Seems better with the edit, it didn't flag as self promotional at all to me, since it was a natural and appropriate thing to include

My null hypothesis is that any research field is not particularly useful until proven otherwise. I am certainly not claiming that all economics research is high quality, but I've seen some examples that seemed pretty legit to me. For example, RCTs on direct cash transfers seem pretty useful and relevant to EA goals. And I think tools like RCTs are a pretty powerful way to find true insights into complex questions.

I largely haven't come across insights from other social sciences that seem useful for EA interests. I haven't investigated this much, and I would be happily convinced otherwise, but a lot of the stuff I've seen doesn't seem like it is tracking truth. You're the one writing a post trying to convince people of the claim that there is useful content here. I didn't see evidence of this in your post though I may have missed something. If you have some in mind I would be interested in seeing it.

(I didn't downvote you, and don't endorse people doing that)

This post is too meta, in my opinion. The key reason EA discusses economics a lot more is that if you want to have true beliefs about how to improve the world, economics can provide a bunch more useful insights than other parts of the social sciences. If you want to critique this, you need to engage with the actual object level claims of how useful the fields are, how good their scientific standards are and how much value there actually is. And I didn't feel like your post spent much time arguing for this

Overrelying on simple economic models might mislead us about which policies will actually help people, while a more holistic look at the social sciences as a whole may counter that.

The papers you cite about how the minimum wage doesn't lead to a negative impact on jobs all seem like economics papers to me. What are the social science papers you have in mind that provide useful evidence that the minimum wage doesn't harm employment?

Your examples seem disanalogous to me. The key thing here is the claim that people have a lifelong obligation to their parents. Some kind of transactional "you received a bunch of upfront benefits and now have a lifelong debt", and worse, often a debt that's considered impossible to discharge

This is very different from an instantaneous obligation that applies to them at a specific time, or a universal moral obligation to not do harm to an entity regardless of your relationship with them, or an ongoing obligation that is contingent on having a certain status or privileges like residency or citizenship and goes away if you give those up/is gained if you acquire those privileges. Eg, I think that many of the obligations you list would not be considered by most to be obligations if someone who grew up in country A moves to country B - this makes sense if the obligations come from ongoing benefits of residency and no sense of its repaying childhood debt.

To me, residency seems analogous to eg still living with your parents. You are choosing to be in that situation, receive benefits, and have some obligations. There's nothing immoral about moving out, and you have fewer/no obligations afterwards.

Interesting. Does anyone do group brainstorming because they actually expect it to make meaningful progress towards solving a problem? At least when you're at a large event with people who are not high context on the problem, that seems pretty doomed. I assumed the main reason for doing something like that is to get people engaged and actually thinking about ideas and participating in a way that you can't in a very extremely large group. If any good ideas happen, that's a fun bonus

If I wanted to actually generate good ideas, I would do a meeting of people filtered for being high context and having relevant thoughts, which is much more likely to work.

A specific format that has worked well for me eg for running research brainstorms for my team is as follows:

• Set a topic and a prompt, eg the topic of planning the team's next quarter, and the prompt of what our goals should be
• Set a 5-minute timer and have each participant brainstorm in a separate doc
  • This means that everyone needs to actually engage, quiet people also get a voice and separate docs minimise groupthink
• After the timer, copy these into a central doc that everyone reads through and leaves comments with questions, disagreements, agreements, further thoughts, etc.
• Optional: after it seems like everyone has had time to read everyone else's, give people a bit of time to verbally discuss any common themes, important disagreements, etc
• Repeat on another question. This often takes about 20 minutes a question

This seems to work well on groups of three to nine people. If your group is larger than that, well, firstly, why on earth are you doing a brainstorming meeting of this many people? But if you do need to do this, then splitting up into groups who each think about a different question, and share the most interesting takeaways after each round, might work ok.

Panels are almost always a massive waste of time though, strongly agreed there - I suspect they generally happen as a way to get more fancy people to turn up (by inviting them to be panellists), because there's a hole in the schedule that needs to be filled, or because of copying what events "should" do

When you say you doubt that claim holds generally, is that because you think that the weight of AI isn't actually that high, or because you think that AI may make the other thing substantially more important too?

I'm generally pretty sceptical about the latter - something which looked like a great idea not accounting for AI will generally not look substantially better after accounting for AI. By default I would assume that's false unless given strong arguments to the contrary.

I agree with the broad critique that " Even if you buy the empirical claims of short-ish AI timelines and a major upcoming transition, even if we solve technical alignment, there is a way more diverse set of important work to be done than just technical safety and AI governance"

But I'm concerned that reasoning like this can easily implicitly lead to people justifying incremental adaptions to what they were already doing and answering the question of, is what I'm doing useless in the light of AI, rather than the question that actually matters of, given my values, could I be doing things that I have substantially more impact? It would just be pretty surprising to me if the list of the most important cause areas conditional on short-ish timelines was very similar to the list conditioning on the reverse, and I expect there's bunch of areas being dropped here.

Empirically, I think they were right

I'd argue that you also need some assumptions around is-ought, whether to be a consequentialist or not, what else (if at all) you value and how this trades off against suffering, etc. And you also need to decide on some boundaries for which entities are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, which there's wide spread disagreement on (in a way that imo goes beyond being empirical)

It's enough to get you something like "if suffering can be averted costlessly then this is a good thing" but that's pretty rarely practically relevant. Everything has a cost