User Comment Replies

On Philosophy Tube's Video on Effective Altruism

I want to clarify that I do specifically mean philosophical movements like existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, the ethics behind communism and fascism -- which all were influential in the 20th century. I would also argue that the grouping into consequentialism/virtue ethics/deontology does not capture the perspectives brought up in the aforementioned movements. I would love to see EAs engage with more modern ideas about ethics because they specifically shed light on the flexibility and impermanence of the terms 'reason' and 'evidence' over t... (read more)

JBentham

I don’t quite see how existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism and fascism are going to help us be more effectively altruistic, or how they’re going to help us prioritise causes. Communism is a different case as in some formats it’s a potential altruistic cause area that people may choose to prioritise. I also don’t think that these ideas are more “modern” than utilitarianism, or that their supposed novelty is a point in their favour. Fascism, just to take one of these movements, has been thoroughly discredited and is pretty much the antithesis of altruism. These movements are movements in their own right, and I don’t think they’d want EAs to turn them into something they’re not. The same is true in the opposite direction. By all means, make an argument in favour of these movements or their relevance to EA. But claiming that EAs haven’t considered these movements (I have, and think they’re false) isn’t likely to change much.

On Philosophy Tube's Video on Effective Altruism

Ekaterina_Ilin3y3

I agree that the choices we make are in some sense political. But they’re not political in the sense that they involve party or partisan politics.

I disagree. Counter-examples: Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the largest donors to Joe Biden's presidential campaign. Voting and electoral reform has often been a topic on the EA Forum and appeared on the 80000h podcast. I know several EAs who are or have been actively involved in party politics in Germany. The All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK says on its website that it "aims to create space for cross... (read more)

JBentham

My comment mainly referred to the causes we’ve generally decided to prioritise. When we engage in cause prioritisation decisions, we don’t ask ourselves whether they’re a “leftist” or “rightist” cause area. I did say that EAs may engage in party politics in an individual or group capacity. But they’re still often doing so in order to advocate for causes that EAs care about, and which people from various standard political ideologies can get on board with. Bankman-Fried also donated to Republican candidates who he thought were good on EA issues, for example. And the name of the “all-party” parliamentary group clearly distinguishes it from just advocating for a standard political ideology or party.

On Philosophy Tube's Video on Effective Altruism

Ekaterina_Ilin3y7

I'd like to add a thought on the last point:

EA appears to largely ignore the developments of modern and post-modern philosophy, making EA appear like a genuinely new idea/movement. Which it is not. That means that there is a lot to learn from past instances of EA-like movements. EA-like meaning Western rich people trying to do good with Rationality. 20th century philosophy is brimming with very valid critiques of Rationality, but somehow EA seems to jump from Bentham/Mills to Singer/Parfit without batting an eye.

Abigail leaves open how we should do good, w... (read more)

JBentham

EA is a movement that aims to use reason and evidence to do the most good, so the centrality of “rationality” (broadly speaking) shouldn’t be too surprising. Many EAs are also deeply familiar with alternatives to utilitarianism. While most (according to the surveys) are utilitarians, some are non-utilitarian consequentialists or pluralists. I suspect that the movement is dominated by utilitarians and utilitarian-leaning people because while all effective altruists shouldn’t necessarily be utilitarians, all utilitarians should be effective altruists. In contrast, it’s hard to see why a pure deontologist or virtue ethicist should, as a matter of philosophical consistency, be an effective altruist. It’s also difficult to see how a pure deontologist or virtue ethicist could engage in cause prioritisation decisions without ultimately appealing to consequences.

In diversity lies epistemic strength

Ekaterina_Ilin5y10

I would appreciate if you could add a reference to the methods the Heterodox Academy is using to measure diversity of perspective s directly.

The German Effective Altruism Network - recap 2020

Ekaterina_Ilin5y1

Ops, thanks for pointing that out - should be fixed now!

The German Effective Altruism Network - recap 2020

Ekaterina_Ilin5y4

Minor point: The two German local groups I’m familiar with focus most on their community of actively engaged people, and I suspect this is true for most other groups (instead of mostly on the „audience“ category).

