I had this course on my list of things to try for a long while, until I finally went through it with several people from my local group throughout this year. We used your provided resources (8 sessions, not the official, updated version with 6 sessions). As meeting for this did cause quite a bit of overhead, we mostly went with double sessions, meeting for most of a weekend day to have two sessions with a longer break in between (and then usually a few more hours of casually hanging out afterwards). This way, we overall met 5 times. There was a bit of fluctuation in who attended, but I think we always were between 4 and 8 people. We met at my flat, which is pretty nice and cozy, so I think it was a good place and probably better than some seminar room or so.
Overall, I enjoyed going through the course and was looking forward to the meetups, but I think it's unlikely it had any outsized impact on our own happiness or our understanding of it (to a degree where it might positively shape our influence on other people's happiness).
Things I liked:
as I mentioned, it was enjoyable, and a good "excuse" to meet friends in a relaxed setting
it was special enough that we even had a person from 100km away (who doesn't have their own local group) attend 4 out of the 5 meetups
the effort for me running the sessions was pretty low as far as the course itself goes (I skimmed the slides beforehand, made sure the videos all loaded etc., and that's about it)
the course sparked some in-depth conversations between us that we possibly wouldn't have had otherwise, as these topics don't come up that often during regular local group meetups
the course materials were nicely paced and I liked the variety of it
What I didn't like:
the materials very often made this implicit jump from correlations to causation, clearly hinting at something being causal when the evidence for that was very thin - naturally, we couldn't help ourselves but spend a non-trivial amount of our sessions pointing out the many scientifically questionable claims in the materials
actual exercises were fairly limited, most of the course was pretty theoretical and consisted of reading, discussing, and watching videos; I expected a bit more "doing"
as far as our group was concerned, there was hardly any new information. Probably this would be true of many other EA groups as well? So it never felt like we actually learned a lot, and it was more repetition of things we already knew.
Even if moderating the sessions was relatively straightforward and low in overhead, hosting physical meetups is still somewhat demanding, and every session probably still took ~3h of preparation, such as getting groceries and preparing food. But that's just the "cost" of social gatherings and is most likely worth it. :)
Interestingly, this:
Although we didn’t run any kind of formal experiment, everyone who attended the course recommended it as a valuable exercise. Some attendees reported sharing material with family members and one attendee invited along family members who also found it valuable.
Was very much the opposite for us. My impression is that all participants here thought that content-wise, the course was somewhat disappointing and didn't really make much of a difference. We still had a good time, but I don't think any of us would recommend the course materials.
The RCT results you quoted of course also sound very impressive:
Life satisfaction (+1.0) on a scale of 1-10 Reduction in depression by 50% of a standard deviation ...
Assuming these results are indeed close to real (of course, surprisingly large study findings are often subject to regression to the mean upon further examination, but even then, it seems pretty large), I could think of several avenues through which such an effect could occur (without having looked into the study):
course participants in the RCT hadn't engaged much with science of well-being before, and many of the concepts were indeed new to them
participants perhaps tended to have a limited social circle, and spending these 8 sessions with a group of others helped them find new friends
if they already knew some other participants, the course may have helped build deeper friendship by providing a scaffolding to be vulnerable
for people with mental health struggles, attending the course may have had a similar effect to talk therapy / self-help groups, where the course materials maybe played less of a role than the mere act of talking about your struggles with compassionate others
I think point 2 applied to some participants to a degree, and maybe there was a bit of 3 as well. 1 and 4, I'd say, didn't really apply to our group.
Overall, as I mentioned, I enjoyed the sessions, and I think the others mostly did as well. We're probably not notably happier than before. I doubt running this course was very "impactful", but then again, it probably was impactful in the fuzzy way that our regular local group socials are, by just strengthening the community and making people feel more comfortable around each other. So I certainly don't regret running this course. As far as recommending it to other groups goes, though, I'd only do that if a group struggles to find topics that excite them, and several members happen to be interested in a course on happiness in particular.
