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rat/eamentalhealth/analysis/readme.md

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- 
 # Data Analysis
 
 ## Index:
@@ -25,8 +24,18 @@
 - 10.3. By mental health
 - 10.4. By age
 - 10.5. By involvement in EA.
-11. Insightful comments made by the respondents.
+11. Implications for mental health in EA overall, guided by some insightful comments made by the respondents.
-12. Conclusion, with some Fermi estimates. [To be added]
+- 11.1. Selection effects in EA. 
+- 11.2. Do mental health problems stem from EA-specific beliefs?
+- 11.3. EA may not have a comparative advantage in providing mental health ressources.
+- 11.4. EA France has something going on 
+- 11.5. Visceral comparison with global poverty
+- 11.6. Moral hazard.
+- 11.7. Layers of indirectness and pathways to impact.
+- 11.8. A support group for EAs with ADHD
+- 11.9. Cheap ressources.
+- 11.10. Providing mental health ressources is creepy
+12. Summary.
 
 ## 1. Is the population which answered the survey representative of EA overall?
 
@@ -542,8 +551,8 @@ No effect.
 ### 10.5. By involvement in EA.
 No effect. 
 
-## 11. Insightful comments made by the respondents. 
+## 11. Implications for mental health in EA overall, guided by some insightful comments made by the respondents. 
-Some of the questions asked their respondents for their thoughts, and I really appreciated some of the long and insightful answers. Here, I paraphrase some of the key ideas and leave a technical comment for the footnotes [1]. This does not constitute an endorsement.
+Some of the questions asked their respondents for their thoughts, and I really appreciated some of the long and insightful answers. Here, I paraphrase and expand on some of the key ideas and leave a technical comment for the footnotes [1]. I have found these comments very useful as way to think about the problem of mental health in EA overall.
 
 ### 11.1. Selection effects in EA. 
 Some respondents suggested that EA attracts people with mental ilnesses. Perhaps there is a snowball effect going on, perhaps it selects from demographic which have higher rates of mental ilness. Thus, a particularly cost effective way to fight mental health in EA might be to do outreach amongst people who do not have mental health issues.
@@ -561,21 +570,21 @@ For a toy model, consider for example whether mental ilness is caused by involve
 
 The fact that we *don't* is indicative of other models, like models with selection effects. For example, maybe obsessive thoughts relating to EA are exactly [like any other obsessive thoughts](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/15/the-chamber-of-guf/). Maybe minds with mental conditions look for things to be depressed or anxious about, and effective altruism happens to provide some. Crucially, the counterfactual would not be not freaking out about stuff, it would be having fixated on something else to freak out about, like american politics, climate change, sexual assault, not being lovable, etc. *The content and origin of the idea being fixated on might be besides the point*. Under this model, EA therapists might be counterproductive.
 
-### 11.4. EA may not have a comparative advantage in providing mental health ressources.
+### 11.3. EA may not have a comparative advantage in providing mental health ressources.
 Either the market or other organizations, like universities or other NGOs specifically dedicated to mental health (CAMH, Zendo are mentioned, but I am not familiar with them). 
 
-### 11.5. EA France has something going on 
+### 11.4. EA France has something going on 
 EA France has a group in which they read *Feeling Good*, by David Burns.  I personally have benefitted from the book, and know that it's available on libgen (or a mirror, like b-ok.org).
 
 Here is a formal invitation to EA France to talk about how the group is organized.
 
-### 11.6. Visceral comparison with global poverty
+### 11.5. Visceral comparison with global poverty
-I think someone who has nothing to eat in a developing country still has it worse than someone living with depression. I'd earlier donate a 100 euros to cure two blind people from blindness than spend it on an hour of therapy for me.
+A respondent notes that they think someone who has nothing to eat in a developing country still has it worse than someone living with depression, and that they'd rather donate a 100 euros to cure two blind people from blindness than spend it on an hour of therapy for themselves. I empathize with this, and I also like second order effects. That is, going to therapy might allow someone to earn and donate more money, and thus cure more blind people, but this depends on the specifics of how much time is saved, how much money the person makes, how much therapy costs, and how much effort it takes to organize the whole thing.
 
-### 11.7. Moral hazard.
+### 11.6. Moral hazard.
 Some people may join EA just to use these resources. Or some EAs who were paying for their therapy might choose to get it for free instead. 
 
-### 11.8. Layers of indirectness and pathways to impact.
+### 11.7. Layers of indirectness and pathways to impact.
 A respondent mentions that providing mental health ressources goes through two layers of indirectness: therapy may not help mental health, which may not help productivity. the comment stops here; what follows are my own thoughts.
 