It is true that there is variety in the groups' main projects, but the most popular activities the last time we took the data were EA intro events. Also in most groups, there is a "hard core", but it of the same size as, and sometime smaller than the total number of mildly engaged members. We wrote a post about the demographics in local groups her... (read more)

MaxRa

Great, and thanks for your replies, makes a lot of sense! :) I think I generally see little criticism of leadership, so per default I think this just doesn't happen too much. It takes effort and care to do this well, and seems to have emotional costs to many. Those emotional costs probably get bigger the closer you are to the people who you're overseeing. I've experienced it at least twice within local EA chapters that I and others kind of danced around patterns of behavior that we thought was way less than ideal because it felt (at least to me) aversive to directly criticize somebodies' behavior when I'm on a friendly basis with them. Another anecdote that comes up, Amnesty International is to my knowledge organized around democratic oversight from its members and some years ago they had a huge leadership crisis including workplace bullying that was only revealed due to a suicide, which was really shocking to me. This had to become as bad as it gets before something happend.

The German Effective Altruism Network - recap 2020

Ekaterina_Ilin5y6

Thank you for your encouragement, I appreciate it (and certainly not only me :)).

I have mixed feelings about leadership on climate issues, and prefer to leave the evaluation of that statement to others. I also suffer from an inside perspective, and I want to flag my uncertainty here.

What I know for sure is that climate change is a regular topic in some local groups, popular not least because it is a "low-barrier" cause in outreach. There is also a loose group within the community who are considering engaging with our Green Party (Bündnis ... (read more)

jared_m

Thanks, Ekaterina! I shared a bit more about my "leadership on climate issues" description (which is, of course, relative to my North American context) above in response to Sebastian — and would reiterate my appreciation of your thoughtful initial post and for this additional context.

Hi, I'm Holden Karnofsky. AMA about jobs at Open Philanthropy

Ekaterina_Ilin8y2

Hi Holden,

the job description for Research Analysts says:

Research Analysts will receive intensive training and mentorship, and over time will become highly experienced with our approach to reasoning transparency, cost-effectiveness analysis, critical evidence assessment, grant investigation, and balancing thoroughness with efficiency."

Could you please elaborate a bit more on the training and mentorship part? E.g.: How much time is reserved for training? Who would be the mentors? What would the relation with the mentor(s) be like?

Thanks for offering this Q&A!

Holden Karnofsky

I answered a similar question here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1mf/hi_im_holden_karnofsky_ama_about_jobs_at_open/dpl In general, people who have been in the Research Analyst role for a while will be the managers and primary mentors of new Research Analysts. There will be regular (~weekly) scheduled checkins as well as informal interaction as needed (e.g., over Slack). There's no hard line between training and "just doing the work" - every assignment should have some direct value and some training value. We expect to lean pretty hard toward the training end of the spectrum for people's first few months, then gradually move along the spectrum to where assignments are more optimized for direct value.

Introducing Sentience Institute

Ekaterina_Ilin9y2

SP used to work on a research agenda with questions concerning sentience as a phenomenon itself, the list still resides here: SP former Research Agenda

SI's research is now much more advocacy centered, as you write:

Our mission is to build on the body of evidence for how to most effectively expand humanity’s moral circle, and to encourage advocates to make use of that evidence.

What is the reason for this strategic shift?

Jacy

We (Kelly and Jacy) weren't working at SP when its agenda was written, but my impression is that SP's research agenda was written to broadly encompass most questions relevant to reducing suffering, though this excluded some of the questions already prioritized by the Foundational Research Institute, another EAF project. I (Jacy) think the old SP agenda reflects EAF's tendency to keep doors open, as well as an emphasis on more foundational questions like the "sentience as a phenomenon itself" ones you mention here. When we were founding SI, we knew we wanted to have a relatively narrow focus. This was the recommendation of multiple advocacy/EA leaders we asked for advice. We also wanted to have a research agenda that was relatively tractable (though of course we don't expect to have definitive answers to any of the big questions in EA in the near future), so we could have a shorter feedback loop on our research progress. As we improve our process, we'll lean more towards questions with longer feedback loops. We also think that the old SP agenda was not only broad in topic, but broad in the skills/expertise necessary for tackling its various projects. Narrowing the focus to advocacy/social change means there's more transferability of expertise between questions. Finally, it seemed there had been a lot of talk in EA of values spreading as a distinct EA project, especially moral circle expansion, which arguably lies at the intersection of effective animal advocacy and existential risk/far future work, meaning it's been kind of homeless and could benefit from having its own organization.* All of this led us to focus SI on moral circle expansion and the more narrow/tractable/concrete/empirical research agenda than that of the old SP.** We've considered keeping the old agenda around as a long-term/broad agenda while still focusing on the new one for day-to-day work. I think it's currently still up-in-the-air what exactly will happen to that document. *The analogy that

Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

All of Ekaterina_Ilin's Comments + Replies