All of Askell's Comments + Replies

On individual advice: I'd add  something about remembering that you are always in charge and should set your own boundaries. You choose what you want to do with your life, how much of EA you accept, and how much you want to use to influence your choices. If you're a professional acrobat and want to give 10% of your income to effective charities, that's a great way to be an EA. If someone points out that you also have a degree in computer science and could go work on AI safety, it's fine to reply "I know but I don't want to do that". You don't need to ... (read more)

6
Matt Goodman
2y
I guess I'd be much more likely to assume good intentions to someone who says 'yeah, I don't want to work on AI safety', than someone who says 'yeah I don't want to step into a shallow pond to rescue a child'. In the first example I'd think something like 'ok, this person has considered working in this area, decided again it, and doesn't want to explain their reasoning to me at this point in time'. I think that's fine. It can be quite draining to repeatedly be asked to justify to others why you're not working in the area they judge to be the highest priority.

I don't buy this. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.

To press, imagine we're at the fabled Shallow Pond. You see a child drowning. You can easily save them at minimal cost. However, you don't. I point out you could easily have done so. You say "I know but I don't want to do that". I wouldn't consider that a satisfactory response.

If you then said "I don't need to justify my choices on effective altruist grounds" I might just look at your blankly for a moment and say "wait, what has 'effective altruism' got to do with it? What about, um, just basic eth... (read more)

4
ThomasW
2y
Agreed! I wrote a post about exactly this. Julia Wise also has a good one on similar topics.

So I think that if you identify with or against some group (e.g. 'anti-SJWs'), then anything that people say that pattern matches to something that this group would say triggers a reflexive negative reaction. This manifests in various ways: you're inclined to attribute way more to the person's statements than what they're actually saying or you set an overly demanding bar for them to "prove" that what they're saying is correct. And I think all of that is pretty bad for discourse.

I also suspect that if we take a detached attitude towards this sort... (read more)

8
HenryStanley
6y
Agreed. I'm not sure how we escape from that trap, except by avoiding loaded terms, even at the expense of brevity.
6
Lila
6y
This used to be me... It wasn't so much my beliefs that changed (I'm not a leftist/feminist/etc). It was more a change in attitude, related to why I rejected ultra-strict interpretations of utilitarianism. Not becoming more agreeable or less opinionated... just not feeling like I was on a life-or-death mission. Anyway, happy to discuss these things privately, including with people who are still on the anti-SJW mission.

An example of a particular practice that I think might look kind of innocuous but can be quite harmful to women and minorities in EA is what I'm going to call "buzz talk". Buzz talk involves making highly subjective assessments of people's abilities, putting a lot of weight in those assessments, and communicating them to others in the community. Buzz talk can be very powerful, but the beneficiaries of buzz seem to disproportionately be those that conform to a stereotype of brilliance: a white, upper class male might be "the next big thing&q... (read more)

8
Michael_PJ
6y
Maybe voters on the EA forum should be blinded to the author of a post until they've voted!

I strongly agree. Put another way, I suspect we, as a community, are bad at assessing talent. If true, that manifests as both a diversity problem and a suboptimal distribution of talent, but the latter might not be as visible to us.

My guess re the mechanism: Because we don't have formal credentials that reflect relevant ability, we rely heavily on reputation and intuition. Both sources of evidence allow lots of biases to creep in.

My advice would be:

  1. When assessing someone's talent, focus on the content of what they're saying/writing, not the general fe

... (read more)
5
Buck
6y
I appreciate this comment for being specific! I don't understand what you mean by that; could you clarify?

There are two different claims here: one is "type x research is not very useful" and the other is "we should be doing more type y research at the margin". In the comment above, you seem to be defending the latter, but your earlier comments support the former. I don't think we necessarily disagree on the latter claim (perhaps on how to divide x from y, and the optimal proportion of x and y, but not on the core claim). But note that the second claim is somewhat tangential to the original post. If type x research is valuable, then even tho... (read more)

0
RyanCarey
7y
You're imposing on my argument a structure that it didn't have. My argument is that prima facie, analysing the concepts of effectiveness is not the most useful work that is presently to be done. If you look at my original post, it's clear that it had a parallel argument structure: i) this post seems mostly not new, and ii) posts of this kind are over-invested. It was well-hedged, and made lots of relative claims ("on the margin", "I am generally not very interested" etc. so it's really weird to be repeatedly told that I was arguing something else. The general disagreement about whether philosophical analysis is under-invested is source of about half of the disagreement. I've talked to Stefan and Ben, and I think that I was convinced that philosophical analysis was prima facie under-invested atm, then I would view analysis of principles of effectiveness a fair bit more favorably. I could imagine that if they became fully convinced that practical work was much more neglected then they might want to see more project proposals and literature reviews done too.

I suspect that the distinctions here are actually less bright than "philosophical analysis" and "concrete research". I can think of theoretical work that is consistent with doing what you call (i) - (iii) and does not involve a lot of guesswork. After all, lot of theoretical work is empirically informed, even if it's not itself intended to gather new data. And a lot of this theoretical work is quite decision relevant. A simple example is effective altruism itself: early work in EA was empirically informed theoretical work. Another examp... (read more)

1
RyanCarey
7y
I don't think I'm arguing what you think I'm arguing. To be clear, I wouldn't claim a bright dividing line, nor would I claim that more philosophical work, or pure mathematics has no use at all. Now would I claim that we should avoid theory altogether. I agree that there are cases of theoretical work that could be useful. For examples, there is AI safety, and there may be some important crossover work to be done in ethics and in understanding human experience and human values. But that doesn't mean we just need to throw up our arms and say that everything needs to be taken on a case by case bases, if in-fact we have good reasons to say we're overall overinvesting in one kind of research rather than another. The aim has to be to do some overall prioritization. I agree that thinking about exploration vs exploration tradeoffs is both interesting and useful. However, the Gittins Index was discovered in 1979. Much of the payoff of this discovery came decades afterward. We have good reasons to have pretty high discount rates, such as i) returns on shaping research communities that are growing at high double-digit percentages, ii) double digit chances of human-level AI in next 15 years. There's very little empirical research going into important concrete issues such as how to stage useful policy interventions for risky emerging technologies (Allan Dafoe, Mathias Mass notwithstanding), how to build better consensus among decision-makers, how to get people to start more good projects, how to better recruit, etc that many important decisions of EAs will depend on. It's tempting to say that many EAs have wholly forgotten what ambitious business plans and literature reviews on future-facing technologies are even supposed to look like! I would love to write that off as hyperbole but I haven't seen any recent examples. And it seems critical that theory should be feeding into such a process. I'd be interested to know if people have counterconsiderations on the level of what sho