Thanks for the post, and for working on such an important problem! This sounds very exciting, and I'm very much looking forward to future reports of ACTRA.

I have to admit though I'm a bit baffled by the apparent evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions:

Evidence: Over 50 high-quality randomized studies show CBT reduces criminal relapse by 25-50%, theft by 54%, and homicide arrests by 65%. One CBT program alone prevented ~300 crimes per participant over a decade at ~$2 per crime averted. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and leading research organizations (J-PAL and IPA) all endorse CBT as highly promising, with IPA calling it a "best bet."

These numbers sounds "too good to be true" on a level I can barely put into words. I haven't looked into the linked studies in detail, and I think very highly of Charity Entrepreneurship and their thorough research, so I'm sure there is indeed something to it. Yet, I wonder, is there a good understanding as to why CBT apparently works so well in this case? I generally do well with the heuristics of "most effect sizes are small" and "behavior change is very difficult (even in yourself, let alone in others)". Of course a heuristic is just that, a heuristic, and there are always cases where they don't hold. What is your current understanding why this area in particular would be so different, and such large positive effect sizes are comparably ~easily achievable?

To expand a bit, I would assume that many different factors contribute to a person leading a life of crime. One part of that surely is some degree of impulsiveness, mental health, dealing with negative emotions - the kinds of properties that CBT can plausibly improve^[1] -  but I would assume that there are many other, potentially even stronger effects (social circle in particular, career perspective and unemployment, substance abuse, being in debt, ...) that should not be affected that much, if at all, by a CBT intervention. Hence, CBT alone reducing crime rates by 50% in some studies just seems very unexpected to me.

Hope I don't sound too critical. But would be very interested in your views on this. :)

1. ^{^}

   And "improve" usually means some marginal improvement - these issues are usually not fully solved by CBT.

I agree with your point, and so do in fact many EA organizations as well: e.g. different charity evaluators tend to recommend organizations that only have a small set of (well researched and evaluated) concrete interventions - usually these are designed for a very particular location / community / target audience. Naively scaling interventions to e.g. very different countries indeed often does not work that well, and would oftentimes lead to much lower (cost) effectiveness.

Note that A or B decisions are often false dichotomies, and you may be overlooking alternative options that combine the advantages. So narrowing in on given options too soon may sometimes be a mistake, and it can be useful to try to come up with more alternatives.

Also, in my experience many of the decisions I get stuck with fall somewhere between 2 and 3: I know their implications and have most of the information, but the results differ on various dimensions. E.g. option 1 is safe and somewhat impactful, while option 2 is potentially higher impact but much riskier and comes at the cost of disappointing somebody you care about. I'm not sure to what degree a decision doc is suitable for these types of problems in particular - but I've at least had a few cases where friends came up with some helpful way to reframe the situation that led to a valuable insight.

(But I should mention I definitely see your point that many EAs may be overthinking some of their decisions - though even then I personally wouldn't feel comfortable in case of value conflicts to just flip a coin. But in many other cases I agree that getting to any decision quickly rather then getting stuck in decision paralysis is a good approach.)

Would you say that, almost 4 years later, we've made progress on that front?

Köln does have a somewhat active local group currently (see here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups/6BpGMKtfmC2XLeih8 ) - I think they mostly coordinate via Signal, which interestingly is hidden behind the "Join us on Slack" button on the forum page. Don't think this had much to do with this post though.

I'm not aware of anything having happened in Dortmund or the general Ruhrgebiet in the last year or so, with the exception of the Doing Good Together Düsseldorf group.

why restarting your device works to solve problems, but it does (yes, I did look it up, so no need to explain it

I'm now stuck in "I think I know a decent metaphor but you don't want me to share it" land... but then maybe I'll just share it for other people. :P

Basically it's less about how computers work on any technical level, and more about which state they're in. Imagine you want to walk to your favorite store. If you're at home, you probably know the way by heart and can navigate there reliably. But now imagine you've been up for a while and have been walking around for hours following some semi-random commands from different people. And by following all these unrelated commands, you've now ended up doing a handstand on some hill next to a lake on the opposite end of town, where you've never been before. It can easily happen now that, from that weird state, going to the store close to your home will not work out and you get stuck somewhere. Restarting the computer is basically the same as teleporting home. It's in a well defined, clean, predictable state again, where you know that most of the usual day to day actions can be performed reliably. And the longer it's running without restart, the more chances it has to, in one way or another, get into a state that makes it fail at certain tasks you want it to do.

Productivity, perfectionism, and self-leadership increased in the correspondingly themed groups.

I guess "increased" here should be "improved"? Unless perfectionism actually increased as well, but this would seem like a surprising outcome. :)

On the one hand yes, but on the other hand it seems crucial to at least mention these observer effects (edit: probably the wrong term, rather anthropic principle). There's a somewhat thin line between asking "why haven't we been wiped out?" and using the fact that we haven't been wiped out yet as evidence that this kind of scenario is generally unlikely. Of course it makes sense to discuss the question, but the "real" answer could well be "random chance" without having further implications about the likelihood of power-seeking AGI.

Highly agree with the post. I discussed almost the same thing with a friend during the conference. Basically, the typical "don't attend talks, most of them are recorded and you can just watch them online later" advice isn't great imho - it seems like a fake alternative to me, in the sense that you miss out on a talk because you tell yourself "ah I'll just watch it later", but in probably >90% of cases this just won't happen. So the actual alternative you're choosing is not "watch online later", but "don't watch at all". Because by the time the talk is online, you'll have forgotten about it, and even if you remember it, just deciding to watch a 30 minute talk at home on your own requires a lot more activation energy to overcome than, in comparison, the act of just walking to another room while you are at a conference.

Indeed 1-1s will be more valuable most of the time for most people, and it's important to make this point to first-timers who otherwise might fill their schedule with talks and workshop. But if there's a talk or two or three that are especially relevant to you, there's a strong case to be made that you should attend it. Even if you're sure that you would indeed watch it online later, it may still be worth attending merely for hearing the talk a few months sooner than you otherwise would.

Plus, you can also schedule virtual 1-1s with people after the conference, so it's not necessarily that you're missing out on anything. (and I'd argue a "hey, my schedule is pretty packed, would you be available for a zoom call some time next week?" message to an actual person will yield a much higher chance of actually happening than a vague "yeah I'll probably watch this talk online at some point!" intention)

Side note: I've read the post on pocket first, and it simply omitted section 7 without any hint of its existence. Wonder if that happens more frequently.

As for the post itself, I do agree with most of it. I think though that it (particularly point 1) has some risk of reinforcing some people's perception of reaching out to well known people as a potential status violation, which I think is already quite common in EA (although I know of some people who would disagree with me on this). I would guess most people already have a tendency to "not waste important people's time" (whatever "important" means to them) and rather err on the side of avoiding these people and e.g. not ask for a 1-1 at a conference even though they might benefit greatly from it. To make it short, I agree quite strongly with your point 7, but not so much with (the general vibe of) point 1.