But I doubt you can make a case that’s robustly compelling and is widely agreed upon, enough to prevent the dynamics I worry about above.
"I doubt you can make a case that's robustly compelling..."
Systemic cascading effects and path dependency might be very coherent consequentialist frameworks & catchphrases to resolve a lot of your epistemic concerns (and this is something I want to explore further).
Naive consequentialism might incentivize you to lie to "do whatever it takes to do good", but the impacts of lying can cascade and affect the bedrock institutional culture and systems of a movement. On aggregate, these cascading (second-order) effects will make it more difficult for people to trust each other and work together in honest ways, making the moral calculus not worth it.
Furthermore, this might have a path-dependent effect, analogous to a significant/persistent/contingent effect, where choosing this path encodes certain values in the institution and makes it harder for other community values to arise in the future.
This similarly generalizes to most "overoptimization becomes illogical" problems. Naive consequentialism & low-integrity epistemics rarely make sense in the long run anyways, so it's just a matter of dispelling simplified, naive models of reality and coherently phrasing the importance of epistemics, diversity, and plurality through a consequentialist lens.
"...and is widely agreed upon."
Still relatively new to the community, so I might have the wrong view on this - but I'm always remarkably surprised by how openly EAs are willing to discuss flaws in the community & are concerned about solid epistemics within the community.
E.g. recently just posted a submission to the EA criticism contest - and it's difficult for me to imagine any other subgroup which pours $100k into a contest seriously considering and rewarding internal & external criticism about its most fundamental values and community.
Thank you so much for this well-written article. I especially love the calculations on cost-effectiveness & comparison on newborn deaths versus other EA cause areas – your proposal clearly makes sense clearly as an alternate GiveWell cause area from a DALYs perspective.
As a student during the pandemic, I’m quite skeptical of online education – but on the other hand, the unit economics are too good for me to ignore. It only takes one decent, quality course to scale and one can have an outsized return on investment.
Therefore, I’d love to know: how do you train people online, effectively? And to the extent previous health training courses exist, how effective have they been and what are their shortcomings?
If it works out, I feel like this “med-ed-tech” model could work really well for a lot of different health professions in developing countries for making an outsized impact. Would also be curious to hear what would make certain professions easy to train online and which would be the most difficult relative to its impact.
This point has helped me understand the original post more.
I feel that too many times, many EAs take current EA frameworks and ways of thinking for granted instead of questioning those frameworks and actively trying to identify flaws and in-built assumptions. Thinking through and questioning those perspectives is a good exercise in general but also extremely helpful to contribute to the motivating worldview of the community.
Still don't believe that this necessarily means EAs "tend toward the religious" - there are probably several layers of nuance that are missing in that statement.
All in all, I'd love to see more people critique EA frameworks and conventional EA ideas in this forum - I believe there are plenty of flaws to be found.
Hey! I liked certain parts of this post and not other parts of this post. I appreciate the thoughtfulness by which you critique EA through this post.
On your first point about the AI messiah:
I think the key distinction is that there are many reasons to believe this argument about the dangers of an AGI are correct, though. Even if many claims with a similar form are wrong, that doesn't exclude this specific claim from being right.
"Climate scientists keep telling us about how climate change is going to be so disastrous and we need to be prepared. But humanity has seen so many claims of this form and they've all been so wrong!"
The key distinction is that there is a lot of reason to believe that AGI will be dangerous. There is also a lot of reason to support the claim that we are not prepared currently. Without addressing that chain of logic directly, I don't think I'm convinced by this argument.
On your second point about the EA religious tendencies:
Because religious communities are one of the most common communities we see, there's obviously going to be parallels that exist between religious communities and EA.
Some of these analogies hold, others not so much. We, too, want to community build, network, and learn from each other. I'd love for you to point at specific examples of things EA do, from conferences to holding EA university groups, that are ineffective or unnecessary.
To perhaps a greater point of EA perhaps becoming too groupthink-y, which I think may be warranted:
I think a key distinction is that EA has a healthy level of debate, disagreement, and skepticism - while religions tend to demand blind faith in believing something unprovable. This ongoing debate on how to do the most good I personally find the most valuable in the community - and I hope this spirit never dies.
Keep on critiquing EA; I think such critiques are extremely valuable. Thanks for writing this.
Interested in the forthcoming successor to EA Hub - to what extent do EA organizations require software engineers to build these networking platforms? I (and probably many other college student EAs over the summer) would be really interested working on a software engineering project to create a Swapcard-and-EA-hub-but-better.
It'd be cool to gather a team of part-time or interning CS/SWE college students and invest in them, given how much effort and money goes into EA conference events but how difficult and time-consuming post-conference followups are.
I really, really like this approach! I like how this exercise doesn’t box in your thinking - rather, it is a very simple and plain “What do you want to do, now how do you get there?" reflection. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, creativity, and interpretation that will differ based on how you imagine solving your specific cause area.
