Henry Stanley 🔸
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Participation4
Former CTO and co-founder of earn-to-give fintech Mast.
Posts 16
Comments194
This is wonderful – thank you so much for writing it.
Mutual dedication to one another’s ends seems like a thing commonly present in religious and ethnic communities. But it seems quite uncommon to the demographic of secular idealists, like me. Such idealists tend to form and join single-focus communities like effective altruism, which serve only a subset of our eudaemonic needs.
Agree about secular, single-purpose communities – but I'm not sure EA is quite the same.
I've found my relationships with other EAs tend to blossom to be about more than just EA; those principles provide a good set of shared values from which to build other things, like a sense of community, shared houses, group meals, playing music together and just supporting each other generally. Then again, I don't consider EA to be the core of my identity, so YMMV.
if I had kept at it and pushed harder, maybe the project would have got further... but I don't think I actually wanted to be in that position either!
I think this is a problem with for-profit startups as well. Most of the time they fail. But sometimes they succeed (in the sense of “not failing” rather than breakout success which is far rarer), and in that case you’re stuck with the thing to see it through to an exit.
people who have strong conviction in EA start with a radical critique of the status quo (e.g. a lot of things like cancer research or art or politics or volunteering with lonely seniors seem a lot less effective than GiveWell charities or the like, so we should scorn them), then see the rationales for the status quo (e.g. ultimately, society would start to fall apart if tried to divert too many resources to GiveWell charities and the like by taking them away from everything else), and then come full circle back around to some less radical position
I agree that we probably shouldn't just defund all arts/cancer/old people charities overnight, but there are lots of causes that plausibly 'deserve' way less funding on the margin which would be better spent by GiveWell without society falling apart.
I take a Chesterton's fence sorta view here where I imagine a world which has zero arts funding and maybe that ends up being impoverished in a hard-to-quantify way, and that seems worth avoiding. But for the time being I'm happy to tell people to stop donating to the Cancer Research UK and send it to AMF instead.
One thing that occurs to me (as someone considering a career pivot) is the case of who someone isn't committed to a specific cause area. Here you talk about someone who is essentially choosing between EtG for AI safety or doing AI safety work directly.
But in my case, I'm considering a pivot to AI safety from EtG - but currently I exclusively support animal welfare causes when I donate. Perhaps this is just irrational on my part. My thinking is that I'm unlikely, given my skillset, to be any good at doing direct work in the animal welfare space, but consider it the most important issue of our time. I also think AI safety is important and timely but I might actually have the potential to work on it directly, hence considering the switch.
So in some cases there's a tradeoff of donations foregone in one area vs direct work done in another, which I guess is trickier to model.
I wonder why this hasn't attracted more upvotes - seems like a very interesting and high-effort post!
Spitballing - I guess there's such a lot of math here that many people (including me) won't be able to fully engage with the key claims of the post, which limits the surface area of people who are likely to find it interesting.
I note that when I play with the app, the headline numbers don't change for me when I change the parameters of the model. May be a bug?
Ferrous sulphate is also common but a bit nauseating and poorly absorbed in any case. Ferrous bisglycinate is also found branded as “gentle iron”.
For those very deficient in iron, an iron infusion will give you ~two years’ worth of iron in one go - and skips all the issues with oral bioavailability of iron. You will need to test your iron levels first to avoid iron overload.
I write a bit about iron supplementation in my guide to treating restless leg syndrome (RLS) for which iron deficiency is a common cause: https://henryaj.substack.com/p/how-to-treat-restless-legs-syndrome