My Comparative Advantage in Effective Altruism

Comparative advantage is the idea that the person you want doing task X is not necessarily the one who is the best at X relative to your other choices, or relative to other tasks.  What you want is the person for whom their ability to do X * the importance of X is more valuable than anything else they could be doing.

Up until age 12, I was the Word Kid and my brother was the Computer Kid.  I read 10 books a week, he turned our IBM/Amiga into an Amiga at age 5 and we’re still not sure how.  I could play games and use the internet, but I knew nothing about the inner workings.  We got a new computer when I was 12, back when tech support was both competent and extremely necessary because that thing constantly broke.*  You would think this would be my brother’s job, but he was Not Good at talking to people.  My dad was good technically but was at work while tech support open.  My mom was home at the right time but still viewed the computer as a fragile word processor that generated many fights between the kids.  So despite not being the best at computers or talking to people, I had the comparative advantage in talking to tech support.  I want to say “I was good at it”, but honestly, I knew enough to follow directions and report results in a useful manner.  Nonetheless, it gave me some knowledge of something, and by the next year I was a STEM person.**  My first love was biology, but I needed a second major to justify four years at college, and I picked computer science.

But strictly practical computer science.  My first choice for second major was math, which I had been extremely good at when taking classes at community college in high school, when they were applied classes taught by people hired for their ability to teach.  My first class at actual university was theoretical hired by someone hired for his ability to bring in grant money, and I hated it.  I got through my first CS theory class because the professor was entertaining, but I resented it the whole time.  The next semester I had what should have been an applied class, but it had a habit of tacking on theoretical problems to the projects.  However much I hated theory, my partner hated it worse.  So despite being extremely bad at theory, I had the comparative advantage.  At the end of the semester, despite everything going against me- it was a miserable, poorly taught class and both my partner and I had the worst semesters of our college careers- I found myself really liking theory.  I not only enjoyed the subsequent mandatory theory classes, I did all my CS electives in theory.

This is what I thought of reading Ben Kuhn’s post on comparative advantage in EA.  You have a group of people who have spent their whole lives with their comparative advantage in math, science, and logical thinking.***  This means that all the squishy stuff inherent in running an organization- leading discussions, advertising, mediating disputes- is going to be done by someone who hasn’t done it much before.  This makes EA a tremendous driver of growth for the participants, independent of the good EA does for the world.  All three of us organizers have leveled up in leadership in the very short time we’ve been doing it, in ways I think will carry over to other spheres.

I still kind of choke on the idea that I’ve got a comparative advantage in organizing, but I am the one who said yes and my work appears to be net-positive, so on a practical level I guess I do.  I’m also the person best read in social justice,  so I was the one that wrote our don’t-be-a-dick policy and who a member approached when she was feeling marginalized.   Which is also not something you would have guessed looking at me at 18. These are all almost totally unrelated to my normal comparative advantages of “math”, “systems level thinking” and “simplifying complex things.”

It is really good for people to experience doing things they’ve never done before.  It also good for the person with the comparative advantage to do them because they are done faster and better.  It is good to have diversity of thought in an organization, and while my EA group is not as terrible as it once was****, we could do a lot better.  This is partially a reminder to myself next time I’m mad at systems or people for being inefficient that sometimes the extra energy is going somewhere good.

*As witnessed by the whole “owning an IBM/Amiga thing”, my dad was not good at choosing computers and had yet to turn the responsibility over to his offspring.

**This, of course, a drastic oversimplification.  There were a lot of other things involved

***I put myself in that category despite my early childhood experience because it was so early.

****So everyone here is a programmer?” “No, James works with robots.”

Cis and Trans

I assume almost everyone is familiar with transgender or transsexual, meaning someone whose gender identity doesn’t match up with what they were assigned with at birth based on their genitals.  For a long time there was no good way to describe some who was not transsexual.  “Biological” and “natural” implied trans people were artificial or unnatural.  “Women born women” was at odds with trans people’s image of themselves as having always been the gender they identify as*.

[Actually, it’s more complicated than that.  According to Julie Serano’s Whipping Girl, while some trans women did always feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body, the dominance of that paradigm was driven by medical gatekeeping.  Doctors would not let male-appearing people get treatment to make them appear more feminine (e.g. hormones, breast removal) unless they were convinced the person fell into a very specific narrative, including being very stereotypically feminine and having always considered themselves women.  This means that there are a bunch of people who would have identified as trans women under more open circumstances who aren’t being counted, and those that did get through the process have a deep memory that their continued access to treatment that makes them psychologically whole is dependent on other people believing they believe they have always been women.]

