As I read the section Two Cities, Two Stadiums I thought to myself that this was a rather long-winded explanation of positional goods. Then I hit the gold of finding out the log distributions matched reality, and I was surprised! That was the first super helpful part of this post.
The second was this paragraph alone:
The education industry is already eating the developed world alive, with little apparent benefit. You might argue that there are diminishing returns – intuitively, education seems important. But, there’s ample evidence that developing-world education often doesn’t really improve people’s productive capacity; it often seems no better than obedience school, when it’s not being used purely as a certification of the ability to obtain a degree (and thus that you’re in the right social class for certain positions).
One of the top three most valuable things I get from reading your posts Ben, is seeing the straightforward implications of my beliefs stated as the norm, followed by internally feeling Pat Modesto tell me that it’s not proper behaviour to take that view publicly even if it is possibly true, followed by me noticing that PAT MODESTO IS IN MY HEAD AND GUIDING THE THOUGHTS I LET MYSELF THINK. (And each time, I get better at kicking him out.) This has generally helped me a great deal in building my own models of the world, and I wanted to thank you for that. The subsequent paragraphs of evidence regarding marginal education being bad and its main function largely failing, were great, but I want to highlight that the quoted paragraph was all it took me to realise this is my actual belief.
The same is true for GiveDirectly, which in all of my conversations is implicitly thought of as a fine and good thing, and not something that has a perfectly good chance of being of minimal/no value due to most money being spent on positional goods, which is something you could’ve pointed out to me by just saying that sentence (I already had the concept of positional goods). Yet I hadn’t noticed this.
For these reasons, I’ve both moved it to the frontpage and promoted it.
Thanks! This kind of feedback is extremely helpful (and a crucial complement to people who helpfully show exactly where and how they’ve missed the point).
I feel like I should point out that the other implication of my argument (for past-me, who’s the intended audience, after all) is that GiveDirectly isn’t wasting its time when it does so much empirical follow-up—that work is really important. And for a bit of balance, see Kelsey Piper’s comments here, which suggest that the empirical picture is actually fairly encouraging.
Two of the dimensions along which I can get feedback are:
Content
Efficacy
Content feedback is stuff like pointing out facts I got wrong, or missed, or extending an argument in a surprising direction, or pointing out supporting facts, etc.
Efficacy feedback is when a comment shows that part of my post was effective or ineffective at communicating. Often when people misunderstand my post, it’s pretty clear to me what part they misunderstood. Learning that something was misunderstood helps me see which sorts of things might need to be better explained. Sometimes people are also kind enough to simply tell me that a part was unclear or seemed unsupported.
But when the efficacy feedback I get is mainly critical, it nudges me towards some combination of general long-windedness (since I lower my estimate of how clear all the parts are), and writing less often (since the EV of writing is lower). Getting praise for the parts that were effective is extremely helpful in counteracting this bias, and is just as good at causing me to reallocate my efforts from less to more effective types of writing.
This particular item of praise was especially helpful because part of what you’re praising—part of what made this piece effective for you—was that I didn’t feel the need to tediously defend something that I thought was clearly true.
Huh! I hadn’t noticed that before. I will try to give people more feedback on the very particular parts of their writing that were useful to me.
Maybe at some point I should put this in a semi-prominent post somewhere on the site called “some types of feedback that are helpful for writers”. My guess is that many folks aren’t aware of this, and that there’s a bunch of things opaque to the majority of folks who aren’t writers that could be put into such a post.
As I read the section Two Cities, Two Stadiums I thought to myself that this was a rather long-winded explanation of positional goods. Then I hit the gold of finding out the log distributions matched reality, and I was surprised! That was the first super helpful part of this post.
The second was this paragraph alone:
One of the top three most valuable things I get from reading your posts Ben, is seeing the straightforward implications of my beliefs stated as the norm, followed by internally feeling Pat Modesto tell me that it’s not proper behaviour to take that view publicly even if it is possibly true, followed by me noticing that PAT MODESTO IS IN MY HEAD AND GUIDING THE THOUGHTS I LET MYSELF THINK. (And each time, I get better at kicking him out.) This has generally helped me a great deal in building my own models of the world, and I wanted to thank you for that. The subsequent paragraphs of evidence regarding marginal education being bad and its main function largely failing, were great, but I want to highlight that the quoted paragraph was all it took me to realise this is my actual belief.
The same is true for GiveDirectly, which in all of my conversations is implicitly thought of as a fine and good thing, and not something that has a perfectly good chance of being of minimal/no value due to most money being spent on positional goods, which is something you could’ve pointed out to me by just saying that sentence (I already had the concept of positional goods). Yet I hadn’t noticed this.
For these reasons, I’ve both moved it to the frontpage and promoted it.
Thanks! This kind of feedback is extremely helpful (and a crucial complement to people who helpfully show exactly where and how they’ve missed the point).
I feel like I should point out that the other implication of my argument (for past-me, who’s the intended audience, after all) is that GiveDirectly isn’t wasting its time when it does so much empirical follow-up—that work is really important. And for a bit of balance, see Kelsey Piper’s comments here, which suggest that the empirical picture is actually fairly encouraging.
You’re welcome :-)
I didn’t understand the parenthetical about it being a ‘crucial complement’ - what did you mean?
Two of the dimensions along which I can get feedback are:
Content
Efficacy
Content feedback is stuff like pointing out facts I got wrong, or missed, or extending an argument in a surprising direction, or pointing out supporting facts, etc.
Efficacy feedback is when a comment shows that part of my post was effective or ineffective at communicating. Often when people misunderstand my post, it’s pretty clear to me what part they misunderstood. Learning that something was misunderstood helps me see which sorts of things might need to be better explained. Sometimes people are also kind enough to simply tell me that a part was unclear or seemed unsupported.
But when the efficacy feedback I get is mainly critical, it nudges me towards some combination of general long-windedness (since I lower my estimate of how clear all the parts are), and writing less often (since the EV of writing is lower). Getting praise for the parts that were effective is extremely helpful in counteracting this bias, and is just as good at causing me to reallocate my efforts from less to more effective types of writing.
This particular item of praise was especially helpful because part of what you’re praising—part of what made this piece effective for you—was that I didn’t feel the need to tediously defend something that I thought was clearly true.
Huh! I hadn’t noticed that before. I will try to give people more feedback on the very particular parts of their writing that were useful to me.
Maybe at some point I should put this in a semi-prominent post somewhere on the site called “some types of feedback that are helpful for writers”. My guess is that many folks aren’t aware of this, and that there’s a bunch of things opaque to the majority of folks who aren’t writers that could be put into such a post.