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: 4,147
And now omicron is at 74% of US cases!
I’ve now added info on this to the post about being a contact person and to CEA’s mistakes page.
Sorry I missed this—we’re working on a couple of updates to the mistakes page, including about this. I can let you know once the new text is up.
To add detail about my mistake:
When you asked if you could confidentially send me a draft of your post about Will’s book to check, I said yes.
The next week you sent me a couple more emails with different versions of the draft. When I saw that the draft was 18 pages of technical material, I realized I wasn’t going to be a good person to review it. That’s when I forwarded to someone on Will’s team asking if they could look at it instead of me.
I should never have done that, because your original email asked me not to share it with anyone. For what it’s worth, the way that this happened is that when I was deciding what to do with the last email in the chain, I didn’t remember and didn’t check that the first email in the chain requested confidentiality. This was careless of me, and I’m very sorry about it.
I think the underlying mistake I made was not having this kind of situation flagged as sensitive in my mind, which contributed to my forgetting the original confidentiality request. If the initial email had been about some more personal situation, I am much more sure it would have been flagged in my mind as confidential. But because this was a critique of a book, I had it flagged as something like “document review” in my mind. This doesn’t excuse my mistake—and any breach of trust is a serious problem given my role—but I hope it helps show that it wasn’t intentional.
I now try to be much more careful about situations where I might make a similar mistake.
CEA regards it as one of our mistakes that the Pareto Fellowship was a CEA program, but our senior management didn’t provide enough oversight of how the program was being run. To Beth and other participants or applicants who found it misleading or harmful in some way—we’re sorry.
This was indeed a big screwup on my part. Again, I’m really sorry I broke your trust.
If it’s a shrub, it’s a shrub that grows 30 feet in the air on the branch of a tree? Herbaceous seems right to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe
This blew my mind!
A couple nitpicks on the chart:
- you said strawberry has a tree ancestor but none of its ancestors on the chart are trees
- pineapple is colored as “definitely a tree,” but it’s a bush
One of the chapters deals with getting rid of behaviors you don’t want, with eight methods (some of which she doesn’t recommend). For example, training an incompatible behavior: if don’t want your dog to beg at the table during dinner, train your dog to lie down someplace else during dinner. Or “shape the absence”—reinforce everything that’s not the unwanted behavior.
I don’t think I have anything much to add in the way of specific tips.
I do think I’m a worse parent when I have less support (when I was home on maternity leave with a newborn and toddler, or when Jeff has been traveling and I’ve been alone with both kids for longer stretches than usual.) I agree that having childcare available, either paid or any kind, can help you be more patient and in-control.
oh right, about the public speaking / communication type skills.
I was coming to say something similar [edited to add: about communication skills.]
I don’t know much about this field, but one comparison that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered that hand-cleaning prevented hospital deaths, but let his students write it up instead of trying to convince his colleagues more directly. The message got garbled, his colleagues thought he was a crank, and continental Europe’s understanding of germ theory was delayed by 60 years as a result.
He did write something along similar lines here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/do-you-feel-lucky-punk.html
I think architects are correct to be skeptical of their own ability to do stuff other than right angles. MIT’s Stata Center is famously interesting, and also is full of leaks and mold because it doesn’t do the basic building thing of keeping the rain out. https://www.core77.com/posts/8026/mits-stata-center-gets-moldy-gehry-sued-over-flawed-design-8026
New Hampshire surprised me for this reason. There’s a small group of LW types but my impression is they feel pretty isolated.
Is the Massachusetts number due to the huge amount of testing MIT is doing? MIT alone is responsible for 10% of the state’s tests, and they’ve got low positive rates (7 positive tests this week out of about 10,000 tests). https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-testing-reopening-0824
Or the number of positive tests was literally negative? I agree that seems impossible unless they somehow overcounted before and were correcting for it
Fraternities and sororities do hazing in a way that’s closest to the rituals described in the books (and the warm welcome to the group afterward).
My impression is that the passage into adulthood is quicker and more definitive in traditional societies. In my circle, you might graduate high school and leave home, which is the biggest change, then college is sort of a transitional stage where you’re fed and housed communally on someone else’s dime, then you transition to working and finding your own place to live some years later, and then maybe establishing your own family some years after that. All of which gives us more freedom—of what to study, where to live, what kind of work to do, whether and whom to marry—than we would have had in villages where that was all pretty much settled by age 20.
1. This was covered, including FGM, but seemed less consistent than the pattern for males.
2. There wasn’t much on this—a few notes on swaddling or hammock systems that included some kind of drainage. One note on how in one culture men hold babies away from their bodies to avoid getting wet, while women hold the babies close (but I’m guessing getting dirty that way?) I also don’t feel like I understand how this has worked historically, especially in colder climates where you can’t just leave them bare.
3. They talk about how mobile cultures (I think foragers) hold babies upright and encourage them to step, which does lead to earlier walking. Using a cradleboard is the opposite method, restricting the baby’s movement but it allows them to be tied to an animal, keeping them from being underfoot.
But other people were sharing other articles saying different things (“this is all overblown”), or just something more moderate like “we’ll have to social distance later but not yet” and other people were also taking those seriously. So I still don’t know how to answer the question of “at the time, how should we have known who to listen to?”
Talking with you was one of the prompts to write it!