Everyday Utilitarian

Everyday Utilitarian Is Moving

2014-09-17T17:00:00-04:00

When I started this blog, I had intended to write a lot about living a utilitarian lifestyle. I intended to write about effective altruism. I did a whole bunch of the seocond, but not very much of the first.

I figured that I was sort of leading by example – my best guess is that someone living an “everyday utilitarian” lifestyle probably wouldn’t spend too much time writing about it. But that made writing for this blog a little bit awkward.

Just one short month after I opened up Everyday Utilitarian, a community blog for EAs opened up, making my writings a little less relevant. Recently, that community blog turned into an entire forum. I’ve now decided that, for as long as that forum continues to be active, it would be better for me to post there instead.

The truth here is that I don’t write as much as I used to. And, as such, my readership has declined. In order to get the exposure and comments I need, it makes sense to group with likeminded people. Furthermore, it makes sense to not divert readership onto many different blogs. So moving there makes a lot of sense.

You can now find my effective altruism and utilitarian related writings on the Effective Altriusm Forum. For writing that isn’t fit to go there, I’ll put it on my Tumblr, because it’s so quick and easy to write to Tumblr, even though the site does look less nice.

To make the transition a little easier and because my content is now all over the internet, I’ll be maintaining a complete list of all my writings on a separate list you can reference. And you can always follow me on Twitter for the latest piece of anything I write.

Hope to see you around. This is not the end, just a start of a new beginning.

Everyday Utilitarian Is Moving was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on September 17, 2014.

One Struggle, One Fight... So Why Are Our Allies All Chowing Down on Steaks and Burgers?

2014-08-23T09:14:00-04:00

What follows is the transcript of a presentation by Norm Phelps, a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians, at a Compassionate Action for Animals conference. The transcript was originally hosted on Their Lives, Our Voices, but for some unknown reason was taken down. I liked the aritcle and wanted to reprint it here. Note that I do not necessarially agree with the entire article. Also note that I do not have formal permission to reprint this, and will comply with any takedown request.

Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking the folks at Compassionate Action for Animals for putting this conference together and for giving me the opportunity to participate. It’s a great conference, and I hope you’re all enjoying it as much as I am.

One struggle, one fight: human freedom, animal rights. That’s a chant you don’t hear as much as you used to, probably because our tactics have evolved away from the heavy reliance on demonstrations and marches that defined the early days of animal rights. But even so, I know very few animal rights advocates who don’t believe that human rights and animal rights are inextricably tied together.

Before I go any farther, I want to explain what I mean by human rights. I will use the term in a very broad sense, to include human rights narrowly defined—freedom from oppression by unjust political regimes or by insurgents against established regimes, but I also include as human rights campaigns wider movements such as civil rights, women’s rights, gay, lesbian, and transgendered rights, children’s rights and so on, as well as still broader campaigns, such as those against poverty and hunger, against diseases like malaria and dengue fever; campaigns for trade unionism, for universal health care, and other campaigns intended to end inequality—political, social, economic—that inflicts suffering on disadvantaged human beings. I also include the environmental movement, since in my experience, with the exception of deep ecologists, most environmentalists want to preserve the environment for the benefit of human beings.

At any rate, the same compassionate impulse that led us to support animal rights leads us to support liberation for oppressed human beings. There is a unity of suffering that erases the differences between genders, races, and species. We all belong to the commonwealth of sentient beings, and it is to this commonwealth that we owe our loyalty. The abhorrence of suffering and the dread of death are not the exclusive attributes of any one species, or even of some supposedly “advanced” aggregation of species, such as mammals or vertebrates; they are the common property of all sentient beings.

Purely subjective experiences, such as suffering and joy, fear and comfort, cannot be measured on any transpersonal scale. And so, there can be no question of ranking sentient beings according to some supposedly “objective” scale of consciousness, and deciding that some—let’s say human beings, to take the most commonly cited example—have moral priority over others because they are supposedly “more aware,” or have a “richer” interior life. Joy and suffering are entirely subjective, individual experiences. Their only valid measure is their intensity and importance as these are experienced by their subject. The chicken’s pain is as agonizing to the chicken as my pain is to me. It fills her consciousness, hijacks her life, and destroys her peace in the same way and to the same degree that my pain fills my consciousness, hijacks my life, and destroys my peace. And for that reason, avian pain must be accorded the same level of moral concern as human pain. Similarly, the life of the lobster is the only life he has; it is everything to him. And it is as precious to him as my life is to me. And for that reason, crustacean lives must be accorded the same level of moral concern as human lives.

Morality is absolutely egalitarian or it is immoral. No sentient being is more important than any other sentient being. The proper goal of all ethics is to ease the suffering and extend the lives of others, without regard for their race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, wealth, social standing, species, their ability to use language or make tools, whether they have an endo- or exoskeleton, a centralized or decentralized nervous system, or any other characteristic apart from their sentience. Sentience is the tripwire that activates morality, and as Austrian animal rights philosopher Helmut Kaplan points out, “There is clearly one single moral principle for both animals and human beings, one single moral principle that shows us our proper relationship to both human beings and animals.” This moral principle, Professor Kaplan tells us, is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

This view, expressed by Doctor Kaplan in his 2003 book “The Universal Ethical Principle,”1 was first stated some twenty-five hundred years ago by the ancient sages who created the very concept of morality. The idea that exploiting and murdering nonhuman animals for human benefit is morally wrong first appeared as part and parcel of the same movement that gave birth to the idea that exploiting and murdering human beings is morally wrong.

The creation of this new ethical worldview, a worldview in which ethics was based on morality rather than on ritual purity—as had been the case prior to this—and in which all sentient beings were included on an equal basis, happened in three different places—India, Israel, and Greece—almost simultaneously. This radical transformation in human thought occurred during the uniquely fertile and creative period that 20th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers dubbed “the Axial Age,” the period between roughly 800 and 200 BCE in which human thought pivoted, as if rotating on an axis, and headed off in an entirely new direction, following a trajectory that—I hope—has yet to run its course.

During this Axial Age, Lord Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), the Buddha, the anonymous sages who created Hinduism as it has existed for the last two-thousand years, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, and the Latter Prophets of Judaism all taught an ethic based upon empathy and compassion and applied that ethic equally to human beings and nonhuman animals. To phrase it anachronistically, but accurately, animal rights and human rights originated simultaneously as part of the same movement and represented, at their inception, coequal applications of the same principle. One struggle, one fight might well have been a motto of Lord Mahavira, the Buddha, the Hindu sages, Pythagoras, and the Latter Prophets.

And yet, when modern scholars and religious leaders—at least in the West—consider the Axial Age, they invariably overlook the inclusion of animals in the morality of the great sages. Karen Armstrong, a spiritually oriented scholar and writer who has written a number of excellent books on the history of religion, recently published a comprehensive interpretive history of the Axial Age entitled, appropriately enough, The Great Transformation. Amazingly, Dr. Armstrong all but ignores the central role that nonhuman animals played in Axial Age ethical throught. She makes the bizarre claim that animal sacrifice played an essential role in the development of modern morality, but does not tell us that many of the great Axial Age teachers applied their revolutionary moral principles to our treatment of animals on the same basis that they applied them to our treatment of other human beings.

Given this moral blind spot in our society, perhaps it should come as no surprise that activists in the various human rights movements have lost the connection with the ancient beginnings. They no longer see the unity of suffering and the moral parity of all sentient beings that was taught by the Buddha, Pythagoras, and the Prophets. And so, they fail to see the unity of oppression. In fact—with shockingly few exceptions—human rights activists are every bit as deeply implicated in the slavery and slaughter of nonhuman animals as are the oppressors of humans that they campaign against.

I am aware, for example, of no major secular human rights organization that insists that only vegan food be served at all of its functions. Human rights activists think nothing of serving fried chicken or pate de fois gras at their dinners, but if PETA were to throw a banquet and serve human drumsticks or fattened human liver paste, these good folk would be horrified.

Why is this so? The short answer, of course, is speciesism. But the short answer begs the real question, which is, Why are most human rights activists speciesist, when speciesism would appear to contradict the core beliefs that motivate their activism?

Part of the answer is that they have simply absorbed speciesism from the general society: from their families, from their schools, from the media, etc. etc. And that is plainly true. But that answer still begs the question, and leads us to ask: Why haven’t the empathy and compassion that infuse their human rights activism inspired them to see beyond the speciesism that they grew up with and that surrounds them everywhere? Animal rights is simply the final frontier in the grand enterprise of creating a society that protects and nurtures all who live within the ambit of its power. It would seem that human rights activists should be our strongest supporters, a conclusion that is reinforced by the fact that it was shared by the sages who created the moral values on which human rights are based.

But human rights activists are not our strongest supporters. Most of them aren’t our supporters at all. And to understand why, I think we have to look away from the history for a moment and consider what modern social justice movements do and what they do not do. Social justice movements empower their constituencies. The abolition movement gave Africans living in Europe and the Americas freedom, a certain degree of control over their own lives. The civil rights movement gave African-Americans legal equality, a greater degree of control over their own lives. The women’s suffrage movement empowered women in the political arena, while second wave feminism gave women greater social and economic freedom.

What social justice movements do not do is disempower their advocates. Which is to say that the advocates of a social justice movement—with a few individual exceptions, noteworthy because they are so few—are not drawn from the ranks of those who will be disempowered by the movement’s success. The abolition movement was comprised of blacks and of whites who were not personally invested in slavery. You can count on your fingers the number of Southern slaveholders who supported abolition with anything more than meaningless lip service designed to preserve their reputations outside the South while they continued to benefit from owning slaves. In the same way, the civil rights movement was carried forward by blacks and by whites (primarily in the north, midwest, and west) who did not see themselves as benefitting from legal segregation. There were very few Southern white landowners (who benefitted from the sharecropper system) or Southern white businessmen (who benefitted from cheap black labor) swelling the ranks of the civil rights movement. Turning to second wave feminism, this movement was advanced by women and by men who were not heavily invested in the social and economic inferiority of women. Wife-beaters, pimps, and sweatshop owners—not to mention corporate executives (who liked having a cheap workforce to perform administrative and menial tasks) were not out there marching with feminists. The ranks of the trade union movement have never been swelled by corporate executives and wealthy stockholders. And to cite one last example, loggers, miners, petroleum workers, commercial fishers, and the executives of the companies they work for do not form the backbone of the environmental movement.

The point is this. Most people join social justice movements because they believe that they personally or members of a group that they identify with will benefit from the success of the movement. A good number who are not particularly affected one way or the other join out of a moral sense—simply because it is the right thing to do. (Although this is easy to lose sight of sometimes, morality is still a powerful motivator.) But only the rare individual will join a social justice movement that they believe will disadvantage them in ways that they consider important to their lives, health, comfort, enjoyment, relationships, or convenience.

And now we get to the heart of the matter. The various forms of human oppression: African slavery, legal segregation, the oppression of women, the exploitation of workers, and so on, divide the human race. They create a beneficiary class and a victim class, and in so doing generate their own opposition. Animal slavery and slaughter is the only injustice in human history that does not divide the human race in this way. It is the only injustice in history that does not generate its own opposition by creating a human victim group. Quite the opposite: animal slavery and slaughter unites the human race by offering something for everyone. Everyone benefits—or is perceived as benefitting—from animal abuse and murder. Whether you’re talking about tasty steaks and chops,; the wool business suits, silk blouses and silk neckties that are expected in many office settings; stylish and comfortable leather shoes; a cure for cancer, AIDS, or MS; or if you just enjoy taking the kids to the circus or SeaWorld, there is hardly anyone who does not derive some benefit—material, social, or psychological; real or perceived—from animal slavery and slaughter.

As individuals and as a society, we are more heavily invested—both in terms of its pervasiveness and in terms of its cultural, economic, and psychological importance—in animal slavery and slaughter than any human society has ever been invested in any other form of injustice. The injustice of animal slavery and slaughter not only does not divide us, it draws us together to defend the crime from which we all benefit. We will ignore the most obvious truth and believe the most absurd lie if it will help us defend and extend the crime to which we think we owe so much. Speciesism differs from other varieties of prejudice, such as the racism and sexism after which it was named, in that it creates no human victim group, unites rather than divides the human population, and benefits, at least potentially, every human being on earth.

The consequence of this is that animal rights is radically different from any social justice movement in history in a way that makes other social activists resistant to our message. Animal rights disempowers everyone who commits to living in accordance with its principles. Not just in terms of our physical enjoyments, but socially and psychologically as well.

For example: We all suffer from an innate urge to feel superior to someone else. In my thirty year career as a personnel specialist for the federal government, I observed at first hand, over and over again, a disturbing but nearly universal phenomenon. Employees were less concerned about the absolute amount of their salaries than whether they were paid more or less than the people working around them. No matter how high or how low their rank on the pay scale, everyone wanted the agency to acknowledge that they were superior to at least some of those who worked at a similar level. An important component of racism and sexism is that—independently of any material benefit they may or may not confer—they allow whites to feel superior to blacks and men to feel superior to women. Speciesism allows all human beings to feel superior to animals, and the importance of this would, I think, be hard to overestimate.

This was brought home to me—with a disconcerting twist—some years ago by an African-American co-worker. He was the civil rights officer for our agency, and before coming to work there, he had had a long and honorable history in the civil rights movement. We were workplace friends, and when he learned that I was an animal rights activist, he expressed deep disappointment. “Animal rights,” he told me, “is just another way for white people to say that black people are no better than animals.” He was massively, tragically mistaken. But in the context of his experience of 20th century America, he was not being irrational. As Charles Patterson has chillingly described in Eternal Treblinka, the comparison of people to animals is a classic racist technique for devaluing a victim group. Telling people that there is no one to whom they can feel superior, not even animals, can be devastating in a society with a blatantly racist and sexist past that even today shapes our national life far more than we like to admit. It is a measure of the moral insight and political courage of Dick Gregory and Coretta Scott King that they stand out from nearly all of their comrades in the first rank of the civil rights generation by their espousal of ethical vegetarianism.

The fundamental lie of our society is that hierarchy is essential to order and stability. Apart from animal rights, most social justice movements do not really challenge this lie at any profound level. They pay lip service to moral parity, but their real goal is to elevate their favored group in the hierarchy while leaving the principle of hierarchy intact.

This is the primary challenge facing the animal rights movement, first vis a vis other social justice movements, but also in dealing with the public at large: to undermine the notion of moral hierarchy and replace it with a commitment to moral parity. (This, incidentally, is also the primary difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Animal rights insists on moral parity for all sentient beings; animal welfare maintains the moral hierarchy in which humans are superior to animals, but simply tries to smooth down the rougher edges of our relationship to our supposed inferiors.)

And so, in the face of this challenge, the greatest challenge ever faced by any social justice movement, how should we proceed? Specifically, how should we attempt to convince the advocates of human and environmental social causes that there really is only one struggle, one fight, and we are all in it together and we are all in it equally?

First, we should not give up. Although other social justice movements have a strong component of selfishness, as I have just described, they also have a strong component of altruism and genuine compassion, which for reasons of time I have not dwelt on. It is to that altruism and compassion that we must appeal. It has been my experience that only the two extremes of the intellectual spectrum—philosophers and scientists on the one hand and the marginally educated on the other—try to deny that the pain of animals is as severe to them as our pain is to us. The overwhelming majority of people trust their observation and intuition and recognize that animals feel pain and fear death just as we do.

(But since I have said that, honor is due. Academic philosophers like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Andrew Linzey, Stephen Clark, Carol Adams, Stanley Godlovich, Roslind Godlovich, and a host of others played a critical role in the creation of the animal rights movement, a role comparable to that played by Enlightenment philosophers in the creation of human rights movements. Without them, we would not be here.)

In the coming years, the task of winning over the human rights communities will become easier for two reasons. First, science is beginning to see the light. Cognitive ethologists and evolutionary biologists are demonstrating that the interior lives—both intellectual and emotional—of all manner of sentient beings, from mammals to insects, are far richer and far more like our own than most of us ever imagined. This will strengthen our sense of kinship with nonhumans and break down barriers between human rights and animal rights. Today, the most important work in animal rights is no longer being done by philosophers, but by scientists like Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff, Jeffrey Masson, and Frans de Waal. We are witnessing a revolution in the scientific understanding of animal consciousness that is a true paradigm shift—on a par with the revolution in astronomy that took place during the age of Copernicus and Galileo. And the implications of this for animal rights and for the unification of the human rights and animal rights movements are tremendously encouraging.

Second, as historically disadvantaged human groups, such as African-Americans, become more secure in their first class citizenship, they will become more likely to turn their attention to other causes, including animal rights. A generation of African-Americans that grows up with Barack Obama as president will be far less likely to see animal rights as a way of saying that blacks are no better than animals than a generation that grew up seeing Bull Connor turning police dogs on African-American demonstrators. In this sense, animal rights is very much dependant upon human rights, and as animal rights activists we should always support human rights campaigns not only because it is the right thing to do—which it is—but also because people who are secure in their rights and freedoms are more often inclined to work for the rights and freedoms of others; and they are in a position to do so more effectively.

But although we should support human rights campaigns, we should be careful not to support campaigns that reinforce animal slavery and slaughter. Fighting third world hunger, for example, is a worthwhile and important human rights cause. But some of the groups in the forefront of that campaign, such the Heifer Project International, actively promote animal agriculture. These groups sacrifice animals for human beings. They represent an hierarchical, speciesist approach to human welfare that I believe no animal rights activist should support. We either believe that humans and animals are of equal moral worth or we don’t. Unfortunately, our society is organized in such a way that it is not always possible for us to act on this belief, but where we do have the freedom and ability to do so—as in denying our support to organizations that promote animal agriculture—we surely should.

We should also be wary of entering into alliances with human rights groups unless those groups make a clear, public, and upfront commitment to the moral importance of animals. The massive imbalance of power between humans and animals necessitates, at least for the time being, a single-issue emphasis for the animal rights movement. Up until recently, there has effectively been no vision for animals, and until the animal rights vision—which in its modern incarnation is barely thirty years old—has been thoroughly integrated into the public discourse, it will be extremely difficult to establish alliances with human rights movements that do not carry a grave risk of betraying animals, a risk that in most instances I would regard as unacceptably high. When a human issue comes into conflict with an animal rights issue (as, for example, in the case of using animal agriculture to combat human hunger in the third world), the human rights group will betray the animals every time. (Based on its track record, I consider ecofeminism an exception to this rule; more on that in a moment.)

At the present historical moment, the battle that needs to be won is for widespread recognition of the moral equality of animals; until that is accomplished, alliances with human rights groups will tend to function like yellow caution flags in an automobile race; they will lock everyone into the relative positions that they held when the flag was raised. If animals are at the back of the pack (as they are), they will stay there because we will have traded away our ability to propel them forward independently. Our task now is to establish the principle of moral equality for animals; then will come the opportunity to forge grand alliances. In the meantime, we must not sell the animals’ birthright for a mess of pottage. Which is to say that we must not compromise the principle of moral parity for small, limited concessions by human rights groups.

Not that I would spurn help for animals from individuals or groups whose primary interest is an anthropocentric issue (women’s rights, economic justice, racial justice, whatever), but I would not make alliances with such groups or movements a part of AR strategy until the power and awareness imbalance has been rectified. And so, I think our posture vis a vis human rights movements should have three aspects. The first is patience. Animal rights is gradually working its way into the mainstream public dialogue—in the academic world, it is progressing more rapidly—and its entry into the public and academic discussion will slowly nudge human rights movements in our direction. For the most part, this is probably a generational issue. A younger generation of human rights activists, who went to school and came of age in the era of animal rights, may have to move into positions of leadership in human rights movements before large-scale progress can be made.

The second is that we must engage the human rights movements—politely and respectfully; we are trying to win people over, not score debating points—in a conversation based on the commonalities of our movements. Both human rights and animal rights are grounded in empathy and compassion for suffering sentient beings, and we need to keep this fact as much on the radar screen of human rights groups as possible. Here, the work of ethologists and evolutionary biologists will be invaluable to us in encouraging human rights activists to recognize the common plight of human and nonhuman animals. Human rights activists can decline to support animal rights only to the extent that they fail to recognize that animals have interior lives similar to our own, and that they abhor suffering and dread death just as we do. And it is in demonstrating—over and over for as long as is necessary—the realities of our close kinship with nonhuman animals that we will make progress for animals within the human rights communities.

In carrying on this conversation, it is absolutely vital that we stay focused on the moral issue. Environmental or human health arguments for veganism concede de facto the moral priority of human beings, so while it is fine to use these as supplements to our moral argument, as a way to get the attention of the anthropocentric activist communities, we must always keep the moral argument front and center. There may be reasons other than morality for doing things that liberate animals, but there is no reason except morality for granting animals rights, and we must never lose sight of that fundamental fact.

Arguments based on human or environmental benefit are also treacherous in ways that we cannot always foresee. Scientists are already developing methods—based on feeding regimes and genetic engineering—to eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases resulting from factory farming. When they do so, as they will, one of our main environmental arguments against animal agriculture will have been undercut.

Finally, we must ourselves support human rights issues—after all, those commonalities I have been speaking of cut both ways. Humans are animals, too. Henry Bergh, the great nineteenth century campaigner for animal welfare, was persuaded to campaign for child welfare when someone told him that “a small animal” needed his help. The “small animal” turned out to be a human child being abused by her family. This does not mean that we must reflexively take the politically correct position on every human rights issue. Many of these issues are questions on which intelligent people of good will can differ. But it does mean that we must show the same compassion for human beings that we show for nonhuman animals.

But at the same time, as I said a moment ago, we should be leery of entering into alliances with human rights groups, at least until the consciousness of human rights activists in regard to nonhuman animals has been raised considerably, and in the course of that process, we must stay focused on the moral issue.

At some time in the future… I don’t know when, certainly years, almost certainly decades—when the full moral importance of nonhuman animals has become a mainstream belief—a unified “sentient rights” movement will emerge. Exactly what it will look like, I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball. But there is a movement active today that I believe provides us with one highly credible model for a sentient rights movement, and that is ecofeminism. As defined by many of its leading voices, advocates like Carol Adams, Marti Kheel, Josephine Donovan, Greta Gaard, pattrice jones, and too many others to name, ecofeminism builds a sophisticated theoretical matrix, grounded in empathy and compassion, that encompasses all sentient beings. It stresses the commonalities between its two primary beneficiary groups, human women and nonhuman animals, and makes the unity of suffering and the unity of oppression major themes in its discourse.

The time for it is not yet here. But I have absolute faith that at some point in the future there will be a unified sentient rights movement. And when I try to contemplate what that movement might look like, I turn to ecofeminism.

Thank you.

One Struggle, One Fight... So Why Are Our Allies All Chowing Down on Steaks and Burgers? was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on August 23, 2014.

Interview with Brian Tomasik

2014-08-07T06:10:00-04:00

Some people have committed a great deal of their lives to trying to best make the world a better place. I’m trying to sit down with some of these people and learn more about their thoughts and motivations.

