All of Gleb_T's Comments + Replies
Let me first clarify that I see the goal of doing the most good as my end goal, and YMMV - no judgment on anyone who cares more about truth than doing good. This is just my value set.
Within that value set, using "insufficient" means to get to EA ends is just as bad as using "excessive" means. In this case, being "too honest" is just as bad as "not being honest enough." The correct course of actions is to correctly calibrate one's level of honesty to maximize for positive long-term impact for doing the most good.
Now...
We have a number of collaborative venues, such as a Facebook group, blog, email lists, etc. for people who get involved.
Yup, we're focusing on a core of people who are upset about lies and deceptions in the US election and the Brexit campaign, and aiming to provide them with means to address these deceptions in an effective manner. That's the goal!
Broad social movement. We're aiming to focus on social media organizing at first, and then spread to local grassroots organizing later. There will be a lot of marketing and PR associated with it as well.
You are mistaken, we have never claimed that we will distance InIn publicly from the EA movement.
We have previously talked about us not focusing on EA in our broad audience writings, and instead talking about effective giving - which is what we've been doing. At the same time, we were quite active on the EA Forum, and engaging in a lot of behind-the-scenes, and also public, collaborations to promote effective marketing within the EA sphere.
Now, we are distancing from the EA movement as a whole.
FYI, we decided to distance InIn publicly from the EA movement for the foreseeable future.
We will only reference effective giving and individual orgs that are interested in being promoted, as evidenced by being interested in providing InIn with stats for how many people we are sending to their websites, and similar forms of collaboration (yes, I'm comfortable using the term collaboration for this form of activity). Since GWWC/CEA seem not interested, we will not mention them in our future content.
Our work of course will continue to be motivated by EA con...
Interesting to see how many downvotes this got. Disappointing that people choose to downvote instead of engaging with the substance of my comments. I would have hoped for better from a rationally-oriented community.
Oh well, I guess it is what it is. I'm taking a break from all this based on my therapist's recommendation. Good luck!
I didn't down vote it, but I suspect others who did were - like me - frustrated by the accusation of not engaging with you on the substantive points that are summarised in Jeff's post. This post followed a discussion with literally hundreds of comments and dozens of people in this community discussing them with you.
I could explain why I think the term astroturfing does apply to your actions, even though they were not exactly the same as Holden's activities, but the pattern of discussion I've experienced and witnessed with you gives me very low credence that the discussion will lead to any change in our relative positions.
I hope the break is good for your health and wish you well.
This makes sense for spreading the message among EAs, which is why we have the Effective Altruist Accomplishments Facebook group. I'll have to think further about the most effective ways of spreading this message more broadly, as I'm not in a good mental space to think about it right now.
I am unwilling to take "active members of the EA group" as representative of the EA community, since your actual claim was that I made the experience of the EA community significantly worse, and that includes all members, not simply activists. On average, only 1% of any internet community contribute, but the rest are still community members. Instead, I am fine taking the bet than Benito describes - who is clearly far from friendly to InIn.
I am even fine with going with your lower estimate of 14 out of 20.
I am fine including friends.
I am fine w...
If the organizations concerned give permission, I am happy to share documentary evidence in my email of them reviewing the script and giving access to their high-quality logo images. I am also happy to share evidence of me running the final video by them and giving them an opportunity to comment on the wording of the description below the video, which some did to help optimize the description to suit their preferences. I would need permission from the orgs before sharing such email evidence, of course.
I hope Jeff will forgive me for answering this comment on his behalf, and Gleb will forgive me for ceasing to pretend he asking in good faith, rather than risible mudslinging in a misguided attempt at a damage limitation exercise (I particularly like the catty "Are you revealing your true beliefs earlier or now?" - setting an example for aspiring rationalists on how to garb their passive-aggressiveness with the appropriate verbiage).
Jeff notes here and in what you link there are two broad families concerns 1) your product is awful, and 2) your gr...
I'm fine taking a random sample of 20 people.
Regarding positive connections, the claim made by Oliver is what we're trying to measure - that I made "significantly worse" the experience of being a member of the EA community for "something like 80%" of the people there. I had not made any claims about my positive connections.
I will think about this further, as I am not in a good space mentally to give this the consideration it deserves
One of the things I'm trying to do, as I noted above, is a meta-move to change the culture of humility about good deeds. I generally have an attitude of trying to be the change that I want to see in the world and leading by example. It's a long-term strategy that has short-term costs, clearly :-)
I understand the long-term goal. I'm claiming that this strategy is actually instrumentally bad for that long-term goal, as it is too widely read as negative (hence reinforcing cultural norms towards humility). More effective would be to embody something which is superior to current cultural norms but will still be seen as positive.
I'll be happy to take that bet. So if I understand correctly, we'd choose a random 10 people on the EA FB group - ones who are not FB friends with you or I to avoid potential personal factors getting into play - and then ask them if their experience of the EA community has been "significantly worsened" by InIn. If 8 or more say yes, you win. I suggest 1K to a charity of the choice of the winning party? We can let a third party send messages to prevent any framing effects.
True, I don't have a very good perception of social status instincts. I focus more on the quality of someone's contributions and expertise rather than their status. I despise status games.
