All of JeremiahJohnson's Comments + Replies
>I also think that (some) EA orgs do more to filter for competence than most companies; I've applied to many conventional jobs, and been accepted to some of those, but none of them put me through work testing anywhere near as rigorous and realistic as CEA's.
I want to push back here based on recent experience. I recently applied for a job at CEA and was essentially told that my background and experience was a perfect fit and that I aced the application but that I was not 'tightly value aligned' and thus would not be getting the role.
CEA certainly h...
Hi Jeremiah. I was the hiring manager here and I think there's been something of a misunderstanding here: I don't think this is an accurate summary of why we made the decision we did. It feels weird to discuss this in public, but I consent to you publishing the full rejection email we sent, if you would like.
Don't have time to write up the full arguments why, but housing and pandemic preparedness would be my top two. Immigration is less tractable but highly valuable. This is from a US perspective.
Globally, I think that promoting women's rights in many developing countries is a potentially high impact activity.
I appreciate this response because I think it's symbolic of something I think is important.
EA has a lot of internal norms, like any group. It seems like on the EA forum one of those is to use more factual, descriptive, neutral titles. But elsewhere, the norm is to be attention getting, provocative, etc. You could fairly call this 'clickbait' if you'd like. Clickbait exists because it works. It is startlingly effective, and not just at cheap engagement that dies quickly. It's effective at prompting deep engagement as well. One quick ...
I think this comment misses the point. The crux is not whether clickbait does in fact draw attention – the fact that clickbait works is precisely why we don't want it on the forum. We have a limited amount of attention to spend, and encouraging clickbait means necessarily drawing away attention from less-clickbaity posts.
"But if EAs only ever use factual, descriptive, neutral language in all forums, that's a strategic mistake, and hinders their ability to effectively communicate with the public."
I don't think the purpose of the EA forum is to communicate with the public.
also - the clever sounding title was taken from an obscure academic screed 9 years ago - https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism
My point is that I think you can often a ton of good by NOT focusing on the highest priority cause.
If you constantly talk about killer AI for a year, you might get 2 people to contribute to it.
If you constantly talk about improving regular people's regular charitable giving for a year, you might influence dozens or hundreds of people to give more efficiently, even if they're still giving to something that isn't the highest priority cause.
Basically - If your goal is to improve restaurant quality, improving every McDonald's in the US by 10% does more to improve restaurant quality than opening a handful of Michelin star joints.
There's definitely a set of principles that underpins our policy beliefs. A lot of this goes all the way back to classical liberalism - to be a neoliberal means first and foremost that you are a liberal and are grounded in liberal political philosophy. This means we hold the core liberal values of equality before the law, democratic governance, a market economy, freedoms of press/religion/speech/assembly/etc.
Modern neoliberals take that liberalism and add and emphasize a few things. Neoliberals are internationalist and globalist, which le...
I'm hesitant to act like I know the One True Answer here because while this is a global phenomenon, I think Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Duterte, Erdogan, Modi, Xi, Putin, Orban, etc etc etc all have their own unique circumstances that makes any kind of general answer impossible. Putin is propelled by unique factors relating to the fall of the USSR and the sense of decline/malaise in Russia. All American politics is inexorably tied into our race relations. Erdogan's boosted by Turkey's tortured history with 'liberal coups' and its historical dan...
Initially the name came from wonkish Hillary Clinton supporters getting called '****ing neoliberals' or other angry denunciations by Bernie Sanders supporters in the 2016 Dem primary. We kind of ran with it - if being a Clinton supporter is being a neoliberal, fine, I'm a neoliberal.
Once the name was there, it attracted attention like a lightning rod and the community grew very fast. At the beginning nobody was trying to make this into anything, it was just a bunch of people memeing about central bankers, globalism and woke capitalism. There wasn't a...
- - open borders. If there was no political blowback it's a multi-trillion dollar idea. Second would either be some sort of giant green package focused on carbon taxes + huge amounts of green energy R&D funding + international agreements, or some sort of federal control of zoning where I liberalize the hell out of EVERY city's zoning (this is probably impossible constitutionally, but no blowback!)