Today, I sit down with Brian Tomasik. Brian worked at Microsoft as a computer programmer, earning a sizable salary that he then donated to important causes. Throughout this time, he also wrote on his blog, Utilitarian Essays, and he is noted for being one of the first people to consider earning to give and donating to vegan outreach, two concepts that are now commonly found in the “effective altruism” community.

Peter Hurford: Hi Brian. When we last talked, you were working on Bing at Microsoft. But I’ve heard that you’ve since left your job there to pursue other projects. What changed?

Brian Tomasik: Microsoft was a great place to work. My job was intellectually interesting, allowed a flexible schedule, paid well per hour, and brought me in contact with really smart people. I appreciated Microsoft’s $12K/year matching-donations limit (now $15K) and the fact that I could use a treadmill desk in my office without people complaining. While earning money was great, I began to realize how many open altruism-related questions I faced in deciding where to donate. Because my approach to ethics is somewhat unique, I didn’t know of anyone else I could pay to work on these questions for me. I knew that these topics would probably take many years to explore and were beyond what I could do in my free time. So, in early 2013, I began plans for starting my own organization to work on basic-research questions in altruism. My collaborators and I eventually decided to call it Foundational Research Institute (FRI). I left Microsoft in October 2013 to spend more time reading, writing, and thinking about issues like artificial intelligence, consciousness, cooperation, and future trajectories from the perspective of aiming primarily to reduce suffering.

P: That sounds like a lot to give up. With all your compensation at Microsoft, you could be funding a lot of people to do research instead of doing it yourself. Why do you think it might be higher value for you to work on these projects instead?

B: It’s a tough decision, and I still think a lot about where my efforts would accomplish the most. Right now, FRI is my top priority for a few reasons.

Figuring out what you value, what actions best advance those values, and what charities best contribute toward those actions is a lifelong process of exploration. It’s easier if you have relatively mainstream values, because then you might take the recommendations of a charity evaluator or other friends who have thought hard about this question. However, that’s less feasible in my case. I’m not aware of any existing organization with the foremost goal of reducing suffering that has systematically explored interventions to shape the far future in light of artificial intelligence and other crucial considerations. This is new ground that needs breaking.

Potentially I could have tried to hire others to study these questions for me, but in practice, I’m not aware of many other people I could have hired. (I’d love to find more!) Many of my collaborators on these questions feel that my contributions to this field have been non-replaceable. These people helped persuade me that my ideas were sufficiently valuable that they would be worth giving up my Microsoft income to explore further. I also personally feel that I contribute some perspectives that others have overlooked, and I need to exercise some degree of due diligence rather than just trusting the opinions of others who explore these questions.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that the cost to hire a researcher is often more than her salary; it also includes the opportunity costs of what she would have been doing instead, which might include earning to give in her own right. The best researchers are likely to have higher opportunity costs. So it’s not clear that my Microsoft income could have paid for several good FRI researchers.

The situation may change in the future. Perhaps in 5 years FRI will have additional researchers to explore ways to shape the future with an eye toward reducing the most suffering. It’s also likely that I’ll have a better overall picture of the world and diminishing marginal insights. At that point I can re-evaluate my options, and earning to give would be on the table. By that point the question of where to donate would be more clear, since I would then be able to donate to a self-sustaining FRI.

Alan Kay famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Analogously, if you have unusual values, one way to find an effective charity is to create it. I don’t mean that FRI is likely to be more efficient by objective metrics like output or influence per dollar than other charities. The principle of mediocrity argues against that. Rather I mean that adjusted for value differences relative to other organizations, FRI’s work is likely to be among the most useful per dollar for those whose focus is reducing suffering. And even if not, then FRI can point to other charities that seem to be more effective than itself.

P: So it seems like you’re intensely interested in the question of reducing suffering. Most of my friends aren’t like this – instead, they’re concerned with a specific kind of suffering, like getting rid of cancer, and even then, that concern doesn’t inform everything they do. Why is suffering in general so interesting to you, as opposed to specific kinds of suffering, and why is that concern so dominating in your life?

B: I’ll start with the second part – why is suffering so dominating? Subjectively, the reason is that when I see or imagine extreme suffering – such as being eaten alive or fried to death in a brazen bull – it seems overwhelmingly apparent that preventing such experiences is the most important thing in the world, and nothing else can compare.

This intuition seems clear enough to most of us when we imagine the suffering happening nearby. If someone was being tortured in a way that could be prevented in the room next door, few of us would hesitate to stop whatever we were doing and go help. But when distance and uncertainty stand in the way, this intuition fades, and people become preoccupied with goals like ensuring interesting, complex, and awesome futures. Of course, I get plenty distracted as well – doing so is only human, and it’s necessary for our emotional wellbeing. But I know in my heart that these other pursuits are only instrumentally valuable, and nothing besides reducing extreme suffering really matters when people and animals are being tortured as we speak.

What I’ve described is analogous to Peter Singer’s drowning-child thought experiment. But in addition to making the case for altruism, my analogy further argues for a kind of prioritarianism in which preventing extreme suffering is more urgent than, say, creating additional happy lives or beautiful art or other forms of value. Because torture-level suffering will likely always exist in some form somewhere within the reach of our influence to prevent it, prioritarianism is in practice equivalent to a focus on reducing suffering over and above other goals.

While I see this argument as relatively convincing on its own merits, I seem more persuaded by it than many people. I think one reason is that I experienced a great deal of physical pain in 2002, when I was dealing with a condition called esophagitis. The pain continued in mild form for a few years thereafter. I think this has rewired my brain to show me just how overriding suffering is compared with other goals. Matt Ball expressed a similar sentiment when describing his youth:

Back then, I worried about abstractions and words and principles; I argued about exploitation, oppression, liberation, etc. I didn’t take suffering seriously. Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem - well, to put it kindly, ridiculous.

It’s easier to answer why I care about any form of extreme suffering rather than just particular forms. I can generalize from knowing that particular experiences I’ve seen or witnessed were agonizingly terrible to realizing that similar sorts of experiences from other causes would also be agonizingly terrible. I have not personally suffered nearly as much as most torture victims or dying wild animals, but I can take what I have experienced and multiply it in my imagination to attempt some degree of comprehension of the horror they have endured.

Based on my own experience and intuitions of others, I think extreme suffering is in some sense qualitatively different from mundane suffering. There’s something so much worse about extreme suffering that even comparing torture with, say, stubbing your toe seems to trivialize torture. Only the really intense forms of suffering demand moral urgency.

P: Have you come to any important realizations from your research yet? What do you think the impact of your research is so far?

B: For concreteness, I’ll define “my research” as things I’ve realized and written about in the last 1.5 years. There have been many course-changing insights. They’ve affected not just me but many of my Swiss colleagues and some other people I know through Facebook. The most tangible impacts may have been to shift where some people donate and where FRI applies future research resources, but the long-run changes to our frameworks for thinking about these questions are likely much bigger.

Some examples of insights:

I now think the work of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is more likely to reduce expected suffering than increase it, and I now think MIRI is among the best places to donate. In early 2013, I had no idea whether MIRI’s work was more likely good or bad. I still have significant uncertainty, but I’d say there’s maybe a ~70% chance I’ll continue to support MIRI ten years from now.
I think cooperation – both at the international level and the interpersonal level – is more important than I had previously realized. AI arms races may be a significant driving force behind dangerous AI in coming decades. Interventions that improve cooperation, social norms, discourse, reflectiveness, and institutions for positive-sum improvements seem reasonably likely to be robustly positive. I now support the principle of coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) for reasons of strategic compromise. Even though CEV will never happen in practice, we can work toward approximations, like democracy and philosophical sophistication.
I’ve downshifted my probability for a hard AI takeoff in favor of soft-takeoff scenarios. This means that society as a whole is more likely to play a role in AI development than I would have thought, and military, economic, political, and social dynamics around AI are likely to be important.
I’ve changed from seeing consciousness as having a narrow, relatively clear cutoff to being a broad, fuzzy continuum. I now realize that sentience should be considered a graded property of systems, and every system is at least slightly conscious. Subjectively, I feel this has been one of the biggest Copernican shifts of my life, and I think I have a much better understanding of the issues at play than a year ago, even if other philosophers disagree with my conclusions. In practical terms, this realization has made it more apparent that the instrumental computations of even a rogue, uncontrolled AI would be somewhat morally problematic. I also now care a little bit about plants and bacteria, although not nearly as much as I care about insects.

These are just some highlights, and in reality, many of the pieces I’ve written since early 2013 represent updates in my views. That said, I have noticed some decline in insights per unit time recently, which may suggest increased convergence in my thinking. On the other hand, I thought my views were pretty well converged in 2010-2012, but then I had a huge number of discoveries in 2013. I expect that many priority shifts due to known and unknown unknowns remain on the horizon.

P: How did you get started at writing on utilitarian-essays.com?

B: In 11th grade, I had an English teacher who focused his class around philosophy. Most high schools never teach philosophy, so I was fortunate to be exposed to the subject. My teacher assigned his students a 500-word journal entry every week, typically on a philosophical topic. This got me into the habit of writing philosophical essays, and I continued doing so on my own after the class ended.

One of the philosophers that we learned about was Epicurus, and his idea of subjective experience as the ultimate good resonated with me. I noticed how, selfishly, I only cared about my own feelings, and hence altruistically I would care about the feelings of everyone who had feelings. I only really thought about humans at this point, because I mistakenly believed that animals probably didn’t have feelings due to lacking language and true self-reflection. (This position is not dissimilar from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s, though obviously I didn’t have his degree of sophistication at the time.)

I also noticed how people were often irrational in apportioning resources (e.g., fighting terrorism getting vastly more funding than addressing world hunger, even though the latter kills orders of magnitude more than the former). I suggested using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate policies, taking into account opportunity costs and counterfactual reasoning.

In spring 2005, my public-policy teacher used the word “utilitarian” in class, and I didn’t know what it meant. Once I got home, I looked it up, and I discovered a philosophy called “utilitarianism”, including a wonderful site of Utilitarian Philosophers by Pablo Stafforini. I began eating up the Peter Singer articles on that site. One topic that I found particularly important was Singer’s defense of animal sentience, which revolutionized my view of the world’s priorities. I began writing more about utilitarianism in my private essay collection.

Caring about animals led me to discover Vegan Outreach, from which I contacted Matt Ball, who passed me along to another utilitarian friend of his. That friend introduced me to the ideas of Yew-Kwang Ng, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, and many others.

In June 2006, I read David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative, after which I wrote to David with comments. I included the collection of utilitarian-related essays that I had been accumulating since roughly 2004. David wrote back: “My first (and utilitarian!) response was: how can I encourage you to get a website?” David soon gave me the domain utilitarian-essays.com and still helps maintain my site to this day.

P: It seems like you might have more influence if you wrote for a wider audience, such as at LessWrong. Why haven’t you chosen to do that?

B: Writing on LessWrong or related forums is a reasonable suggestion. I do share my essays on Facebook when they’re published. The reasons I haven’t posted on LessWrong more are:

I think my essays look more authoritative on a stand-alone site than in a forum setting
Sometimes what I write about is not of sufficient interest elsewhere, and I don’t want to bore people
It might look bad if I didn’t reply to comments, but I’m also not sure that reading comments and engaging in discussions is the best use of time. It may or may not be depending on the issue. In general I try to read more famous authors or at least peer-reviewed publications, which I find can be more insightful per paragraph than comments on Internet forums, though this depends a lot on the topic and the forum. For some relatively uncharted questions, forum comments are like gold.

P: A lot of your writing these days seems to focus on Wikipedia, and you have racked up an impressive list of contributions there. Could you briefly outline why you think editing Wikipedia is such an important outlet for your research?

B: I wrote an essay listing many reasons to favor contributing to Wikipedia on altruism-relevant subjects, including not reinventing the wheel by writing what has already been written, large readership, credibility, peer review, and being forced to maintain a balanced perspective on a topic. When I want to learn about an issue, Wikipedia is typically the first place I go, and I suspect the same is true for many people reading this interview. Wikipedia is an immense public good that we may often take for granted.

I’m trying to take a big-picture view of many issues before getting deeply engrossed in technical minutiae, so that I can pick areas of focus that I find most important. This contrasts with the standard approach in academia where you often have to zero in on a microscopic piece of one subject area in order to make novel contributions. Because I’m mostly not making novel contributions but rather am absorbing knowledge that already exists, Wikipedia is a great place for me to be. It allows me to accomplish something with my reading beyond just privately improving my own understanding of the world.

On a few occasions I’ve had the experience of proposing a research topic and then hearing people reply, “Oh, that has been discussed in papers A, B, C, D, and E.” I think to myself, “Thanks – that’s great. But I need to get the information from papers A-E into my head. That takes time. In addition, there are probably papers F-Z that would also be relevant that I haven’t found yet.” Most of the effort in cause-prioritization research is not in inventing novel findings but rather in accumulating nuggets of insight from a vast sea of information that already exists. Wikipedia is a natural way to attack this problem because Wikipedia is the world’s definitive summary of a topic. If you read papers A-E, you should consider adding a sentence or two describing each of them to relevant Wikipedia articles, so that others who want an overview can read your summaries, get a big-picture understanding, and have links to the papers if needed. And because Wikipedia is coherently organized, readers will be able to absorb the insights in a sensible and content-addressable fashion. In many ways, Wikipedia is the ultimate platform for altruism research.

Some altruists prefer to summarize existing knowledge on their own websites in order to increase traffic to their organizations. In general, effective altruists may underestimate the value of Wikipedia because it mainly benefits people outside their movement. I think these ideas rely on a false assumption that effective-altruist organizations are vastly more important than what everyone else in the world is doing. It’s easy to see your own work with rose-tinted glasses and assume that the efforts of others aren’t as useful. This is a bias on our part. Many people throughout the world are doing immensely valuable projects, even if they don’t realize it or label those projects as altruism. Wikipedia contributions help many people whom we will never meet and whose future contributions we’ll never find out about; that doesn’t mean we didn’t facilitate their work.

Of course, the world contains many harmful and risk-increasing projects as well. For this reason, I recommend “differential Wikipedia progress” in which we contribute mainly on topics where additional knowledge seems likely to be used beneficially. That said, I suspect ~95% of Wikipedia articles are either net good for the world (e.g., the wild animal suffering article) or basically neutral (celebrity biographies, TV episode guides, etc.). A few of the contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia have been just for fun or my own personal edification rather than altruistic impact.

P: Contributing to Wikipedia feels like a good idea for someone doing a lot of research on their own, but do you think there are ways a more typical person could still contribute? Would that be worthwhile?

B: It’s actually not hard to make small contributions to Wikipedia. If you read an academic paper or news article on a topic you want to share with others, you can do a search like {author-surname keyword site:wikipedia.org} to see if what you want to cite is already mentioned somewhere. If not, you can find a relevant article and add a sentence or two with your citation. The whole process could take just a few minutes. If it feels daunting at first, that may be just because you’re not used to it.

I think Wikipedia is one of the easiest ways to make a meaningful contribution in one’s free time, and the work can be neatly packed into small, discrete chunks. But of course there are other things you can do as well. I have a page describing some ideas for spreading concern for wild-animal suffering, but many of those suggestions apply to other causes. And you can probably invent many ideas on your own.

I find that it’s often better to just try something on your own and see how it goes than to over-analyze whether it’s the best thing to do or create bureaucracy in order for it to get done. Keep learning, experimenting, and changing course based on how things turn out. I’m thinking of my personal experience when saying this, but we can see similar patterns in companies, where big companies stereotypically may be slow to innovate because they over-analyze and over-bureaucratize. Wikipedia’s model seems better: Be bold, just do what you planned to do, and let other people get involved in an organic, asynchronous fashion. That said, I can imagine legitimate debate about these issues. For instance, if you don’t have bureaucracy, it may be harder to divide labor with comparative advantage in mind. There are structural and efficiency reasons why small, fast companies become big and slow.

P: I also saw that you’ve recently been working on a small video series. What do you think you’ve gotten out of this?

B: At the moment I have two videos on YouTube. I created them because I woke up one day and decided it would be fun to make a video and see how it would come out. This relates directly to what I said in my previous answer: I like to just try stuff in a low-cost fashion and learn from the experience, without worrying about its apparent effectiveness. These particular videos were decently successful (together they got more than 500 views), but even if they weren’t, it was a fine use of a few hours to create them.

This approach of trying stuff to learn what it’s like and see how it goes is also a reason why I decided to submit a paper to an academic journal, build AdWords campaigns for some organizations, and create the FRI podcast. Doing many things can improve my understanding of what different parts of altruism work are like. This is also something I appreciate about being on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators: I can get a first-hand glimpse at the internals of what a charity does in a way that I wouldn’t have if I were just an external donor.

P: Cool. With all this writing and time to yourself to do whatever you think is high priority, you must have a less typical schedule. What would you say your typical day is like?

B: I don’t work on a plan or schedule. Instead I do whatever I’m in the mood for at a given moment. This makes work effortless and probably improves productivity. Sometimes I get in the flow of writing an essay or Wikipedia article and try to ignore everything else until I’m done with it. On other days, I don’t have anything specific to finish and instead try to “pick up the crumbs”, i.e., do those little tasks that built up while I got distracted with a bigger project.

Taking an average across all days might give something like the following breakdown, though I don’t keep track explicitly:

10 hours: sleep
1.5 hours: physical maintenance and manual chores (during some of which I can listen to podcasts)
2.5 hours: reading and responding to emails and Facebook discussions
1.5 hours: exercise while watching YouTube videos or a movie
2 hours: random small tasks, including little jobs for other people and monitoring Google Grants, Wikipedia updates, website traffic, my to-do list, etc.
2.5 hours: tangible altruism-related work like fixing a website, Animal Charity Evaluators board meetings, or discussing strategy
4 hours: reading and writing (with more emphasis on the reading part).

I think it’s important to read a lot (or listen to audio content) in order to produce useful writing. Elijah Young has said: “If you can’t think of anything to write, you’re probably not reading enough.” Of course, some of my writings are based on personal experience, long-term observations, and/or theory. But especially on empirical topics, good writing generally requires good background knowledge.

P: Some people feel like “saving the world” all the time is too much and they need some balance in their life, so they might give only 10% of their income and 10% of their time, instead of all of it. It’s comforting that you make sure to spend a large amount of time on self-maintenance and sleep. What are your thoughts on this balance?

B: I think the question assumes a premise that is (happily) misguided. There’s not a hard distinction between “save the world” work and everything else we do. Our altruism stands on the shoulders of the rest of our lives. We need to learn how the world works at a deep level to direct our altruism in helpful directions. This learning takes many decades and is happening all the time through our experiences. Likewise, earning money and developing social connections are other resources that we build as we go through life. Certainly some uses of time are more valuable per hour than others, but even relaxation is important when it keeps our moods positive and ensures that we enjoy our altruistic activities.

I think altruism should generally be fun, and if it’s not, you might consider how else you can contribute to reducing suffering that is fun. There are so many ways to make a difference that the process doesn’t need to be a burden. There’s no law stating that good accomplished is proportional to amount of sacrifice on your part (even if perhaps social praise increases with degree of sacrifice because of the need to generate incentives for unpleasant tasks like military service or providing emergency aid). And if altruism is fun, then the problem of how much of it to do compared against other leisure activities becomes less potent.

One way to make altruism more exciting is to become friends with other altruists. It’s natural to be more interested in what your friends are interested in. For me, the boundary between socializing and saving the world often breaks down; they are often the same thing.

Finally, as noted previously, I “waste” some time on so-called non-altruistic activities as well. In the past I found this troubling, but I’ve grown to realize that it’s part of being a finite human who needs many forms of rejuvenation. If you feel burned out, you’re probably pushing yourself too hard. Let yourself relax a bit without feeling guilty.

On the flip side, if you think about altruism very little, try increasing that somewhat. 10% of your effort seems a reasonable goal. Then you can evaluate where you are and see if you’re inspired to do more. But remember that “altruism time” is not clearly defined. Ask yourself whether one of your ideal hobbies or careers is altruistically valuable even if it’s not what most effective altruists spend their time doing.

P: Thanks, Brian. I really appreciate that closing thought. I’m glad to have followed the work you’re doing and wish you continued success! I’ll eagerly be following what you do next.

Interview with Brian Tomasik was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on August 07, 2014.

The Making of the Personal Review: Behind the Scenes

2014-07-16T01:00:00-04:00

Earlier, I just released a personal review. I try to do these every three months to give my life some direction and continue to strive for something. These reviews, and the broader effective altruism movement in which I operate, together give my life a lot of purpose.

Some people have asked me how I make these personal reviews. I’m here to tell you. I like my workflow a lot and it works well for me, but I’m not endorsing this as the “best way” to create a personal review, and other things might be better / more efficient, or work better / more efficiently for you in particular.

Really Quick Summary

I have goals.
I track time in Google Calendar.
I use GTimeReport to export my Google Calendar for the desired date horizon.
I go through my time report and combine things into categories.
I publish those categories and compare them against my goals.

Having Goals

The first step to writing a personal review is having goals you want to review your progress against. Putting some thought into this is important.

Some people will tell you that it’s not important to have goals.

…Zen Habits says the best goal is no goal. Maybe that works for him, and it’s not like he isn’t accomplished. But he found goals to get in his way. I like goals.

…Some say to focus on systems (daily processes that get you closer to your goals) instead of goals – I think this is mostly right, which is why I focus on systems a lot. But I don’t forget the goals; the reasons why the systems are there in the first place.

But many people don’t yet have goals. They yearn to do something, but they don’t have a goal.

So the first goal is to get some goals. But where to start?

Do more of what you enjoy: Maybe you want to make time to practice guitar or learn computer programming, but are having trouble fitting it into your schedule? Maybe you want to excercise? Commit to doing more!
Do less of what you dislike: Maybe you want to cut down on junk food, or lose weight? Maybe you want to oversleep less or hold less grudges? You can work to eliminate the negative in your life.

Tracking Time

I personally track every minute of my day with Google Calendar. My calendar ends up looking like this:

This allows me to plan for what I want to do and record what I actually did all in the same place, which is very convenient for me.

But there are other ways to track your time. You could track time spent on goals directly in Beeminder. Toggl also looks nice.

Exporting and Compiling a Log

At the end of your review period, you can then compile how well you did on your goals and compare them to how well you wanted to do. Toggl and Beeminder both let you see your totals pretty easily.

Google is less easy – I did my first review by hand, but then I discovered GTimeReport to export my Google Calendar for the desired date horizon. GTimeReport makes an Excel Spreadsheet that I can then tabulate into goal-related categories. There are other Google Calendar export services as well.

Reflect!

The last step is to reflect on why you succeeded or failed.

If you succeeded – congratulations! – how are you going to repeat, and build upon, your success?

