I work at the Centre for Effective Altruism as a contact person for the EA community. I read a lot of LessWrong around 2011 but am not up to date on whatever is happening now.
juliawise
Karma: 4,236
It seems odd to write a post about someone with a common first name and not mention their last name until the acknowledgement at the end of the post.
Posting on behalf of my coworker Sam Deere (who didn’t have enough karma to post):
“Thanks for the feedback. It’s good to know that this is something people are thinking about — we think a lot about how to make EA’s online presence best serve the needs of the community too.
For context, I’m head of tech at CEA, which runs EffectiveAltruism.org. (I have less to do with the content and structure of the site these days, but had a hand in putting it up, and am involved in a lot of decision making about which projects to priorities.)
There seem to be a few concerns, one about functionality, one about discoverability, and one about content. That is, EA needs better discussion spaces, the ones it has are too hard to find, and the easiest-to-find content doesn’t represent the breadth of EA really well.
In general we agree that EA needs good discussion spaces, and that the current ones could be improved (e.g. by separating concerns of content discovery and content creation etc). This is something that’s in CEA’s longer-term tech projects roadmap, but we don’t have the capacity to prioritise this right now. This is doubly true when there are fairly good discussion spaces available, in particular the EA Forum. However, we’re working on building out more features, on top of the EffectiveAltruism.org webapp (which at the moment is functionally just EA Funds).
Individual projects will have their own coordination needs so at this point it hasn’t made sense to try to build a be-all/end-all platform that encompasses all of them. You’ve suggested a number of tools that such a platform could draw inspiration from — in many cases people do just use these tools to coordinate on projects. The EA Forum serves a useful role to announce project ideas and seek collaborators, and this isn’t the only place in the community where projects/collaboration happens — EA Grants and the .impact Hackpads were already mentioned. Another example is Effective Altruism Global, which allows people to discuss these projects and ideas in person, which is much higher bandwidth.
(It’s also important to get the balance right between shiny new things that work better and continuity — there’s always a new platform, a new tool that we could use that will be an improvement on existing processes. But if it doesn’t complement existing tools and processes people use, then it risks either not gaining adoption, or splitting the user base. Developer time and energy is a scarce resource, and like everything, needs to be prioritised. Many projects of this scope fall into disuse.)
Regarding discoverability, as others have suggested, it’s not clear that the solution is to make things more discoverable. Online communities are very hard to get right — there’s a constant tension between preserving the culture and norms that make the culture great, while keeping it open and accessible to newer members who want to get involved. Newer members have less context for certain discussions (which makes people feel they can’t be as open for fear of alienating newcomers), newer members may ask lots of basic questions etc (see the Eternal September effect). The solution is never perfect, but it’s important to have ways for people to get involved with the community incrementally, so that they can acquire that context as they go — this necessitates having some more introductory content on places like EffectiveAltruism.org, and the selection effects of the effort required to learn a bit more about the community are likely a feature, not a bug.
In general we observe that people start reading introductory content, then those that are hooked do a deep dive and discover the rest of the community in the process. However, it’s a useful data point to know that you felt that as someone who was already potentially on board, that the introductory stuff was off-putting, and we’ll keep that in mind as we’re considering what other content needs to be on EffectiveAltruism.org.
Regarding content breadth, CEA is currently working on a project to make the content covered on EffectiveAltruism.org more comprehensive and representative of the broader spectrum of ideas that get discussed within the community (partly building on the existing Effective Altruism Concepts project, and also drawing inspiration from things like the LW sequences — more details will be announced in time).
As with everything, we’re massively constrained by staff and volunteer time. At the moment we’re hiring for a number of roles that should speed up the development of some of these features (hint hint...). As someone noted, it would perhaps have been worthwhile to post this on the EA Forum to see if there are more ideas in this vein, or if others in the community are working on something like this.”
I think it was sensible of them to at least evaluate the question, particularly if they thought their children might live in a nuclear wasteland rather than dying. Given that I heard this from their daughter, they did indeed decide to have children (at the advice of their priest, who reasoned as you do that a short life was better than none.)
I think LW is rare in that regard, though. I don’t think most people think their children are in danger of any grand disaster except maybe climate change.
Yeah, I remember around 2007 a friend saying her parents weren’t sure whether it was right for them to have children circa 1983, because they thought nuclear war was very likely to destroy the world soon. I thought that was so weird and had never heard of anyone having that viewpoint before, and definitely considered myself living in a time when we no longer had to worry about apocalypse.
It might depend on the market, but I live up the street from a three-apartment building that was occupied by a co-op for a long time. The co-op residents enforced stuff like not messing up the house, and because lots of people wanted to live in the co-op the landlord never had to worry about vacancies.
Assuming the landlord likes the initial group of tenants, having a group of tenants who will pre-vet new tenants and will find those tenants themselves should be very appealing.
This would require patience and risk-tolerance on the part of the initial group, if they’re renting apartments or buying houses in an area where they hope more will become available but don’t know when (and don’t know that their friends will still want to join them when space is available.)
Yeah, when I looked into cohousing this is what I concluded too. My husband and I ended up buying a house with 6 bedrooms and occupying two of them (then adding two more family members and building two more bedrooms.) None of our housemates would have bought in because they’re not sure how long-term they want to be here, but they’re happy to be renters and we’re happy to own the building.
