More thoughts here, but TL;DR I’ve decided to revert the dashboard back to its original state & have republished the stale data. (Just flagging for readers who wanted to dig into the metrics.)
angelinahli
Karma: 151
Hey! Sorry for the silence, I was feeling a bit stressed by this whole thread, and so I wanted to step away and think about this before responding. I’ve decided to revert the dashboard back to its original state & have republished the stale data. I did some quick/light data checks but prioritised getting this out fast. For transparency: I’ve also added stronger context warnings and I took down the form to access our raw data in sheet form but intend to add it back once we’ve fixed the data. It’s still on our stack to Actually Fix this at some point but we’re still figuring out the timing on that.
On reflection, I think I probably made the wrong call here (although I still feel a bit sad / misunderstood but 🤷🏻♀️). It was a unilateral + lightly held call I made in the middle of my work day — like truly I spent 5 min deciding this & maybe another ~15 updating the thing / leaving a comment. I think if I had a better model for what people wanted from the data, I would have made a different call. I’ve updated on “huh, people really care about not deleting data from the internet!” — although I get that the reaction here might be especially strong because it’s about CEA (vs the general case). Sorry, I made a mistake.
Future facing thoughts: I generally hold myself to a higher standard for accuracy when putting data on the internet, but I also do value not bottlenecking people in investigating questions that feel important to me (e.g. qs about EA growth rates), so to be clear I’m prioritizing the latter goal right now. I still in general stand by, “what even is the point of my job if I don’t stand by the data I communicate to others?” :) I want people to be able to trust that the work they see me put out in the world has been red-teamed & critiqued before publication.
Although I’m sad this caused an unintended kerfuffle, it’s a positive update for me that “huh wow, people actually care a lot that this project is kept alive!”. This honestly wasn’t obvious to me — this is a low traffic website that I worked on a while ago, and don’t hear about much. Oli says somewhere that he’s seen it linked to “many other times” in the past year, but TBH no one has flagged that to me (I’ve been busy with other projects). I’m still glad that we made this thing in the first place and am glad people find the data interesting / valuable (for general CEA transparency reasons, as an input to these broader questions about EA, etc.). I’ll probably prioritize maintenance on this higher in the future.
Now that the data is back up I’m going to go back to ignoring this thread!
Hey! I just saw your edited text and wanted to jot down a response:
Edit: I’ll be honest, after thinking about it for longer, the only reason I can think of why you would take down the data is because it makes CEA and EA look less on an upwards trajectory. But this seems so crazy. How can I trust data coming out of CEA if you have a policy of retracting data that doesn’t align with the story you want to tell about CEA and EA? The whole point of sharing raw data is to allow other people to come to their own conclusions. This really seems like such a dumb move from a trust perspective.
I’m sorry this feels bad to you. I care about being truth seeking and care about the empirical question of “what’s happening with EA growth?”. Part of my motivation in getting this dashboard published in the first place was to contribute to the epistemic commons on this question.
I also disagree that CEA retracts data that doesn’t align with “the right story on growth”. E.g. here’s a post I wrote in mid 2023 where the bottom line conclusion was that growth in meta EA projects was down in 2023 v 2022. It also publishes data on several cases where CEA programs grew slower in 2023 or shrank. TBH I also think of this as CEA contributing to the epistemic commons here — it took us a long time to coordinate and then get permission from people to publish this. And I’m glad we did it!
On the specific call here, I’m not really sure what else to tell you re: my motivations other than what I’ve already said. I’m going to commit to not responding further to protect my attention, but I thought I’d respond at least once :)
Quick thoughts on this:
“The data was accurate as far as I can tell until August 2024”
I’ve heard a few reports over the last few weeks that made me unsure whether the pre-Aug data was actually correct. I haven’t had time to dig into this.
In one case (e.g. with the EA.org data) we have a known problem with the historical data that I haven’t had time to fix, that probably means the reported downward trend in views is misleading. Again I haven’t had time to scope the magnitude of this etc.
I’m going to check internally to see if we can just get this back up in a week or two (It was already high on our stack, so this just nudges up timelines a bit). I will update this thread once I have a plan to share.
I’m probably going to drop responding to “was this a bad call” and prioritize “just get the dashboard back up soon”.
Hi! A quick note: I created the CEA Dashboard which is the 2nd link you reference. The data here hadn’t been updated since August 2024, and so was quite out of date at the time of your comment. I’ve now taken this dashboard down, since I think it’s overall more confusing than helpful for grokking the state of CEA’s work. We still intend to come back and update it within a few months.