If you failed – sorry to hear that – how are you going to avoid failure in the future? Was your goal just too hard, or were you missing an important system to prevent yourself from failing?

Be honest with yourself, but kind. Work out ways to do better.

The Making of the Personal Review: Behind the Scenes was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on July 16, 2014.

Interesting Mathematical Relationship

2014-07-13T20:00:00-04:00

Today I found an interesting mathematical relationship where if you define f(x) such that

and you define f(0) = c and f(1) = 2c, then f(x) = 3f(x-1) for all x = 2.

Why is that?

UPDATE: This was figured out in this Facebook thread. Also, it was found that the relationship is true for all x > 2 for f(0) and f(1) of any values.

Interesting Mathematical Relationship was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on July 13, 2014.

Personal Review for May-June 2014

2014-07-13T01:00:00-04:00

Follow up to “Personal Review for March - May 2014”.

This review covers May 18 through June 29. The reason I’m doing this review for 1.5 months instead of the standard three is two-fold: (a) this time period is very neatly bounded by large shifts in my life – graduating college on the 17th of May and starting at my first job on the 30th of June and (b) I need to end this cycle early if I want to get on a standard Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec, Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun three month review cycle.

How Did I Spend My Time?

For these 1.5 months, I was focused primarially on pre-professional prep (learning a lot more statistics and programming) and secondarially on seeing friends and family. Here’s the breakdown:

Activity	Total Time	Hours Per Week[1]	% Week
Sleep	351.5hrs	51.3hrs	30.5%
Social[2]	253.8	37	22%
Other[3]	167.3	24.4	14.5%
Programming	121.3	17.7	10.5%
Breaks	63.3	9.2	5.5%
.impact	25	3.6	2.1%
Move to Chicago	18.5	2.7	1.6%
Exercise	11.8	1.8	1%
Driving[4]	11.8	1.7	1%
Apartment Hunt	6.8	1	4.1%
Write	6.25	0.9	0.5%

1: On average – obviously not all of these activities took place every week.

2: In previous Personal Reviews, this was listed as “Friends”, but the category is the same. This is just a more accurate title as “Friends” always included “Family” too.

3: People have been interested in the past in what such a large “Other” category could entail, so I’ll disclose the precise breakdown in the next section.

4: This involved work toward getting a driver’s liscense.

Individual Breakdown for “Other”

Since some people asked last time, I’ve broken down the “other” category:

Activity	Hours Per Week
Tasks[1]	6.5
Daily/Weekly Reviews	5.9
Shower/Hygeine	3.2
Email[2]	1.8
Clean/Pack/Unpack[3]	1.5
Clothes Shopping[4]	1.3
Errands	1.1
Banking/Finances	0.7
Notes[5]	0.5
Haircut	0.3
Prepare Food[2]	0.3
Employment Forms	0.2
Dentist	0.2
Laundry	0.1
Research	0.4
Travel[3]	0.4

1: This consists of doing assorted small things from my to-do list.

2: For both preparing food and email, some of these times were in “Tasks” instead. I estimate that my actual time spent preparing food is ~e1hr a week and doing email is ~3.5hrs a week.

3: Not counting what was related to moving to Chicago.

4: This was a one-day 9hr shopping spree to do a once-in-three-years wardrobe update to prepare for the professional world. Not typical.

5: This mostly involves thinking about ideas and recording them.

What Did I Accomplish?

Pre-professional Prep

I’m a bit dissapointed that – despite making it my primary focus and no longer having school to compete – the amount of time I spent working on learning computer programming only bumped up by half an hour a week. I fell far short from my target goal of being a full-time 40hr/wk learner and didn’t even make the goal I thought would be so easy of being a part-time 20hr/wk learner.

However, the total output of my work was still pretty good, I think. I spent 20.5 hours learning more front-end development with HTML5/CSS including redesigning my personal website to look really beautiful. I spent 60.5 hours learning more Ruby on Rails and 24.25 hours learning Ruby syntax in particular. I also spent 12 hours learning more JavaScript.

Two weeks into my job, I think I adequately prepared myself, though I still would have benefited from doing maybe another 100 hours of work, if only to get some more confidence.

EA Projects

I originally didn’t want to do any EA Projects work, though I did predict I’d find it hard to tear myself away from it. Therefore, it’s not much of a surprise to find that I did about as much EA Projects work per week during this review cycle as I did during the last review cycle.

I wrote two research pieces – “How Much Suffering is in the Standard American Diet?” and “A Re-Analysis of ACE’s Leaflet Study” – to further understand the potential for vegetarian advocacy. I worked on the ongoing EA survey and I also worked on furthering .impact.

Socializing

At 37 hours a week, I definitely spent most of my (awake) time socializing. I spent more time with my girlfriend and family, which is great. I also spent a good amount of time with my old high school friends – and given that we’re now scattered all over the country, it might be a long time, if ever, that I see them all again… I also got to go back to the Origins Game Fair, which was really neat, and a great opportunity to see some old and new friends from college.

Moving to Chicago

I moved to Chicago and got a Real Job(TM), which is pretty cool, I guess? It took a lot more work than I expected to prepare for this, stressing over getting an apartment and buying furniture and what not.

Driver’s Liscence

I finally accomplished a goal that I’ve been chasing since the very first blog post here more than a year and a half ago – after two failed attempts, I finally got my driver’s liscense! I’m now authorized to operate a motor vehicle, and I think I will respond to this newfound freedom by continuing to avoid owning a car for as long as possible.

I did drive all by myself precisely one time… to go to the dentist’s office. Fun times indeed!

Goals for the Next Review

Back in January in “My Case Study: I (Mostly) Finished Choosing Between Careers”, I outlined that I’d like to have “full-time employment for 40-60 hours a week, but then spending significant portion of my ‘free time’ volunteering and doing EA side projects”. I later clarified in “Personal Review for December 2013 - February 2014” that “[b]y splitting my time this way, I hope to learn a lot more about my earning potential, my ability to do EA projects, and how the value of these two things might compare.”

The next review will be on November 1. However, my lease and internship here runs out by the end of August. So by the next review, I should be settled into whatever my next opportunity will be, even if it’s a permanent position at my current place.

It’s time to bucle down and see if this plan works and what I can learn from it.

Curious how this review was made? See “The Making of the Personal Review: Behind the Scenes” for more.

Personal Review for May-June 2014 was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on July 13, 2014.

A Better Way to Learn Programming? Notes on The Odin Project

2014-07-09T22:57:00-04:00

Follow up to “So You Wanna Learn How to Code? Going from Zero to Programmer Hero in One Guide, for Great Justice”.

I’m currently working as a computer programmer at a start-up in Chicago. I’m getting paid to write code. It’s pretty neat. Most notably, I was not a Computer Science major in college, and I only took two CS classes. I got the job nearly entirely through about 700 hours of self study.

Best of all, you can do it too!

I wrote a guide on how to go from “zero to hero” in computer programming. I got a lot of people I know who program to contribute. I think it’s a pretty good guide, linking a few resources together into a coherent curriculum. In fact, I think it is the best guide you could find, short of working full-time to develop a complete online curriculum of their own.

Well, turns out someone did work full-time to develop a complete online curriculum of their own.

Enter The Odin Project.

Visit there, and find a complete curriculum, focused on Ruby on Rails, that takes you from zero to hero in a fulfulling way. Best of all, they focus on doing projects, so you actually learn by doing.

I went through it and now, after a few months, I’ve completed the curriculum in entirety. I must say, I’m forced to admit defeat. I find it much easier, more thorough, and more motivating than my own guide. I recommend people follow through it instead of follow my own guide.

…That being said, I do have some modifications I’d like to see to The Odin Project. So consider doing The Odin Project, except with the following modifications. I advise that you read these notifications in their entirety before starting The Odin Project, and then follow them as they come up.

Things You Should Skip

The first thing you should know about The Odin Project (TOP) is that they tend to overload on large heapings of repetition. For real beginners, this is often a feature and not a bug. However, don’t be afraid to skip through things or skim things if you already understand them. It is frequently unnecessary to do every reading unless you’re confused on a concept. This is doubly true for “Additional Resources” – the initial allegedly “required” resources are already more than enough, and you should rarely need to consult any of the “Additional Resources”.

Here are some things I particularly advise skipping, to save time:

When TOP links you to a YouTube video that’s longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably unnecessary. Skim the videos or ignore them entirely. Don’t forget you can speed them to 1.5x (or often even 2x) to get through them quicker, as they tend to be pretty slow.

Course “1: Introduction to Web Development” is cute and fun to read, but, in my opinion, not really necessary. Skip it if you’d like. If you do read it, try and skim. Don’t spend too much of your time here.

For “Web Development 101 » The Basics » 2: How Does the Web Work?”, I don’t think you really need to spend nearly that much time understanding the internet. It might come up on an interview question or two, but a thorough understanding isn’t really necessary outside the interview. Just watch the “Not Tubes” video and then move on to the next lesson.

Skip “Web Development 101 » Web Development Frameworks » 3: Backbone.js” it’s more confusing than helpful and you end up reviewing it in its proper detail later, after you understand more stuff.

Things You Should Do More Of

Overall, I think you should be skipping more of TOP and getting through it faster than they tell you to, so you get to the good stuff quicker. However, there are a few cases where I think TOP doesn’t have you do enough, and slowing down is warranted.

In “Web Development 101 » The Front End » 4: jQuery Basics”, you’ll get a chance to do lessons from either Codecademy or Code School. I personally found it highly to do lessons from both, because they emphasize different things and the repetition is useful. Code School does a better job of explaining in my opinion, so I highly recommend doing all of Code School’s lessons first, then do all of Codecademy’s lessons. Also, TOP tells you that the remaining sections on events are extra credit, but I think that they’re important to do, so I’d instruct you to fully complete both Codecademy and Code School lessons for jQuery.

In “Ruby Programming » Intermediate Ruby » Project: OOP”, I chose to do some additional work: make an AI for the Tic-Tac-Toe program that plays optimally. I think this was a worthwhile learning experience, and I urge you to try it.

I don’t think you should build a copy of Tic-Tac-Toe in JavaScript as TOP has you do – Snake an Minesweeper seem like enough. But I do think there is an important lesson to be had with Tic-Tac-Toe and JavaScript: a much better exercise to make an Ajax front-end for the Ruby Tic-tac-toe you already created earlier in the courses. After you complete “Javascript and jQuery » Better Forms with jQuery and AJAX » Project: Infinite Scroll and Submitting a Form with AJAX”, do this.

Let’s Fix The Learning Ruby Section

I’ll be honest – TOP is great, but I don’t like the TOP’s approach to learning Ruby much at all. It just throws too many resources at you, and you never learn everything you need at once. So, when you get to “Web Development 101 » The Back End » 2: Ruby Basics”, freeze. We’re going to fix this.

Skip this lesson entirely. Do not do “Web Development 101 » The Back End » 2: Ruby Basics” – just mark it as complete and move on.

Instead, go to Codecademy’s Ruby Track and complete it entirely. Throughout the course, TOP will make you complete it all eventually anyway in stages, so we might as well get it out of the way now. This way, you’ll get a better mastery of some things that come up in TOP before they’re introduced.

Then, after your done with Codecademy’s Ruby Track, read Chris Pine’s “Learn to Program” and then read Chapters 1-3 of Peter Cooper’s “Beginning Ruby”. Also review Tutorial Point on Ruby Loops, which is a resource I like that isn’t in TOP, and important for the things TOP focuses on.

This counts as you completing this lesson. Go on to the next lesson “Testing Basics”. Note that you have completely ignored tryruby.org, “Ruby in 100 Minutes”, and Ruby Monk and this is for the best, because I don’t think they’re very good resources, and you should have already learned everything they teach 2-3x over through the resources you did consult. Doing it five times seems like overkill (see “Things You Should Skip”).

Since you did things a little out of order, you’ll need the following clean-up.

When you get to “Ruby Programming » Basic Ruby » 2: Ruby Building Blocks” you’ll realize that you’ve been plopped in quite well, having already completed assignments 1-5. Continue from assignment 6. Skip assignment 9.

When you get to “Ruby Programming » Basic Ruby » 3: Advanced Ruby Building Blocks” skip all the assignments and go straight to the Code Quizzes. Complete those. If you do well (>87% on each), continue. Otherwise, go back and review, and try again. Try to really understand why you got each question wrong.

When you get to “Ruby Programming » Intermediate Ruby » 1: Object Oriented Programming”, skip assignment 1 because you have already done it.

Reorder the JavaScript and jQuery Readings

For “Javascript and jQuery » The Basics and the Browser » 2: Javascript Basics”, I think now is a better time to do some of the readings that TOP puts off for later. So read the following links now and not later:

1.) “Agent Cooper on Comparing JS and Ruby”

2.) “Ruby vs. Javascript Functions”

For “Javascript and jQuery » Deeper into Javascript” and “Javascript and jQuery » Advanced Browser Work”, I have different opinions than the authors of the Odin Project. In my opinion, the readings make more sense when they are presented like this:

1.) “JavaScript Objects in Detail”

2.) “JavaScript Prototype in Plain Detailed Language”

3.) “OOP in JavaScript – What You Need to Know”

…Now, pause to build something object oriented. I don’t think re-creating Tic-tac-toe in JavaScript is necessary – Minesweeper and Snake should already be enough. So build something object oriented, but simpler. I’m not very good at exercises, but maybe build a town full of people objects, and then make professions (like doctor, police officer, etc.) that inherit from “person” but do special things.

…Now back to reading.

4.) “JavaScript Variable Scope and Hoisting Explained”

5.) “Understand JavaScript Closures with Ease”

6.) “Understand JavaScript Callback Functions and Use Them”

7.) “Understand Asynchronous Code in Layman’s Terms” (a reading not in TOP that I added)

8.) “Callbacks, Listeners, and Promises”

9.) “Understand JavaScript’s ‘This’ with Clarity and Master It”

10.) “JavaScript Apply, Call, and Bind Methods”

11.) “Understand JavaScript Function Prototype”

12.) “Non-Blocking JavaScript and CSS in Modern Browsers”

13.) “Organizing JavaScript Code”

…Now do the Minesweeper project.

Then do the readings in “Javascript and jQuery » Advanced Browser Work » 3: Using Canvas to Draw and More” and then complete “Javascript and jQuery » Advanced Browser Work » Project: Building Games with Canvas”.

You’re now ready to go onto “Javascript and jQuery » Better Forms with jQuery and AJAX” as normal. Don’t worry too much about the stuff you skipped – it was either really unnecessary (a third review) or something I’ll have you come back to later.

Consider a Programming Bootcamp

This is mentioned in passing in TOP, but I thought I’d put it right here where you can see it, and spend more depth on it.

If you feel like you enjoy programming and want to make a career about it, but haven’t been doing so well at self-teaching, you could consider going to a programming bootcamp. These are more-than-full-time intense programs that teach you programming and help you with job placement. Here, you set aside 10+ weeks, enroll in the site, learn from the program, and hopefully pop out with a job on the way.

I’ve never personally gone to a boot camp (and don’t plan to). Keep in mind that a bootcamp is neither necessary nor sufficient to land a good programming job. But for people with the time and inclination, it could be a lot better than trying to go through this guide yourself. If you’ve got the time, it’s definitely at least worth investigating.

App Academy is widely considered to be the best program and there’s been lots of discussion of it on LessWrong. App Academy covers exactly the same material as this guide (and not much more or less), but gives you support, formal teaching, and a good learning environment. Buck Shlegeris is a TA at App Academy and is happy to be a contact if you’re interested in getting more information on applying and/or getting coached through the process. Here’s an interview with Buck about App Academy for more information.

Buck and Chris Hallquist (who went to App Academy) also say that Hack Reactor is the second-best program if you’re not able to get into App Academy (it is somewhat selective). Here’s a full list of all available bootcamps, with details.

It’s worth noitng that App Academy might be best for people in the US. Maker’s Academy seems pretty good for people near London, though.

When You Can Get a Job

TOP does a lot to make sure you know a wide variety of material before going on to look for a job in the final step. However, I think you might be able to hit that last step earlier than you might think. Even better than a Coding Bootcamp is an internship with a company, which not only will let you learn loads, but will also pay you money to do it! An unbeatable deal! And you can still learn more on the side! I recommend trying to do some work toward applications (completing all of Course 7 “Getting Hired as a Web Developer”) right after finishing Course #4 “Ruby on Rails”.

More Things to Learn

This is sort of more of an afterthought than it probably should be, but it could be useful to learn Python. Python is somewhat popular in the start-up world, though not nearly as popular as Ruby on Rails. However, Python is really popular in the academic world. It has good support for statistical programming and has a platform called Django that acts similarly to Rails. It’s probably good to learn Python so you’re not “pidgeonholed” into only one type of programmer job (though the demand is definitely there).

Ultimately, Python is a good language to know, but that being said, several of us don’t think it’s worth the time investment if you’re solely focused on getting into the start-up world and don’t have a particular use for it.

However, if you’re interested, now would be a good time to pick it up. If you’d like, work your way through “Learn Python the Hard Way”, skimming a bit as necessary. Also, give a look through “Think Python”, though you’ve probably learned much of it already from completing “Learn Python the Hard Way”.

Once you’ve completed all of TOP, I really think you should start applying for jobs (I mean, if you want one), because the best learning will come from being on the job. However, while you’re applying (or after you have the job), here are some things I think you might want to focus on, to extend your skills even further beyond what TOP asks for:

ERB, which you have been using to display Ruby in HTML, is nice, but HAML is also popular. Haml makes a trade-off that allows you to write code faster, but has a steeper learning curve and is hard to understand. Read through the HAML Tutorial. For a project, take a project you have done where you wrote views in ERB, and re-write all those views in Haml. Make sure it works.

It could be a good idea to learn CoffeeScript. Skim through the Tuts Plus Coffeescript Tutorial, then through http://coffeescript.org/. Next, the tutorial at CarbonFive. Finally, watch Coffeescript in action in this RailsCast.

As a project, make a Coffescript function that prints out the first twenty numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. That should be good enough, but feel free to re-do some of your JS stuff in CoffeeScript if you’d like. You also might want to read through http://coffeescript.org/ a little more thoroughly to get a better understanding of what it can do. You’ll also benefit from reading through CSS Tricks’s jQuery Coffeescript Cheat Sheat to get an idea of how to do jQuery stuff with Coffeescript.

It could be a good idea to learn Knockout.js. Do this tutorial.

You might want to learn some Data Science. This deserves a post of it’s own, but you could thumb back to “Optional Step Twenty-four – Learn Some Data Science” in my guide.

Conclusion

In my guide, I said the following, and it equally applies here:

There are multiple paths to getting a programming job, learning programming, or whatever goal you may have. There’s no “one true way”, and there’s going to be a lot of conflicting advice on what is the “best” way to learn. Honestly what is best is going to vary person by person, and based on your interests and goals.

Like I said before, “I’ve designed a guide here based on my personal experience.” It’s entirely possible that TOP is right about something and their original method was better for you, and I was wrong to disagree. It’s also entirely possible TOP is wrong about something for you, and I didn’t catch it, because it didn’t come up for me.

Your mileage might vary. I’m not better than TOP – they have their way, and I have mine. I just wanted to write up my experience. The best thing to do is just start, somewhere. See if this guide works for you, tweak if it doesn’t. Let me know.

Appendix: How Long Will All This Take?

I did the math, and my estimates add up to a minimum of 234 hours of work, scaling up to the 900+ hour range if you go slow and do all the extras. TOP believes that it takes ~1000 hours to become a good web developer. This sounds generally correct, but your mileage may vary. I personally got away with about 700 hours, and I wasn’t even doing it all that efficiently, because I didn’t find TOP for awhile.