To us it’s important that the arrangement be flexible; rather than a single big house we bought a house that had been divided into two apartments, so if we ever want to stop having housemates or we can’t find housemates who want to live with us, we can pick the smaller or the larger apartment and rent the other one out. There’s also some possibility of our kids wanting to rent from us in 20 years, which we think will work better if they can have their own apartment. I wouldn’t have wanted to sink our savings into something that would really only work in one configuration.
N Street Cohousing in Davis CA is a classic example of this. http://nstreetcohousing.org/
If the demographic transition continues, I’m not too worried about Malthusian scenarios. It seems that people who are less worried about their children being wiped out by disease have fewer children.
Another option is interventions that improve lives without saving them, such as deworming.
The law just changed for 2015, so although many companies were switching to less-toxic ones in the past they are now free to not use any flame retardants at all, and some are doing so. All IKEA furniture manufactured after Jan 1, 2015 should be fine. The only exception would be if you somehow bought something that was made before then, but I imagine their turnover is fast enough their 2014 stock is all sold.
She does not speak either and is really fussy, screaming a lot
Where I live, a child with in that situation would probably be referred for early childhood intervention (a free service where health visitors come to your home and work with you and your child). I wonder if that’s available where you live?
For kids that are slow in speaking (or really any babies), one thing that’s common here is to use baby sign language to allow them to communicate before they’re speaking. We’ve found it’s really helpful for our daughter to be able to communicate things like “more” and “all done” with hand signals. Still working on “hungry” vs. “thirsty”, since currently all that is encompassed by “more.” I think it reduces fussiness because she can express her needs better and we can meet them better.
Also, there’s now a chicken pox vaccine, so no need to catch it at all.
Gerbils? Guinea pigs? Mice? Birds? They don’t have personality in the way that dogs or cats do, but might appease a six-year-old.
None of these sources are about indoor cats. They are all about feral or indoor-outdoor cats.
I did find a study about the prevalence of toxo in Polish indoor cats, which was 19% if they were not fed raw meat. A study on “indoor” cats in Rhode Island animal shelters found 26% had toxo. That last one seems a bit odd, because you don’t know much about the history of a cat at a shelter. A lot of cat adoption places make you promise to keep the cat indoors, but they have no way of checking, so people returning an unwanted cat to a shelter may claim to have kept their promise even if they didn’t. In any case, no indication of whether these cats got toxo while they were indoor cats, or for example while kittens with a different owner.
I would feel more comfortable without cats, but since they belong to my housemates they’re not my choice. Luckily one is blind and the other seems pretty incompetent (the cats, not the housemates).
One possibility is to get a cat that already has toxoplasmosis (I believe you can get them tested), since they can’t shed it after the first few weeks. But you’re more likely to get it from undercooked meat, anyway, so if you’re really concerned it’s probably best to focus attention there.
Source on cats getting out of the house, killing and eating animals, and then sneaking back in unnoticed? Especially unlikely in our second-floor apartment since the cat would have to make it through a closed door four separate times without anyone knowing.
I did the same thing. The studies/abstracts I’ve read talk about effects on children of women with “high levels” of PCBS but I have no idea where I fall on that scale. Like, Inuit women have very high levels, but they’re eating very large amounts of fish, seals, etc. This paper has info about health effects of people eating Great Lakes fish, which may be more relevant to you.
My very non-expert impression is that it seems to be less serous than mercury. And even the evidence on mercury had some weird bits, like studies that show mercury is good for babies’ neurodevelopment (because they didn’t control for maternal fish consumption, and apparently the fish was more helpful than the mercury was harmful!) But obviously the goal is to get the good fish nutrition without the pollutants.
By “save” I meant “avoid losing” not “gain an extra.” Assuming a child would not normally get mercury poisoning, for example, by preventing mercury exposure I am preventing my child from losing some amount of cognitive ability.
My guess is that interventions like preschool are more likely to fade with time, and brain damage is less likely to fade.
I’m not taking Salkever’s numbers literally. But you probably agree that brain damage causes lost value, possibly a lot of lost value. I estimate that I may spend a few thousand dollars on various steps to prevent brain damage to my children. That seems like a good investment to me.
Thanks; fixed. Our deck is considerably older than that, though, so depending on the wood’s age it may still be relevant.
He had testing for a genetic disease done due to his family history. I had whatever the slate of “early risk assessment” treating includes—what I remember is a blood test for cystic fibrosis and an ultrasound to look for signs of Down syndrome. All was covered by insurance. http://www.earlyriskassessment.com/
I’m not aware of prenatal testing for autism? We did both take the Baron-Cohen AQ quiz, which didn’t think we were particularly likely to have autistic kids, though I’m not sure that’s worth much.
I tried something like this on Saturday. I notice that in a household with two small children, any effort for one parent to have more “slack” usually results in the other having less. Most of the work of taking care of children doesn’t stop when electronics and lists stop.
I also worry that to people unfamiliar with how this traditionally plays out, there’s work happening that’s invisible in these posts. My understanding is that for the house to be ready and the feast prepared by Friday evening, women in observant Jewish families typically need to leave any other jobs they hold at noon. (Perhaps this isn’t universal—it’s coming from a family member’s time working at a Jewish school, where everything shut down Friday at lunchtime so the female staff could go home and cook.)
You’ve approached this at the individual level, but any thoughts on how this works out at the household level?