Seeing Clearly: Red-teaming GiveWell's Glasses Research

Cross-posted on the EA Forum

If you are one of the 166 million Americans who wear glasses, take them off. Now imagine going your whole life like that. Not fun, right? Whether due to prohibitive cost or a lack of awareness/education, over a billion people are estimated to be living with avoidable vision impairment.

Sounds like a promising cause area! GiveWell has done a few analyses on eyeglasses provision and is funding an ongoing RCT that will provide our best evidence yet on the effects of correcting vision impairment. They’ve concluded the evidence is stronger for productivity effects than for educational effects; the RCT will focus on productivity. In this post, I’ll review their glasses -> productivity cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), summarizing what GiveWell found and adding some new wrinkles. In a subsequent post, I’ll take a stab at an education-focused CEA, which GiveWell has not yet done.

Well, Well, Well…Do Wells Clear the Bar?

Having two articles in the three years following my angsty post about needing to write more is a bit embarrassing. To help ease my pain, let it be known that I've written two EA Forum posts in the last year, analyzing a local organization working on installing wells in Niger.

This was a really fun project to work on. There was a lot of engagement on both posts which was very cool to see!

Well, Well, Well…Do Wells Clear the Bar?

Revisiting Well, Well, Well…Do Wells Clear the Bar?

A Hill Worth Dying On: Why it's Thiam to turn the LePage on track's most underdiscussed stat

 What do all these men have in common? 

Film Critics Hate This One Weird Trick: Finding Movies in the Age of AI

I’m back! After an outpouring of concern from my thoughtful and numerous readers, I realized it was time to return to my true calling: writing random stuff on the internet for no one to read. 

What’s kept me busy since the last time you heard from me? Well I’ve picked up a bit of a cinema addiction, having seen a slightly embarrassing 421 movies since my last post 18 months ago. 

And while I’ve been glued to the screen, the world’s been buzzing about LLMs. I’ve always followed AI developments pretty closely and have done some AI-adjacent work as a data scientist, but I’ve yet to find the right way to bring LLMs into my life. As they get better and more useful in personal and career life, it’s time to get stuck in. And the natural starting point seems to be testing LLMs’ movie chops.

So what’s our mission here? Should we choose to accept it, we want to see what it's like to interact with LLMs, and which ones are the most fun and useful to talk to about movies! And ultimately we want to know if they can successfully make personalized recommendations after being given a list of favorite movies.

(Don’t) Write

So you started a blog, but you can never decide if you actually want to write something. Good news. I’m here to (not) help: 

Book Review: The Power Law

 

Don’t judge a book by its cover. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a less inviting one.

Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future and its awful cover sat on my floor for almost a year, but I finally got around to reading it. The book chronicles the evolution of VC from its beginnings to the present and does a great job mixing high-level history with fun stories and insightful analyses. My timing ended up being perfect as I’ve been increasingly curious about VC, both as a general interest and as a theoretical/unlikely career path. It’s a fun read if you have any interest in VC or “tech”, and it definitely left me wanting to learn more.

A quick summary:

My 2022 Highlights

In the end of year reflection spirit, I thought it would be fun to go through my top highlights and moments from 2022. This post is out of character for this blog… but I haven’t posted in over 6 months… and I would definitely be interested in reading something like this from any of my favorite writers… so it’s making the cut.

I’m not sure highlights are a great way to holistically reflect on a year (they don’t include lowlights, things I DIDN’T do, or long term projects and changes), but they are a fun way to force yourself to look back. And it’s great to have them recorded for the future. They can also be a good way to trick yourself into thinking your year went better than it actually did 🙂 (for better and worse)!

Book Review: The WEIRDest People in the World

(Writer’s note: I have a newfound appreciation for good book reviews! This was so much more challenging and time-consuming than other posts)

Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in Western Europe? Why has the West continued to pull away from the rest? Why are Westerners so individualistic? These are some big questions! According to Joe Henrich, the answer to all three is… the Western Church. Bet you weren’t expecting that! I sure wasn’t (even after reading ~ 20 economic development books).

Development Economics Series: Preflection

One of the main motivators for starting this blog was to write a series of posts on development economics. Well, we’ve been going for about 18 months now, and so far I have completely failed in that mission. 