 Additionally, offering therapy does not mean that therapy is taken up, and an increase in productivity might not mean that the world will be made better. 
@@ -588,11 +597,12 @@ Thinking about this further, the case for providing EAs with mental healthcare s
 
 With regards to pathway 1, [perhaps effective altruism are not the best demographic to worry about](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XWSTBBH8gSjiaNiy7/cause-profile-mental-health). 
 
-With regards to pathway 2, we have a rough upwards crosssectional estimate of 2 hours of work saved per week if satisfactory mentalh healthcare is provided (with a more realistic estimate being 1 hour/week). If therapy lasts one hour per week, and the therapist has to be paid for one hour, in the short term no real time gain might be made. However, this is only indicative, and one could argue that:
+With regards to pathway 2, we have a rough upwards crosssectional estimate of 2 hours of work saved per week if satisfactory mentalh healthcare is provided (with a more realistic estimate being 1 hour/week). If therapy lasts one hour per week, and the therapist has to be paid for one hour, and 10% of the counterfactual gain is donated, the math doesn't check out. However, this is only indicative, and one could argue that:
 - The distribution is more important than the mean. That is, the average person does not exist; we may have a small number of people who could be a lot more effective if they had mental health, and a lot of people who wouldn't benefit that much (see image below)
     - This requires to argue that filtering and organizational costs are not likely to be significant. I am skeptical of this if organized centrally, and less skeptical if local EA groups organize it themselves.
 - Gains because of therapy continue after therapy has ended
     - As opposed to regression to the mean? That is, the gains of therapy might not be people getting better, but people getting better sooner.
+- People who recover from a mental ilness because of help from the EA community might not donate 10% of the counterfactual gain, but more. 
 
 ![](https://nunosempere.github.io/rat/eamentalhealth/analysis/Q7-9b.png)
 
@@ -613,10 +623,10 @@ In each of the first three cases, there are many different steps in the process
 
 All in all, althought the questions in our survey only ask about "offering mental health resources to effective altruists" in the abstract, the specific pathway to impact matters, because the several outlined here are different. In particular, if none of them work, being fuzzy about which one is in effect wouldn't help.
 
-### 11.9. A support group for EAs with ADHD
+### 11.8. A support group for EAs with ADHD
 A commenter talked about forming a support group for EAs with ADHD. Here is a formal invitation to create one.
 
-### 11.10. Cheap ressources.
+### 11.9. Cheap ressources.
 Whereas therapists are relatively expensive, it's relatively cheap to make [Nate Soares' writing on guilt] (http://mindingourway.com/guilt/) more widely known. I personally have also recently gotten some value out of Kaj Sotala's blogposts on psychological frameworks (https://kajsotala.fi/blog/blog_english/); there is a certain power in hearing other people talk about their struggles with mental conditions. 
 
 SlateStarCodex's list of [mental health professionals](https://slatestarcodex.com/psychiat-list/), [ressources](https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/6cdmn2/new_here_helpful_posts_comments_from_rbnbestof/) by [r/raisedbynarcissists](https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/wiki/helpfullinks), and in particular [this list of books for building your life](https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/1axuzu/book_list_for_building_your_life/), are free. I've personally gotten some value out of these [Strategies and tools for getting through a break up, from LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/opLKzAFQWCco8wQiH/strategies-and-tools-for-getting-through-a-break-up). Julia Wise seems to have [some](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJZGFxzHfdPuu2X76/a-mental-health-resource-for-ea-community) useful [things](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZGW8Tmc6mDWZTnqyo/burnout-and-self-care). The aforementioned *Feeling Good*, by David Burns is also free if found online (b-ok.org). 
@@ -633,7 +643,25 @@ In personal converations, a person in the outer orbit of the EA community has po
 
 [1] [Technical note](https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/information-hazards/): Let a be a variable which stands for an individual eas, and consider a mapping of O: A-> |N, such that O(a) falls in {1,...,n}, and consider a function like f(x) = c\*x^(-j)\*(1 + 1/sqrt(2\*pi\*9)\*exp(-x^2 / 2\*9}\*sin(x)/BB(6)), where BB is the busy beaver function. It may be that the counterfactual impact of eas follows such a distribution; j and c would be arbitrary constants, with j preferably greater than 3, because otherwise the variance is not well defined, and consider the relationship which the integral from 1 to k of f(x)dx and the integral from k+1 to n of f(x) dx have. It wouldn't  be unsurprising if O(a) were not inversely correlated with conscientiousnes and initiative, and correlated, perhaps causally, with more mental health problems, as these variables often are. Now consider the first k such that the integral from 1 to k of f(x)dx > the integral from k+1 to n of f(x) dx. The question is now whether for high O(a), offering mental health is worth it, given that O(a) is a priori unknown, and that computing the exact value of f(O(a)) is arduous / subject to Goodhart's law or to moral hazards. 
 
