@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg I think this article understates how big the disconnect is between how people think about charity/altruism and how they think about effectiveness or causal reasoning.
@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg Years after being personally familiar with the EA movement I *finally* grokked, after a friend showed me some equations on paper, that these people were trying to spend LESS money to get a desired result (like lives saved.)
@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg I had thought the point of charity was to prove you were a good person who was willing to sacrifice.
If you were going to think about it in budgeting/efficiency terms, like you would for personal consumption or business purchases, why would you give to charity at all?
@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg Of course the answer is “because you actually care about the desired result of the charity.”
But some part of me says “yeah I guess...but then it’s just a thing you want, it doesn’t make you a good person.”
@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg I don’t really endorse this perspective — this notion of “good person” that excludes intrinsic motivation is a person who won’t actually *get anything done in the real world*, and I don’t want to live in a world run by people who don’t care about outcomes.
@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg But like...if a lot of people think this way intuitively, the reason they’re not EAs is not ignorance of the importance of “overhead” to nonprofits or the existence of variance in charity cost-effectiveness. It’s not even that they succumb to emotional rhetoric.
@SteveStuWill@anderssandberg It’s that the idea of “second-guessing whether well-meaning people’s projects work” or “getting more value for money” feels like a “selfish” or “professional” concern, not applicable at all to altruistic endeavors.
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Cell therapy means taking cells out of a patient or donor, genetically modifying them, and putting them back in to treat a disease. CAR-T therapy does this with immune cells and has remarkable results in some cancers. But it costs $100k to produce one dose.
The potential patient population is huge; the world’s production capacity is tiny.
You effectively have to produce a custom “drug” in the hospital, for each patient.
Eyeblink conditioning is when an animal learns to associate a stimulus with a puff of air to the eye, and to blink when the stimulus is presented alone.
Eyeblink conditioning requires the cerebellum. Remove the cerebellum and it doesn't happen.
Cradle liberals like Scott get exposed, as adolescents or young adults, to social conservatives (often Christian) who are better prepared than they are to argue their case.
Not sure I agree with Hanson that law vs. governance is independent of the "size" or "amount" of government.
A governance system (regulation) and a law system (torts) can be exactly the same in their "strictness/laxity". In his example of pollution, they can define the same actions as "pollution" and require equally costly penalties to polluters.
OTOH, in general I think you need more people to staff a regulatory agency than to staff a civil court system, so the government will literally be larger (more employees, more spending) when rules are enforced via governance.