Just to be clear on why / what’s going on:
I stopped updating the dashboard in August because I started getting busy with some other projects, and my manager & I decided to deprioritize this. (There are some manual steps needed to keep the data live).
I’ve now seen several people refer to that dashboard as a reference for how CEA is doing in ways I think are pretty misleading.
We (CEA) still intend to come back and fix this, and this is a good nudge to prioritize it.
Thanks!
Thanks, I found this interesting! I remember reading that piece by Froolow but I didn’t realize the refactoring was such a big part of it (and that the GiveWell CEA was formatted in such a dense way, wow).
This resonates a lot with my experience auditing sprawling, messy Excel models back in my last job (my god are there so many shitty Excel models in the world writ large).
FWIW if I were building a model this complex, I’d personally pop it into Squiggle / Squigglehub — if only because at that point, properly multiplying probabilities together and keeping track of my confidence interval starts to really matter to me :)
Level up your spreadsheeting
I also spent a cursed day looking into the literature for NONS. I was going to try and brush this up into a post, but I’m probably not going to do that after all. Here are my scrappy notes if anyone cares to read them.
You’re citing the same main two studies on Enovid that I found (Phase 3 lancet or “Paper 1”, Phase 2 UK trial or “Paper 2″), so in case it’s helpful, here are my notes under “Some concerns you might have” re: the Lancet paper:
The study was funded and conducted by the drug manufacturer (the first 3 authors of the study all work at the manufacturer).
The smaller UK study, which also found that NONS significantly reduced viral load, was conducted by an independent academic researcher.
On the other hand, this study was still funded by the manufacturer, and reports that “the funder of the study conducted the randomisation of the anonymised participant data” (??) which I find pretty weird.
We don’t know about the long term effects — including even relatively short term stuff like whether any patients got rebound COVID after their negative PCR tests.
The study stops following patients after their first negative PCR, so we don’t really have evidence on long term consequences.
Nitrix oxide is supposed to be pretty safe, since it’s produced by your body in response to e.g. eating leafy greens.
But you might worry about mechanism of delivery here — these sprays don’t actually contain NO, they contain agents that combine to produce NO. Might this combination process also create harmful byproducts?
Very very anecdotally, this random science writer on Twitter is worried that combining sodium nitrite in acidic solution could produce nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. I don’t know any chemistry and can’t quickly check whether this is a valid concern.
The study is supposed to study the effects of nitric oxide. But the treatment spray differs in two ways: it contains NO-creating agents, and an additional gelling agent (HPMC).
This might be a problem as people have suspected HPMC could independently be protective against COVID for a while, and one observational study seems to back this up.
So you might just be picking up on the effects of HPMC, not nitric oxide. Despite being a fairly common food additive, HPMC isn’t well studied as a COVID treatment, so it’s hard to tease these effects out — Here’s a quick summary.
The UK study doesn’t report what exactly they put in the placebo spray, so I can’t verify whether this issue applies to that study.
The in vitro study finds that gaseous NO does not have virucidal effects on SARS-CoV-2, which makes me wonder if in fact HPMC is the real reason why these sprays are effective?
In practice, since there’s only one company that currently sells these sprays, and their product in fact contains HPMC, you might not care about this. But this might tip you in favor of buying a cheaper HPMC spray instead of this product.
.
Note the evidence base on explicitly prophylactic use of NONS is not very good. Here’s the only study I could find (after maybe an hour of searching), and it’s a retrospective epidemiological case study (i.e. not randomly assigned), again by the manufacturers.
They’re running a Phase 3 prophylactic RCT right now, which in theory is supposed to wrap up this month, but who knows when we’ll see the results.
For example: let’s say you want to know the impact of daily jogs on happiness. You randomly instruct 80 people to either jog daily or to simply continue their regular routine. As a per protocol analyst, you drop the many treated people who did not go jogging. You keep the whole control group because it wasn’t as hard for them to follow instructions.
I didn’t realize this was a common practice, that does seem pretty bad!
Do you have a sense of how commonplace this is?
What’s depressing is that there is a known fix for this: intent-to-treat analysis. It looks at effects based on the original assignment, regardless of whether someone complied or not.
In my econometrics classes, we would have been instructed to take an instrumental variables approach, where “assignment to treatment group” is an instrument for “does the treatment”, and then you can use a two stage least squares regression to estimate the effect of treatment on outcome. (My mind is blurry on the details.)