-## Inf. Survey questions
+## 12. Summary
+
+Throughout this analysis, we have seen that demographically, respondents varied somewhat compared with the 2018 EA Survey, but didn't worry too much about that. The rates of mental ilnesses were astoundingly high: 45% of respondents had been diagnosed with at least one mental condition, which shoots up to 71% if we include respondents who think they have a mental condition, but have not formally been diagnosed with one.
+
+This makes us suspect selection effects, but from the data, we cannot know whether these play out at the level of our survey, or at the level of the EA community. For this reason, we'd **strongly suggest to add a mental health section to the annual EA survey**. Nonetheless, some conclusions can be reached despite a potential bias, because sometimes the bias either doesn't matter, or we know its direction. 
+
+We also have the issue of p-hacking, or in general picking and choosing regressions to push a conclusion. Because computing power is cheap, we choose to instead run all the regressions, that is, we choose to operationalize our questions and to model our data in many different ways, and report the aggregate results. Additionally, most of our conclusions carry the caveat of coming from a crossectional analysis, a method which not only can be unreliable, but also doesn't tell us the direction of our effect. For example, if we run a regression GDP ~ education, we see that richer countries are more educated, but we can't say whether that is because they like to spend their money on education, or because being more educated makes them richer.
+
+Nonetheless, our first conclusion is that, among the respondents of this survey, more involvement in the EA community is positively correlated with better mental health. The correlation does not reach any significance threshold whatsoever, and, we're relieved to find out that it doesn't go in the opposite direction. This is evidence against EA causing mental health problems, and a toy model is presented in which EA causes mental health through the idea of x-risk; we find that such a model is not consistent with our data. 
+
+As a proof of concept, we run a correlation on whether having mental health problems is correlated with thinking one could benefit from mental health ressources; we find the expected correlation, and get an absurdly low p-value. We also run a correlation on potential self-interested, that is, we ask whether thinking one could benefit from mental health ressources is correlated with answering that providing these ressources would be an effective thing to do. Again, we get a positive correlation with absurdly low p-values.
+
+We then ask what the effect of mental health on productivity is, and how access to treatment mediates it. We see that people lose a lot of hours because of mental ilness: an additional diagnosed mental ilness is correlated with a loss of ~5 hours per 2 weeks. But  conditions are highly comorbid, so being mentally ill is correlated with losing ~9 hours per 2 weeks. This is not homogeneusly distributed, but instead like a power law: a small proportion of respondents (~10%-20%) loose a lot of hours. Limiting our regression to that 10-20% takes our statistical power away, but nonetheless, knowing the shape of the distribution helps indicate what sort of interventions might be valuable.
+
+Dividing respondents by whether they have received satisfactory healthcare, we find that those who have loose ~1-2 hours of work less than those who have not, and we think that this is probably and upwards estimate. In total, among our respondents 1 758 hours of work were lost because of mental ilness in the two weeks previous to our survey, compared to 16 737 hours worked, and 1 899 hours missed because of other reasons. We also ask whether productivity is lost because of mental ilness, but our scale is inadequate to estimate effects, because we do not know to quantify the amount of productivity lost which a "6" represents.
+
+Several questions in our survey ask respondents for their personal opinions and insights, and some of the observations which they make are quite sharp. I present the ones which are likely to be useful, expand on some of them, and see whether the data gathered supports the hypothesis they propose. That section is likely to be accessible to the casual reader, nonetheless, here are some brief highlights: Many respondents seem to think that there are selection effects going on in EA. Others propose that EA itself causally leads to mental conditions, and I give some nondefinitive arguments to why that might not be the case, supported by the data at hand.  I sketch several layers which providing mental health would have to go through before the world is positively changed, consider three different possible pathways to impact which providing mental health to effective altruists may have, and warn that if none of them work, being fuzzy about which ones are in effect wouldn't help. Many respondents suggest creating or scavenging mental health ressources, and I mention some which have been of use to me. EA France seems to have something going on with a book club for reading *Feeling Good*, by David Burns, and I extend them an invitation to talk about it. 
+
+## 13. Survey questions
 1. How involved are you in the Effective Altruism Community?	
 2. Do you attend EA meetings?	
 3. How much impact do EA ideas have on your life?