Great series of posts, This Can't Go On in particular has really stayed with me since first reading it a few years ago.
"I am forecasting more than a 10% chance transformative AI will be developed within 15 years (by 2036); a ~50% chance it will be developed within 40 years (by 2060); and a ~2/3 chance it will be developed this century (by 2100)."
I wonder how now, 3.5 years later, your forecasts have changed. To me, 10% by 2036 seems incredibly low now, given the AI progress since 2022.
Thanks for the post, and for working on such an important problem! This sounds very exciting, and I'm very much looking forward to future reports of ACTRA.
I have to admit though I'm a bit baffled by the apparent evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions:
Evidence: Over 50 high-quality randomized studies show CBT reduces criminal relapse by 25-50%, theft by 54%, and homicide arrests by 65%. One CBT program alone prevented ~300 crimes per participant over a decade at ~$2 per crime averted. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and leading research organizations (J-PAL and IPA) all endorse CBT as highly promising, with IPA calling it a "best bet."
These numbers sounds "too good to be true" on a level I can barely put into words. I haven't looked into the linked studies in detail, and I think very highly of Charity Entrepreneurship and their thorough research, so I'm sure there is indeed something to it. Yet, I wonder, is there a good understanding as to why CBT apparently works so well in this case? I generally do well with the heuristics of "most effect sizes are small" and "behavior change is very difficult (even in yourself, let alone in others)". Of course a heuristic is just that, a heuristic, and there are always cases where they don't hold. What is your current understanding why this area in particular would be so different, and such large positive effect sizes are comparably ~easily achievable?
To expand a bit, I would assume that many different factors contribute to a person leading a life of crime. One part of that surely is some degree of impulsiveness, mental health, dealing with negative emotions - the kinds of properties that CBT can plausibly improve[1] - but I would assume that there are many other, potentially even stronger effects (social circle in particular, career perspective and unemployment, substance abuse, being in debt, ...) that should not be affected that much, if at all, by a CBT intervention. Hence, CBT alone reducing crime rates by 50% in some studies just seems very unexpected to me.
Hope I don't sound too critical. But would be very interested in your views on this. :)
I agree with your point, and so do in fact many EA organizations as well: e.g. different charity evaluators tend to recommend organizations that only have a small set of (well researched and evaluated) concrete interventions - usually these are designed for a very particular location / community / target audience. Naively scaling interventions to e.g. very different countries indeed often does not work that well, and would oftentimes lead to much lower (cost) effectiveness.
Note that A or B decisions are often false dichotomies, and you may be overlooking alternative options that combine the advantages. So narrowing in on given options too soon may sometimes be a mistake, and it can be useful to try to come up with more alternatives.
Also, in my experience many of the decisions I get stuck with fall somewhere between 2 and 3: I know their implications and have most of the information, but the results differ on various dimensions. E.g. option 1 is safe and somewhat impactful, while option 2 is potentially higher impact but much riskier and comes at the cost of disappointing somebody you care about.
I'm not sure to what degree a decision doc is suitable for these types of problems in particular - but I've at least had a few cases where friends came up with some helpful way to reframe the situation that led to a valuable insight.
(But I should mention I definitely see your point that many EAs may be overthinking some of their decisions - though even then I personally wouldn't feel comfortable in case of value conflicts to just flip a coin. But in many other cases I agree that getting to any decision quickly rather then getting stuck in decision paralysis is a good approach.)
Köln does have a somewhat active local group currently (see here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups/6BpGMKtfmC2XLeih8 ) - I think they mostly coordinate via Signal, which interestingly is hidden behind the "Join us on Slack" button on the forum page. Don't think this had much to do with this post though.