IIUC this sounds similar to intent-to-treat analysis, except allowing you to back out the effect of actually doing the treatment, which is presumably what you care about in most cases.
I have built three or four traditional-style lumenators, as described in Eliezer and Raemon’s posts. There’s a significant startup cost — my last one cost $500 for the materials (with $300 of that being the bulbs), and the assembly always takes me several hours and is rife with frustration — but given that they last for years, it’s worth it to me.
Reading this post inspired me to figure out how to set up a lumenator in my room, so thank you for writing it! :)
I just set mine up and FWIW I got 62,400 lumens for $87 ($3.35 / bulb if you buy 26, 2600 lumens, 85 CRI, 5000k, non-dimmable). These aren’t dimmable, but are over half the price of the 83 CRI Great Eagle bulbs you mentioned (which are $6.98 / bulb right now).
My full set up cost $212.
June 2023 cheap-ish lumenator DIY instructions (USA)
I set up a lumenator! I liked the products I used, and did ~3 hours of research, so am sharing the set-up here. Here are some other posts about lumenators.
Here’s my shopping list.
$212 total as of writing:
$142 for bare essentials (incl $87 for the bulbs)
$55 for the lantern covers
$17 for command hooks (if you get a different brand, check that your hooks can hold the cumulative weight of your bulbs + string)
62,400 lumens total(!!)
Here are the bulbs I like. The 26 listed come out to $3.35 / bulb, 2600 lumens, 85 CRI, 5000k, non-dimmable. This comes out at 776 lumens / $ (!!!) which is kind of ridiculous.
The only criteria I cared about were: (1) CRI >85, (2) Color temperature of 5000K, and then I just tried to max out lumens / $.
These are super cheap. @mingyuan seemed to have spent $300 on bulbs for their last lumenator. They had a stricter CRI cutoff (>90), but the price difference here means it might be worth considering going cheaper.
I don’t understand if I am missing something / why this is such a good deal? But IRL, these are extremely bright, they don’t ‘feel’ cheap (e.g. are somewhat heavy), and don’t flicker (as of day 1).
They aren’t dimmable. I wasn’t willing to pay the premium for the dimmability — TBH I would just get another set of less bright lights for when you don’t want it to be so bright!
To set up (1-2 hours):
Set up the command hooks, ideally somewhere kind of high up in your room, wait an hour for the backing to dry.
Plug in the switch, and then plug the wire into the switch. Run the wire through your hooks.
Screw in the bulbs. With this brand of wire, you have to screw them in with a lot of force (more than you would think). I kept the switch near me, and periodically checked if all the lights turned on as I went along.
Set up the lantern covers (you could do this in parallel with the bulbs).
I initially used a couple older bulbs at my house instead of entirely using the MAXvolador ones throughout to save money, but I’m probably going to go back and replace all the older bulbs with the above product (it’s just so much brighter!).
angelinahli’s Shortform
LW bug(?) report: All of the inline footnotes are pointing to the Cold Takes references, even though the backref links in the Notes section are pointing to the LW post (screenshot of what I see on hover). Same issue with the alignment forum post. I’m wondering if there’s any way to fix that?
Here’s a Share-a-cart link to grab all of the 6 basic pills + pill organizer on Amazon for ~$57. (Click on the link, click “Send all to cart”, and then “Add to cart” at the bottom).
I did very minimal research for this and mostly just clicked on the first fine-seeming product per item on the list, and did not check whether things were vegan, the best possible product in each category, etc. Commenting mostly to encourage people to use services like Share-a-cart when publishing shopping lists to make it super easy for people to buy things you recommend.
[musing] Actually another mistake here which I wish I just said in the first comment: I didn’t have a strong enough TAP for, if someone says a negative thing about your org (or something that could be interpreted negatively), you should have a high bar for not taking away data (meaning more broadly than numbers) that they were using to form that perception, even if you think the data is wrong for reasons they’re not tracking. You can like, try and clarify the misconception (ideally, given time & energy constraints etc.), and you can try harder to avoid putting wrong things out there, but don’t just take it away—it’s not on to reader to treat you charitably and it kind of doesn’t matter what your motives were.
I think I mostly agree with something like that / I do think people should hold orgs to high standards here. I didn’t pay enough attention to this and regret it. Sorry! (I’m back to ignoring this thread lol but just felt like sharing a reflection 🤷🏻♀️)