- Go outside Mike :)
This is a complex thing to measure, because the largest thing we're trying to do is to create an ideological movement that captures a lot of people in the long run. I admire the DSA a lot and think they're very much an example of the impact I'd like to have (but obviously with what I think are preferable political views). I think they have had enormous impact on current US politics.
But if you had asked 10 years ago 'What has the DSA accomplished?', it'd be a tough question to answer. They had a handful of local politicians, but nobody really no...
I think it's important to realize that different names serve different purposes at different points in time.
If the initial subreddit had called itself the very sober sounding "/r/NewLiberal" from the beginning, I firmly believe that what we are doing right now would not exist. The subreddit would never have gotten the attention it got, and would never have grown as fast as it did. Reclaiming the term neoliberal was delightfully subversive and grabbed people's attention - people who loved it and people who hated it. Before the Neoliberal P...
The term came from wonkish people who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary being called 'neoliberals' by Bernie Sanders supporters and general leftists. There was a sense of "If supporting Hillary and being a wonk is being a neoliberal, fine, I'm a neoliberal".
I'm not aware of any serious arguments that open borders are bad on a first-order, only that the political backlash is something to worry about.
With that in mind, I'm a pragmatist (and pragmatism is one of our core values). I'll fight for whatever increases in immigration I can get and work within the political reality that we live in. I'm willing to explore what Bryan Caplan calls 'keyhole' solutions that are much less than ideal or unfair in some ways, but better than nothing.
I also think that the backlash angle can be overstated. A lot of th...
Going through the first list
- Single Payer Healthcare. -Weakly opposed. I prefer a multi-payer system like many, many other rich countries have. I'm usually annoyed when people present single payer as the only way to get everyone affordable healthcare coverage.
- Build More Housing. Huge yes, neoliberals are pretty explicitly YIMBY.
- Legalize Drugs. Yes, but I'm unsure about harder drugs.
- Jail People Less. Very much yes
- Less Military. This is complicated and I'm unsure.
- Give People Money. In general, fungible cash benefits are better than restricted bene
I'm somewhat of a skeptic on the dangers of AI, so I may not be the best person to address that point. On pandemics, I think it's likely that Gain of Function research should be heavily curtailed - but I don't think that's a core neoliberal value or anything, just my personal opinion.
More broadly, I don't really think of x-risk and economic growth as things that necessarily have to be traded for each other. I think that in many important ways a more prosperous society has more stability and less x-risk. One important area to worry about is the ...
Big fan of many of the groups discussed here, and we're often close with the groups you listed. We've had Matt and Ezra on the podcast several times, as well as Dylan Matthews from Future Perfect to discuss kidney donation. Love the work that Future Perfect does. I've also hosted on the podcast Glen Weyl, Jason Crawford of the Roots of Progress, and Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute. Much less a fan of Peter Thiel, whose goals are explicitly anti-liberal (and being an ideological liberal I obviously view this as a very bad thing).
I th...
I think it's a good proof of concept - have something fun that people enjoy as a gateway drug into the group's more serious ideas. But simpler reddit/twitter content would work even better - their content is astonishingly viral compared to long works of fan-fiction.
Yes, lobbying officials is part of what we do. We're trying to talk to officials about all the things we care about - taking action on climate change, increasing immigration, etc etc etc. Truthfully I don't have a ton of experience on this front yet - I've been part of the project since its inception in early 2017, but have only been formally employed by PPI for the last 8 months or so. So I'm not a fountain of wisdom on all the best lobbying techniques - this is somewhat beginner level analysis of the DC swamp.
One thing I've noticed is that an ounce...
You might be partially right, but in the early days we were largely memeing about free trade, immigration, and semi-ironic worship of central bankers. Most of that isn't exactly the hot thing with the youths, but never underestimate the power of memes to make something ironically cool in a subculture.
Loved the post you linked!
