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Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

This all makes sense, and I think it is a a very reasonable perspective. I hope this ongoing process goes well.

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

I at least would say that I care about doing the most good that I can, but am also mindful of the fact that I run on corrupted hardware, which makes ends justifying means arguments unreliable, per EY's classic argument (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/)

""The end does not justify the means" is just consequentialist reasoning at one meta-level up. If a human starts thinking on the object level that the end justifies the means, this has awful consequences given our untrustworthy brains; therefore a human shouldn... (read more)

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Gleb_T

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, the above refers to the ideal-type scenario. IRL, different people are differently calibrated. Some tend to be too oriented toward exaggerating, some too oriented to being humble and understating the case, and in either case, it's a mistake. So one should learn where one's bias is, and push against that bias.

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

JBeshir7y5

This definitely isn't the kind of deliberate where there's an overarching plot, but it's not distinguishable from the kind of deliberate where a person sees a thing they should do or a reason to not write what they're writing and knowingly ignores it, though I'd agree in that I think it's more likely they flinched away unconsciously.

It's worth noting that while Vegan Outreach is not listed as a top charity it is listed as a standout charity, with their page here: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/charity-review/vegan-outreach/

I don't think it is... (read more)

Ben_West

Thanks for the response, it helps me understand where you're coming from. I agree that the sentence you cite could be better written (and in general ACE could improve, as could we all). I disagree with this though: At the object level: ACE is distinguishable from a bad actor, for example due to the fact that their most prominent pages do not recommend charities which focus on leafleting. At the metalevel: I don't think we should have a conversational norm of "everyone should be treated as a bad actor until they can prove otherwise". It would be really awful to be a member of a community with that norm. All this being said, it seems that ACE is responding in this post now, and it may be better to let them address concerns since they are both more knowledgeable and more articulate than me.

Peter Wildeford

To be clear, it's inaccurate to describe the studies as showing evidence of no effect. All of the studies are consistent with a range of possible outcomes that include no effect (and even negative effect!) but they're also consistent with positive effect. That isn't to say that there is a positive effect. But it isn't to say there's a negative effect either. I think it is best to describe this as a "lack of evidence" one way or another. - I don't think there's good evidence that anything works in animal rights and if ACE suggests anything anywhere to the contrary I'd like to push against it.

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

JBeshir7y4

Thank you for the response, and I'm glad that it's being improved, and that there seems to be a honest interest in doing better.

I feel "ensure others don't get the wrong idea about how seriously such estimates should be taken" is understating things- it should be reasonable for people to ascribe some non-zero level of meaning to issued estimates, and especially it should be that using them to compare between charities doesn't lead you massively astray. If it's "the wrong idea" to look at an estimate at all, because it isn't the true bes... (read more)

EricHerboso

I agree: it is indeed reasonable for people to have read our estimates the way they did. But when I said that we don't want others to "get the wrong idea", I'm not claiming that the readers were at fault. I'm claiming that the ACE communications staff was at fault. Internally, the ACE research team was fairly clear about what we thought about leafleting in 2014. But the communications staff (and, in particular, I) failed to adequately get across these concerns at the time. Later, in 2015 and 2016, I feel that whenever an issue like leafleting came up publicly, ACE was good about clearly expressing our reservations. But we neglected to update the older 2014 page with the same kind of language that we now use when talking about these things. We are now doing what we can to remedy this, first by including a disclaimer at the top of the older leafleting pages, and second by planning a full update of the leafleting intervention page in the near future. Per your concern about cost-effectiveness estimates, I do want to say that our research team will be making such calculations public on our Guesstimate page as time permits. But for the time being, we had to take down our internal impact calculator because the way that we used it internally did not match the ways others (like Slate Star Codex) were using it. We were trying to err on the side of openness by keeping it public for as long as we did, but in retrospect there just wasn't a good way for others to use the tool in the way we used it internally. Thankfully, the Guesstimate platform includes upper and lower bounds directly in the presented data, so we feel it will be much more appropriate for us to share with the public. You said "I think the error was in the estimate rather than in expectation management" because you felt the estimate itself wasn't good; but I hope this makes it more clear that we feel that the way we were internally using upper and lower bounds was good; it's just that the way we were talking a

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

JBeshir7y4

I find it difficult to combine "I want to be nice and sympathetic and forgiving of people trying to be good people and assume everyone is" with "I think people are not taking this seriously enough and want to tell you how seriously it should be taken". It's easier to be forgiving when you can trust people to take it seriously.