I disagree with the following:
"I doubt you can make a case that's robustly compelling..."
Systemic cascading effects and path dependency might be very coherent consequentialist frameworks & catchphrases to resolve a lot of your epistemic concerns (and this is something I want to explore further).
Naive consequentialism might incentivize you to lie to "do whatever it takes to do good", but the impacts of lying can cascade and affect the bedrock institutional culture and systems of a movement. On aggregate, these cascading (second-order) effects will make it more difficult for people to trust each other and work together in honest ways, making the moral calculus not worth it.
Furthermore, this might have a path-dependent effect, analogous to a significant/persistent/contingent effect, where choosing this path encodes certain values in the institution and makes it harder for other community values to arise in the future.
This similarly generalizes to most "overoptimization becomes illogical" problems. Naive consequentialism & low-integrity epistemics rarely make sense in the long run anyways, so it's just a matter of dispelling simplified, naive models of reality and coherently phrasing the importance of epistemics, diversity, and plurality through a consequentialist lens.
"...and is widely agreed upon."
Still relatively new to the community, so I might have the wrong view on this - but I'm always remarkably surprised by how openly EAs are willing to discuss flaws in the community & are concerned about solid epistemics within the community.
E.g. recently just posted a submission to the EA criticism contest - and it's difficult for me to imagine any other subgroup which pours $100k into a contest seriously considering and rewarding internal & external criticism about its most fundamental values and community.
Thank you so much for this well-written article. I especially love the calculations on cost-effectiveness & comparison on newborn deaths versus other EA cause areas – your proposal clearly makes sense clearly as an alternate GiveWell cause area from a DALYs perspective.
As a student during the pandemic, I’m quite skeptical of online education – but on the other hand, the unit economics are too good for me to ignore. It only takes one decent, quality course to scale and one can have an outsized return on investment.
Therefore, I’d love to know: how do you train people online, effectively? And to the extent previous health training courses exist, how effective have they been and what are their shortcomings?
If it works out, I feel like this “med-ed-tech” model could work really well for a lot of different health professions in developing countries for making an outsized impact. Would also be curious to hear what would make certain professions easy to train online and which would be the most difficult relative to its impact.
This point has helped me understand the original post more.
I feel that too many times, many EAs take current EA frameworks and ways of thinking for granted instead of questioning those frameworks and actively trying to identify flaws and in-built assumptions. Thinking through and questioning those perspectives is a good exercise in general but also extremely helpful to contribute to the motivating worldview of the community.
Still don't believe that this necessarily means EAs "tend toward the religious" - there are probably several layers of nuance that are missing in that statement.
All in all, I'd love to see more people critique EA frameworks and conventional EA ideas in this forum - I believe there are plenty of flaws to be found.
Hey! I liked certain parts of this post and not other parts of this post. I appreciate the thoughtfulness by which you critique EA through this post.
On your first point about the AI messiah:
I think the key distinction is that there are many reasons to believe this argument about the dangers of an AGI are correct, though. Even if many claims with a similar form are wrong, that doesn't exclude this specific claim from being right.
"Climate scientists keep telling us about how climate change is going to be so disastrous and we need to be prepared. But humanity has seen so many claims of this form and they've all been so wrong!"
The key distinction is that there is a lot of reason to believe that AGI will be dangerous. There is also a lot of reason to support the claim that we are not prepared currently. Without addressing that chain of logic directly, I don't think I'm convinced by this argument.
On your second point about the EA religious tendencies:
Because religious communities are one of the most common communities we see, there's obviously going to be parallels that exist between religious communities and EA.
Some of these analogies hold, others not so much. We, too, want to community build, network, and learn from each other. I'd love for you to point at specific examples of things EA do, from conferences to holding EA university groups, that are ineffective or unnecessary.
To perhaps a greater point of EA perhaps becoming too groupthink-y, which I think may be warranted:
I think a key distinction is that EA has a healthy level of debate, disagreement, and skepticism - while religions tend to demand blind faith in believing something unprovable. This ongoing debate on how to do the most good I personally find the most valuable in the community - and I hope this spirit never dies.
Keep on critiquing EA; I think such critiques are extremely valuable. Thanks for writing this.
Interested in the forthcoming successor to EA Hub - to what extent do EA organizations require software engineers to build these networking platforms? I (and probably many other college student EAs over the summer) would be really interested working on a software engineering project to create a Swapcard-and-EA-hub-but-better.
It'd be cool to gather a team of part-time or interning CS/SWE college students and invest in them, given how much effort and money goes into EA conference events but how difficult and time-consuming post-conference followups are.
I really, really like this approach! I like how this exercise doesn’t box in your thinking - rather, it is a very simple and plain “What do you want to do, now how do you get there?" reflection. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, creativity, and interpretation that will differ based on how you imagine solving your specific cause area.