Here’s a time breakdown:

Course 1: Introduction to Web Development – 0hrs, skip it unless you find it interesting.
Course 2: Web Development 101 – 45hrs-80hrs
- The Basics – 3-7hrs
  - 1: How this Course Will Work – 2min
  - 2: How Does the Web Work? – 10min
  - 3: How Does Your Computer Work? – 30min, if you’ve never used the command line before
  - 4: Terms to Know – 10min
  - Project: Installations – 2-6hrs if you’ve never done the installations before
- The Front End – 12-34hrs
  - 1: Introduction to the Front End – 30min
  - 2: HTML and CSS Basics – 30min - 6hrs depending on how familiar you are with CSS/HTML. Skip steps 3-5 here.
  - Project: HTML/CSS – 1-5hrs, depending on how familiar you are with CSS/HTML.
  - 3: Javascript Basics – 4-9hrs
  - 4: jQuery Basics – since you do the entire Codecademy course here as I recommend AND Code School, like 5-8hrs
  - Project: Javascript and jQuery (Etch-Sketch) – 1-5hrs
- The Back End – 19-23hrs
  - 1: Introduction to the Back End – 0-30min
  - 2: Ruby Basics – here’s where we implement the Ruby fix, which will take ~11hrs
  - 3: Testing Basics – 2-3hrs
  - Project: Ruby (TestFirst) – 4-6hrs
  - 4: Databases – wow, I think I skipped this lesson somehow. I’m not sure the material is essential, so a 2hr skim ought to do it.
- Web Development and Frameworks – 8-8.5hrs
  - 1: Introduction to Frameworks – 15-30min
  - 2: Ruby on Rails Basics – 2hrs
  - Project: Ruby on Rails (Basic Blog App) – 6hrs for a beginner, though I could do it now in 20 minutes
  - 3: Backbone.js – Skip this per my recommendation
- Additional Important Topics – 1-4.5hrs
  - 1: Git Basics – 1-2hrs
  - 2: The Cloud, Hosting, and Software as a Service (SAAS) – 0-1hr (skippable)
  - 3: Security, SSL, and Best Practices – 0-1hr (skippable)
  - 4: FTP Basics – 0-0.5hrs (skippable)
- Tying it All Together – 1-3hrs
  - 1: How are Websites Built in the Real World? – 0-2hrs (skippable)
  - 2: Principles of Good Programming – 1hr
  - 3: Conclusion – 5min
Course 3: Ruby Programming – 83-133hrs
- Basic Ruby – 10-14hrs
  - 1: How this Course Will Work – 15min
  - 2: Ruby Building Blocks – Start from step 6 because of the Ruby fix earlier. Should take 2hrs.
  - Projects: Ruby Building Blocks (various Ruby scripts) – 3hrs
  - 3: Advanced Ruby Building Blocks – 30min if you get the Code Quizzes right, per my Ruby fix.
  - Project: Advanced Building Blocks (sorting algorithms) – 4-8hrs
- Intermediate Ruby – 33-36hrs
  - 1: Object Oriented Programming – 5-8hrs
  - Project: OOP (Tic-tac-toe) – Because I add the AI to this project, it took like 16hrs, and this is even with skipping Mastermind.
  - 2: Files and Serialization – 2hrs
  - Project: Serialization and Working with Files – 10hrs, though I spent time adding an AI to the Hangman too (to guess the word based on letter frequency and knowledge of the dictionary)
- Ruby on the Web – 7-12hrs
  - 1: Bringing Ruby Online – 1-2hrs
  - Project: Ruby on the Web (Twitter Spambot and Web Server) – 6-10hrs
- A Bit of Computer Science – 8-15hrs
  - 1: A Very Brief Intro to CS – 0.5-1hr
  - 2: Recursive Methods – 0.5-1hr
  - Project: Recursion (Fibbonachi, Merge Sort) – 2-4hrs
  - 3: Common Data Structures and Algorithms – 1hr
  - Project: Data Structures and Algorithms (Binary Trees, Knights Travails) – 4-8hrs
- Testing Ruby with RSpec - 11hrs
  - 1: Introduction to RSpec – 1hr
  - Project: Testing Ruby (Past tests, Connect Four) – 10hrs
- Git - 2-5hrs
  - 1: A Deeper Look at Git – 1-3hrs
  - 2: Using Git in the Real World – 1-2hrs
- Conclusion – 12-40hrs
  - Project: Ruby Final Project – I haven’t actually done this one yet, it’s on the to-do list. But 12-20hrs looks right. Maybe +10-20hrs if you add an AI. ;)
  - 1: Conclusion – 5min
Course 4: Introduction to Rails – 106-200hrs
- Introduction to Rails – 40hrs
  - 1: How this Course Will Work – 5min
  - Project: Getting Your Feet Wet (Hartl Tutorial) – the entire Hartl tutorial took me 40hrs. This is split up over multiple projects here, so this bit won’t actually take 40hrs.
  - 2: A Railsy Web Refresher – 0.5hrs
  - Projects that are part of the Hartl tutorial omitted.
- Databases and Active Record – 11-16hrs
  - 1: Databases and SQL – 1hr
  - Project: SQL (SQLZoo) – 4-5hrs
  - 2: Active Record Basics – 1-2hrs
  - Project: Building With Active Record (Reddit) – 5-8hrs
- Forms and Authentication – 5-10hrs
  - 1: Form Basics – 1-2hrs
  - Project: Forms – 3-6hrs
  - 2: Sessions, Cookies, and Authentication – 1-2hrs
  - Projects that are part of the Hartl tutorial omitted.
- Advanced Forms and Active Record – 18-28hrs
  - 1: Active Record Queries – 2-3hrs
  - 2: Active Record Associations – 2-3hrs
  - Project: Associations – 5-8hrs for the additional EventBrite project
  - 3: Active Record Callbacks – 2-3hrs
  - Projects that are part of the Hartl tutorial omitted.
- 4: Advanced Forms – 2-3hrs
  - Project: Advanced Forms (Flight Booker) – 5-8hrs
- APIs, Mailers and Advanced Topics – 32-105hrs
  - 1: APIs and Building Your Own – 1-2hrs
  - 2: Working With External APIs – 1-2hrs
  - Projects: Building and Using APIs (Kitten API) – 5-8hrs
  - 3: Mailers – 1-2hrs
  - Project: Ruby on Rails Mailers – 1-5hrs
  - 4: Advanced Topics – 3-4hrs
  - Project: Ruby on Rails Final Project!!! – Uh, this really depends on what you pick, but a good 20-80hrs ought to be enough, depending on how good you want to make it for your portfolio
  - 5: Conclusion – 0-2hrs (skippable, but not as skippable as the other ones I say are “skippable”)
Congratulations, at this point you can definitely get a job. Enjoy being paid to learn, and pick up the rest in your free time while not at work.
Course 5: HTML5 and CSS3 – 16-46hrs
- Basic HTML Page Structure – 5min-5hrs
  - 1: How This Course Will Work – 5min
  - 2: HTML5 Basics – 0-2hrs
  - 3: Linking Internal and External Pages – 0-30min
  - 4: Working with Images, Video and Other Media – 0-30min
  - Project: Embedding Images and Video – 0-1hr
  - 5: What’s New in HTML5 – 0-1hr
- Displaying and Inputting Data – 1-4.5hrs
  - 1: Tables in HTML – 0-30min
  - 2: Ordered and Unordered Lists – 0-30min
  - 3: Forms for Collecting Data – 0-30min
  - Project: HTML Forms (with Mint) – 1-3hrs
- CSS3 – 4-10.5hrs
  - 1: CSS3 Basics – 30-90min
  - 2: The Box Model – 30-60min
  - 3: Floats and Positioning – 30-60min
  - Project: Positioning anx Mloating Elements – 1-3hrs
  - 4: Best Practices – 30min
  - 5: Backgrounds and Gradients – 0-30min
  - Project: Building with Backgrounds and Gradients – 1-3hrs
- Design and UX – 3.5-10hrs
  - 1: Introduction to Design and UX – 30min-3hrs
  - 2: Fonts and Typography – 30min
  - 3: CSS Grids – 30-90min
  - Project: Design Teardown – 2-5hrs
- Responsive Design and CSS Frameworks 5.5-9.5hrs
  - 1: Responsive Design – 30min
  - Project: Building with Responsive Design – 2-4hrs
  - 2: CSS Frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation – 1hr
  - Project: Using Bootstrap – 2-4hrs
- Advanced CSS3 – 2-6.5hrs
  - 1: Animations, Subtle Effects and Compatibility – 30min
  - 2: Using CSS Preprocessors to Save Time – 30-60min
  - Project: Design Your Own Grid-Based Framework – 1-5hrs
  - 3: Conclusion – 5min
Course 6: JavaScript and jQuery – 69-138hrs
- The Basics and the Browser – 6-9.5hrs
  - 1: How This Course Will Work – 5min
  - 2: Javascript Basics – 2hrs, less because you already did the bulk of the work earlier, but more because you have the two extra readings I move
  - Project: On Screen Calculator – 2-4hrs
  - 3: jQuery Basics – 30min-1hr
  - Project: Manipulating the DOM with jQuery (Restaurant Page) – 1-3hrs
  - 4: Organizing Your Code and More – 30-90min
- Events, Effects, and Widgets – 8-18hrs
  - 1: Working with Events and Effects – 30-60min
  - Project: jQuery and the DOM (Snake) – 5-10hrs
  - 2: Using jQuery UI to Build Widgets – 30-120min
  - Project: Creating an Image Carousel/Slider in Javascript – 2-5hrs
- My JavaScript Fix – 7-9hrs for the readings, 15-20hrs for the projects
- Better Forms with jQuery and AJAX – 8-17hrs
  - 1: Validating Form Inputs Using jQuery – 1-2hrs
  - Project: Validating a Form with jQuery – 3-5hrs
  - 2: Submitting a Form Without Reloading by Using AJAX – 1-2hrs
  - Project: Infinite Scroll and Submitting a Form with AJAX – 3-8hrs
- Linking to APIs and Your Rails Back End – 6-17hrs
  - 1: Working with Javascript APIs – 1-3hrs
  - Project: Putting Google Maps Onto Your Site – 1-3hrs
  - 2: Using Ruby on Rails For Your Back End – 1-3hrs
  - Project: Where’s Waldo (A Photo Tagging App) – 3-8hrs
- Server Side Javascript and Javascript Frameworks – 17-44hrs
  - 1: Node.js and Server-Side Javascript – 1-3hrs
  - Personal Note.js Project – 3-20hrs
  - 2: Using Templates – 30-90min
  - 3: Javascript MV Frameworks Like Angular.js and Backbone.js – 1-2hrs
  - Angular and Backbone Tutorials – 6-12hrs
  - 4: Workflow Tools, Tech Stacks and Dependency Management – 2-5hrs
- Finishing Up with JavaScript – 2-3hrs
  - 1: Javascript Testing with Jasmine – 2-3hrs
  - Project: Final Project – up to you. 0-80hrs? Let’s look to my extras instead?
  - 2: Conclusion – 5min
My Extras – 165-326hrs
- Personal Angular or Backbone Project – 3-20hrs
- Knockout Tutorial – 1-2hrs
- Knockout Project – 3-20hrs
- Python Tutorials – 20-40hrs
- HAML – 30-60min
- CoffeeScript Tutorials – 3-5hrs
- CoffeeScript Practice – 5-8hrs
- Data Science Learning – 130-230hrs
  - Udacity Intro to Stats – 40-50hrs
  - Coursera’s Data Analysis – 50-80hrs
  - Advanced R – 30-80hrs
  - Kaggle Work – 10-20hrs

A Better Way to Learn Programming? Notes on The Odin Project was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on July 09, 2014.

A Re-Analysis of ACE's Leaflet Study

2014-06-04T01:00:00-04:00

Now that I’ve been doing some research blogging, it’s time to continue the trend with something big. Maybe you’ve seen ACE’s leafleting study analysis and was like “woah, that’s long, no way I’m going to read all that”. Instead, my reaction was “that’s long, but is there any way I can make it longer?” So I did. Sixteen hours later, I emerge with this:

Introduction

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is a non-profit with the goal of using research to find ways to help more save nonhuman animals with the same amount of resources. Given that the pro-nonhuman movement is quite small, any increase in our “bang for our buck” is quite important, and I welcome this research and aim to contribue to it myself.

Vegan Outreach and The Humane League are two pro-nonhuman non-profits that aim to do direct advocacy on behalf of non-human animals. One thing they do is deliver leaflets to people aiming to convince people about the horrors of factory farming and convince them to eat less meat. ACE claims that this is one of the most cost-effective ways to help non-human animals, but wants to put this to the test.

Throughout the latter half of 2013, Joey Savoie and Xio Kikauka, in cooperation with Animal Charity Evaluators, implemented a study of the impact of two Vegan Outreach leaflets on diet change. In March 2014, ACE released their analysis in cooperation with Statisticians Without Borders.

I was personally somewhat skeptical of the analysis and though there was a decent amount of information still being left on the table. I wanted to take advantage of the publicly provided dataset to do my own independent analysis to see what I could personally learn.

I did my best to check for errors, but it’s quite possible errors in my analysis may still remain.

Summary

This blog post in one sentence: ACE’s claims are broadly correct, though perhaps overstated.

I do not feel like the study provides any positive evidence for vegetarian conversion as a whole, so ACE’s claim that “[w]e found support for claims that distributing leaflets from Vegan Outreach (or similar leaflets published by other groups) causes a small percentage of respondents to go vegetarian” is overstated. I also think there is more nuance affecting some of their conclusions than ACE’s analysis admits, though to ACE’s credit, they are pretty self-skeptical about their own results.

I think ACE should be appluaded for having a good degree of self-skepticism, a high degree of transparency, and doing great with going through pre-registration and other checks to make sure they wouldn’t be fooling themselves.

Overall, one’s attitude toward these results depends really on how skeptical and negative one wants to be:

Reasons for positivity

Rates of people eliminating both red meat and poultry after receiving the treatment leaflet were quite high at 2.5% (4/161) (see “Red Meat Elimination”).
The connection between the treatment leaflet and elimination of red meat and poultry was statistically significant (see “Are these differences statistically significant?”).
There is a statistically significant connection between overall meat reduction and receiving the treatment leaflet (see “Are these differences statistically significant?”).
The sample size of this study was underpowered enough that it could have missed an effect under 6% with >20% chance, and almost certainly would miss an effect at 1% or below (see “Upper Bound”).

Reasons for negativity

Rates of people becoming entirely vegetarian were quite low at 0.56% (1/178) and this was not statistically significant, even before Bonferroni corrections (see “Red Meat Elimination”).
Treatment leaflets appear to have no effect on fish, eggs, or dairy (see “How important is reducing red meat and poultry, but not anything else?” and “Why might the leaflets only be reducing red meat and poultry, and not other food groups?”). .
Less than half of the people in the treatment group who changed their diet specifically attribute their diet change to the leaflet (See “How much can these changes be attributed to the flyers?”).
There was a problem with the control group (see “What should the treatment and control groups be?”).
There were sizable problems with whether people were able to recall the leaflets that were handed out to them at the time of the post-treatment assessment three months later (see “Recollection Errors”)
There are methodological problems with both food frequency questionnaires and with asking people about their diet change in terms of “vegetarian” and “pescetarian” (see “Challenges to These Variables”).
The connection between the treatment leaflet and elimination of red meat and poultry was no longer statistically significant after Bonferroni corrections (though see “How bad is it that the tests were not able to pass Bonferroni corrections?”).
The change in eliminating red meat and poultry derived from the food frequency questionnaires did not correspond with changes from people stating that they “went pescatarian” (see “What changes reportedly occurred as a result of the leafleting?”, though also see “How bad is it that there was no connection between pescatarianism or meat reduction?”).
There also appeared to be errors in how the survey was designed (see “Survey Design Errors”).

Setting up the Dataset

To start, I went to the survey dataset, downloaded a copy as a csv, removed the first row, and imported the file into R. The provided survey questions and guide to the data were very useful in interpreting the dataset, and I thank ACE for making it so easy to do this re-analysis. It reflects really well on their value for transparency.

My R script for doing the re-analysis is here.

What should the dependent variable be?

Once I set up the dataset, I looked into how we should represent the dependent variable – the amount of change in diet caused by the survey.

Meat Elimination

Question 1 asked about the amount of foods people eat now and Question 3 asks about the amount of foods people ate three months ago. I summed up the total ranks across red meat, poultry, and fish/seafood for both present and three months ago. I then compared these totals and looked for people who had no meat consumption at present but did consume meat three months ago (meat eliminator), people who consumed meat both in present and three months ago (no change), and people who consumed meat at present but did not consume meat three months ago (meat adders).

Meat Eliminator	No Change	Meat Adder	N
4 (0.8%)	532 (99%)	1 (0.2%)	537

Note that while 0.8% new vegetarians might look low, we still have not yet compared that population to the leaflet-receiving population, and thus still cannot make any conclusions about how many people given they receive a leaflet, go vegetarian – that percentage could still be much higher (or lower).

Meat Reduction

I’m not sure how much I trust the Food Frequency Questionnaires to provide accurate and precise measures of people’s diets, so I’m a bit uncomfortable trying to tease meat reduction out of the dataset (as is the ACE analysis). However, there is also a problem that outright elimination happens too infrequently (only 0.8% of the data set), so we might want a variable that is more easily changed.

Therefore, I compared the past and current consumption of meat and this time assigned categories for Reduced, Stayed the Same, and Increased, looking at relative changes rather than outright elimination. I do not think this is a variable ACE looked at.

Meat Reducer	No Change	Meat Increaser	N
174 (32.4%)	243 (45.3%)	120 (22.3%)	537

Red Meat Elimination

ACE spent a lot of their analysis looking at how consumption of individual foods changed as a way to measure meat reduction. I was particularly interested at people’s elimination of red meat, as this is a type of meat frequently eliminated first.

Red Meat Eliminator	No Change	Red Meat Adder	N
13 (2.3%)	539 (96.4%)	7 (1.3%)	559

Poultry Elimination

As ACE found positive results for poultry as well, I looked at that too.

Poultry Eliminator	No Change	Poultry Adder	N
8 (1.4%)	547 (98%)	3 (0.6%)	558

Some of the people even eliminated both. Six people were found to eliminate both poultry and red meat, with nine people eliminating just one (seven for just red meat, two for just poultry).

Change in Declared Vegetarianism and Veganism

In addition to food frequency questionnaires, the survey also asked people if they identified as vegetarian or vegan at present and if they identified as vegetarian or vegan three months ago.

Omnivore (3mo ago)	Vegetarian (3mo ago)	Vegan (3mo ago)	Omnivore (present)	Vegetarian (present)	Vegan (present)
578	32	13	570	39	14

Vegan to Omnivore	Vegetarian to Omnivore	Vegan to Vegetarian	No Change	Vegetarian to Vegan	Omnivore to Vegetarian	Omnivore to Vegan
3	3	1	572	1	10	4

Change in Declared Pescetarianism and Intent to Reduce Meat

As we were looking at whether people were dropping red meat and poultry, I was also curious if this would match up with people personally identifying as pescatarians.

Reducer (3mo ago)	Pescatarian (3mo ago)	Reducer (present)	Pescatarian (present)
35	28	44	33

Pescatarian to Omnivore	Reducer to Omnivore	Pescatarian to Reducer	No Change	Reducer to Pescatarian	Omnivore to Reducer	Omnivore to Pescatarian
12	10	1	527	2	19	15

Challenges to These Variables

Why look at eight different dependent variables? One reason was that we were interested in both partial meat elimination and full meat elimination. But another reason is that it’s really hard to figure out who exactly is vegetarian…

First Problem: Vegetarians and Vegans Eat Meat

Weird, I know. But it seems like people report themselves as “vegetarian” or “vegan” without knowing what it really means. The good news is that vegetarians and vegans do eat less meat. But the weird thing is that they still do eat meat. Therefore, we may have someone who claim they became vegan, but all that might mean in reality is that they merely reduced their meat consumption.

Mean “Ranks” in Meat Eating by Diet Status (Reverse coded so higher = more meat eating)
	Red Meat	All Meat	All Animal Products
Omnivore	2.97 / 7	8.2 / 21	14.30 / 35
Vegetarian	0.97 / 7	2.6 / 21	8.51 / 35
Vegan	0.43 / 7	1.7 / 21	3.69 / 35

Second Problem: Pescetarians Underreport Their Pescatarianism

If you think people have a hard time with the “vegetarian” label, then you must think people have huge problems with the less popular “pescetarian” label. Here’s a table with whether people label themselves pescetarian and how they respond on the food frequency questionnaires about red meat and poultry (they never ate the two, they no longer eat the two as of the post-survey, or they still eat the two despite self-identifying as pescetarian).

	Not Pescetarian	Pescetarian
Never Ate	28	7
No Longer Eat	5	1
Still Eat	525	15

As you can see, the pescetarian label is quite untrustworthy.

Third Problem: Food Frequency Questionnaires Seem Troublesome

Quick! How many servings of cheese did you eat three months ago?

Don’t know the answer?

…Can you ballpark it?

No?

Me neither.

But yet this is the alternative method of figuring out whether people go vegetarian or reduce meat consumption – compare their actual diets from three months ago to now. These food frequency questionnaires are standard to the nutrition science industry, so they might be the be best we’ve got. But I’m skeptical of them.

That being said, it’s possible that these food frequency questionnaires are reliable in the cases of elimination as opposed to reduction, as zero is a pretty hard number to misremember.

What should the relevant treatment and control groups be?

So we’re looking to five different dependent variables to track changes in diet. But we’re really interested in the impact of leafleting. The study was designed well – there was a control leaflet and two different treatment leaflets.

Leaflets Recognized by Follow-up Survey Respondents
EIYLM (treatment)	CC (treatment)	CBTC (control)	Fictional Flyer	No Leaflet
95	125	44	5	428

EIYLM = Even if You Like Meat, CC = Compassionate Choises, CBTC = Cruelty Behind the Cuteness. Note: The same respondent may be in multiple categories.

Problems with the Control Group

It seems like it might be easy to sort people into a treatment group and a control group. However, because people received multiple leaflets, a lot of people who received the control leaflet also received the treatment leaflet, which means that they’re in the treatment group.

Leaflets Recognized by Follow-up Survey Respondents
Treatment Leaflet Group	Control Leaflet Group	No Leaflet
178	17	428

This makes a control group that is much smaller than we need to use. The ACE analysis decides to use the No Leaflet group as a secondary control group. This seems sensible as a point of comparison, though it’s possible that there could be selection biases if the type of people who would take a leaflet are more predisposed to go vegetarian.

Problems with Leaflet Recall

The fictional flyer refers to participants erroneously identifying receiving a flyer that was never handed out – at least five people were duped by this, so there’s probably other errors with people remembering which leaflet they actually received.

Also, ACE mentions that more than sixty people also mention receiving a treatment leaflet that was not actually handed out at their location. This means some people may have sorted themselves into the wrong treatment or control group, messing with our results.

What changes reportedly occurred as a result of the leafleting?

So now that we have eight potential dependent variables and three groups to look at, how did things actually turn out?

	Treatment Flyer	Control Flyer	No Flyer
Meat Elimination	Elim: 1/158 (0.6%) None: 156/158 (98.7%) Add: 1/158 (0.6%)	Elim: 0/15 (0%) None: 15/15 (100%) Add: 0/15 (0%)	Elim: 3/364 (0.8%) None: 361/364 (99.2%) Add: 0/364 (0%)
Meat Reduction	Dec: 62/158 (39.2%) None: 67/158 (42.4%) Inc: 29/158 (18.4%)	Dec: 3/15 (20%) None: 8/15 (53.3%) Inc: 4/15 (26.7%)	Dec: 109/364 (29.9%) None: 168/364 (46.2%) Inc: 87/364 (23.9%)
Red Meat Elimination	Elim: 7/162 (4.3%) None: 155/162 (95.7%) Add: 0/162 (0%)	Elim: 0/16 (0%) None: 16/16 (100%) Add: 0/16 (0%)	Elim: 7/381 (1.8%) None: 368/381 (96.6%) Add: 6/381 (1.6%)
Poultry Elimination	Elim: 5/165 (3%) None: 160/165 (97%) Add: 0/165 (0%)	Elim: 0/15 (0%) None: 15/15 (100%) Add: 0/15 (0%)	Elim: 3/378 (0.8%) None: 372/378 (98.4%) Add: 3/378 (0.8%)
Net Vegetarians and Vegans Added	3/178 (1.7%)	0/17 (0%)	5/428 (1.2%)
Net Pescetarians Added	4/178 (2.5%)	1/17 (5.9%)	0/428 (0%)
Net Meat Reducers Added	4/178 (2.5%)	0/17 (0%)	5/428 (1.2%)

Are these differences statistically significant?

Just looking at the table, it appears that a Vegan Outreach flyer does produce more meat reduction, red meat elimination, and net vegetarians/vegans added, relative to the control and no flyer groups, though it also seems to produce less meat elimination than the control / no flyer groups.

But the differences across the groups could just be due to chance. To be sure, let’s compare across the groups with T-tests. We’ll compare the population of those who received the treatment flyer to the population receiving the control flyer and then the wider population of everyone sampled who did not receive the treatment flyer. I think treatment vs. non-treatment is by far the better case to look at, given the small size of the actual control group, though it does have possible opportuniteis for bias.

	Treatment vs. Control	Treatment vs. Non-treatment
Meat Elimination	t = 0.78, p = NS	t = 0.00, p = NS
Overall Meat Reduction	t = -1.44, p = NS	t = -2.21, p = 0.03
Red Meat Elimination	t = -2.69, p = 0.01	t = -2.48, p = 0.01
Poultry Elimination	t = -2.26, p = 0.02	t = -2.05, p = 0.04
Net Vegetarians / Vegans Added	t = -1.00, p = NS	t = -0.30, p = NS
Net Pescatarians Added	t = 0.59, p = NS	t = -0.99, p = NS
Net Meat Reducers Added	t = -1.15, p = NS	t = -0.51, p = NS

Based on this, the statistically significant effect of treatment flyers is muddled, but existant. They do have statistically significant effects on meat reduction (for treatment vs. non-treatment), red meat elimination, and poultry elimination, but there is no corresponding statistically significant effect with declared pescatarianism or declared intent to reduce meat. And no other variables are statistically significant.