But don’t worry! It’s still on the docket. I just may have underestimated the challenge.

Train Horn Reflection

Surround Yourself

 

Surround yourself with the type of people you hope to become, they said. If you have positive and inspirational examples in your life, you’ll strive to be more like them and improve yourself. You don’t want to be around less successful people because they will just make you feel sad about their circumstances and content with yours.

Surround yourself with the type of people who aren’t quite at your level, they said. If your peers are less physically and intellectually capable than you are, you will feel better about your life. You’ll win most of your arguments and games and people will look up to you. When you compare yourself to others, you’ll be proud of how much more successful and capable you are than your friends. You don’t want to be around successful people because they will just make you feel pathetic about your lack of accomplishments.

A Nation At The Crossroads: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Blaring Train Horns

Co-written/researched w/ @SJ

For the past 3 years, your co-authors lived within a few blocks of a railroad crossing. Around five times a day (and usually at least once in the middle of the night), a train would blast through, blaring its horn for a long 30 second approach. We were probably 400 meters from the crossing, and we couldn’t leave the windows open at night or we’d be woken up. Most confusingly, that crossing had signals with the arms that come down across the road whenever a train comes, so no one was going to be driving across the tracks. Who is this horn for? How many people are at the crossing when they roll through at 3 AM? Surely blaring lights and descending gates should be enough for them to not be an idiot!

The noise really gets under your skin after a while, and we were bothered by the seeming uselessness of this constant annoyance, so we’ve gathered you here today for a little cost-benefit analysis on the evil that is the train horn. It sounds pretty trivial, but disrupted sleep, stress, and general annoyances aren’t! Multiply the suffering over 100,000 train crossings in the US and even a small cost at each one is going to add up. We couldn’t find any serious analysis* pitting the costs of loud train horns against their benefits (presumably a reduction in collisions/deaths), so we’re going to try our hand at one.

Let’s start with the basics. How easy would it be to just… not honk? Lots of people hate the honking. Does anyone think it’s necessary and do they really have to do this?

Quick Thoughts on Facebook

My Olympic Highlights

I spent more time watching and reading about the Olympics in the past three weeks than any other thing I can think of ever having consumed in such a short time. So I thought it might be worth writing down some of my favorite memories. This is something I want to start doing more in my life, mostly with things I actually participated in, but the Olympics seems like a good place to start anyways. It is both good to reflect on things as they happen, and very nice to have written memories to look back on. 

These are extremely me-specific (i.e lots of Israel, Croatia, and whatever I happened to be watching) so I'll probably miss a few of the "big moments". And while I don't really know what the point of writing most of what I've written on here is, this one in particular has no point or intended audience beyond future me. 

MAGA: Make A (Great Olympic) Games Already!

In my humble opinion, The Summer Olympics are the greatest event in the world. What else even contends?

Who doesn’t have some memory of growing up watching the Summer Olympics? If you aren’t a sports fan, Tom Brady and LeBron James might mean nothing to you beyond their commercials. But you probably watched (or heard about) Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps race to world records. You know McKayla Maroney’s “not impressed” face. 

Kamala Harris Kissing Fish or: How to Memorize a Deck of Cards

Do you think you can easily learn to memorize the order of a deck of cards in a few minutes? Well guess what, you can!

I’m sure I am far from the only person to read Moonwalking with Einstein and get inspired to try some memorization. It turned out to be pretty fun and eye-opening! One week after finishing the book I was able to memorize the order of a deck of cards in under 10 minutes.

In honor of len(deck), here are 52 thoughts/takes:

College Is Bad

Epistemic status: Very uncertain, I’m interested if others agree and if any other writing or research on this exists. Don't take too seriously. 

For most smart-ish upper-middle class-ish kids these days (well, maybe not *these* days; thanks covid), going to college means moving out of your house (and often your state) and into a dorm, doing schoolwork for a few hours a day, and spending the rest of your time hanging out with new friends, who will likely be very similar to you in their interests, political views, and smarts.

Gee that’s a lot of free time there...especially if you extend the trend to 2021 

Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15954/w15954.pdf