JW

Julia_Wise

11782 karmaJoined Aug 2014Boston, MA, USAjuliawise.net

Bio

I'm a contact person for the effective altruism community: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community

Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to make the EA community stronger and more welcoming. I also serve on the board of GiveWell.

Besides effective altruism, I'm interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.

Sequences
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2023 project on reforms in EA

Comments
443

Topic contributions
4

Thank you for writing this up! 
It's helpful that you flag that the large majority of studies are done in the US. I would find it helpful in discussing interventions if the location is flagged more - for example, the cash transfers intervention is in rural Kenya. My impression is that these interventions don't generalize well across different settings.
 

Love this topic!

>Do these interventions lead to a permanent reduction in family size, or a temporary one?

Note that even if total number of children ends up the same, there are benefits to spacing children by at least 18 months in terms of health (mother has more chance to recover between pregnancies, mother and baby are better nourished, better care for older siblings). Families may also be able to better afford to educate children who are more widely spaced.

This isn't relevant to all the impacts, you list, though — still worth thinking about those separately!

Does "before/after" mean the kids came before the Nobel, or the Nobel came before the kids? (probably what you want is the work that earned the Nobel, which is harder to time.)

I'd also guess it's confounded by more intense careers and people who are more dedicated to spending a lot of time at work. I doubt you change outcomes much by taking a shorter leave, once your personality and career are already a given.

I did laugh at this — it's a helpful strategy for your career if you'd by default be doing more than half, and anti-helpful if not!

I could imagine benefits to overall productivity across the couple by allocating to whoever can most spare the time. When our childcare falls through, my husband and I work out who will handle what based on the timing of our meetings, who's done more lately, etc, rather than it defaulting to the mother.

I keep thinking about this post. Thank you for the work you're doing, and for writing up this effort and your learnings.

I hadn't read this at the time I wrote the post, but an excerpt from Ricki Heicklen's piece in the "Mistakes" issue of Asterisk Magazine:
 

In January 2022, I decided to leave my job at Jane Street Capital to move to the Bahamas and take a job as a generalist at a new crypto firm funded by Sam Bankman-Fried. In the weeks that followed, I had three strokes of good luck:

a) I talked to a family friend, a lawyer familiar with financial fraud, who expressed alarm about various details of my new job. From our conversations, I made a list of a few dozen questions to investigate before committing.

b) I shared those questions with my new employers, believing they would be appreciated as valuable for our firm.

c) A few hours after sharing the questions, I was told not to come into work the next day

A thought on joy in righteousness:
I haven't read anything by Benjamin Lay, and have no idea how he felt about his actions. But during my more intensely Quaker stage I read the writings of John Woolman, another weirdo vegetarian Quaker who was ardently abolitionist before it was cool. I went in thinking, "It's one thing for someone who kind of enjoys being disruptive, but I'm not like that, I find it really embarrassing and uncomfortable." But in his diary he's clear that he also found it embarrassing and uncomfortable, would have liked to lead a more normal life, and pushed through because of his convictions.

Thanks for your question, Tiresias. We appreciate people coming to us with concerns, and we absolutely don't want to disincentive people from doing so. And we know that people usually aren’t at their best when they’re in the midst of stressful situations.

However, we don't think it’s a workable policy to promise never to take action against people who come to us. Many concerns we get involve two or more people who each have complaints about the other's actions. In those cases, we don't want to unfairly advantage the side of the person who raises the topic with us first. Or there could be a concern separate from the problem the person reported. So we have to balance these two considerations.

As we got more caseworkers, practices like getting input / sanity-checking from other caseworkers and managers on important cases have been helpful in a variety of situations.

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