Furthermore, it’s also worth noting that ACE did not do any sort of corrections for doing multiple statistical tests. When we do a Bonferroni correction here, having done fourteen separate analyses, we reduce our threshold for statistical significance from p = 0.05 to p = 0.05/14, or 0.003, which no tests met. Even a less stringent test, such as starting from p = 0.1 before Bonferroni corrections is not met.

How much can these changes be attributed to the flyers?

One way we can look a little bit closer is with variables that (a) self-report how much of the leaflet was actually read, (b) self-report how influential the leaflet was, and (c) self-report the reason for changing diets.

How much of each leaflet was read?

	Did not read	Glanced	Read some	Read all
EIYLM (treat)	9 (9%)	26 (27%)	34 (36%)	26 (27%)
CC (treat)	12 (10%)	33 (27%)	44 (35%)	35 (28%)
CBTC (control)	6 (14%)	15 (35%)	16 (37%)	6 (14%)
Fictional flyer	0 (0%)	4 (80%)	1 (20%)	0 (0%)
No flyer	155 (82%)	17 (9%)	7 (4%)	9 (5%)

Interesting that reading patterns for the treatment leaflets are statistically identical (p = 0.11), but statistically distinct from the control flyer (p = 0.05).

…Also of problematic interest is how many people claimed never to receive a flyer, yet claimed to have read a flyer anyway.

How influential were the leaflets?

	Leaflet caused diet change	Thinking differently about farming	Thinking differently about pets	Possible effect	No effect
EIYLM (treat)	7 (7%)	18 (19%)	6 (6%)	26 (28%)	37 (39%)
CC (treat)	11 (9%)	28 (23%)	2 (2%)	29 (24%)	53 (43%)
CBTC (control)	2 (5%)	6 (1%)	4 (10%)	13 (31%)	17 (40%)
Fictional flyer	0 (0%)	1 (25%)	0 (0%)	2 (50%)	1 (25%)
No flyer	0 (0%)	8 (4%)	10 (5%)	39 (22%)	124 (69%)

6 people who received the treatment flyer self-reported becoming a vegetarian or vegan. Of these…
5 out of the 6 reported reading all of the leaflet.
1 out of the 6 report having their diet changed by the leaflet.
2 out of the 6 report the leaflet having zero impact on their diet.
2 out of the 6 report changing their diet for animal cruelty or ethical reasons.

We can also use this to dig a little bit deeper at red meat elimination, one of the dependent variables credited by ACE as being affected by the leaflet.

7 people who received the treatment flyer self-reported eliminating red meat. Of these…
2 out of the 7 reported reading all of the leaflet.
4 out of the 7 report having their diet changed by the leaflet.
1 out of the 7 report the leaflet having zero impact on their diet.
4 out of the 7 report changing their diet for animal cruelty or ethical reasons.

This is good as a check of our results above – we have found that some of the people who appear converted by the leaflet also agree that they were converted. Moreover, I was concerned that people switching to eliminate red meat would be doing so for health reasons alone, and this does not appear to be the case, nearest as we can tell.

Though take this all with a grain of salt – if you have middling confidence in people’s ability to self-report their diet, like I do, you probably should also have middling confidence in people’s ability to understand how much the leaflet affected them. I do think you can justify slightly higher confidence in these numbers, as it’s more salient and potentially easier to recall than precise numbers about your diet, but people are still generally bad at retrospecting on causal influences on their life.

What are preliminary lower and upper bounds for flyer conversion rates?

Lower Bound

178 treatment flyers were given out, and it appears quite plausible (as clear as can be determined by the survey, given that you trust self-reported data) that precisely one person was lead to become a (genuine) vegetarian specifically based on having received the treatment flyer. One could consider this as establishing a preliminary lower bound on conversion rates at 0.56%, though I would be careful not to generalize from solely one person.

Upper Bound

It’s worth noting that the small sample size of this study means that it might have trouble detecting a statistically significant difference in diet change. This study had a sample size of 623, with 178 having received a flyer. The past Facebook study had a sample size of 104 and a similar leafleting study had a sample size of “about 500”.

Small changes in diet change can be drowned out by statistical noise. To figure out what sample size we can use, we can use an “a priori sample size calculator for the two group chi-squared test”. For this, we need a desired power level (chance of detecting the effect given that the effect exists), a probability level (our threshold p-value), and an estimate of the proportion of people who become vegetarians (or vegans, or reduce meat, etc.) in the control group and treatment group.

Any desired sample size is going to be a trade-off between wanting more statistical power and wanting to spend less money collecting the sample. An additional consideration is that the desired sample size is the number of people we need to take the follow-up survey, which might be a smaller proportion of the total number of people that see the ads, due to inefficiencies in our conversion process.

Here’s a table with some estimations with the classic probability level = 0.05 and desired power level = 0.8, and our treatment-control proportions found in this survey, here is how much larger our population would need to be to detect the effect with 80% chance, given our current study size and ratios between the treatment and control group:

Control %	Treatment %	Difference	Population Needed
1%	8%	+7%	0.8x larger
1%	7%	+6%	1.01x larger
1%	6%	+5%	1.3x larger
1%	5%	+4%	1.7x larger
1%	4%	+3%	2.5x larger
1%	3%	+2%	4.4x larger
1%	2%	+1%	12.4x larger
1%	1.5%	+0.5%	39.4x larger

Based on this table and our sample size, it’s possible that the leaflets could be converting people at a rate of 7% (relative to a 1% baseline) and we’d have about an 80% chance of detecting it. So therefore, I feel confidant placing a preliminary upper bound at 6%. Based on this data, it’s highly unlikely that flyers convert at a rate higher than 6%.

Also of note is that if we think the difference between treatment and control is quite small (like 0.5%), we’d need a much larger study to detect it – 39.4x larger than our current study. Though if we had an even split between treatment and control, it could be detected 80% of the time with just 16,294 people, or 26x our current population.

Conclusions

What are the implications for ACE’s Analysis?

ACE concludes in their analysis that “[w]e found support for claims that distributing leaflets from Vegan Outreach (or similar leaflets published by other groups) causes a small percentage of respondents to go vegetarian or give up eating specific types of meat.” This claim is tepid, but appears somewhat substantiated by my analysis.

Statistical tests were able to connect the treatment flyers to the cessation of eating red meat and poultry, but these tests ceased to be statistically significant once Bonferroni corrections were made. Additionally, they did not connect with any statistically significant finding for declared pescatarianism or meat reduction.

Additionally, statistical tests were not able to reject the null hypothesis that leaflets do not cause wholesale shift to a vegetarian diet. Therefore, the part of ACE’s claim that leaflets cause “a small percentage of respondents to go vegetarian” may not be established at this time. However, less robust (but still plausibly reliable) were able to detect one person who responded as we would expect a vegetarian who had been changed by the leaflet to respond.

How bad is it that there was no connection between pescatarianism or meat reduction?

It seems potentially problematic that while there was a reduction of red meat and poultry consumption, there was no corresponding change in people declaring themselves “pescatarian.” However, given how bad people appear to be with just the common “vegetarian” label (e.g., how self-identified “vegetarians” eating meat), I wouldn’t trust them one bit to understand the “pescatarian” label. And once we do the analysis and see that people who don’t eat red meat or poultry still don’t call themselves pescetarian), it’s clear this variable is untrustworthy.

How bad is it that the tests were not able to pass Bonferroni corrections?

It’s true that a statistically robust conclusion should be able to pass Bonferroni corrections. However, given the sample size of this study compared to how large the sample size would have to be, it’s unlikely that we would be able to detect such robust effects even if they did exist, so I’m not particularly worried. I’d be inclined to accept that the effects on meat reduction, red meat elimination, and poultry elimination are genuine effects, but that no other real effects exist (e.g., other kinds of meat, or shift to vegetarianism).

What are the implications of this study for prior studies of veg outreach?

It’s curious that this study finds a much smaller amount of vegetarian change attributable to flyers than a past study on leafleting, which found a conversion rate of 2% of leaflet takers becoming pescatarian (CCC Flyer Study), which is very similar to our study.

The Need for Some Point of Comparison, If Not a Control Group

The CCC Flyer Study sampled everyone, but only permitted those who received a leaflet to take the survey. Of course, the language of the survey was strong, asking people to directly attribute their diet change to the leaflet. But I imagine that this didn’t work as intended, and had they sampled people who did not receive the leaflet, or sampled at a college that had no leaflets distributed, it’s possible they would have found a similar conversion rate. Therefore, it’s good that this study was done with ACE with a point of comparison, so we can see that the 2% figure does make sense in context. Including these valuable pseudo-control groups is an important step forward.

Recollection Errors

Prior flyer research had attempted to navigate non-response bias (systematic biases in who fills out the survey) and social desirability bias (systematic increases in vegetarianism as people aim to please or look more virtuous). Much has been done recently to try to work against these two biases.

However, another important aspect of the ACE Study is drawing our attention to a third form of bias – recollection errors. ACE concludes that “[w]e do not know whether this pattern [of decreased meat consumption in our data] reflects real decreases in consumption or only systematic errors in recollection.”

This recollection error also undermines the food frequency questionnaires used for meat reduction statistics – if they can’t remember receiving a leaflet, how can we trust them to remember intricate details about the number of servings of cheese they ate three months ago? This seems difficult to deal with and suggests that new designs will be necessary for future studies.

Survey Design Errors

Another problem was the design of the survey. According to Joey and Xio, who designed the study and helped hand out many of the questionnaires, people were struggling with taking the survey as it was too long and complicated. One large problem was that people were skimming and had trouble understanding that the two food frequency questionnaires were different items.

How important is reducing red meat and poultry, but not anything else?

It’s certainly good that the leaflets are doing something, most notably getting about 4% of respondents to give up red meat and another 4% to give up poultry, with no corresponding increases in meat eating elsewhere. But how important is this?

In my essay “How Much Suffering is in the Standard American Diet”, I provide figures that show if we take a suffering-per-kilogram point of view to our averting animal products, giving up red meat has 13% of the impact a typical vegan (not vegetarian) conversion would have, giving up poultry has 33.4% of the impact of veganism, and giving up both has 46% of the impact.

This means that a leaflet that converts 2% of people to become pescatarian (giving up red meat and poultry) would have essentially the same impact as a leaflet that converted 0.92% of people to become vegetarian, at least prima facie. Given that these leaflets appear to have this impact on poultry elimination, that isn’t so bad!

Vegetarian Recidivism

One potential problem, though, is that it’s unclear whether people would stick with poultry elimination with the same fervor as one would stick to vegetarianism. It seems intuitively less likely to me, because there’s less of a culture and moral force surrounding it.

The 100 Yard Line

On the other hand, perhaps we could look to Brian Tomasik’s 100 Yard Line Model for vegetarian conversion, which is summarized with the observation that perhaps pushing people to eliminate poultry and/or red meat is just one stepping stone to getting them to become full vegetarian soon. It’s definitely a big first step!

Why might the leaflets only be reducing red meat and poultry, and not other food groups?

Aside from the philosophical question about what the value of reducing red meat and poultry is, we might also be curious as to the empirical question – why are people only eliminating red meat and poultry, and not other food groups?

Unfortunately, we can only speculate, but it seems quite plausible that the reason is that the two treatment leaflets (“Compassionate Choices” and “Even if You Like Meat”) both focus significantly on the meat of pigs, chickens, and cows, and do not focus much at all on dairy, eggs, or fish.

What future research should be done?

I think we are getting very close to understanding the impact of leafleting, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. We could use further research (as always).

I think the most important future research should focus on addressing the methodological issues here, trying to come up with better dependent variables or better ways to mitigate the drawbacks that have been discovered with these dependent variables. For example, I’d propose further research into how the public understands terms like “vegetarian” or “pescetarian” or more research into leaflet recall after a few months. Perhaps we could make use of more reliable panel studies, where we know we’d have access to the same participants after a few months.

Additionally, the next step to settle this question as much as it can be settled would be to do a large sample size study with a control group. Having a couple thousand people in each group should do the trick and place a worthwhile upper bound on what the size of the effects would be, even if we don’t yet know the true lower bound (because it might remain too small to detect).

Lastly, something still worthwhile would be to run this study again though with a functional control group (that receives control leaflets) or to run this study in different contexts (e.g., online ads).

A Re-Analysis of ACE's Leaflet Study was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on June 04, 2014.

How Much Suffering is in the Standard American Diet?

2014-05-31T01:00:00-04:00

We all know that “the standard American diet” is unhealthy, and bad for the environment, and all sorts of things. But, as we know, it also contains a lot of suffering due to the consumption of factory-farmed meat. I’m not going to argue for the ethics of a vegetarian diet here (I’ve done that elsewhere). Instead, I’m interested in some quantification – just how much suffering is in the standard American diet?

As a caveat, at the moment I’m not looking at environmental impact, though I might expand the analysis later. As another caveat, it’s worth pointing out that the standard American diet may not really exist in any particular person, but it’s a useful statistical generalization to talk about. As a third caveat, this analysis ignores the fact that there is an elasticity to supply and demand (e.g., by not eating one pound of cow, you do not cause precisely one pound of cow to not be produced, but rather just a large fraction of it, since a drop in demand leads to a corresponding drop in price, which leads to a corresponding yet smaller re-increase in demand.)

To begin, we need to know three things: (a) how many animal products are in the standard american diet, (b) how many animals does it take to produce that much meat, and (c) how much suffering is brought about by each kind of animal?

Let’s go!

American Meat Consumption

Luckily for us, the USDA is pretty obsessive with cataloging our food consumption. The USDA’s Profiling Food Consumption in America p15 says that in 2000, Americans consume, on average, per year:

64.4 pounds of beef
47.7 pounds of pork
52.9 pounds of poultry
13.6 pounds of turkey
15.2 pounds of fish and shellfish
250 eggs
29.8 pounds of cheese
27.8 pounds of frozen dairy products (e.g., ice cream)
22.6 pounds of milk

Animals Needed to Produce Each Kind of Meat

In Brian Tomasik’s “How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods?”, Brian has a very similar goal to ours here, so we only need to extend his analysis to match up with the entire American diet, rather than individual animals.

Brian says that:

…one beef cow produces 339kg of beef (747 pounds)
…one pig produces 91.1kg of pork (201 pounds)
…one meat chicken produces 1.83kg of poultry (4 pounds)
…one turkey produces 10.3kg of turkey meat (22.7 pounds)
…one egg chicken produces 15.3kg of eggs
…one dairy cow produces 50,420kg of milk (111,157 pounds)

These numbers are good for our analysis, but a bit more work needs to be done to make the numbers work for us.

Eggs

First of all, how many eggs is 15.3kg of eggs? Wikipedia gives a list of egg sizes, and says that the typical egg is “large” sized, or 57g. 57g is 0.13 pounds, which means that 15.3kg of eggs (34 pounds) is 262 eggs.

Dairy

Second, we know that dairy cows produce 50,420kg of milk, but what is that in terms of cheese and frozen dairy products? If we could convert cheese and frozen dairy products into milk equivalents, we could make a cleaner calculation. The Moomilk FAQ pegs 1 gallon of ice cream at 12 pounds of milk and 1 pound of cheese at 10 pounds of milk.

But how much does a gallon of ice cream weigh? Now we’ve descended to Wiki Answers (sorry!), but we come out with something: 4.5 pounds.

So we can take the 29.8 pounds of cheese and convert it to 298 pounds of milk equivalent. Similarly, we can take the 27.8 pounds of frozen dairy products and convert it to 74 pounds of milk equivalent. In total, that’s 394.6 pounds of milk per year for the average American.

Fish

Last, and the most troublesome, is working out fish. 14.2 pounds of fish and shellfish is not very helpful, because these animals are vastly different in sizes (and presumably suffering capacities). For this analysis, I’m really only interested in factory farmed aquaculture fish, so I’ll switch over to Counting Animal’s estimate of 1.3 aquacultured fish.

Note that the aquaculturing of fish means that up to 225 wild fish are being caught to feed the aquacultured fish, but I’m uncomfortable including this number because I’m not sure that reducing the demand for fish will result in any significant reduction in suffering for wild fish. While certainly fishing is painful for wild fish and there are great environmental concerns with overfishing, I’m choosing to not include them in this analysis.

American Animal Consumption

Now that we have these statistics, we can find out not how many pounds of animal meat is consumed each year by a typical American, but rather how many animals are consumed.

drumroll please…

0.09 cows for beef
0.004 cows for dairy
0.24 pigs
13.2 chickens for meat
0.95 chickens for egg
0.6 turkeys
1.3 aquacultured fish

But How Much Suffering is That?

Obviously quantifying suffering is very tricky, so I’m going to be careful about it here. Stay with me. Let’s first look to how many days of suffering each animal undergoes, sort of like a DALY metric would do for quantifying suffering in humans.

Looking to Brian’s table, we get the following information:

Cows for beef live 402 days on average
Cows for dairy = 2009 days
Pigs = 183 days
Chickens for meat = 42 days
Chickens for eggs = 365 days
Turkeys = 126 days
Aquacultured fish = 730 days

So the average American is producing, each year on average…

36 days of suffering via beef
8 days of suffering via dairy
44 days of suffering via pork
554 days of suffering via chicken meat
347 days of suffering via eggs
76 days of suffering via turkey
949 days of suffering via aquacultured fish

…That means there’s a total of 5 years, 6 months, 5 days of animal suffering in each standard American diet, per year. Yikes! …And this doesn’t even include the suffering from the slaughter of the animals themselves.

Adjusting for Product Elasticity

However, as is commonly known by economists, when you choose to not buy a product, you lower the demand ever so slightly, which lowers the price ever so slightly, which turns out to re-increase the demand ever so slightly. Therefore, forgoing one pound of meat means that less than one pound of meat actually gets prevented from being factory farmed. So vegetarianism does have an effect on reducing the amount of animals farmed, but a little less than we might naïvely think. F. Bailey Norwoord’s Compassion by the Pound gives the following figures:

If someone gives up one pound of beef, the product falls by 0.68 lbs
One Pound of Milk… 0.56lbs.
One Pound of Pork… 0.74 lbs
One Pound of Chicken… 0.76 lbs
One Egg… 0.91 Egg.

Cheese, Turkey, and Fish Elasticity

However, Norwood is missing figures for the rest of dairy, and for turkey and fish, so we need to add a bit more information. Luckily, the organization Animal Charity Evaluators has done some more research on this.

ACE cites this paper for a dairy elasticity of 0.65, such that if someone gives up one pound of dairy, the product falls by 0.65 lbs.

For turkey, this paper gives an elasticity of 0.26.

For fish, this paper gives an elasticity of 0.75.

Though it’s important to note that this science is somewhat imprecise, and ACE cites figures that conflict with some of Norwood’s figures. It’s also curious why turkey elasticity is so low compared to Norwood’s estimates for chicken.

Putting it together…

With these adjustments, in actuality, the average American is producing, each year on average…

20.1 days of suffering via beef
5.2 days of suffering via dairy
32.6 days of suffering via pork
421 days of suffering via chicken meat
315.7 days of suffering via eggs
20 days of suffering via turkey
711.7 days of suffering via aquacultured fish

Adjusting for Context

That isn’t all the adjusting I think we should do, however. We can get a bit more precise at the cost of being a bit more speculative, if you don’t mind me experimenting, because I don’t think that each animal suffers the same. Instead, each animal has (a) different intensity of farming conditions and (b) a different capacity for suffering.

First, let’s do differences from intensity of farming conditions. Brian’s table takes this into account, and suggests the following adjustment ratios (higher ratio means more suffering from the farming):

Beef - 1
Dairy - 1.8
Pork - 1.8
Chicken (meat) - 1.8
Chicken (eggs) - 2.5
Turkey - 1.8
Aquacultured Fish - 0.9

I’d like more research into this, but right now I’m willing for Brian’s work to be taken at face value.

Second, we need some estimates of the differences of capacity to suffer. Again, these are just my rough intuitions, should not be taken at face value, and can be easily disagreed with. Feel free to substitute your own numbers. I arrive at these ratios (higher ratio means more capcacity for suffering):

Beef - 1
Dairy - 1
Pork - 1
Chicken (meat) - 0.3
Chicken (eggs) - 0.3
Turkey - 0.3
Aquacultured Fish - 0.2

Taking these ratios into account, we adjust to the new totals:

20.1 adjusted days of suffering via beef
9.4 adjusted days of suffering via dairy
58.9 adjusted days of suffering via pork
227.3 adjusted days of suffering via chicken meat
236.7 adjusted days of suffering via eggs
10.8 adjusted days of suffering via turkey
128.1 adjusted days of suffering via aquacultured fish

(The adjustment is technically in units of “days of beef suffering equivalents”.)

Relative Importance

I think these adjustments are important not for coming to a more accurate total of years of suffering caused per year of American diet, but rather for more accurately determining which food groups are the most important to target. For example, based on these adjusted numbers, we can tentatively (and perhaps naively) conclude:

Giving up beef is ~2.1x as important as giving up dairy.
Giving up beef is ~1.9x as important as giving up turkey.
Giving up pork is ~2.9x as important as giving up beef.
Giving up chicken meat is ~11.3x as important as giving up beef.
Giving up eggs is ~11.8x as important as giving up beef.
Giving up aquacultured fish is ~6.4x as important as giving up beef.

So this gives a pretty good approach for a “meat reduction” diet, with the most ethical bang-for-the-buck for each animal product given up. Maybe consider eating all the beef, turkey, and dairy you want, but spare the really important ones – chicken, eggs, and fish!

In fact, a diet where you only avoid chicken, eggs, and fish is 85.6% as impactful at preventing animal suffering as a fully vegan diet!

Updated 21 Jul to add information about elasticity.

How Much Suffering is in the Standard American Diet? was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on May 31, 2014.

Sunday Links #27

2014-05-25T01:00:00-04:00

Meta-note: I’ve now decided that I like shifting toward doing these less frequently, with less links each, but in much more depth, potentially spinning more lengthy discussion to my Tumblr. Going forward, I will now also tag each of these posts with “Sunday Links” in addition to tagging them with the categories of the contained links, when appropriate.

Longer musing redirected to my Tumblr: “Not All Arguments are Nuanced”:

Sometimes I hear my non-Greek female friends talk about men in fraternities being rapists, or even more likely to rape than the typical person. This has always made me uncomfortable, even if it is technically true. I always feel tempted to say “But not all Greek men are like that”, a variation on the clichéd Not All Men Are Like That you hear in feminist circles.

Of course, this type of derailment is appropriately rejected for reasons Vox explains well, which is why I say it in my head and not in real life.

