drug policy is that it doesn't halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
- When a jurisdiction bans chicken farmers from using small cages, (such as California's Proposition 2 from 2008) then it might just shift production elsewhere.
- More mundane: a parent doesn't want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven't read the research on this).
- A little bit different, but a classic example of this kind of "poor reasoning about second order effects" is the cobra effect (or any similar incentive for extermination)
- Welfare traps
I also want to give a shout out to the EA Anywhere community for those of us that don't have neighborhoods. EA Anywhere's Slack workspace isn't as nice as living within walking distance of friends or getting together for lunch, but it is a really nice little community for those of us that would otherwise require a bus, two flights, and a train to meet in-person.
An additional upside: people from a variety of countries and cultures are there. If I recall correctly, the people who founded and ran EA Anywhere were from three very different countries.
Tantra and yin/yang are definitly not things I expected to read about on the EA Forum today, but bravo for managing to adapt the ideas and build bridges across cultural differences. This is a lovely example of tailoring communication to the intended audience. I think that a lot of us interested in and involved in effective altruism could learn from this.
I think it is admirable to strive for that. I also notice the tendency within myself to be uselessly nitpicky with well actually. Recurse Center's social rules have provided some small inspiration for me: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules
My best guess is that most EAs have never heard of this argument, and that the few who have heard of it think that it isn't accurate. It conflicts with their informal impressions/anecdotes, and it also conflicts with what they've learned about the world and society changing during the past few years.
If I did think it was accurate and really believed that human intelligence was getting worse over time, here are some thoughts that would probably come along with that:
- Does average/mean intelligence even make sense?
- Maybe we should do something about public schooling?
- Anything relating to restricting dumb people from having babies feels pretty unpalatable to me, so even if it was completely convinced that was the right choice, I'm not confident I would pursue it. I'm willing to accept sub-optimal results along some metric in exchange for having rights; I don't want to naively optimize.
- We probably shouldn't look at a trend of a decade or two and assume that it will continue in a linear fashion. (relevant XKCD)
- People were on average dumber 50 years ago (and 100, and 500), and human civilization still managed to survive, thrive, and develop. So maybe it would just be a yo-yo effect over the course of a couple centuries, and humans get smarter, then dumber, then smarter again, repeatedly? I can't say this with any confidence, but it does seem accurate that if the human average went down by 5 IQ points over the next few decades, it wouldn't cause civilization to collapse.
- Maybe this is somewhat similar to poor people having lots of kids, and as they get wealthier they have fewer kids? So maybe as people get more education they have fewer children also? So we should make sure that kindergarten and elementary schools are good quality.
The phrasing here is a bit tricky, since Bouke De Vries seems to be stating (from my brief skim of his article and of) not that people are getting less smart, but that less smart people are reproducing faster than smart people.
Overall, this seems like the kind of social science issue where most of us haven't read the research and barely grasp the meaning, and yet people tend have opinions on it anyway. I'd take a more cautious approach and wait either A) until I've read through some of the literature to have sufficient context to actually understand it, or B) until someone with good contextual knowledge of the research can write a summary.
As an example of how our ignorance of the research can lead us astray, some of the sources Bouke De Vries cites (Egeland, 2022, Lynn and Harvey, 2008) don't seem to fully support the argument that "residents of many Western countries as well as high-income non-Western ones are becoming less intelligent." Even the book he cites (Dutton and Woodley of Menie, 2018) seems to have overly simplistic and fallacious arguments, such as claiming that the Concord no longer flies between London and New York because we are too dumb to figure out how to make it fly, rather than the decision to stop it due to high operating costs.
But maybe the facts really do support Bouke De Vries argument and my quick skim of a dense academic article is leading me astray, because I don't have the context to fully understand.
I'm mentally preparing myself to see a dozen or more April's fools posts from various people. For a crowd of people that often doesn't take time off because there is more work to do, or thinks of triage in terms of lives, it can be nice to see people have fun and be silly.
If anybody wants to have serious discussions on the EA Forum, I recommend postponing for a few days.