Finally, someone came up with cis, which I loved because it was the only time between graduating college and starting this blog that anything I learned in organic chemistry came up in the real world.   In chemistry, cis is the opposite of trans.  A molecule’s molecular formula doesn’t tell you everything about it.  If you want to read the exact definition it’s here, but the important point is that cis and trans are roughly opposites (just like L- and R-), and trans means roughly “on opposite sides” and cis means roughly “on the same side.” (in Latin, of course).  So when I heard cis-woman I knew exactly what it meant, with no explanation.  When you throw in that it is shorter and more accurate than the terms it was attempting to replace, I was sold.

It only recently occurred to me that most people have not taken organic chemistry or Latin, so to them cis was one more g-ddamned thing to memorize.  But now you know, and you can tell your friends, and everyone can adopt this much shorter, simpler, more precise term.

What doctors can learn from day care workers

So if being fat is bad for people, than doctors should tell them not to be fat, right?  Or at least tell them to eat vegetables and hit the elliptical, right?

Well, maybe.  But sometime around age two humans realize that they are independent beings who do not physically have to do everything an authority tells them to do.  Unfortunately, most doctors’ patients are over the age of two, and those that aren’t have their own issues.

vomiting baby
They’re gross

Telling people to do things they already know they need to do has mixed results.  Scott Alexander suggests alcoholism could be decreased by as much as 13% if doctors would spend five minutes telling alcoholics it was bad for them.  What this doesn’t capture is how lectures change the doctor-patient relationship.  It is very difficult to give a non-judgmental lecture when your billing model gives you 10 minutes per patient.  Patients might avoid or delay visits for problems- alcohol related or not- in order to avoid the lecture.  This is a pretty big issue with overweight patients, and apparently without upside: patients lectured by their doctors are more likely to attempt weight loss but no more likely to achieve it.

In this TED talk, Thomas Goetz talks about a study of dental patients (no cite, unfortunately) that found that scaring them had no effect, but patients’ belief in their own ability to floss had a large one.  It’s impossible for me to separate my personal experience from this data.  Multiple dentists and hygienists told me my pain was my fault for terrible oral hygiene, and if I brushed and flossed it would go away.  This turned out to be untrue on a couple of levels.  The pain was caused by structural damage and internal infection, which may have been made incrementally worse by oral plaques but wasn’t caused by it.  And I was actually brushing pretty regularly, it just wasn’t do anything.  Then I started treating a completely unrelated digestive problem, and suddenly my teeth were cleaner.  I didn’t even tell my dentist anything had changed, she asked spontaneously.  So I guess, yeah, patients belief in their own ability to effect change matters, and if they don’t believe it, maybe consider that they’re correct and investigate why.

But let’s go one step farther.  Crum and Langer did an interesting experiment on two groups of hotel maids.  Both were told exercise is good for you.  One was given additional information about the intensity level of the work they did all day, and told just by going to work they were exceeding the surgeon general’s RDA of exercise.  Four weeks later, the informed group was slightly thinner (they even checked body fat %.  I am so pleased) and had lower blood pressure .  Not astoundingly lower(10 points on diastolic BP), but it was only four weeks, and a pamphlet is even less work than a doctor lecture.

This suggests that one of the more helpful things public health officials can do is reinforce the good things people are already doing.  You did a stretch?  Hurray for you.  Check parking lot twice before accepting a far out spot?  Still counts.  It would not shock me if part of the health improvements attributed to standing desks turned out to be simply a halo effect of feeling like you made a healthy choice.  Which coincidentally is how you turn a two year old into a civilized human being.

Multifactor analysis

Elodie Under Glass (no relation) has a guest post up at Captain Awkward about dealing with family members with disabilities/when you have a disability. You should read the whole thing and the comments, because it lives up to CA’s high standards, but here’s the thread I want to talk about: one LW owns a house that is unable to accommodate her disabled father comfortably. It’s three stories, no elevator, no bathroom on the ground floor, and she doesn’t have a good bed to offer him. He has MS. Some people viewed her choice of house as a failure to accommodate her father properly. Others pointed out that it’s quite possible she couldn’t afford a disability-friendly house, or the renovations necessary to make it so. One commenter went so far as to say:

The people replying to you rightfully take issue with your snide implication that the LW should have just bought a smaller house- which has no correlation to price of house.