But I’m still uncomfortable. I know it’s not all about me, but it’s how I feel as a participant in the discussion. I feel uncomfortable and now I understand why.</blockquote>

Another musing redicted to Tumblr, this time about politics: “Why Are Politicians Crazy? Because it Works”:

There’s a fundamental paradox with some politicians: they’re smart enough to get law degrees from top universities, start a multi-million dollar political campaign, fund and sustain a multi-million dollar political campaign, and win a multi-million dollar political campaign, yet… some of these politicians are crazy. …Like off-the-wall crazy with their ideas.

It presumably takes a lot of talent to start and win a political campaign. So how can these crazy politicians be so crazy yet so smart?

The dominant theory is one of multiple intelligences – they’re talented at being likable and attracting money, but not good at generating useful policy. The runner-up theory is that winning a campaign is much easier than I’m giving it credit for. (Though why people who are also talented at policy don’t win an easy campaign is beyond me.)

But I like a third theory. I call it the “Secret Smarts” theory.

Scott Alexander writes that we should “Vote on Values, Outsource Beliefs”:

Today I learned about social impact bonds. […] The basic idea is: government could save a lot of money if some problem got fixed. For example, if people stopped committing crime, they could spend less money on prisons. So they make a deal with a corporation. The corporation agrees to spend a certain amount of money to prevent crime for five years. And if crime goes down and the government saves on prisons, the corporation gets half the savings (or a third, or whatever).

Zero taxpayer money gets risked. It is entirely up to the corporation to fund the problem-solving effort. If they fail, then it’s their own loss. If they succeed, then the government pays them money, but less than the government made, so the taxpayers still get a profit. […]

The particular article I read about this today was How Goldman Sachs Can Get Paid To Keep People Out Of Jail. It was the name “Goldman Sachs” that got me excited. They’re an investment bank. Their job is predicting risk. I don’t know if they’re any good at it or not. But they’re the sort of organization that potentially could be. So we have people who understand risk trying to figure out what social policies will produce which results, with money riding on the decision.

This is looking impressively close to prediction markets. Futarchy says “vote on values, bet on beliefs”. Asking a corporation to invest money in crime-solving is a form of betting on belief – they are betting on what anti-crime programs will decrease crime most and win them the most reward. You still have the elected government deciding what bonds to place – voting on values – but you’re outsourcing your beliefs to the corporation involved and giving them an incentive to get it right.

Think of all the possibilities.

There’s a game called Super Hot. It’s part puzzle and part shooter. You have to deal with limited ammo and a refreshingly realistic one shot kills you, but you’re not stressed as you get enough time to think about your strategy and your shots. In the end, you get to run around as some sort of (refreshingly unrealistic) super ninja. (Robin Hanson and Jesse Galef think the shooter is like what life would be like as a computer emulated brain.)

I’ve been having a bit too much fun with this. Right now it can be played in the browser, but there’s also A Kickstarter for a full version of the game (already fully funded, but they’re working toward some cooler additional things).

Some satire on the idea of pitching effective altruism, from Michael Bitton: The World’s Worst Meme. Maybe “self-sacrifice” is not a big seller.

Speaking of effective altruism, here’s a good real life example: should Detroit sell off masterpieces in the local art museum to help stabalize the finances of the city?

Robert Frank says the answer is yes:

Consider “The Wedding Dance,” a 16th-century work by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Detroit museum visitors have enjoyed this painting since 1930. How much would it cost to preserve that privilege for future generations?

A tidy sum, as it turns out. According to Christie’s, this canvas alone could fetch up to $200 million. Once interest rates return to normal levels — say, 6 percent — the forgone interest on that amount would be approximately $12 million a year.

If we assume that the museum would be open 2,000 hours a year, and ignore the cost of gallery space and other indirect expenses, the cost of keeping the painting on display would be more than $6,000 an hour. Assuming that an average of five people would view it per hour, all year long, it would still cost more than $1,200 an hour to provide the experience for each visitor.

As Scott Alexander puts it:

So the question of “should Detroit keep this painting?” reduces to “does the average visitor to the art museum derive $1200 in value from seeing this particular painting?” which is very close to “would you pay $1200 for a ticket to an art museum that only had this painting in it?”

…Case settled to me.

Sunday Links #27 was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on May 25, 2014.

Personal Review for March - May 2014

2014-05-20T01:00:00-04:00

Follow up to “Personal Review for December 2013 - February 2014”.

I’m doing this review a little bit earlier because (a) I just graduated college and feel like I want to review what I’ve done within that context and (b) I can get back onto a Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec review cycle by doing a May-Jun review next. I’ve also had a shift in goals that fits well within this cycle as I start work at the beginning of July. This review covers 1 Mar to 17 May.

How Did I Spend My Time?

These two months, I was focused on pre-professional prep (learning a lot more statistics and programming), bringing greater organization to my projects, and trying different things.

Activity	Hours Per Week	Per Day	% of Day	% of Awake Day
Sleep	54.3	7.8	32%	-
Friends	35.0	5.0	21%	31%
Other[1]	24.6	3.5	15%	22%
Programming	17.2	2.5	10%	15%
Break	12.5	1.8	7%	11%
Class[2]	5.8	0.8	3%	5%
Beta	4.3	0.6	3%	4%
Exercise	3.6	0.5	2%	3%
.impact	3.0	0.5	2%	3%
Write	2.5	0.3	1%	2%
Senior Research	1.9	0.3	1%	2%
DVP	1.5	0.2	1%	1%
DCA	1.6	0.2	1%	1%
ACE	1.0	0.1	1%	1%
80K	0.4	0.05	0%	0%

1: Other includes things like showering, hygeine, prioritizing tasks, reading/answering email, travelling, packing/unpacking, visiting the dentist, getting a haircut, etc.

2: Class does not include my Computer Science class, which was instead included in Programming.

What Did I Accomplish?: Pre-professional Prep

I spent 17.2 hours a week (189.3 hours total) learning programming, which is almost a part time job. This was broken down with 89.8 hours (47.4%) spent on my CS class (Python, C++); 48 hours (25%) redesigning all my websites (lots of CSS, some JavaScript); 28.8 hours (15.2%) spent developing Jorge’s Trading Post (PHP); 10.5 hours (5.5%) learning R; 6.5 hours (3.4%) learning Ruby/Rails; and 6 hours (3%) on other miscellaneous stuff.

I’m happy with this level of time commitment, but I would like to up it both in overall quantity and in distribution. As my job will be working with Ruby/Rails and R, I need to spend the vast majority of my time focusing on those two languages. I’d ideally like to work 40 hours a week on learning programming to make sure I’m prepared, which would give me another 240 hours of prep, which I think would be adequate, especially if focused on Ruby/Rails and R.

What Did I Accomplish?: EA Projects

In addition to focusing on pre-professional prep, I was also focused on expanding my knowledge of EA Projects by trying a bunch out and seeing how things went, with the goal of finding opportunities to focus in on. My overall goal was to try to make some progress in six areas: marketing/outreach, community building, cause prioritization research, coaching, and project management. Here’s how I’ve done so far:

Marketing / Outreach

I gave a TEDx Talk on 1 Mar. It was viewed in person by about 200 people and then viewed online by 260 more people. It’s too difficult to figure out how many people were influenced by it. I wrote a retrospective that I think is informative for helping develop the pitch for EA. Overall, I spent 34.3 hours preparing, giving, and reviewing the TEDx event. I don’t think the talk had much impact, though I’ll continue to monitor. It was worth the experiment.

I had a conversation with Michael Bitton where we discussed EA marketing, including the promising idea of focusing on atheists / skeptics, currently being explored by the new organization Charity Science (though I believe they thought of targeting that group independently).

Community Building

I interviewed Boris Yakubchik. The benefit here is to use human stories to inspire people into effective altruism. A few people said they found the interview useful, though it’s hard to know how much impact this translates into. This took 3.5 hours of my time and two hours of Boris’s time.

Cause Prioritization Research

I did some more research on the cost-effectiveness of vegetarian advocacy (currently unpublished). More by the next review.

Coaching

I wrote a guide on how to learn programming. Six people told me personally that they would use it. I still have not checked in with any of them, but intend to do so before the next review. This took me five hours of my time and one hour of other people’s time. More on the impact of this by the next review.

I coached one person in productivity techniques, but still haven’t followed up enough to know if I’ve had any impact.

I also coached two people on how to add effective altruism into one’s life. For one person, I think I had an impact, but I’m very confident that this person counterfactually would have turned out the same if I had not coached her. For the second person, I have still not followed up as there hasn’t been enough time. More on this in the next review. Both of these coaching sessions were one hour each.

Furthermore, I coached two people in career choice. For one, I don’t think I’ll have any impact. For the other, it’s too soon to see if I’ll have any impact. These took 1.5 hours of my time, each.

Lastly, I reached out to Jacy to review the impact of my prior coaching with him. It appears my advice did not have any direct impact, but “the social support/encouragement of having another like-minded individual in a similar place in life accomplishing visible [and] productive” was “most important”. Likewise, Jacy felt inspired by how I “took a non-standard career path (AFAIK, you’re doing EtG+Movement-Building, which is pretty unique) and that probably galvanized [his] decision to do a similar thing with graduate school (career capital+Movement-Building)”. The advice plus the review was two hours of my time, so I think it was worth it. Overall, careers coaching seems to be a promising use of my time, even if I have not generated any career changes. More by the next review.

Project Management

I re-started .impact after a month hiatus. While three of our members (Ozzie Gooen, Patrick Brinich-Langois, and Ciaran Phillips) have dramatically scaled down their time commitment for .impact in order to pursue finding a programming job, we’ve added two new committed members – Tom Ash and Jacy Anthis – who have started work on different projects, most notably a survey of effective altruists (take it if you haven’t already) and several community building tools, such as a map of EAs and a cause-neutral donation registry. I don’t think my project management or project work here is essential, but it seems somewhat critical, so it appears to be 34 hours well invested during this review cycle.

Eating and Exercise

Previously, I said I would have to renew my focus to eating right and exercising consistently for the next review cycle. I have done this to some success by committing to Beeminder, which tracks your goals and charge you money for derailing. This allowed me to regain my ability to run a 5k in about half an hour (10min mile). I also boosted my Squat, but none of my other lifts – Squat +10lbs (215 to 225lbs), Benchpress +0lbs (110lbs), Deadlift +0lbs (265lbs), Overhead Press +0lbs (85lbs), and Rows +0lbs (110lbs). I owe this letdown to the smaller review cycle and the fact that not exercising for a large period of time lead me to have to spend my time catching up rather than increasing my lifts.

Thanks to Beeminder, I also have been able to more frequently keep to a healthy diet and eat significantly less junk food.

Goals for the Next Review

My three-year goal is to watch the development of the effective altruist community and my own personal talents to (a) assess how much room there is for marginal high-impact EA projects work, (b) assess whether I would be well suited for that work personally, and (c) assess whether doing that work full-time would be preferable to working full-time and donating some of my salary.

I’m only 1.5 months in, but it appears that coaching, project management, and cause prioritization research have some promise (listed in decending order of promise-having). I’m also reasonably confident they could amount to full-time work. However, I’m still very uncertain whether my working full-time on this area would be better than my ability to donate potentially $30K-$40K a year and rising to other people already working in the area, like the Centre for Effective Altruism.

For my next review cycle (now until the beginning of July, right after I settle into my new job), I’ll be taking a bit of a different approach and focusing as much as I can on learning programming to prepare for my job. Originally, I was also planning on focusing on EA Projects, but I expect that marginal time learning programming will be more immediately valuable for increasing my near-term and long-term job prospects. Furthermore, as I home after college, I expect to be allocating a significant amount of time to seeing my friends, family, and girlfriend prior to entering the “real world”. As you can see, I already spent 35 hours a week with friends over the past two months, celebrating the end of college.

Personal Review for March - May 2014 was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on May 20, 2014.

Conversation with Michael Bitton about EA Marketing

2014-05-10T09:20:00-04:00

Michael Bitton is a graduate student in Media Production in Toronto. For his thesis paper, he’s been researching effective uses of media for doing good in the world. He currently sees the most potential in health communication and social marketing in the developing world. You can find out about his writings at his blog, A Nice Place to Live. I had this conversation with him on 26 Feb via .impact, but thought it would be good to cross-post the conversation here. I’ve added a bit more from the comments I’ve received from others.

Note: These notes are a quick summary of our conversation and may not be all that coherent. They miss a lot of nuance and may not reflect statements that both people agree to.

What is the goal of marketing EA?

Move more existing donations to more effective charities
Create more donations
Get more people to think of “doing good” as a consideration for choosing their career
Create more people who will identify as effective altruists?
Create more vegetarians / vegans?

Who could the target audience be?

Generally Speaking…

Right now, it seems like people either get EA immediately or not, as seen in currently unpublished GWWC marketing surveys. Though, as Ben Kuhn points out, this could be confabulation. He wouldn’t be surprised if people edited their memories so that they “got it” immediately. Ben used to think that he “got it immediately”, but now says in retrospect he doesn’t think that’s true. I personally think I got it immediately, even in retrospect.

Pablo Stafforini says that this could be tested by considering the lag between exposure to EA material and affiliation to an EA org, as it’s much harder to confabulate dates than about thought processes. Anecdotally, Pablo says he knows of many people who decided to contact GWWC and even sign the pledge after a few days of reading The Life You Can Save.

Michael Bitton thinks that equating “EA” with “signing GWWC’s pledge” is setting the bar way too high and that the bulk of the untapped population would only be persuaded to give “part-way.”

Fine Tuning the Message

If it’s true that there is a core group of people that will get it, reaching them is all that is important (“spray and pray” method), though we should check o make sure this isn’t misguided. It’s also possible that if we fine-tune our message, we can reach more people.

GWWC is a really big ask, and people might be receptive to smaller asks, like The Life You Can Save – comparing asking people to pledge at different rates would be informative.

The core EAs in Switzerland think that getting interested in science/rationality first may be more effective than pitching altruism. This works better for them and is their new strategy. Adriano Mannino knows more about this.

Potential Target Group: Secularist / Atheist / Skeptic community

Interested in secular morality
Friendly to consequentialism
Friendly to applying skepticism to charity
Friendly to thinking rationally / hearing arguments
Niel Bowerman thinks this would be a great group to tap into more heavily. His intuition is that many of them would “get” effectiveness and convincing them of the altruism component wouldn’t be all that difficult. He would be interested in hearing from anyone who has tried approaching these communities in more detail.

Potential Target Group: Devoutly religious

Pre-existing drive toward altruism
Willing to tithe their income / donate lots
May not identify with EA directly, but maybe a church could be persuaded to donate to Against Malaria Foundation or Give Directly, though it may be hard to persuade them away from religious / local causes.
Downside: the religious tend to be unfriendly to consequentialism
Niel knows a few very dedicated EA pursuing earning-to-give that have come through this route. Like other groups such as campaigners that are already heavily bought into the idea of altruism, my experience is that a much lower fraction are interested, but for the very few who ‘get’ EA they can become very dedicated.

What is our pitch?

Emphasize an “excited altruism” approach. While lots of current EAs found the moral-imperative approach compelling, the intuition is that a message of “self-sacrifice” might not be catchy for the mainstream. But it would be good to test further. Michael Bitton think people are driven mostly by low motives and thus their decisions will come down to factors besides merely identifying the morally right action. Plenty of people think vegetarianism is the morally superior option and yet eat meat anyway. Furthermore, the existence of current moral-imperative-EAs is much evidence that that pitch would persuade more people. It could be that the moral-imperative-people would naturally be the first ones to join, for some reason.

Gather more stories of people who are EAs. Emphasizing a human element might make it more appealing.

Concern that EA as community might backfire. Bitton says that people don’t like joining communities that have a value system. Furthermore, other things in the ea community could be a turn-off to some people. While the connection to utilitarianism is ok, things like cryonics, transhumanism, insect suffering, AGI, eugenics, whole brain emulation, suffering subroutines, the cost-effectiveness of having kids, polyamory, intelligence-enhancing drugs, the ethics of terraforming, bioterrorism, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, mindhacking, etc. might not appeal well. There’s a chance that people might accept the more mainstream global poverty angle, but be turned off by other aspects of EA. Bitton is unsure whether this is meant to be a reason for de-emphasizing these other aspects of the movement. Obviously, we want to attract more people, but also people that are more EA. He doesn’t have a good sense of how to approach decisions that involve trade-offs between these two desiderata.

Consider the fanbase analogy. As a start, Bitton thinks the above concern should be treated as analogous to a corporation deciding whether to appease its core fan base or the (more numerous) casual fans. I’m more interested in gaining “casual fans” (ordinary people that start to give a bit more or decide a bit better) than in further uniting the “core fan base” (the people that currently post in EA Facebook groups, on LessWrong, identify as EAs, read EA blogs, work on EA projects, etc.).

Concern the EA community is too homogonous. Even if EA is not a value system or ideology, it’s still a somewhat clear identity category (white, atheist, background in STEM, rationalist, “nerdy,” introverted, familiar with philosophy, dislike of continental philosophy, “innocent” in the sense of low rates of tattoos, piercings, smoking, heavy drinking, radical physical appearance, etc.)

Need more on-the-ground research to figure out how normal people think of charity (e.g., people donate to cancer charities because their parents died of cancer). Perhaps it would be immediately obvious that saving lives is more important than the arts, but people haven’t realized the things are in tension…

Need to learn more about what pitches work through A-B testing, focus groups, talk with marketers, etc., to create actionable findings that are generally useful for the whole movement.

Conversation with Michael Bitton about EA Marketing was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on May 10, 2014.

Interview with Boris Yakubchik

2014-05-06T22:46:00-04:00

Today, I sit down with Boris Yakubchik. He’s the co-President of Giving What We Can: Rutgers and has been involved in the effective altruist movement for a long time, regularly giving away 50% of his income to the Against Malaria Foundation.

Peter Hurford: One of the most notable things about you is that you regularly give 50% of your salary to the Against Malaria Foundation without missing a beat. How did you get to that point in your life? And do you plan on going any further?

Boris Yakubchik: I was lucky to have learned about effective altruism before I started my full-time job. I joined Giving What We Can previously and was already giving 10% from my part-time self-employed tutoring income. And by January 2012 I started my full-time job as a high-school math teacher and my income more-than-doubled.

Before taxes I started earning close-to $50,000 and my expenses were less than $20,000. I figured I didn’t need a more-lavish lifestyle and I thought I would be able to sustain giving 50% to cost-effective charities.

Unfortunately in 2013 I was not working full time and wanted to quickly pay down the college debt of my fiancée, so I temporarily decreased my giving to 10%.

I’m at the moment trying out a work-from-home business in which my parents have been successful; it has the potential for a significantly higher income than a teacher.

P: Why did you pick Against Malaria Foundation as a place to give? Why not give somewhere else, or to a bunch of different charities?

B: At the time that I started giving, AMF was GiveWell’s top-rated charity. I feel that is the best reason.

Also, I had several “Birthday for Charity” events and was able to raise money for AMF directly through their website. There is certainly a psychological tie to giving to AMF because I’ve publicly endorsed AMF for several years now.

I’m open to giving to other charities, and through the years have done that. Specifically I gave to Vegan Outreach and the Humane League based on the evaluations from Animal Charity Evaluators.

There are some strong arguments that conclude that once you find the best charity, you ought to give there. I give the bulk of my money to whichever charity I think does the most towards eliminating extreme poverty, but will continue to give nontrivial amounts to organizations that effectively decrease animal suffering.

P: You say your expenses are less than $20K. That’s quite frugal! How do you make that work?

B: I don’t want lavish things, my car is for purposes of getting from point A to point B. I try to minimize large expenses (like apartment rent). I rarely eat out (my fiancee cooks amazing food). Most of the entertainment is virtually free: spending time with friends, reading book and internet, watching films at home.

I wrote up some of the best advice about frugal liging that I’ve come across on my website: http://www.yboris.com/frugal.php

P: Let’s change topics a little bit. Another thing I’ve seen you talk a lot about is the Giving What We Can chapter at Rutgers. What does it do? And how did you get involved with it?

B: I was lucky to watch the Rutgers chapter get started (primarily by Nick Beckstead, Mark Lee, and Tim Campbell) and attend the meetings from day one. At our second meeting I gave a short talk about positive psychology and how giving affects happiness (primarily relying on Andreas Mogensen’s wonderful “Giving Without Sacrifice”).

By the second academic year I volunteered (and was elected) as the president. The main task has been to organize events, and get others involved. The primary function of the chapter is to draw an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, educate them about the problems of extreme world poverty, and demonstrate to them that they can individually make a big positive difference in the world.

We’ve done that through a variety of events like lectures (e.g. Poverty: Lessons Learned from Photography), workshops (e.g. THINK’s Evaluating Social Interventions), and fundraising (Booksale for Charity).

Last academic year we had another President running Giving What We Can: Rutgers, Michaél MF.

P: Wow. I always forget that there are a lot of cool people involved in the Rutgers chapter! Have your events been able to engage people well? What lessons have you learned from running them?

B: I wish I tracked our success more quantitatively, but I’m confident that over the years we’ve been able to encourage many to start giving more effectively. At the very least, several of my friends have joined Giving What We Can (started giving at least 10%).

Some of the events we had, for example Thomas Pogge came to give a talk, drew an audience of students who have never heard of Giving What We Can, several stayed around after the talk to learn more. Some events were attended poorly, in part because of poor advertizing on my part, but we have video recordings for others to see, for example Zell Kravinsky talked about how he gave away over $40 million.

While it’s certainly important to have an interesting and educational event, it’s very important to advertise widely. Doing things by yourself isn’t the best strategy, I really recommend giving specific tasks to those who are interested in helping (e.g. contact the student paper to send a correspondent, or print 3 flyers and post them in these buildings).

P: Do you have any tips on how to advertise an event so that people get interested and come?

B: I’m not sure how important it is to have a well-designed flyers, but posting flyers has been successful for us. There have been times when we post flyers on the day of the event with “TODAY” written on it. I think that can encourage more people to look at the flyer, thus increasing the chances of more people attending.

Personal invitations have worked well, one acquaintance I had I urged to come to our meeting, she came just because of the request and was interested enough to come to many events for several semesters.

I had better success getting people to come when I was a student at Rutgers. I don’t know, but it seemed that when we had weekly meetings (same day, same time, same location), we had better attendance than when we had them bi-weekly. Perhaps building a habit is good.

P: I saw that as a part of GWWC: Rutgers you even were able to give a TEDx talk on cost-effectiveness in philanthropy. That’s so cool! How did you arrange for that to happen? What came out of it?

B: TEDxRutgers happened for several years at Rutgers and in early 2013, Michaél MF told me that he knew some of the people organizing the event. Because I’ve given talks related to Effective Altruism (some modeled on Toby Ord’s presentation), Michaél put me in touch with the organizers. I was lucky that they still had some space in their line-up and I was accepted with a 12-minute limit.

