All of Nick_Anyos's Comments + Replies

But also, every local community organiser I talk to talks about how CEA is controlling and that their funding comes with lots of strings attached.

(Just wanted to add a counter datapoint: I have been a local community organizer for several years and this has not been my experience.)

Talking from my time in EA NTNU, my experience was indeed the complete opposite. Funding and follow up from CEA was excellent, kind and thoughtful. There were virtually zero strings attached and at no point did I feel like they were controlling.

The feelings of other organisers might differ of course, but I've not heard about this from anyone personally, and I did talk to quite a lot of student group leaders around 2017-2019.

Again, this is just my experience.

I had a similar thought to Shiny. Am I correct that an agent following your suggested policy ("‘if I previously turned down some option X, I will not choose any option that I strictly disprefer to X.’ ") would never *appear* to violate completeness from the perspective of an observer that could only see their decisions and not their internal state? And assuming completeness is all we need to get to full utility maximization, does that mean an agent following your policy would act like a utility maximizer to an observer?

1
EJT
1y
There's a complication here related to a point that Rohin makes : if we can only see an agent's decisions and we know nothing about its preferences, all behavior can be rationalized as EU maximization. But suppose we set that complication aside. Suppose we know this about an agent's preferences:  * There is some option A such that the agent strictly prefers A+$1 Then we can observe violations of Completeness. Suppose that we first offer our agent a choice between A and some other option B, and that the agent chooses A. Then we give the agent the chance to trade in A for B, and the agent takes the trade. That indicates that the agent does not strictly prefer A to B and does not strictly prefer B to A. Two possibilities remain: either the agent is indifferent between A and B, or the agent has a preferential gap between A and B. Now we offer our agent another choice: stick with B, or trade it in for A+$1. If the agent is indifferent between A and B, they will strictly prefer A+$1 to B (because indifference is sensitive to all sweetenings and sourings), and so we will observe the agent taking the trade. If we observe that the agent doesn't take the trade, then they must have a preferential gap between A and B, and so their preferences must be incomplete.

Thank you for this super kind comment! ^_^

Thank you for both comments! :)

Personally I feel exhausted by the last few months of what I felt like was much some firestorm of angry criticism. Much of it, mainly from the media and Twitter, feels like it was very antagonistic and in poor taste. At the same time, I think our movement has a whole lot of improvement to do.

I feel the same. Hopefully with this podcast I can increase the percentage of EA criticisms that is constructive and fun-to-engage-with.

My guess is that 70%+ of critiques are pretty bad (as is the case for most fields). I’d likewise be cu

... (read more)

Thank you for your comment and especially your guest recommendations! :)

Note that saying "this isn't my intention" doesn't prevent net negative effects of a theory of change from applying. Otherwise, doing good would be a lot easier. 

I completely agree. But I still think that saying when a harm was unintentional is an important signaling mechanism. For example, if I step on your foot, saying "Sorry, that was an accident" doesn't stop you from experiencing pain but hopefully prevents us from getting into a fight. Of course it is possible for signals li... (read more)

Hi! My name is Nick and i I have been reading articles on the EA forum since it started and finally got around to making an account today.

I first became aware Effective Altruism when I was 17 (2011). I had been working a summer job and wanted to know what was the best charity to donate some of the money too. Through that search I found GiveWell and became very interested effective charities. A year or two later (around 2013) I came across Less Wrong and read the sequences. Through Less Wrong I found many other places to learn about Effective Altruism and o... (read more)

1
Evan_Gaensbauer
9y
Hi Nick, welcome to the forum!