I'm not aware of anything having happened in Dortmund or the general Ruhrgebiet in the last year or so, with the exception of the Doing Good Together Düsseldorf group.
why restarting your device works to solve problems, but it does (yes, I did look it up, so no need to explain it
I'm now stuck in "I think I know a decent metaphor but you don't want me to share it" land... but then maybe I'll just share it for other people. :P
Basically it's less about how computers work on any technical level, and more about which state they're in. Imagine you want to walk to your favorite store. If you're at home, you probably know the way by heart and can navigate there reliably. But now imagine you've been up for a while and have been walking around for hours following some semi-random commands from different people. And by following all these unrelated commands, you've now ended up doing a handstand on some hill next to a lake on the opposite end of town, where you've never been before. It can easily happen now that, from that weird state, going to the store close to your home will not work out and you get stuck somewhere.
Restarting the computer is basically the same as teleporting home. It's in a well defined, clean, predictable state again, where you know that most of the usual day to day actions can be performed reliably. And the longer it's running without restart, the more chances it has to, in one way or another, get into a state that makes it fail at certain tasks you want it to do.
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand it seems crucial to at least mention these observer effects (edit: probably the wrong term, rather anthropic principle). There's a somewhat thin line between asking "why haven't we been wiped out?" and using the fact that we haven't been wiped out yet as evidence that this kind of scenario is generally unlikely. Of course it makes sense to discuss the question, but the "real" answer could well be "random chance" without having further implications about the likelihood of power-seeking AGI.
I had this course on my list of things to try for a long while, until I finally went through it with several people from my local group throughout this year. We used your provided resources (8 sessions, not the official, updated version with 6 sessions). As meeting for this did cause quite a bit of overhead, we mostly went with double sessions, meeting for most of a weekend day to have two sessions with a longer break in between (and then usually a few more hours of casually hanging out afterwards). This way, we overall met 5 times. There was a bit of fluctuation in who attended, but I think we always were between 4 and 8 people. We met at my flat, which is pretty nice and cozy, so I think it was a good place and probably better than some seminar room or so.
Overall, I enjoyed going through the course and was looking forward to the meetups, but I think it's unlikely it had any outsized impact on our own happiness or our understanding of it (to a degree where it might positively shape our influence on other people's happiness).
Things I liked:
What I didn't like:
Interestingly, this:
Was very much the opposite for us. My impression is that all participants here thought that content-wise, the course was somewhat disappointing and didn't really make much of a difference. We still had a good time, but I don't think any of us would recommend the course materials.
The RCT results you quoted of course also sound very impressive:
Assuming these results are indeed close to real (of course, surprisingly large study findings are often subject to regression to the mean upon further examination, but even then, it seems pretty large), I could think of several avenues through which such an effect could occur (without having looked into the study):
I think point 2 applied to some participants to a degree, and maybe there was a bit of 3 as well. 1 and 4, I'd say, didn't really apply to our group.
Overall, as I mentioned, I enjoyed the sessions, and I think the others mostly did as well. We're probably not notably happier than before. I doubt running this course was very "impactful", but then again, it probably was impactful in the fuzzy way that our regular local group socials are, by just strengthening the community and making people feel more comfortable around each other. So I certainly don't regret running this course. As far as recommending it to other groups goes, though, I'd only do that if a group struggles to find topics that excite them, and several members happen to be interested in a course on happiness in particular.
Great series of posts, This Can't Go On in particular has really stayed with me since first reading it a few years ago.
I wonder how now, 3.5 years later, your forecasts have changed. To me, 10% by 2036 seems incredibly low now, given the AI progress since 2022.
Thanks for the post, and for working on such an important problem! This sounds very exciting, and I'm very much looking forward to future reports of ACTRA.
I have to admit though I'm a bit baffled by the apparent evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions:
These numbers sounds "too good to be true" on a level I can barely put into words. I haven't looked into the linked studies in detail, and I think very highly of Charity Entrepreneurship and their thorough research, so I'm sure there is indeed something to it. Yet, I wonder, is there a good understanding as to why CBT apparently works so well in this case? I generally do well with the heuristics of "most effect sizes are small" and "behavior change is very difficult (even in yourself, let alone in others)". Of course a heuristic is just that, a heuristic, and there are always cases where they don't hold. What is your current understanding why this area in particular would be so different, and such large positive effect sizes are comparably ~easily achievable?