I had significant help from friends and the EA community while drafting and revising my talk (at the very least I’d like to thank Roxanne Heston). I wish I had an extra day to practice, because during the final talk I stumbled several times.

Unfortunately, it took a long time for the video to be edited. But,finally, a year later, we were able to post it online on the Giving What We Can YouTube channel.

P: In addition to raising awareness via Giving What We Can: Rutgers, I’ve also seen you raise awareness on different issues via prolific posting on Facebook. And I remember we once talked about how you were handing out leaflets from Vegan Outreach that encourage people to eat less meat. A lot of people, like me, care a lot about these causes, but are too shy to become activists. How did you cross that bridge?

B: I was rather shy even in my first year in college, but by third year I became a lot more social (with the help of a friend who kept encouraging me to go to parties with him). I didn’t like the parties, but at some point I somehow knew hundreds of people and felt a lot more confident talking to strangers.

At some point, I went silly in the head on Facebook and started befriending people who I just met once, or who had some large number of friends in common; so I managed to have a ‘network’ of about a thousand people.

At first I was a cheerleader for science, posting news of fantastic discoveries and potential technologies, but with time, especially once I learned of extreme world poverty and moral arguments like Peter Singer’s, I decided to use my platform to share pro-social ideas.

I think incremental steps can help one become less uneasy about approaching others (when handing out VO booklets), and it’s easy to talk about what you’re passionate about.

P: Do you have any recommendations to people that also want to get involved in influencing, whether through Facebook, pamphlets, or official organizations?

B: Facebook provides a rather safe environment for starting a conversation. It’s hard to know how much influence posts and discussions can have, but I think over the years, at least a dozen people have messaged me privately saying things akin to “I really appreciate your posts” and even “You’ve influenced my thinking”.

I’ve occasionally posted images that were provoking (especially ones urging people to take steps to decrease animal suffering). Sometimes the discussions are hijacked by people that sound like they are from another planet, but at other times it feels productive.

Getting involved with official organizations is great because they legitimize what you are doing. It’s much easier to talk about a topic when others are there for that purpose.

P: Has anyone reacted negatively or hostile to your activism? If so, how do you deal with that?

B: I’ve had in the past some discussions with friends (in person) where the topic of morality came up and I argued too forcefully. I think one needs to be very careful when discussing issues like that because even well-worded comments can be misunderstood, and even the purpose of the discussion could be misinterpreted. With practice you can get better at these conversations. I absolutely love Giving What We Can’s approach: you just share your excitement about how awesome it is that you can, thanks to research and awesome organizations, help people significantly with little cost to you!

It’s possible that some people won’t be moved by arguments or other appeals. Something that’s helpful is to keep in mind that people come from different backgrounds with different assumptions. Motivating a change that is too drastic can backfire. Reading books written by psychologist can help (e.g. Influence, The Charisma Myth, etc)

One of the most helpful books I’ve read was “The Animal Activist’s Handbook” which shares excellent (psychology-informed) advice about working towards change.

P: Speaking of vegan activism, I’ve heard you describe yourself personally as “near vegan”. What do you mean by that? And how did you make that lifestyle change?

B: The first time I heard of vegetarianism was with a PETA leaflet that compared factory farms with concentration camps. This was too-drastic for me to accept at the time and I promptly threw it away with a laugh and a thought “crazy people”.

I was lucky that I met many vegetarians through my college careers, many were happy to say why they chose it for themselves, many were not pushy. I think because I liked the people, I was eager to learn more.

Through extended conversations, and especially because I made a close friend (Graduate Philosophy student) who was vegetarian, I warmed up to the arguments. I was lucky that my diet was primarily vegetables based (mom cooked soups, fried potatoes, etc) so it wasn’t hard to decrease my meat consumption.

For the longest time, and still, I think of vegetarianism as a continuum. This type of thinking makes it psychologically easier for people to eat less meat: they can feel like they are already doing something by eating less.

I know it’s possible to be entirely vegan; one year that I was living alone I just refrained from buying animal products. But I think it’s better to be flexible (and not freak out over some butter in your restaurant dish) - this creates a more inviting picture for others to join.

It’s important not to forget about the social component: you are able to do more by encouraging and inspiring others to change too.

P: When not trying to save the world, what do you do in your free time?

B: I really enjoy reading and have read some amazing books in the past (I recommend some here: http://www.yboris.com/reading.php). I like electronic music and listen often through the day (have been listening to trance/progressive house on di.fm for over a decade). I enjoy spending time with friends, learning about and joking about trivial things. During the summer, hiking is one of my favorite activities.

Now I’m lucky to have met a partner for life, Yetzenia, now my fiancee. We live together and thus spend most of the time in each other’s company. I recently bought a used projector and with the help of a large white wall Yetzenia and I watch movies.

I look forward to the release-version of Oculus Rift.

P: Last time we talked, you were involved in a massive cross-continental US road trip with your fiancee. What’s that like? What’s your favorite moment?

B: It’s hard to pick one. The 10,000-mile trip was wonderful and we both learned a lot about what we like and what we don’t. There were numerous beautiful moments, I’ll share one.

One of the most exhilarating moments for me was when I found a probably-five-story-high mountain of sand along the East Coast Highway in California (some miles north of LA); I walked up it for a long time, and then ran down. Yetzenia described that I looked like a gazelle. By the time I reached the bottom I was breathless, laughing, with tears running down my eyes from the wind.

P: Wow, that sounds really fun! Well, thanks for taking the time to let me get to know you! This was awesome!

Cross-posted on the EA Blog.

Interview with Boris Yakubchik was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on May 06, 2014.

Effective Altruism at TEDxDenisonU

2014-04-22T00:54:27-04:00

Recently, my university had a TEDx event, and I was one of the people that got to give a talk:

My goal of the talk was to present the idea that effectiveness in charity choice matters, with particular care to highlight the research of GiveWell and the work of The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.

Here are my notes on how the talk went:

What Went Well

This video represents my current best guess on how to pitch effective altruism to a general audience. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to go about it.

I made it short. Just seven minutes.
I never mentioned the words “effective altruism”. I think using and explaining the term tends to confuse more than inspire.
I mentioned only one topic (charity choice in giving), with one EA org (GiveWell), one example (SCI), and one call to action (look at GiveWell’s research). This keeps it as simple as possible.
I orginally thought of mentioning more things (like Giving What We Can’s pledge), but chose not to, as this would make things more confusing.
I tried to humanize the idea as much as possible. I attempted to make my dilemma of charity choice relatable to the typical donor.
I specifically acknowledged that people give for non-EA reasons, and tried to frame my approach as a source of excitement, not a moral obligation.
I mentioned “two quarters” in addition to “fifty cents” to employ the “disrupt and reframe” persuasion technique.
The talk was a really fun opportunity. I broadened my horizons and met some cool people.

What Could Have Gone Better

The technical recording of the video isn’t that great. There’s a weird black screen for the first couple of seconds, and the video lingers on my slides a little bit more than they should.
Despite rehersing for a really long time, I still felt nervous when presenting and messed up a tiny bit in two sections. Overall, I think the performance was good given that I’m not the best at public speaking.
The title of the talk could have used some more thought to make it punchier, so that people would be more willing to click on it when they see it on social media.
It probably would have been better to use images of Africans in my slides, but I did not have such pictures readily available and I was nervous about TEDx’s feelings of copyright.
The talk probably could have been even shorter.
I used the statistic that connects SCI with “fifty cents” and the Fred Hollows Foundation with “$40”. I know both these statistics are potentially misleading. I understand that SCI does not save a life for fifty cents – their cost per treatment is actually now about $1 and cost per life saved higher than that. I did choose SCI knowing full well that it would “sound better” than other high impact orgs, specifically because of the “fifty cents” statistic. I couldn’t go down the “actually, things are more expensive than you expect, but still a good route” deal in a short tal but, in retrospect, it would have been more honest to stick to $1.

Impact

The talk was given to an audience of about 200. Since being posted online – and before I promoted it online – it’s received an additional 50 views.
Overall, my talk seems to have been very positively received. I did not receive any negative comments or feel like anyone was distant from my talk, despite talking along side other non-profits that my message could have been seen as harmful towards.
Several people (as in ~6) specifically mentioned something positive to me, like saying that I had a really important message. Another small handful (as in ~3) mentioned to me that they were definitely planning on checking out GiveWell.

Transcript

[Slide 1: Blank]

One day, I was walking with my friends. It was cold out, so I was wearing my winter jacket. As I was walking, I was fidgeting and checking my pockets. And then came my surprise – in one of my pockets, I found a twenty dollar bill that I never knew I had.

I showed it to my friends and we thought about what to do with it. Maybe we should go out to lunch? We weren’t sure. Then one of my friends mentioned that, since I never knew I had the twenty, I never would miss it. I should donate it to whoever needs it most.

I thought this was an excellent idea. I wanted to donate my twenty to whoever needed it most. But who was that? I’ve heard of many different non-profit organizations and lots of different people in need. Who needed my twenty dollar bill the most?

I thought this was a strange notion – how am I supposed to compare charities? Many people around me donate to “charity” …in general. They never would specify which charity or why. Giving was a personal choice.

My friends all had different ideas – the local food bank, other non-profits, even our own university. We definitely have no shortage of charities competing for us. We’re all bombarded by charity advertisements in our mailboxes and our emails. Our universities have all asked us to make a Senior Gift. We’ve all changed the channel when that sad commercial with the puppies comes around – you know which one I’m talking about.

I don’t have much money as a college student, so I want to make my money count. I want my $20 to go far. Where can my money get the most impact?

My story started when I heard that giving should start at home. I thought that was smart. The needs here are important and I know organizations are helping. But then I saw just how much further my money goes when spent in the developing world.

[Slide 2: Choice]

For example, imagine I gave you this choice:

Option A: Spend $40K and restore the eyesight of one blind person. Option B: Spend $40K and restore the eyesight of one thousand blind people.

Hopefully the choice is obvious – we’d all go for Option B. You spend the same $40K in either scenario, but in Option B, 999 more people get their sight. Option B is literally one thousand times better.

…But this scenario – choosing between these two options – It’s all contrived, right?

[Slide 3: Blank]

Not so fast.

In America, it’s often impossible to cure blindness. However, we can go to Guide Dogs of America, a top non-profit that works on training guide dogs and providing them to blind people free of charge.

[Slide 4: Guide Dogs of America]

According to them, the cost of training a guide dog and matching it with a blind person is $42,000. Pay $42K and they train a dog, give it to a blind person, and that blind person can have a more normal life, able to get around.

In the developing world, people are often blind due to trachoma, which is a bacterial infection in the eye. Curing trachoma is a simple procedure.

[Slide 5: Guide Dogs + Fred Hollows]

All it takes to cure someone of blindness in the developing world is about $40 to the Fred Hollows Foundation.

For the same cost as it takes to train a guide dog, I could cure 1000 people from blindness.

Why is this the case? It’s not that the Guide Dogs of America is full of fraud. They don’t funnel money to for-profit fundraisers or waste expenses on overhead. It’s not even that the Fred Hollows Foundation is better run or more effective at doing their jobs than the Guide Dogs of America.

Rather, it’s that the Fred Hollows Foundation is working in the developing world where money can go further. The United States already eliminated trachoma in 1960, so it’s no longer a problem here. Causes of blindness in the US are much harder to treat, because so many of the easy cases have already been treated.

We can see the same difference when we look at poverty. Let’s look at the amount of “extreme poverty”, or how many people live on an income of less than $2 a day.

Surprisingly, there is extreme poverty in the US.

[Slide 6: Pie chart of US extreme poverty]

Once we take into account food stamps, subsidies, and tax credits, we find that 0.5% of Americans live in extreme poverty. This is bad, definitely.

[Slide 7: Pie Chart of US extreme poverty vs. Pie Chart of 3rd world extreme poverty]

But in the developing world, over 70% of people live in extreme poverty. And that’s even after you take into account the fact that things are cheaper there. Not to mention that people in the developing world don’t have access to things like food stamps, homeless shelters, or soup kitchens to stay afloat.

[Slide 8: Simple Fact]

This all led me to a simple fact. Money just goes so much further to help people in the developing world. I think of myself as a poor college student, but $20 barely gets me through my day. It isn’t even enough to fill up a gas tank.

In the developing world, things are different. When you’re in extreme poverty, $20 is enough for two weeks. In the developing world, having an additional $20 means you can buy food, invest in your home, pay school fees. An additional $20 can be the difference that empowers you to get yourself out of extreme poverty.

And this simple fact was a powerful fact that really resonated with me. Even with just $20, I could do so much for people in the developing world.

[Slide 9: Blank]

I certainly don’t mean to trivialize the very serious problems in the US. I wish I had enough money to cure blindness, poverty, and hunger both in the developing world and here in the United States. But, unfortunately, I don’t. Instead, my resources are limited.

[Slide 10: Choice]

Instead, it comes down to a choice.

Option A or Option B?

[Slide 11: Blank]

So what are we supposed to do if we don’t know how to make our money go the furthest? Certainly we can’t just work full-time investigating as many non-profits as we can to find the ones with the highest impact, right?

Luckily for us, there are already people working on just that. Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld used to be employed full-time in the hedge fund industry. But then they decided they wanted to donate some of their salary. To their surprise, they found it very difficult to get high-quality information about charities. So they actually quit their jobs and created…

[Slide 12: GiveWell]

…GiveWell, a non-profit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing their analysis to help donors decide where to give. Now, anyone can go to www.givewell.org and read their in-depth research about how to make a difference.

[Slide 13: Blank]

GiveWell has been spending years finding the organizations that are the best of the best of the best. The organizations they select are thoroughly vetted to make sure they’re what they do actually works. GiveWell reviews research, does interviews, performs site visits, add deeply investigates each charity they evaluate.

Organizations that GiveWell supports are proven, cost-effective, underfunded, and outstanding. And you don’t have to take their word for it – they publish pages and pages of reviews for anyone to consult.

That’s when I knew where I’d give my $20.

[Slide 14: SCI]

GiveWell recommends a few top organizations. My favorite is the Schitsosomiasis Control Initiative – a bit of a mouthful to say, I know. It’s not a sexy name and it’s not a flashy charity. Instead, it’s run by a bunch of academics at the Imperial College in London.

The Schitsosomiasis Control Initiative – or SCI – focuses on doing one simple thing: treat children in the developing world for parasitic worm infections. These are parasites that sit inside you and steal your nutrients as you eat them. Instead of feeding yourself, you feed these worms. SCI gets these worms out by giving children a simple tablet that costs only fifty cents to buy.

For two quarters, you can deworm a child. Deworming causes improved health and nutrition. Deworming also reduces the chance of dying early. Moreover, when children are treated, they regain energy and are able to attend school, improving education.

Deworming has so many benefits, but there’s not enough people funding it yet. Here’s a huge opportunity to make a difference.

[Slide 15: Option C]

So really, the choice is even better. I’m really excited to be able to make such a large difference.

My heart motivated me to give in the first place. But my head told me to think about it some, look at the research, and make an informed decision about where to give. Because of this research, I just gave my $20 to SCI.

Just think – the $20 in my pocket I didn’t even know I had was enough to remove worms from 40 kids.

[Slide 16: Blank]

I know donations are a very personal and emotional manner. Giving with your heart is great. But I ask you to consider taking a similar journey as I did – find out where your money can go furthest and think more about your impact.

Together, passion and evidence can make a powerful combination when it comes to your donations.

I urge you to visit www.givewell.org and consider combining your heard and your head.

Effective Altruism at TEDxDenisonU was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 22, 2014.

Career Advice for Phyllis Schmidt: Choosing Between Masters, Software Engineering, and EA Direct Work

2014-04-21T21:14:27-04:00

Recently, an effective altruist contacted me looking for career advice. This EA had previously been working on a philosophy Ph.D., but recently decided to abandon the field due to insufficient stable job opportunities. As abandoning the philosophy field is looked upon as very negative by those still in the field, this EA asked me to keep their identity anonymous. Therefore, this person goes by the alias “Phyllis Schmidt”.

Phyllis is currently looking at a wide-variety of options for what to do next, looking to make an informed “best guess”, work on that career for a bit, and then re-evaluate.

Phyllis is currently considering (roughly ranked):

I-O psychologist
Software engineer
Economist working on development (e.g., J-PAL)
Continue philosophy professor path

Other options Phyllis is open to include:

Working directly in an EA org
Civil / public service
Working in a foundation as a program officer
Management consulting
Public health

What follows are my notes to Phyllis on each of the options, followed by general advice:

I-O Psychology Masters

Phyllis has looked over 80k’s list of careers, but feels that pursuing a masters in industrial/organizational (I-O) psychology would be the best fit for her, given her talents and interests.

Potential Upside of I-O

According to Phyllis, I-O has the potential to be a gateway toward high-earning jobs. Psychology About pegs the salary as starting at $64K and rising to about $100K. Phyllis plans to earn to give on this salary.

Phyllis sees I-O as ripe for EA research potential. I-O psych work aimed at the right sectors could fit in 80K’s category of “working inside international organisations, government or foundations to improve them”.

Lastly, this career has not been well explored by EAs yet, and learning about the career could be a valuable contribution in itself.

Potential Downsides of I-O

Need to take a year of pre-req classes to have a shot at getting into a masters program, which is not guaranteed.

The Masters program itself requires two years and tuition to complete, and an exiting job is not guaranteed.

Options for non-PhDs appear limited, according to some Google searching and a conversation with an I-O psychology professor.

Assessment on I-O

I have actually studied organizational psychology a fair amount, even getting a concentration in it. However, I never considered going further in the career, and therefore I don’t know a whole lot about career opportunities, as I’ve never looked at the career much in depth.

It seems like an interesting field with a mix of EA research potential and earning to give potential, though the research is not as good (in my opinion) as other psych topics (e.g., behavior change) and the earning to give is not as good as other opportunities. I’d be concerned about trying to optimize for too much at once, however, as both EtG and research opportunities seem individually better elsewhere.

Also, the double-risk of failure is very daunting – you’re potentially putting a lot of time and money into something that could easily get you nowhere, with no easy way to find out in advance.

Software Engineering

Potential Upsides to Software Engineering

Very high salaries for earning to give

Great work environments

Could lead to direct impact, depending on what you work on (e.g., productivity applications, AI, etc.)

Potential Downsides to Software Engineering

The field is pretty low risk, though you could spend a lot of time learning programming only for it to not work out.

Assessment on Software Engineering

This option has pretty high potential upside, so merits exploration. Luckily, it should only take about 50 or so hours to determine provisionally if software engineering is a good fit. I recommend Phyllis to complete Steps 1 and 2 in my programming guide and then decide if she wants to pursue this field further.

Economics Masters

Potential Upsides to Economics

Leads to a wide variety of favorable options after attaining a Ph.D. (high-paying finance jobs, government work, good EA research opportunities), but it’s unclear whether a masters would attain the same benefits. Phyllis says there are programs like Master’s of Public Administration in International Development that could potentially lead to a job at the World Bank.

Research while getting the degree could be useful to EA.

Potential Downsides to Economics

Long time to finish degree.

No guarantee to get into a program, and finishing the degree does not guarantee a good job.

Might end up not matching Phyllis’s interests.

Overall Assessment of Economics

This route seems better to me than I-O or Philosophy, though I’d have to know more about Phyllis’s interests and economics background. There still is a lot of potential risk here.

Continue Philosophy Ph.D.

Potential Upsides to Philosophy

Potential influencing of students.

Already much of the way through a Ph.D. program (sunk cost)

Potential Downsides to Philosophy

Positions are very low pay.

Positions are in geographic areas undesirable to Phyllis.

Phyllis is very burnt out in this area.

Assessment of Philosophy

I personally tend not to recommend this path because I don’t think the impact is all that high, unless you get really lucky like Peter Singer, or you use it as a platform to do EA org work, like Toby Ord or Will Macaskill. As Phyllis already seems to be looking very negatively upon this path, I don’t think it’s worth exploring further.

Direct Work in an EA Org

A lot of Phyllis’s previous work seems like it would make her well qualified to do good work in an EA org of some sort. I recommend Phyllis look into this in a bit more depth. Unfortunately, as Phyllis is American, the opportunities for stable employment in Oxford’s CEA are more limited, but not impossible. I recommend Phyllis look into doing an internship with CEA and talk to people who work there.

Phyllis could also consider working for American EA organizations or EA-aligned non-profits. American-based The Life You Can Save might be of particular interest to Phyllis. Though I don’t believe they’re doing full hiring yet, I think Phyllis could potentially get an internship there to explore this opportunity further.

Working in a Foundation

Working in a foundation has many potential benefits. Unfortunately, my analysis of foundation jobs shows that positions are very competitive and seem to require a lot of prior specialized education and experience. If Phyllis wishes to work in a Foundation, I recommend pursuing a Ph.D. in economics first.

Conclusion and Next Steps

I generally err against recommending people take on Ph.D. programs without high certainty they’d enjoy and prosper in the field. Unfortunately, this does not yet appear to be the case for Phyllis. Moreover, earning to give opportunities seem higher for Phyllis in software engineering and research opportunities seem better for Phyllis in EA orgs. Lastly, committing to a lot more school does not fit well with the “best guess and re-evaluate” plan.

Therefore, I suggest Phyllis first look more heavily into software engineering and direct work in EA orgs.

I recommend to Phyllis the following next steps:

Complete Steps 1 and 2 in my programming guide and then decide if she wants to pursue this field further.
Talk to people in CEA, the Life You Can Save, and other EA orgs about what opportunities here might look like – including volunteer opportunities, internships, and full positions. I’d be happy to make these connections.

Epilogue

Phyllis has agreed to look at my programming guide and is strongly considering applying to a programming bootcamp. Phyllis has also been talking to US-based EA organization Animal Charity Evaluators about interning with them.

Career Advice for Phyllis Schmidt: Choosing Between Masters, Software Engineering, and EA Direct Work was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 21, 2014.

Sunday Links #26

2014-04-20T03:31:00-04:00

What started out as some links and commentary on a discussion of Pigovian taxation ended up becoming an entire post on my Tumblr instead.

And then I did it again. Now I analyze how much money matters in politics. Answer: it’s complicated?

One interesting way to think of ethics is as protecting you from yourself: “But why not become an expert liar, if that’s what maximizes expected utility? Why take the constrained path of truth, when things so much more important are at stake? Because, when I look over my history, I find that my ethics have, above all, protected me from myself. They weren’t inconveniences. They were safety rails on cliffs I didn’t see. I made fundamental mistakes, and my ethics didn’t halt that, but they played a critical role in my recovery.”

Speaking of very lengthy discussions, here’s one on libertarianism, and why it’s sorta wrong sorta misguided sorta maybe? On the other end of things (by the same author), we get a left-libertarian manifesto. Left-libertarianism sounds pretty good to me, quite in line with my discussion of Pigovian taxation earlier.

An interesting study looks at how donors respond to evidence of effectiveness in advertisements of charities. The paper hypothesizes that those who are altruistically-inclined respond positively to evidence, whereas those who are donating to seek a “warm glow” of personal happiness respond negatively to evidence.

