I feel exactly the same way. I love the idea of "lowercase" effective altruism. I've also dabbled with term "evidence-based altruism", where "evidence-based" I hope signals to people that I am not interested in hypothetical/rationalist/extremely philosophical issues.
I gave this post a strong downvote because it merely restates some commonly held conclusions without speaking directly to the evidence or experience that supports those conclusions.
I think the value of posts principally derives from their saying something new and concrete and this post failed to do that. Anonymity contributed to this because at least knowing that person X with history Y held these views might have been new and useful.
It wasn't anonymous when the post went up, but it became so when the user deactivated their account.
Is that just from the tooltip? I'm not sure how anonymous posting works. It'd be interesting to learn who the author was if they didn't intend to be anonymous and if it was anyone readers would know.
I saw it when it first went up and it was nonymous, though I don't remember what the user name was.
I don't think you can post 'anonymously' in the sense that there is no account related to your post, you'll always have to create an account, but you can of course use a one-off username and even email address if you want to. However, you can delete your account and then apparently all 'your' posts appear as "[anonymous]" whether you intended this or not. (And in this case, it seems the original poster just created this post with their usual, non-anonymous account, but then deleted their account.)
You are not alone, definitely not alone.
As a community builder, I have several people telling me this on a frequent basis. It's nice to be able to follow good charities on Twitter, but that does not make up for the direction of the funding and therefore the opportunities and projects that are actually selected and funded, or the fact that most posts on the forum are now about AI given the sharp increase in AI-interested people (who do not necessarily have a past with EA, or altruism, as in giving etc). It does not make up for the fact that most people enter EA through 80k and get the feeling that they have to get into AI to be impactful, given the priorities. Or the fact that your chance to be coached by 80k is much greater if you want to work in longtermistic matters.
There is really a turning point in the movement, few actors are reacting against it, there is no real counter movement and most people in power do not speak up against this, even though they might have a more nuanced view on funding distribution than what is actually happening.
Maybe it will be one of these cases where the audience of one community changes completely, and thus becomes a different organization. It makes me very sad--there is no replacement to EA. No, global aid economics are not 'GH' in EA. No, animalistic parties cannot replace the work done by some EA orgs. It's a question to all: will we silently abide and passively go along the movement, whatever it becomes, or will we just have to exit EA? The latter is already happening a lot.
I wish you well. I would love it if you let me know what you find beyond this and what you learn. I'm sad that this place wasn't for you, but currently we disagree on a lot. I hope things become clearer.
May you be more well and do more good.
I wish you well. I would love it if you let me know what you find beyond this and what you learn. I'm sad that this place wasn't for you, but currently we disagree on a lot. I hope things become clearer.
The same problem: arthropods welfare over farmed animals. EA has become some kind of reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. But the good part of the movement is its portfolio structure. The classical effective altruism has not disapeared.
The Platonic/iconoclastic side will run out of steam in a few years, and the Aristotelian/Ecclesiastic will take over. This has happened before. Anabaptism and Quackerism was the infant illness of the Reformation, but at the end Presbyterians and Episcopalians will be dominant.
There seems to be this belief that arthopod welfare is some ridiculous idea only justified by extreme utilitarian calculations, and that loads of EA animal welfare money goes to it at the expensive of many other things, and this just seems really wrong to me. Firstly, arthropods hardly get any money at all, they are possibly the most neglected, and certainly amongst the most neglected, areas of animal welfare. Secondly, the argument for arthropod welfare is essentially exactly the same as your classic antispeciesist arguments; there aren't morally relevant differences between arthropods and other animals that justifies not equally considering their interests (or if you want to be non-utilitarian, equally considering them). Insects can feel pain (or certainly, the evidence is probably strong enough that they would probably pass the bar of sentience under UK law), and have other sentient experiences, so why would we not care about their welfare? Indeed, non-utilitarian philosophers also take this idea seriously: Christine Korsgaard, one of the most prominent Kantian philosophers today, sees insects as part of the circle of animals that are under moral consideration, and Nussbaum's capabilities approach is restricted to sentient animals, and I think we have good reason to think insects are sentient as well. Many insects seem to have potentially rich inner lives, and have things that go well and badly for them, things they strive to do, feelings of pain etc. What principled reason could we give for their exclusion, that wouldn't be objectionably speciesist. Also, all arthropod welfare work at present is about farmed animals; those farmed animals just happen to be arthropods!
Insect welfare (unlike woke identitarian proliferation) is not a priori wrong. Consciouness is noumenal and consenquently you cannot rule it out from insects. But it looks obvious that conscienciousness is related to nervous system complexity, which depends on brain size.
