SoniaAlbrecht 🔸
Bio
Participation3
I'm an electronics engineering undergraduate. I love physics too much to help with AI alignment unless optical accelerators or matrix multiplication with memresistors take off for inference accelerators, but with lack of electronic access a major constraint on growth in low income countries, I'm excited about the many opportunities to contribute in global health and development.
Once I've built up enough savings, I plan to take a Giving What We Can Further Pledge to live on maybe $24,000 per year (to be adjusted for inflation and reevaluated if I have a child) so I can donate most of my income to GiveWell recommended charities.
My secret passion is economics, but I didn't pursue more than a minor because the field seems lower impact for me.
How others can help me
I'd love to hear about opportunities for direct work for electronics engineers who don't work on the digital side of the field.
How I can help others
In my experience, what the average rich world Christian believes is one of the things this community is simultaneously most confident about and most confused about. This is a misunderstanding that points to epistemic failures, and our confusion about the epistemics of the average rich world voter. I think understanding the average voter better is crucial for helping the government craft effective policies. I can provide useful data and thoughts on this topic.
Posts 1
Comments63
I feel more confident about this than I did in July.
The 2021 US real median household income numbers were released, and they showed a 1% decrease despite a similarly large stimulus package and real GDP growth improving by 7 percentage points, because inflation got so bad. Without a large stimulus package, and with worse inflation and real GDP growth, incomes could easily have decreased in 2022. US real median household income grew by 90% between 1979 and 2021, making a decrease a rare and important experience.
Nate Silver also came out with an article making a similar argument, noting that real disposable personal income has stagnated during the Biden administration. While I dislike this source because it is not a median measurement in a time when incomes could well be growing faster for poorer Americans than richer ones, he notes that it has historically been one of the best predictors of election outcomes.
Thanks for sharing your expertise.
I will add that I found this type of analysis for why inflation was higher in the US persuasive. For example, this study from 2022 by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that likely 3 percentage points of the higher inflation (basically all of it at the time) in the US compared to other rich countries was due to the stimulus in the US. But yes, I agree that the history of low inflation (and I believe lower stimulus than was appropriate during The Great Recession) made this a reasonable mistake to make.
I should note that the purpose of my post wasn't to make a point about the pros and cons of different policies. I just wanted to point out that the personal experiences of voters were probably pretty different than most of us were thinking. I feel like I should have put more thought into making that clearer. I've been enjoying our conversation though!
Thank you for sharing!
I’m glad experts are taking it more seriously than laypeople. However, I still feel like laypeople can have a lot of influence. Many of us are performing outreach in swing states, have significant online presences, and/or have friends or family members who are undecided.
I also think that these extremely unusual circumstances merit experts focusing on economic conditions outside the current presidential term more than would normally be the case.
I do feel that the inflation problems Biden has experienced are largely self-inflicted (to the extent that politicians can influence economic conditions, which I agree is generally overestimated under normal circumstances). His budget deficit in his first year wasn’t much smaller than Trump’s, which was another unprecedented circumstance and I believe also unnecessarily large. The deficit has still not come down to its normal levels for this part of the business cycle (even the levels before inflation was a problem). The Economist often argues that the deficits have played a big role in inflation, and my professors in my economics major have encouraged me to trust their analysis a lot. It’s still helpful to notice how little room for error he had given the context. I feel the role of deficits under Biden is more commonly understood in our community than the role of the deficit in 2020.
I've been thinking about your perspective lately, and wondered if there is a variable I hadn't considered enough. I was raised middle class American. For this post, I drew on my decade of experience as a lower class American after a disability left me unable to earn a good living for a long time. My field was heavily male dominated (construction). Since in my experience lower class American norms seem more gendered to me, I would expect the experience of someone who hasn't worked in a male-dominated lower class American field to be pretty different from mine. My friends were ones I made from work, so they already considered me one of the guys. Do you think your experience was different from mine because you didn't work in a male-dominated field?
I also suspect I gave off a one-of-the-guys vibe (because that's the environment I prefer) that you don't that altered how people treated me. I found this Slate Star Codex post helpful in thinking about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
I think the essence of EA's smartness comes down to our ability to change our minds when presented with good information that challenges our worldview. I've been part of all sorts of communities, including many other youthful social-do-gooder movements, and never seen anything like it. People's models of the world are usually wrong in important ways, so I think this is probably the most important form of intelligence. So yes, I agree with Jeffrey Kursonis that we are probably typically smarter than average in the ways most applicable to what we work on.
Proposing a change to how Karma is accrued:
I recently reached over 1,000 Karma, meaning my upvotes now give 2 Karma and my strong upvotes give 6 Karma. I'm most proud of my contributions to the forum about economics, but almost all of my increased ability to influence discourse now is from participating in the discussions on sexual misconduct. An upvote from me on Global Health & Development (my primary cause area) now counts twice as much as an upvote from 12 out of 19 of the authors of posts with 200-300 Karma with the Global Health & Development tag. They are generally experts in their field working at major EA organizations, whereas I am an electrical engineering undergraduate.
I think these kinds of people should have far more ability to influence the discussion via the power of their upvotes than me. They will notice things about the merits of the cases people are making that I won't until I'm a lot smarter and wiser and farther along in my career. I don't think the ability to say something popular about culture wars translates well into having insights about the object level content. It is very easy to get Karma by participating in community discussions, so a lot of people are now probably in my position after the increased activity in that area around the scandals. I really want the people with more expertise in their field to be the ones influencing how visible posts and comments about their field are.
I propose that Karma earned from comments on posts with the community tag accrues at a slower rate.
Edit: I just noticed a post by moderators that does a better job of explaining why karma is so easy to accumulate in community posts:
If anyone's curious about GoodEAGoneBad's reply, we continue the conversation in a comment I made sharing this shortform on this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2JXLxKbSsbicnt9N9/ea-needs-life-veterans-and-less-smart-people
I'm sorry my comment gave the wrong impression!
I did find your comments on that post and believe we have very different perspectives on how serious the punishment should be. I thought the likelihood of someone familiar with lower class banter culture having such different opinions from me about the punishment was low, so I really appreciate you speaking up!
I believe people are substantially underestimating how much the economy contributes to Trump’s support, and being more aware of it would help better protect the democracy of the most powerful country in the world.
In 2020, the US budget deficit more than tripled. This and other (I think much smaller) factors resulted in US real median household income increasing by a completely unprecedented 11.6% in 2020 according to the Congressional Budget Office. Prior to that year, US real median household income under the Trump administration had improved by the 7% it had under the last Obama administration. However, by the end of 2020, US real median household income had increased by 19.3% total during the Trump administration, more than the 17.8% it had increased over all 4 previous presidential terms combined. If this had been accomplished in a way that didn't decrease long run incomes, we would have called it a miracle. Nothing anywhere near this has happened in the 41 years this statistic has been recorded. Caring about the long run impacts of deficits is esoteric. A miracle is what Americans of normal education experienced.
Polling bears this out. While partisans typically care deeply about culture wars, swing voters (who overall switched from voting from Biden to planning to vote for Trump) are concerned about the economy instead.
For the median income data source, see the supplemental data section. After thinking about various sources' methodology for this statistic more than my economics professors have, I believe this is the highest quality source for this statistic.