I've kind of erred on the side of the latter today, because "no one criticises dishonesty or rationalisation because they want to be nice" seems like a concerning failure mode, but it'd be nice if I were better at combining both.

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

JBeshir7y10

One very object-level thing which could be done to make longform, persistent, not hit-and-run discussion in this particular venue easier: Email notifications of comments to articles you've commented in.

There doesn't seem to be a preference setting for that, and it doesn't seem to be default, so it's only because I remember to come check here repeatedly that I can reply to things. Nothing is going to be as good at reaching me as Facebook/other app notifications on my phone, but email would do something.

Peter Wildeford

https://github.com/tog22/eaforum/issues/65

John_Maxwell

Less Wrong has a "subscribe" feature that might be importable.

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

JBeshir7y5

Perhaps. It's certainly what the people suggesting that deliberate dishonesty would be okay are suggesting, and it is what a large amount of online advocacy does, and it is in effect what they did, but they probably didn't consciously decide to do it. I'm not sure how much credit not having consciously decided is worth, though, because that seems to just reward people for not thinking very hard about what they're doing, and they did it from a position of authority and (thus) responsibility.

I stand by the use of the word 'plundering'- it's surprising how so... (read more)

Ben_West7y11

ACE's primary output is its charity recommendations, and I would guess that it's "top charities" page is viewed ~100x more than the leafleting page Sarah links to.

ACE does not give the "top charity" designation to any organization which focuses primarily on leafleting, and e.g. the page for Vegan Outreach explicitly states that VO is not considered a top charity because of its focus on leafleting and the lack of robust research on that:

We have some concerns that Vegan Outreach has relied too heavily on poor sources of evidence to dete

JBeshir7y9

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm sorry that it's harsh. I'm willing to believe that it wasn't conscious intent at publication time at least.

But it seems quite likely to me from the outside that if they thought the numbers were underestimating they'd have fixed them a lot faster, and unless that's not true it's a pretty severe ethics problem. I'm sure it was a matter of "it's an error that's not hurting anyone because charity is good, so it isn't very important", or even just a generic motivation problem in volunteering to fix it, some kind of rat... (read more)

DavidNash

Maybe I'm being simple about this, but I find it's helpful to point people towards ACE because there doesn't seem to be any other charity researchers for that cause. Just by suggesting people donate to organisations that focus on animal farming, that seems like it can have a large impact even if it's hard to pick between the particular organisations.

Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to "EA has a Lying Problem", among other things)

JBeshir7y8

Copying my post from the Facebook thread:

Some of the stuff in the original post I disagree on, but the ACE stuff was pretty awful. Animal advocacy in general has had severe problems with falling prey to the temptation to exaggerate or outright lie for a quick win today. especially about health, and it's disturbing that apparently the main evaluator for the animal rights wing of the EA movement has already decided to join it and throw out actually having discourse on effectiveness in favour of plundering their reputation for more donations today. A mistake ... (read more)

Ben_West

This seems like an exaggerated and unhelpful thing to say.

Peter Wildeford

I'm involved with ACE as a board member and independent volunteer researcher, but I speak for myself. I agree with you that the leafleting complaints are legitimate -- I've been advocating more skepticism toward the leafleting numbers for years. But I feel like it's pretty harsh to think ACE needs to be entirely replaced. I don't know if it's helpful, but I can promise you that there's no intentional PR campaign on behalf of ACE to over-exaggerate in order to grow the movement. All I see is an overworked org with insufficient resources to double check all the content on their site. Judging the character of the ACE staff through my interactions with them, I don't think there was any intent to mislead on leaflets. I'd put it more as negligence arising from over-excitement from the initial studies (despite lots of methodological flaws), insufficient skepticism, and not fully thinking through how things would be interpreted (the claim that leafleting evidence is the strongest among AR is technically true). The one particular sentence, among the thousands on the site, went pretty much unnoticed until Harrison brought it up.

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