And complexity grows far more than linearly with "interactions" among parts of a system. I would say that my iphone is as likely to be consciouss as a fly. A fruit fly has 150,000 neurons, a human 16,340,000,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons
"Secondly, the argument for arthropod welfare is essentially exactly the same as your classic antispeciesist arguments"
That are right, but exagerated. I mean:
Fruit fly: 150,000
Dog: 885,460,000
Human: 16,340,000,000
Torturing animals that have a neuron count around 2-3% of yours is something to be concerned about. But the ratio Human-fruit fly is 0.0009%. And mathematical theories of consciousness suggest strong supperaditivity of conscience, so the ratios probably understate the moral weight difference.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FjiND3qJCvC6CtmxG/super-additivity-of-consciousness
While it certainly can be appropriate to criticize religious beliefs, the last sentence feels quite gratuitous and out of left field. [I assume/hope that "Quackerism" is a either a typo or a group I've never heard of.]
I assume is this is an accidental mispelling of Quakerism
It was accidental, but now... looks funny!
This is a story of growing apart.
I was excited when I first discovered Effective Altruism. A community that takes responsibility seriously, wants to help, and uses reason and science to do so efficiently. I saw impressive ideas and projects aimed at valuing, protecting, and improving the well-being of all living beings.
Today, years later, that excitement has faded. Certainly, the dedicated people with great projects still exist, but they've become a less visible part of a community that has undergone notable changes in pursuit of ever-better, larger projects and greater impact:
From concrete projects on optimal resource use and policy work for structural improvements, to avoiding existential risks, and finally to research projects aimed at studying the potentially enormous effects of possible technologies on hypothetical beings. This no longer appeals to me.
Now I see a community whose commendable openness to unbiased discussion of any idea is being misused by questionable actors to platform their views.
A movement increasingly struggling to remember that good, implementable ideas are often underestimated and ignored by the general public, but not every marginalized idea is automatically good. Openness is a virtue; being contrarian isn't necessarily so.
I observe a philosophy whose proponents in many places are no longer interested in concrete changes, but are competing to see whose vision of the future can claim the greatest longtermist significance.
This isn't to say I can't understand the underlying considerations. It's admirable to rigorously think about the consequences one must and can draw when taking moral responsibility seriously. It's equally valuable to become active and try to advance one's vision of the greatest possible impact.
However, I believe a movement that too often tries to increase the expected value of its actions by continuously reducing probabilities in favor of greater impact loses its soul. A movement that values community building, impact multiplying and getting funding much higher than concrete progress risks becoming an intellectual pyramid scheme.
Again, I’m aware that concrete, impactful projects and people still exist within EA. But in the public sphere accessible to me, their influence and visibility are increasingly diminishing, while indirect high-impact approaches via highly speculative expected value calculations become more prominent and dominant. This is no longer enough for me to publicly and personally stand behind the project named Effective Altruism in its current form.
I was never particularly active in the forum, and it took years before I even created an account. Nevertheless, I always felt part of this community. That's no longer the case, which is why I'll be leaving the forum. For those present here, this won't be a significant loss, as my contributions were negligible, but for me, it's an important step.
I'll continue to donate, support effective projects with concrete goals and impacts, and try to actively shape the future positively. However, I'll no longer do this under the label of Effective Altruism.
I'm still searching for a movement that embodies the ideal of committed, concrete effective (lowercase e) altruism. I hope it exists. Good luck to those here that feel the same.
This has probably been what many people experienced over the last few years, especially as the rest of the world also started getting into AI.
But I think it's possible to counteract by curating one's own "public sphere" instead.
For example, you could follow all of your favorite charities and altruistic projects on Twitter. This might be a good starting point. For inspiration, you could also check the follow lists of places like Open Phil (my employer; we follow a ton of our grantees) or CEA's "official EA" account. Throw in Dylan Matthews and Kelsey Piper while you're at it; Future Perfect publishes content across many cause areas. And finally, at the risk of sounding biased, I'll note that Alexander Berger has one of the best EA-flavored research feeds I know of.
If you mostly follow concrete, visibly impactful projects, Twitter will start throwing more of those your way. I assume you'll start seeing development economists and YIMBYs working on local policy — at least, that's what happened to me. And maybe some of those people have blogs you want to follow, or respond when you comment on their stuff, and suddenly you find yourself floating peacefully among a bunch of adjacent-to-EA communities focused on things that excite you.
The Forum also lets you filter by topic pretty aggressively, hiding or highlighting whatever tags you want. You just have to click "Customize feed" at the top of the homepage...
...and follow these instructions. (You might be familiar with this, but many Forum users aren't, so I figured I'd mention it.)
Of course, it's not essential for anyone to follow a bunch of "EA content" — your plan of donating to and supporting projects you like is a good one. But if you previously enjoyed reading the Forum, and find it annoying as of late, it may be possible to restore (or improve upon!) your earlier experience and end up with a lot of stuff to read.
I think this is a really important point. My “public sphere” of EA has very little longtermism just because of who I happen to follow / what I happen to read.