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[Discussion] What have you found great value in not doing?

I'm actively choosing not to go out with people who I don't find particularly interesting or fun (i.e., people in the "they're nice" category, but who either aren't really interested in the type of discussion I want to have, are really judgemental/cynical about trying new things, etc.). Before, I'd feel like I needed to be nice and make friends with everybody or I'd be a mean person, but as my social circle has expanded and the number of things I've wanted to do has increased, I've become more selective.

Oddly, this has actually made me enjoy meet... (read more)

zdgroff

I've had a similar shift. One other consideration is that I used to think it was important to spread EA ideas by hanging out with non-EAs primarily, but I've come to believe the social influence of other EAs makes me more effective.

3[anonymous]9y

Similarly, I'm actively selective of the people and social groups I spend time with. This is important. I happen to have an identical twin. He spends a lot more time than I do with school friends, and a lot less time with effective altruists. While we're ideologically almost the same, I tend to act more on my EA beliefs, and my 'actively choosing to hang out with people who will positively influence me' has been a big contributing factor to this.

[Discussion] What does winning look like?

Anj9y3

I was reading Lifeblood by Alex Perry (it details the story of malaria bed nets). The book initially criticizes a lot of aid organizations because Perry claims that the aim of aid should be "for the day it's no longer needed". E.g., the goal of the Canadian Cancer Society should be to aim for the day when cancer research is unnecessary because we've already figured out how to beat it. However, what aid organizations actually do is expand to fill a whole range of other needs, which is somewhat suboptimal.

In this case, EA is really no exception. S... (read more)

Ozzie Gooen

On that note, for Effective Altruist organizations, I imagine that 'not being needed' means 'not continuing to be the best use of our resources', or, 'have faced significant diminishing marginal returns to additional work'. That said, the condition for an organization to rationally end is different than their success condition. On obvious point: Most organizations/causes have multiple increasingly-large success conditions. There's not one 'success condition', but a progressive set of improvements. We won't 'win' as an abstract term. I mean, I don't think Martin Luther King would say that he 'won', he accomplished a lot, but things got complicated at the end and there was still a lot to be done; needless to say though, he did quite well. A better set of questions may be 'what are some reasonable goals to aim for?' Then, 'how can we measure how far we are from those specific goals?' In completely pragmatic matters, I think that the best goals for us is not legislation, but monetary donations to EA-related causes. Goal 1: 100m/year 3: 1b/year 4: 10b/year etc The ultimate goal for all of us may be a positive-singularity, though that is separate from effective altruism itself and harder to measure. Also, of course the money above would have to be adjusted for quality of the EA org relative to the best. There is of course, still the question of how good the interventions are and how good the intervention-deciding mechanisms are. However, I feel like measuring / estimating those are quite a bit more challenging and also present a very orthogonal and distinct challenge from raising money. For instance, growing a movement and convincing people in the large would be an 'EA popularity goal', which would be measured in money, while finding new research to understand effectiveness would be more of a 'EA Research Goal'. Two very different things.

[Discussion] Are academic papers a terrible discussion forum for effective altruists?

Anj9y5

I find a lot of value in academic papers, especially in STEM fields, and am going to spend some time outlining my defense for writing them. That being said, I'm not necessarily looking at them as a "discussion forum for EAs". I think there are many reasons why academic papers can be useful to Effective Altruism even if they're not directly geared towards promoting EA-type ideas (though they certainly can be). Specifically, I think they're hugely important in research, and not just for helping secure a research-type job.

Academic papers are, in

Anj9y0

This is really interesting. I have a lot of thoughts about this (most of which I might elaborate in a separate post) but I'll post a quick summary here.

I think one of the biggest challenges to spreading EA right now is perhaps that we rely too much on word-of-mouth. It would be better to have some sort of centralized social media or infrastructure that we can use to share EA more broadly. EA.com is a very good one, but even that requires a large amount of reading, and people might be put off by the large amount of learning/background info needed to get inv... (read more)

We are Seb Farquhar and Owen Cotton-Barratt from the Global Priorities Project, AUsA!

Anj9y4

I'm starting a PhD in Bioengineering soon, so my question mainly relates to academia. Are there any specific benefits that academic collaborations could provide the EA movement that currently aren't available? How can we encourage researchers to join the EA movement without making it seem as though we might be condemning some of their research for being too low-impact?

Owen Cotton-Barratt

Nice questions. I think academia is moving in a promising direction in thinking about impact more. This affects funding, and means that individual academics are encouraged to engage with the question of the routes from their work to impact. How to measure the impact of research is a hard question, though, and the academic community is still learning how to do that. We can help people to take a big-picture perspective on choosing impactful research questions, rather than just choosing the most interesting questions. I think it’s important to collaborate with researchers here rather than to judge from outside. They will know their area better than outsiders, and this expertise should help them identify the best questions. Most academics I know genuinely want their research to be high-impact, so would be open to this if framed properly. The increased focus on impact from funding bodies may also provide a good opportunity for us to liaise with them about how we can most appropriately assess impact. If we can improve the practices that drive funding decisions, that will help make academic incentives line up even more with finding the most valuable research.

Owen Cotton-Barratt

Academic discourse is (with some justification) seen as the gold-standard for answering intellectually challenging questions in our society. Because effective altruism often cares about such questions, it’s going to be important to try to answer them in that venue. Otherwise after some years have passed we will be open to the reasonable criticism that if the ideas were worthwhile, they’d have stronger defence in the literature, and this could lead to people dismissing us. There are some other benefits: * Getting critiques from academics is a valuable route to improving the robustness of our ideas. * Academia is generally quite open to well-justified ideas. There is a large group of potential collaborators here! * Because we may want to comment on social questions touching on a large range of specialties, it’s helpful to be able to talk to and work with these specialists.

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