Which is clearly bullshit.  It is true that size is not the only determinant of the price of a house.  It may even be true that in a particular set of houses (one that sampled over a wide geography, time, condition, and set of amenities), price and size are not particularly predictive of each other.  But if you hold those others factors constant, size is strongly positively correlated with price. So while I do believe people should get off the LW’s case about buying a house that couldn’t accommodate her father, for lots of reasons, I think saying there’s nothing she could have done to accommodate him is wrong.

This is actually a pretty good metaphor for weight, if houses actively fucked with you to maintain their price within a set range. Build an addition to your house?  Black mold. Hog rendering plant built upwind?  Enjoy your newly refinished basement.  Eat less fewer calories?  Enjoy catching twice as many colds this year.  Eat more calories?  Never stop fidgeting.  Weight is not beyond our influence, but neither is it completely in our control.

Back exercises

My back pain book recommended a stretch in which you lie on the floor, with your hips and knees at a 90 degree angle,  resting your hands on your quads, then lightly press your legs into your hands.  I didn’t even try it, because I knew my back wasn’t strong enough to hold the position.  But when I do the same stretch with my feet resting on an exercise ball, it feels awesome.  I can’t be sure I’m getting the same stretch because the book didn’t include a musculature chart, but it is definitely doing something good.

Review and Science: Thomas Was Alone

Humans have an amazing ability to ascribe intention and emotion when logic tells us there could not possibly be any, a fact demonstrated most succinctly by this clip from Community

but proven somewhat more rigorously by An experimental study of apparent behaviour (PDF), in which experimental subjects were asked to watch and describ a short film showing some shapes moving around.  If you would like to play along at home, I’ve embedded the video below.

The first subject group (n=34 undergraduate women) was given no instruction beyond “describe what happened in the movie.”  Exactly one subject described it in purely geometric terms.  Two others described the shapes as birds, and the rest described them as humans.  19 gave a full story.  The stories people told  (in this treatment and another where subjects were primed to view the shapes as people) had a shocking amount in common, suggesting there was something innate in the interpretation.*

My point is, humans will bond with anything.  In many ways it’s easier to bond with/project onto simple objects than actual humans or almost humans.  This can be used to great effect in art, to evoke desired emotions without all the messiness of using real people.  A simple example is an extremely short, simple game whose name I’m not going to tell you, because it would bias your experience of it.

Did you play it?  The game’s name is Loneliness.  Can you guess why?

I like to think the shunned little square from Loneliness grew up in to be Chris in Thomas Was Alone, a game about rectangles making friends.  Thomas Was Alone‘s premise sounds kinds of dumb: it’s a puzzle platformer with some narration ascribing emotions to the rectangles you solve puzzles with.  But it pulls this off so masterfully I actually bought branded merchandise of it, which is something I can’t say about a single other game.  The story is genuinely sweet, but the real skill is in how the puzzles reinforce it.  Each rectangle has slightly different skills, some more useful than others.  Chris is a shitty jumper whose initial story revolved around resenting the better jumper, and who is nothing but dead weight in the first puzzles (the other rectangles could get through without him, but he could not with them) suddenly becomes indispensable, I felt pride and relief.

TWA starts out a little slow.  If you want to play, finish the first world before deciding whether to continue or quit.  But I highly recommend it both as an interesting example of human psychology, and as a piece of happy art, which I don’t think we see enough of.

Okay, fine, I don’t see enough of because I’m a severe subscriber to the dark and edgy trend.  But that just makes Thomas Was Alone more impressive.

*Attenuated by the fact that women attending college during WW2 is a narrow subset of the population.

Wish me luck

Fourth dental surgery (this year) is today (not counting when they snapped that extra bone off).  I’ve buffered with some content but it’s going to be kind of grab bag for a bit, possibly even the rest of the year.  I have two different multi-book reviews in the pipeline but apparently other people use the library too, so neither is done.  I loved doing that HAES deep dive but it was seriously tiring and there was no way I was finishing another before this surgery.  So enjoy my forthcoming waffle mix review and have a happy solstice celebration of your choice.