Also, there's a basic inference gap between people who perceive InIn and me as being excessively self-promotional. I am trying to break the typical and very unhelpful humility characteristic of do-gooders. See more about this in my piece here.
FWIW, I read quite a bit of the self-promotional stuff as being status-gamey. I expect I'm not all that unusual in this.
That it gets read this way is a challenge here, and indeed a challenge to the general problem of trying to dial back humility re. good deeds. I think some humility about good deeds is instrumentally pretty important for sending the right signals and encouraging others to be attracted to the idea (not of course to the point of keeping them all private).
Gleb, there is a social norm that things one says in private email will not be publicized without consent. In the document quotes attributed to you from private messages are only included where you have been asked for consent, it has been given, and you have had opportunities to review prior to publication.
The same expectation does not apply to you vetoing Michelle's statements about what she said (not what you said).
No "exchange" has been disclosed. Michelle has disclosed her own words and that she said them to you. Are you claiming people can not report their own speech without the permission of their audience?
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part three of my comments.
Now that we got through the specifics, let me share my concerns with this document.
1) This document is a wonderful testimony to bikeshedding, motte-and-bailey, and confirmation bias.
It’s an example of bikeshedding because the much larger underlying concerns are quite different from the relatively trivial things brought up in this document: see link
Consider the disclosures. Heck, even one of the authors of this document who...
Regarding Gleb's point #1 I would like to agree in particular that harsh hyperbole like "Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse" is objectionable, and Oliver should not have used it.
Also it's worth signal-boosting and reiterating to all commenters on this thread that public criticism on the internet, particularly with many critics and one or a few people being criticized, is very stressful, and people should be mindful about that and empathize with Gleb's difficult situation. I will also add that my belief is that Gleb is ...
Regarding point #2, Gleb writes above:
2) This document engages in unethical disclosures of my private messages with others. When I corresponded with Michelle, I did so from a position as a member of GWWC and the head of another EA organization. Neither was I asked nor did I implicitly permit my personal email exchange to be disclosed publicly. In other words, it was done without my permission in an explicit attempt to damage InIn.
Here is the entirety of section 1.2, which does not cite or quote any statement from Gleb's email to Michelle, but rather ci...
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part two of my comments.
Some of you will be tempted to just downvote this comment because I wrote it. I want you to think about whether that’s the best thing to do for the sake of transparency. If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.
I disagree with other aspects of the post.
1) For instance, the points about affiliation, of wh...
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part one of my comments.
Some of you will be tempted to just downvote this comment because I wrote it. I want you to think about whether that’s the best thing to do for the sake of transparency. If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.
I’m very proud of and happy with the work that Intentional Insights does to promote rational ...
I have down-voted this comment because I think as a community we should strongly disapprove of this sort of threat
"If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote."
The criticisms have been raised in an exceptionally transparent manner: Jeff made a public post on Facebook, and Gleb was tagged in to participate. Within that thread the plans to make this document were explained and even linked to: anybody (Gleb included) could r...
It seems to me that risk aversion and selfishness are orthogonal to each other - i.e., they are different axes. Based on the case study of Alex, it seems that Alex does not truly - with their System 1 - believe that a far-future cause is 10X better than a current cause. Their System 1 has a lower expected utility on donating to a far future cause than poverty relief, and the "risk aversion" is a post-factum rationalization of a System 1, subconscious mental calculus.
I'd suggest for Alex to sit down and see if they have any emotional doubts about...
Good question about RCTs! We're actually gathering funding to conduct a study on various forms of messaging using Mechanical Turk.
Oh, I didn't mean "going to the people" as an activity, but a cultural tradition of valuing the masses. Namely, get to that part of the intelligentsia that values such activities, and show that EA is actually a great way to achieve their goal of valuing human beings in the most effective way possible (and later perhaps expand to other sentient beings).
Ah, didn't know about Yuliy's disengagement. Thanks for updating me about that.
Speaking from my perspective as someone who has researched Soviet civic engagement, I'm curious if it would be good to tie EA to existing Russian cultural ideas. For example, the idea of "going to the people" might be useful. This sort of cultural translation is what is being tried right now in translating EA to Muslim norms of giving to charity. Also, have you worked with the sizable LessWrong community in Moscow? They might be particularly amenable to EA. I can put you in touch with the group leader there if you're not, email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Sounds like there will be a significant focus on collaboration. Also consider collaborating with SHIC if you aren't yet!
Thanks for sharing about the project! I'm curious how do you plan to engage with existing EA chapters in colleges?
Yup, scared straight is a famous example, but not a charity. Neither are the social interventions at the link. I'd love to see some charities that had scholarly studies proving them either ineffective or net negative.
I'm not sure I know of many studies of charities that show they have negative effects. Do you have any citations of such studies?
Interesting stuff about Effective Environmentalism. Can you share some relevant links for people who might want to learn more?
I personally donated to the fundraiser and encourage other folks to do so as well, it's a great cause.
Excellent to hear about both the outreach work, and the fundraiser too. We tend to focus too little energy on doing outreach by comparison to moving money, so it's great to see you and the EA Munich group doing so much great outreach!
Great piece!