A new Pew survey finds that Americans don’t feel ready for a future of driverless cars, lab grown meat, and servant robots. However, as “From Yuck to Yippee” in Reason Magazine points out, people tend to be opposed to new potential technology right until they become actual, like in vitro fertilization.

Once upon a time, I wrote a summary of “earning to give”, or the idea of looking specifically for a high paying job in order to earn a lot of money, and then use your large disposable income to donate to charity. Now, Pablo Stafforini has expanded that work into a larger annotated bibliography.

You may have heard that 90% of all medical research is flawed. Turns out that this claim is flawed.

Sunday Links #26 was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 20, 2014.

So You Wanna Learn How to Code? Going from Zero to Programmer Hero in One Guide, for Great Justice.

2014-04-18T03:23:00-04:00

v1.8.22 - Last Update: 22 Apr 2014 1:50p EDT - by Peter Hurford (with lots of help)

UPDATE: Thanks to someone in the comments, I found a new resource for learning programming called The Odin Project, and dare I say it, I think it’s better than my guide. I took detailed notes on it here, and I urge you to read them if you’re interested in a slightly different take on learning programming.

The Introduction

So you wanna learn how to code? Whatever your motivation, computer programming and general computer know-how are good skills to have. Programming knowledge can be potentially high value for careers or start-up opportunities, and with not too much time investment, you can figure out if programming is something you would enjoy and be good at.

There are multiple paths to getting a programming job, learning programming, or whatever goal you may have. There’s no “one true way”, and there’s going to be a lot of conflicting advice on what is the “best” way to learn. Honestly what is best is going to vary person by person, and based on your interests and goals. I’ve designed a guide here based on my personal experience and had it tweaked based on feedback from other programmers. This guide is heavy on web development and Ruby on Rails because those are the things I’ve had the most experience with, they seem like good places to start, and they seem quite employable. That doesn’t mean that learning other languages is not a good idea. This guide is designed with the mind to try and find your interests as soon as possible. But it still might not be precisely right for you. Your mileage may vary. The best thing to do is just start, somewhere. See if this guide works for you, tweak if it doesn’t. Let me know.

Additionally, you might find out that programming is not a good fit for your skills and interests, and you have to be okay with that. Keep in mind that true programming skill only comes from the long haul. There is no real “learn X language in two hours” – even 100 hours of learning will only give you a beginner’s knowledge of one particular language. “Programmer hero” status will only be achieved after many years of work. So it’s important you really like it and stick with it, if you want to get anywhere. Programming also seems to come best if you have multiple, uninterrupted, consecutive hours to devote to it – it appears much harder if it’s just 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there.

Also, let me know (Peter Hurford on Facebook or peter@peterhurford.com by email) if you try this guide, so I can get feedback on how it goes for you. Feel free to also reach out to me with comments on how to improve the guide – I’m still relatively new to programming myself and have not yet implemented all these steps personally!

The Guide, Pt. I – Zero to Beginner

Step One – Codecademy

If you don’t know any programming at all, it would be a good idea to get a feel for it on Codecademy. Pick either the Python lesson or the Ruby lesson. Spend about 5-10 hours on one of them (no need to finish it).

Here’s a good test – Can you implement FizzBuzz in either Python or Ruby? Can you implement bubble sort in either of those languages? If you answered no to the first question, definitely do this step. If you answered yes to the first, but no to the second, consider doing this step. If you answered yes to both, definitely skip this step.

If you do this, see how you feel after the 5-10 hours are up. How fun was it? How much of a struggle was it? How much time were you able to devote to it per week? Is this something you can see yourself doing?

I don’t think it’s necessary to complete the course, but feel free to finish it at this point if you wish.

Step Two – Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial

I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news – real programming is actually a lot more fun and interesting than Codecademy. The bad news – Codecademy is not real programming. Codecademy is a good supplemental learning guide, but it isn’t comprehensive enough. So we’re going to look to something a bit better.

At this point, I’m going to recommend to you to complete Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails tutorial. Ruby on Rails is already a really popular and useful language right now, and is a very employable language to know if you want to go into the start-up / tech world. The guide also provides useful introductions to many other important supporting technologies, like GitHub, RSpec, and Heroku. You’ll also learn critical concepts like Model-View-Controller and test driven development.

When you complete this guide, make sure you never copy and paste the provided code – always retype it by hand. You won’t really learn it if you just copy and paste. Moreover, try all the provided exercises in each section. That’s how you expand your knowledge.

My guess is that it should take you 30-60 hours to get through the tutorial. Use Beeminder or something if you feel like you’re not doing a good job at getting the hours in.

Optional Other Step Two – If you hated Hartl’s Tutorial…

I personally enjoyed Hartl’s tutorial a lot and think it’s a really great set-up to not just Ruby on Rails, but many other things (e.g., GitHub, getting a text editor, etc.). But if you disliked it, don’t fear! It doesn’t mean programming is right for you, it just means you’re different than me.

Some other ways to learn the right amount of Ruby on Rails to progress to step three is to sign up for Code School and work through all the Ruby classes. This costs money, but is worth it. This is a decent method in my opinion and I believe is the preferred method of Ozzie Gooen.

Buck Shlegeris doesn’t like Hartl’s tutorial and prefers that people complete the Codecademy class for Ruby completely and then work through Test First’s Ruby Tutorial. I’ve not personally tried this, but Buck seems to have turned out pretty well, so it can’t be that bad. Buck then says after the Test First tutorial to then also sign up for Code School and work through all the Ruby classes.

Yet Another Optional Other Step Two – Consider a Programming Bootcamp

App Academy is widely considered to be the best program and there’s been lots of discussion of it on LessWrong. App Academy basically does Step 2-17 from this guide, but gives you support, formal teaching, and a good learning environment. Buck Shlegeris is a TA at App Academy and is happy to be a contact if you’re interested in getting more information on applying and/or getting coached through the process. Here’s an interview with Buck about App Academy for more information.

It’s worth noitng that App Academy might be best for people in the US. Maker’s Academy seems pretty good for people near London, though.

Step Three – A Personal Rails Project

Now you should know enough to fail forward on a project of your own. You’re off the bunny slopes and now it’s time to ski down the hill. Personal projects are the most exciting and useful ways to learn code, and you now should know exactly enough (and not much more) to try your own Rails application. So make something! I made a Job Board, others made a Skillshare. Hartl had you make a Twitter clone, but you could try to create a clone of another popular app like Reddit. It doesn’t have to be useful, because the idea is just to learn code.

This may be hard, but Googling around and StackOverflow should get you farther than you think. It also could be a really good idea to seek out a personal mentor or two, who can walk you through inevitable points where you get stuck.

Optional Step Four – Another Rails Tutorial

If you feel like you’re struggling at this step, you could consider working through another Ruby/Rails tutorial to re-learn some of the stuff in a different context. I like “Agile Web Development with Rails”. No need to do this if you feel like you’re going well, though.

Step Five – Re-evaluate

At this point, you are a certified beginner in Ruby on Rails. Congratulations! At this point, you could probably get an internship or Junior Developer position at a rapidly expanding tech company. Not too bad for ~200 hours of work.

But more importantly – at this point, you should now be able to know if programming is for you. Did you complete your personal project? Was it fun? (It should be fun.) Was it hard? (It should be hard.) If you enjoyed yourself and found yourself able to put in a fair amount of time on it each week, then congratulations – programming might be for you! But be honest with yourself, and don’t force it just because programming seems glamorous.

Optional Step Six – Learn Python

Earlier, in Step One, I had you look at either Python or Ruby. Python is somewhat popular in the start-up world, though not nearly as popular as Ruby on Rails. However, Python is really popular in the academic world. It has good support for statistical programming and has a platform called Django that acts similarly to Rails.

It’s a good language to know, but that being said, several of us don’t think it’s worth the time investment if you’re solely focused on getting into the start-up world and don’t have a particular use for it.

The Guide, pt. II – Skiing the Blue Squares

Step Seven – An Interlude for HTML/CSS

I think now is a good time to switch gears. Ruby on Rails is a language that does back-end, or helps you get information on the server to the user. But we also want to give you some experience in front-end, or making that information usable and well presented. Hartl’s tutorial gave you some intro to this and you probably worked on some of this for your personal project, but now it’s time to take it to the next level.

Skip this if you already know HTML and CSS pretty well. Neither is particularly hard, but both are completely essential for front-end development. That is, could you re-create a simple personal website like this by hand, with minimal looking up of things online? Feel free to try. Even if you’ve never done HTML and CSS before, you might have picked up enough to do it.

If you can’t (don’t worry!), read through Shay Howe’s Beginner HTML/CSS Guide and Advanced HTML/CSS Guide (though “advanced” is a bit of a misnomer here). After you’re done, try to re-create the site.

Step Eight – And Now, JavaScript

We’ll start with the undisputed base language for front-end development – JavaScript. Let’s start by working our way through the entire “Eloquent JavaScript” textbook.

Step Nine – JavaScript Design Patterns

Design patterns are reusable solutions to common programming problems. They’re really good to know. Let’s learn some JavaScript design patterns. Work your way through “JavaScript Design Patterns”.

Step Ten – Go Advanced on JavaScript

Now it’s time to get a little more advanced and learn more about what JavaScript can do. Work your way through “Learn Advanced JavaScript”.

Step Eleven – Connect back to Back-End work with Node.js

Work your way through “The Node Beginner Book”. If you want to learn more about Node.js, consider also working through “Node.js in Action”.

Step Twelve – Get Intermediate on Ruby

We now seem to know more JavaScript than Ruby, so it would be good to catch up here. Let’s read through Peter Cooper’s “Beginning Ruby” and then David Black’s “The Well Grounded Rubyist”.

Step Thirteen – Build a More Complex Application

You now know a lot of Rails and JavaScript, and it’s time to bring it all together. Make something cool. Much cooler than your last app. Show off both your front-end and back-end skills.

The Guide, pt. III – Aiming for a Job?

Step Fourteen – Re-evaluate, Again

Earlier, I mentioned that you knew enough to consider applying to a programming job. At this point, this is even more the case. You now know the beginnings to both a front-end and back-end framework and can build sites on your own. If you were interested in applying to a job, consider looking into that now. Think now about if that’s right for you.

Step Fifteen – Get an Intro to Algorithms

Lastly, it could be a good idea to learn some more about algorithms – this is a good idea even if you’re not aiming for a job. First, reaTry to sign-up for and work through the Coursera class on Algorithms I and Algorithms II. It’s best if you can do them while they’re live, but not necessary. You can also supplement this work by skimming through the “Algorithms” textbook.

Optional Step Sixteen – Read “Cracking the Coding Interview”

If you’re aiming for a Senior Developer job at a tech company, it would be really helpful to tie this algorithm knowledge to how you’ll need to know it – in the interview. Read through “Cracking the Coding Interview”.

Optional Step Seventeen – Do Other Basic Job Stuff

Create a GitHub account if you haven’t already and put some projects there.
Create a nice portfolio website for your work (like Chris’s or mine).
Read through Alexei’s account of getting a software job.
Create a list of companies you want to apply to. Ask people to add to your list.
Seek out people to give you advice on how to apply and perhaps give you internal referrals in a company (very valuable to have).
Familiarize yourself with basic job etiquette like thanking interviewers by e-mail afterwards.
Do some google searches for interview questions beyond what you read about in “Cracking the Coding Interview” – some questions are basic trivia unrelated to coding, such as questions about hexadecimal or how the internet works.
Consider creating an Anki deck of information to know for interviews.

Optional Step Eighteen – Complete some Problem Sets

Besides building your portfolio with projects, another good idea would be to complete some problem sets. Project Euler asks you to solve math problems in any programming language, which is a good test of creativity and math skills. CodeForces Problem Sets are similar.

Exercism is also good – they’re not nearly as math-oriented, but instead offer Ruby and Python (and other) challenges where you try to make code work a given test suite.

Codility challenges also more closely approximate what you might encounter in an interview, with the two-star problems being about the difficulty you should expect, according to Chris Hallquist.

It seems good to try to get a breadth of challenge from all four, though I’d stick more to Exercism and Codility if you’re looking for a position in web development / software engineering.

Also, continuing with this guide couldn’t hurt. The stuff after this guide appears to give much less marginal returns for entry-level jobs, but they’re still important.

The Guide, pt. IV – Black Diamond JavaScript and Ruby

Step Nineteen – Test Driven Development for JavaScript with Mocha

If you’re not looking for a job, or just want to take your skills to the next level, there’s still more guide. I now suggest you learn some good tests for JavaScript and jQuery. Mocha is a nice platform for testing your front-end code. Work your way through the Mocha tutorial.

Step Twenty – Learn Backbone.js and Angular.js

Work your way through “Developing Backbone.js Applications”. You could then consider also learning Angular.js by working through this tutorial and these videos.

Step Twenty-one – Learn more SQL

Rails handles most of the SQL for you, and you’ve probably already learned some SQL through other tutorials. But at this point it could be nice to just get it done. SQLZoo is a nice interactive tutorial here. Let’s complete it now.

Optional Step Twenty-two – Watch RailsCasts

RailsCasts cost money, but they’re an excellent resource for learning how to do particular things in Rails.

Optional Step Twenty-three – Skim around with BentoBox

BentoBox is another site with a lot of resources for learning programming. While less structured than this guide, it offers more depth, and provides resources for learning many things that are not contained in this guide. Maybe you could start learning PHP or Java, maybe you might take up building mobile apps, or who knows? BentoBox provides some resources to help with all of that as well.

Optional Step Twenty-four – Learn Some Data Science

In addition to work in front-end and back-end, another popular programming career is data science. This is a bit of enthusiasm on my part, but statistical programming can be pretty fun and open up a whole new world about what programming can do. And statistics is, next to programming, one of the great skills to know.

If you don’t know stats or want a refresher, work through Udacity’s Intro to Stats class. Then work through Coursera’s Data Analysis class – it’s much better if you can catch it while live, because it’s a pretty dynamic class. After that, work through “Advanced R Programming” and then try your hand at some Kaggle tutorials and competitions. This tutorial on the Titanic is good, and has a companion guide that teaches more R.

Once you’re here, if you want to get really serious into Data Science, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to learn Hadoop and/or MapReduce. But you should have done the hard part already.

Optional Step Twenty-five – Celebrate!

You should now know enough about programming that you’re off on your own. If you’ve found a good mentor, they can tell you what to do next. Or maybe now you can land a programming job and learn programming in a real-world context. Good luck!

Followed up in “A Better Way to Learn Programming? Notes on The Odin Project”.

The Acknowledgements

This advice is based on my personal experience, plus advice given to me (in rough descending order of magnitude) by Richard Batty, Chris Hallquist, Robert Krzyanowski, Ozzie Gooen, and Buck Shlegeris.

The Changelog

v1.0.0 - Initial launch.
v1.0.1 - Added more info to intro.
v1.0.2 - Added version tracker.
v1.1.2 - Added alternatives to Hartl’s tutorial.
v1.1.3 - Added my contact information.
v1.1.4 - Added call for action for feedback.
v1.1.5 - Added Changelog.
v1.1.6 - Added more info about “multiple routes” to intro.
v1.2.6 - Added info on programming bootcamps.
v1.2.7 - Added more info on Python.
v1.3.7 - Added an explicit step for HTML/CSS.
v1.3.8 - Added more info on when one can apply to an internship / Junior position.
v1.4.8 - Added another re-evaluate period.
v1.4.9 - Added Codility to the list of problem sets.
v1.4.10 - Added info on Hack Reactor.
v1.4.11 - Added FizzBuzz test for the first step.
v1.5.11 - Added more info on getting a job.
v1.5.12 - Reorganized some of the steps.
v1.6.12 - Added a step for SQL.
v1.6.13 - Minor fixes.
v1.6.14 - Added more information on App Academy.
v1.6.15 - Tweaked intro.
v1.6.16 - Typo fixes.
v1.6.17 - Added BentoBox.
v1.6.18 - Added reference to list of Bootcamps.
v1.6.19 - Added link to interview with Buck.
v1.6.20 - Fixed some broken links.
v1.6.21 - Fixed two typos.
v1.7.21 - Added information about The Odin Project.
v1.7.22 - Made punctuation consistent in changelog.
v1.8.22 - Added clarification for people who live outside the US.

So You Wanna Learn How to Code? Going from Zero to Programmer Hero in One Guide, for Great Justice. was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 18, 2014.

Sunday Links #25

2014-04-06T21:41:00-04:00

I was recently interviewed by Ryan Carey about the effective altruist movement, movement building, .impact, and work on the far-future. Yay!

Exercising regularly is really important for living longer, staying smarter and healthier, being less depressed, being more attractive, being more respected, and being higher energy. But what should we do? Recently, I’ve been enjoying the guides put together by Rob Wiblin and Romeo Stevens. Personally, I like to run twice a week and do the Stronglifts weightlifting program three times a week.

Psychiatric hospitals are less “Cukoo’s Nest” and more “Catch-22”: “When it gets cold or rainy, the hospital fills up with homeless people. Word has spread on the streets that if you go to the emergency room and tell the nurse that evil spirits are telling you to kill everyone, you will get a nice bed and three warm meals a day (the hospital meals, in contrast to all conventional wisdom, are really good). It can be hard to turn these people away, since bloodthirsty lawyers are circling the hospital waiting for you to make a Type II error (“So, Dr. Alexander, you’re saying this homeless man walked right into your hospital and explicitly told you evil spirits were telling him to kill everyone, and you refused to even admit him to the hospital long enough to evaluate him more carefully? And this happened just before his shooting rampage at City Hall?”). Besides, many of the people with genuine mental illnesses are homeless, so you can’t conclude much either way until you’ve done a proper evaluation which means letting them in for a few days at least.”

Why we should fire the entire “financial advice” industry. The real life-changing idea is early retirement (or extreme frugality) – you can live a really great life on $10K a year or so, and thus, with stocks, you can retire on $250K. With an after-tax income of $50K, you’ll have what you need to retire after just six years of work (savings rate of 80%).

Want to know what economic reforms you should be fighting for? Rolling Stone clocks five economic reforms millenials should be fighting for: the job guarantee, universal basic income, the land-value tax, a US sovereign wealth fund, and public banking. Not to be outdone, Washington Post takes the exact same five economic reforms and frames them for conservatives.

Olof Johansson-Stenman presents research that typical ethical intuitions can be in line with consequentialism. Elsewhere, utilitarianism is linked with higher testosterone and activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Though I’m taking all these findings with a grain of salt.

The Business Habits of Highly Effective Terrorists. Strangly applicable to other businesses.

Sunday Links #25 was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 06, 2014.

On the Rationality of Luck Wishing

2014-04-06T20:00:00-04:00

A friend asks:

What are other things you can wish someone well other than with their luck? “Best of luck” makes sense, but luck seems to refer to some specific external factors rather than just all external or internal factors, and “Hope you try hard enough” or something referring to their own actions sounds condescending and weird. What’s the best way to wish someone success?

In my opinion, if you’re wishing someone well, you’re already doing something that — taken literally — is irrational, as no amount of “wishing” will directly help them accomplish their goals.

Yet, well-wishing is rational, mainly because it’s a polite interaction to show friendship (or signal tribal alliances, if you’d rather) and because the well-wish can boost their confidence and actually indirectly increase their chances of success.

So maybe say “I hope this sentence shows my friendship to you and boosts your confidence in your own abilities!”

…or, for short, say “good luck”.

On the Rationality of Luck Wishing was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 06, 2014.

My Favorite Productivity Apps

2014-04-04T22:20:00-04:00

I use a lot of different apps on the internet to save time for myself. I thought I’d categorize the apps I personally use. I’ve tried to sort them from most to least relevant for who I imagine the typical person who reads this article will be:

Pocket: Allows you to save online articles to read later, even offline and across devices.

Workflowy: A collapsable outline for taking notes and thinking about ideas. Can be used to store and organize anything, from recepies to to-do lists.

AdBlock Plus: Remove ads from the internet.

One Tab: “Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.”

Flux: “It makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.”

ITTT: IFTTT (If This, Then That) is probably the most powerful app on the internet in terms of what it can do. Basically, it’s an app that lets you set up custom, automatic responses to certain events. For example, I use IFTTT to automatically post these blog posts to Facebook and Twitter by using recipes like “If new post in RSS, then post to Twitter”. IFTTT also helps automatically populate the r/smartgiving subreddit that I help out with. And it can be used for dozens of other things, like giving you a warning about rain on your phone, automatically backing up files, having a change in your Facebook profile picture automatically change all your other profile pictures across the internet, automatically log things on Google Calendar, etc.

The Time Zone Converter: I frequently correspond with people in Europe, Australia, Chicago, and California, so I need something to keep my time zones straight. I’ve tried six different apps for this, and this one is my favorite.

Wolfram Alpha: An impressive online calculator (“knowledge engine”) that can handle an impressive amount of input, from solving calculus to figuring out probabilities of various Poker hands, with a lot inbetween.

Cronometer: Cronometer tracks your nutrition (macronutrients and micronutrients) and makes sure you’re on track. Good way to spot check a diet and see if you’re missing something important. A lot of foods are already built-in, so you very infrequently need to enter in things for yourself.

Beeminder: Automatic commitment contracts to keep you on track in your goals, whatever they may be.

This custom 25min-5min timer, that I use for implementing the Pomodoro technique.

Political Wire: So not really an app, technically, but still a time-saver. It’s a really efficient way of learning about what is happening now in the world of US politics.

Text Manipulator: “Need to change something from lowercase to uppercase? Count the letters, numbers, and punctuation? Remove spaces or add spaces at every X characters? This can help.”

YouTube to MP3 Converter: Does exactly what it says it does. I’ve tried four different ones of these and this one is my favorite.

RainyMood: Rain sounds in your browser. What could be better? Doesn’t really save you time per se, but could make you more productive!

Buffer: Sometimes I come up with fun stuff I want to say on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s two in the morning and would be a bad time to post it. Buffer lets me schedule these things for later, which lets me space out the things I would share. This is probably like using a fire hose to put out a candle in terms of functionality, but it’s free and works well. Good thing to use if you really like Facebook and Twitter.

GTime Report: Exports your Google calendar into an Excel spreadsheet. Great for doing some time analysis.

Giasma: I like to know when sunset and sunrise are – mostly because of idle curiosity, but sometimes for figuring out when to go to bed or wake up. Giasma logs sunsets and sunrises for the entire world.

HTML to Markdown: Painlessly converts HTML script into the Markdown format. Does not do the reverse.

Pingdom: Tests page load speed and does server pings and traceroutes.

MTG Proxy Generator: Quickly make proxies for “Magic: The Gathering” cards. Probably not relevant for that many people, but this app has personally saved me hours of time.

My Favorite Productivity Apps was originally published by at Everyday Utilitarian on April 04, 2014.