Zane
Comments3
Thanks for making this post. Many commenters are disputing your claim that "Being paid to run a college club is weird", and I want to describe why I think it is in fact distorting.
One real reason you don't want to pay the leadership of a college club a notably large amount of money is because you expose yourself to brutal adverse selection: the more you pay above the market rate for a campus job, the more attractive the executive positions are to people who are purely financially motivated rather than motivated by the mission of the club. This is loosely speaking a problem faced by all efforts to hire everywhere, but is usually resolved in a corporate environment through having precise and dispassionate performance evaluation, and the ability to remove people who aren't acting "aligned", if you will. I think the lack of mechanisms like this at college org level basically mean this adverse selection problem blows up, and you simply can't bestow excess money or status on executives without corrupting the org. I saw how miserable college-org politics were in other settings, with a lot less money to go around than EA.
At the core of philanthropic mission is a principal-agent problem. Donors, at some length, need to empower agents to spend their money wisely and maximally efficiently. As an EA contributor, rather than primarily a donor, you are constantly being nudged by your corrupted hardware to justify spending money on luxuries and conveniences. From the outside, it's very difficult to tell whether the money-spenders are adjusting for this bias, hence why things like Wytham Abbey are controversial. So then as an outsider, seeing that the Columbia EA club pays its executives so much and does things like maintain The Commons basically destroys the club's credibility in my eyes, and I'd only engage with it (as a former Columbia student and now donor) if it were of a substantially different and more frugal looking character.
I expect I reside farther on the "you should be frugal to signal credibility" axis than a lot of people here, and this comment bleeds into larger criticisms I have of current EA culture, but I thought it was reflected neatly in the dynamic your post describes.
Towards Better Epistemology in Medicine
Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Medicine is a field subject to an incentive landscape that can, among other issues, encourage pathological risk aversion in treatment and research, which holds back patients getting the care
with the greatest expected value to them and limits our ability as a society to adapt
to new and changing health issues such as global pandemics. Medical professionals are often trained in a narrow set of epistemic norms that lead to slow updates on new evidence, overreliance on individual decisionmaking, and difficulty communicating about complex tradeoffs. The unavoidable closeness to moral and ethical issues, as well as difficulties in reasoning about decisions that hold lives directly in the balance, exacerbate the problem.
We're interested in projects that address these problems, perhaps including the following:
- Literature and media that promotes truth-seeking and expected-value-thinking norms
in medicine, whether explicit in non-fiction or training material, or in fictional settings
- Resources that seek to aggregate medical evidence relevant to a specific condition or
clinical application, and attempts to normalize bringing up such a resource to your
medical provider
- Efforts to open-source medical metadata, particularly with regard to outcomes of different
treatment plans, and to precisely relax certain regulations that prevent this data from being collected
- Increasing incentives for the reporting of null results, unconventional results, and meta-analyses of existing medical studies. Establishment of specific prizes for meta-analysis studies, and literature that communicates neutral and evidence-based research effectively at a layperson's level
Yeah, I think the interest rates post is all but entirely refuted immediately by the obvious argument (the one in your rebuttal) and it both confuses me and slightly irritates me to see it regarded so highly.
If anything I think a rebuttal should win the contest, because it would present what I guess is a nontrivial observation about how information-free the yield curve is in this context, and so serves as a correction to people who frankly aren't trading-literate who would spend energy trying to infer things about TAI timelines from securities prices