I second your hesitation about the upside/downside to "identifying as an EA". But I honestly don't think you can help this sort of thing happening. The most you can do is actively guide the values that are defining your group. In the early days of the neoliberal subreddit (the earliest large-scale group of modern self-identified neoliberals), one of the slogans we used was 'evidence based policy'. The leaders and prominent members of the subreddit tried to instill 'evidence based policy' as a core value to the members, to of...
If Eliezer Yudkowsky had spent 30% less time writing the sequences and used that time to shitpost a bunch of solid memes on twitter about the shorter version of the sequences, EA would probably be twice as large as it is now.
This is both a joke and directionally true. Twitter and reddit are community building tools and best at creating memes and viral content. I haven't really thought this through in any detail, but I wonder if the EA/rationalist obsession with deeply analyzing and debating everything makes them bad at memes.
There's a private facebook group you can sign up for that has some pretty solid EA memes . I love it, but I always figured it was private for a reason -- EA is full of lots of counterintuitive philosophical ideas that people find off-putting (like... utilitarianism alone is already off-putting to most normies), and EA seems to be very obsessed with having a good/prestigious reputation as a responsible, serious movement. Our jokes are mostly about how weird EA is, so we might want to keep our jokes to ourselves if we are desperately trying to seem normal...
Neoliberals tend to talk about issues that many people take an interest in to a greater extent than EAs do. I would guess that that's an important part of the explanation of the Neoliberals' greater success on Twitter.
Certainly as a part-time neoliberal I'll say neolibs have a much more vibrant meme culture. Though I guess that's because they have a more publicly shitpost-y aesthetic. By r/neoliberal standards almost every post on the EA forum is an "effortpost".
EA as a community is pretty publicly soberminded. I imagine that turns some poeple off.
You need more emojis and memes.
Sounds like a joke, but it's serious. My theory of politics is that basically all politics are identity politics. 'Identity politics' has traditionally been used to mean things like "Black person cares about race issues' or 'Woman cares about women's issues', but I think it goes beyond that. Tribalism is infecting virtually everything we do and every issue we care about, and when you get separated into tribes you develop identities. 'Neoliberal' and 'Socialist' are identities today, there are people who strongly identify as t...
I wish it was more mainstream!
EA is basically a group of weirdos caring about very weird, abstract things. I think that's great and we need weird people pursuing weird passion projects, because that's how a lot of important shit has gotten done throughout history. But I also wish there was a more mainstream version of EA.
What I have in mind here is not an EA movement trying to get John Q Donor to give money to things like AI-alignment, or animal welfare studies, or any of the generally very weird and off-putting stuff that EA often focuses on. ...
Neoliberalism is an explicitly globalist ideology, with heavy emphasis on free international trade, free immigration, and cooperative international institutions.
Of those
- Free trade is something I see as incredibly beneficial to the world, but also an area where most of the hard work has already been done and the gains from further trade liberalization are small-to-medium sized. Not necessarily an EA area of focus.
- Increasing immigration is something I think has enormous potential for EA action (I go into more depth in a different comment chain)
- Cooperat
I'm someone who thinks of myself as an EA, but I don't engage at a deep level with the community at all times, so this is my half-insider-half-outsider view of EA. My general sense is that EA famously focuses on a handful of areas - AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risk management, GiveWell-style medical interventions, etc. I very rarely see EAs talking about 'normal politics' as a place to do good, and I think there are some normal politics issues that have deep promise.
One example is advocacy for increased immigration for rich countries. The eviden...
I don't particularly feel it would be a valuable use of anyone's time to get into a drawn out public back-and-forth debate where we both nitpick the implications of various word choices. I'll just say that if your intention was to communicate something other than "We prefer a candidate who is tightly value aligned" then there was a significant failure of communication and you shouldn't have specifically used the phrase "tightly aligned" in the same sentence as the rejection.
If the issue is that CEA communicated poorly or you misunderstood the rejection, I agree that's not necessarily worth getting into. But you've made a strong claim about how CEA makes decisions based on the contents of a message, whose author is willing to make public. It looks to me like you essentially have two choices:
Agree to make the message public, or
Onlookers interpret this as an admission that your claim was exaggerated.