All of Helen's Comments + Replies
Yeah, fair question, though I think both estimating the numerator and the denominator is tricky. Probably your estimate that I know very roughly ~150-250 EAs is approximately right. But I'd be nervous about a conclusion of "this problem only affects 1 in 50, so it's pretty rare/not a big deal," both because I think the 3-5 number is more about specific people I've been interacting with a lot recently who directly inspired this post (so there could be plenty more I just know less about), and because there's also a lot of room for interpretation of how strongly people resonate with different parts of this / how completely they've disengaged from the community / etc.
Love the analogy of "f**k you money" to "I respectfully disagree with your worldview social capital" or "I respectfully disagree with your worldview concrete achievements that you cannot ignore"!
Before writing the post, I was maybe thinking of 3-5 people who have experienced different versions of this? And since posting I have heard from at least 3 more (depending how you count) who have long histories with EA but felt the post resonated with them.
So far the reactions I've got suggest that there are quite a lot of people who are more similar to me (still engage somewhat with EA, feel some distance but have a hard time articulating why). That might imply that this group is a larger proportion than the group that totally disengages... but the group that totally disengages wouldn't see an EA forum post, so I'm not sure :)
A mix! Some things I feel or have felt myself; some paraphrases of things I've heard from others; some ~basically made up (based on vibes/memories from conversations); some ~verbatim from people who reviewed the post.
I'm delighted that you went ahead and shared that the tone felt off to you! Thank you. You're right that I didn't really run this by any newcomers, so that's on me.
(By way of explanation, but not excuse: I mostly wrote the piece while thinking of the main audience as being people who were already partway through the disillusionment pipeline - but then towards the end edited in more stuff that was relevant to newcomers, and didn't adjust who I ran it by to account for that.)
I like this! Thanks for sharing it.
Another analogy I've been playing around with* is "having an impact isn't a sprint or a marathon - it's an endurance hunt." Things I like about this include:
- You're not competing against other people - you're trying to succeed at something that (a) is much less structured and (b) may or may not actually be possible
- Probably the best strategy isn't to run a constant, steady pace - depending on how the hunt is going at any given moment, it may suddenly be really valuable to run flat out for a stretch, or it may be fine to
I am in contact with a couple of other funding sources who would take recommendations from me seriously, but this fund is the place I have most direct control over.
Both Matts are long-time earn-to-givers, so they each make grants/donations from their own earnings as well as working with this fund.
This is a great comment. If I were to rewrite this post now, I would make sure to include these.
Also, going back to a conversation with you: if I were to rewrite, I would also try to make it clearer that I'm not trying to give a formal definition of Effective Altruism (which is what it sounds like in the post), just trying to change the feeling or connotations around it, and how we think about it.
This is awesome, Ryan! Well done on working so hard to pull it together, and on actually pulling it off.
I think it's fair to say that "aspiring" doesn't quite fit for you. The point of that word being there is to reduce the strength of the claim: you're focused on being effective, you're trying hard to be effective, but to say that you are effective is different.
Maybe the slightly poor epistemology doesn't matter enough to make up for the much clearer name... I'm not sure.
You can easily say that Effective Altruism answers a question. The question is, "What should I do with my life?" and the answer is, "As much good as possible (or at least a decent step in that direction)."
I think this is the key part of our disagreement - I don't think this is the case - and I've answered more fully in my comment in reply to Kerry. Would love to hear your thoughts there.
Great comment, thanks Kerry. To your first point:
...it seems to me that EA is answering a question. The question is "what should I do with my life" and the answer is "do the most good with the resources available to me."
I'm really glad you stated this clearly (and it's the same idea as in pappubahry's comment). If this were the core idea of EA, then I agree that this whole post would be incorrect.
Is it the core idea though? None of the introductions I linked to above mention anything about what one "should" do. Certainly ...
Some current things that are trying to push on "differential progress", if I understand you right:
- The Good Judgement Project
- Political lobbying to promote regulation of biotech & nanotech research, a la CEA's/FHI's Global Priorities Project
- AI safety research
- Animal rights activism (where the emphasis is on values shift/expanding circles)
Does that look right? What else would you add?
(Paul, I think I've heard you talk before about trying to improve institutional quality - do you know of anyone you think is doing this well?)
Do you have any thoughts about how to juggle timing when different opportunities will arise at different times? For example, if applying for jobs & university places at the same time, the response times will be very different.
The obvious strategy is to delay the decision as long as possible, but it's hard to know how to trade off confirmed options that will expire against potential options you haven't heard from yet.
One EA friend I talked to about this said he tried to do this, then found that when it came down to it he couldn't bear to let an opportunity slide while waiting for others, so just took the first thing he got.
Turns out tax deductibility is much more complicated in Australia than elsewhere, and is made even worse by the fact that a couple of legal challenges are currently underway, so the case law is in flux.
There are a couple of people in Melbourne (not me!) who know their way around the tax system very well and are planning to write up the parts that would be relevant to setting up a re-routing fund. I think they're not prioritising it because setting up such a fund looks like it would be at least 1 full time job, plus a decent amount of accounting/legal/senior-community-figure support.
Nick Beckstead's thesis "On the Overwhelming Importance of the Far Future" deals thoroughly with these questions from the perspective of Effective Altruism (albeit within the framework of a Philosophy PhD). See especially chapter 4.
http://tinyurl.com/BecksteadFuture
Working through the thought experiments he presents and seeing the different unintuitive consequences of each theory changed my mind: I had strong intuitions that creating extra happy lives had no moral value, but I'm now convinced that doesn't make sense. I also agree with Ryan that t...
I know this isn't answering your question, but I think Mihai Badic was working on making a high-quality intro video at the EA summit and retreat earlier this year, so it would be worth talking to him.
We should reward the charities that we believe do the most good, not those that have the best marketing strategy, otherwise the most successful charities will be those that are best at soliciting funds, not those that are best at making the world a better place.
Nice post! I've always heard cosmopolitanism contrasted with "communitarianism", which I think is a more charitable name for the opposing position, and makes it clearer why so many people think that way. Less good for persuasive purposes though, I guess.
Completely agree that 1) Cosmopolitanism describes an important feature of Effective Altruism well, and 2) Non-cosmopolitanism is pervasive throughout our political & social discourse (another example is reporting on natural disasters or plane crashes, where the number of US/Australian/whatever citizens involved is usually emphasised).
Hm... thinking in terms of 2 types of claim doesn't seem like much of an improvement over thinking in terms of 1 type of claim, honestly. I was not at all trying to say "there are some things we're really sure of and some things we're not." Rather, I was trying to point out that EA is associated with a bunch of different ideas; how solid the footing of each idea is varies a lot, but how those ideas are discussed often doesn't account for that. And by "how solid" I don't just mean on a 1-dimensional scale from less to more solid—more like, the relevant evid... (read more)