Helping Ferguson, part 2

I talked before about the challenges in supporting causes like Ferguson, where the best work is being done spontaneously and you have very little information.  It turns out I do have a little bit of a connection- a good friend’s little brother goes to college in St. Louis, and he has a professor he considers a local expert on the subject of activism in St. Louis.  I realize that readers as smart and informed as my own will give “blogger’s friend’s little brother’s professor” very little weight as a source.  But sharing this information is better than not, so here it goes:

So after a bunch of back and forth with Bob Hansman, a professor here who is probably the person in St. Louis I trust the most to know how various charities affect people on the ground here, we decided that the best place to donate is the United Way of Greater St. Louis’s Ferguson Fund.

If you’re curious, I looked at various people on the ground and activist groups to see how to (or if we should) get them money. The problem was that many of these groups are not super active or transparent and that they advocate their own solutions to the complex issues at play here. For example, the most recent cause one of these groups organized for was a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers.

I wanted to send out a recommendation that was more broadly applicable. United Way seems to be pretty transparent and post a lot of updates on where this money is going. They also are supporting independent groups who are trying to figure out how to solve the problems in Ferguson, like the Ferguson Commission appointed by the governor. Hard not to get behind that.

I found this surprising.  United Way is often held up as everything that’s wrong with charity: a big, lumbering organization more concerned with their own status than the people they are helping.  And yet, they seem to be doing good work here, including supporting more nimble organizations.  I think I will be putting some money towards this.

r/fatlogic endorses creationism

Normally when I’m investigating something I like to read well regarded books on both sides, in the hopes that the ignorance will cancel out.  Finding a suitable counterpoint to Health At Every Size is hard, because its opposition is “everyone in the world”, and there has been no selective pressure to elevate the actual science away from the shame and aesthetic preferences.

For example, I spent a little bit of time on r/fatlogic which, as decisions go, was not my best ever.   r/fatlogic frames itself as a criticism of horrible “fat logic”- things like “700 pounds is no less healthy than 200 pounds.  Possibly healthier.”  This is not a great start.  I have a deep personal understanding of how frustrating it is when people are wrong, but I have found I am happier and a better person when I say “yup, wrong”, and then move on with my day.  For the truly awful I might e-mail a friend making fun of it (thanks, Rachel!).  Forming a whole club around criticizing people, especially people that are already having a pretty tough time in life, is bad for everyone.

r/fatlogic is even worse than that, because it has an extraordinary case of the cowpox of doubt.  Wrong people keep insisting body fat is independent of calories consumed and exercise?  Well then body fat must be solely dependent on calories consumed and exercise, and anyone who suggests it is affected by anything else is a fatty fat fathead making excuses for their fat.  They are literally denying  the possibility of individual variability in the translation of external environment into physical state.  For bonus points, they invoke “but thermodynamics”, which is the same argument creationists use against evolution itself.

Here I tried several ways to explain exactly how wrong they were and how that was terrible, but then I decided to take my own advice and stop before I endorsed the hollow Earth theory.  My current contender for an opposition book is Good Calories, Bad Calories, but I’m open to suggestions.

Health At Every Size Roundup

I read Health At Every Size and wrote a number of blog posts on it.  Some are follow ups on science it mentions but didn’t not examine in depth, some are spot checks of its scientific claims.  Neither set is comprehensive, but hopefully they are helpful.

HAES pre-check: What I thought about fat, food, and health before reading HAES.

Now I’m learning about hypothalamusing: The hypothalamus is the main coordinator of food consumption and use, and we have no idea how it works.

Ghrelin: The Hunger and Lung Development Games: the discovery that the hunger hormone also plays a crucial role in fetal lung development inspires a pun I will find increasingly difficult to maintain as the series progresses.

Leptin: Catching Chemicals: This one was a stretch.

Insulin and Glucagon: Mockingsugar: you try and come up with a food/health/fat based pun on the word Mockingjay.

Bariatric Surgery: HAES says it’s universally bad, my reading of the literature is that it’s awful, but sometimes the better choice.

Fiber: The Mr Rogers of Nutrition: Everyone likes fiber.

Obesity, Blood Pressure, and Study Design: partially an examination of the link between obesity and blood pressure, but mostly an explanation of why the studies we’ve done so far are so unhelpful.

Controls and Confounds: Why designing a study to determine causality is so hard.

HAES post-check: What I thought about fat, food, and health after reading HAES.