To expand a bit, I would assume that many different factors contribute to a person leading a life of crime. One part of that surely is some degree of impulsiveness, mental health, dealing with negative emotions - the kinds of properties that CBT can plausibly improve[1] - but I would assume that there are many other, potentially even stronger effects (social circle in particular, career perspective and unemployment, substance abuse, being in debt, ...) that should not be affected that much, if at all, by a CBT intervention. Hence, CBT alone reducing crime rates by 50% in some studies just seems very unexpected to me.
Hope I don't sound too critical. But would be very interested in your views on this. :)
And "improve" usually means some marginal improvement - these issues are usually not fully solved by CBT.
I agree with your point, and so do in fact many EA organizations as well: e.g. different charity evaluators tend to recommend organizations that only have a small set of (well researched and evaluated) concrete interventions - usually these are designed for a very particular location / community / target audience. Naively scaling interventions to e.g. very different countries indeed often does not work that well, and would oftentimes lead to much lower (cost) effectiveness.
Note that A or B decisions are often false dichotomies, and you may be overlooking alternative options that combine the advantages. So narrowing in on given options too soon may sometimes be a mistake, and it can be useful to try to come up with more alternatives.
Also, in my experience many of the decisions I get stuck with fall somewhere between 2 and 3: I know their implications and have most of the information, but the results differ on various dimensions. E.g. option 1 is safe and somewhat impactful, while option 2 is potentially higher impact but much riskier and comes at the cost of disappointing somebody you care about. I'm not sure to what degree a decision doc is suitable for these types of problems in particular - but I've at least had a few cases where friends came up with some helpful way to reframe the situation that led to a valuable insight.
(But I should mention I definitely see your point that many EAs may be overthinking some of their decisions - though even then I personally wouldn't feel comfortable in case of value conflicts to just flip a coin. But in many other cases I agree that getting to any decision quickly rather then getting stuck in decision paralysis is a good approach.)
Would you say that, almost 4 years later, we've made progress on that front?
Köln does have a somewhat active local group currently (see here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups/6BpGMKtfmC2XLeih8 ) - I think they mostly coordinate via Signal, which interestingly is hidden behind the "Join us on Slack" button on the forum page. Don't think this had much to do with this post though.
I'm not aware of anything having happened in Dortmund or the general Ruhrgebiet in the last year or so, with the exception of the Doing Good Together Düsseldorf group.
I'm now stuck in "I think I know a decent metaphor but you don't want me to share it" land... but then maybe I'll just share it for other people. :P
Basically it's less about how computers work on any technical level, and more about which state they're in. Imagine you want to walk to your favorite store. If you're at home, you probably know the way by heart and can navigate there reliably. But now imagine you've been up for a while and have been walking around for hours following some semi-random commands from different people. And by following all these unrelated commands, you've now ended up doing a handstand on some hill next to a lake on the opposite end of town, where you've never been before. It can easily happen now that, from that weird state, going to the store close to your home will not work out and you get stuck somewhere. Restarting the computer is basically the same as teleporting home. It's in a well defined, clean, predictable state again, where you know that most of the usual day to day actions can be performed reliably. And the longer it's running without restart, the more chances it has to, in one way or another, get into a state that makes it fail at certain tasks you want it to do.
I guess "increased" here should be "improved"? Unless perfectionism actually increased as well, but this would seem like a surprising outcome. :)
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand it seems crucial to at least mention these observer effects (edit: probably the wrong term, rather anthropic principle). There's a somewhat thin line between asking "why haven't we been wiped out?" and using the fact that we haven't been wiped out yet as evidence that this kind of scenario is generally unlikely. Of course it makes sense to discuss the question, but the "real" answer could well be "random chance" without having further implications about the likelihood of power-seeking AGI.