Just a readability suggestion: have the column for n (etc.) on the left and book on the right, so that we can read a left-aligned list of book names without the eyes having to jump around so much :)

One needs to remove the dot after the URL :)

4) The direct translations of Effective Altruism can sound a bit forced. The dutch “Effectief Altruïsme” is a case in point. This can make you seem a bit “out of touch”. We checked with German and Spanish EA’s and they confirm that the direct translations sound rather awkward in their native tongue (a Polish EA we talked to have said that the name actually sounds really positive in Polish, so this point may not be relevant in all languages).

Finnish definitely shares this problem. The two predominant ways to translate 'effective' into Finnish are:

1. tehokas (efficient)
2. vaikuttava (impressive or impactful)

Efficient is problematic because it's not the same as impactful. Many people have emotional or ideological problems with the ideals of efficiency, productivity, and optimization, and would have a gut-feeling of resistance against, e.g., this definition (from Google Translate) applied to human behavior:

• efficient: (especially of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. 

Impressive is even more problematic because an EA group would be wise to actively avoid the air of elitism which you mention. So "vaikuttava altruismi"  is basically equally close to "impressive altruism" as it is to "impactful altruism" — and there is not really a word in Finnish to separately capture the intended meaning of impactful.

The direct translation, efektiivinen, is very forced, and seems to have only rare and technical use in other contexts.

For these reasons (and other points mentioned in the post), I would encourage Finnish groups to consider alternative names!

Great post, full of good points!

FWIW, I also love your chosen name of Positive Impact Society Erasmus and find it much more relatable and less problematic than if you had gone with Effective Altruism Erasmus. It also sounds like you have good synergy with that name and the mission of the university.

I also agree that even 'altruism' can be an unfamiliar word (and/or a technical concept) and therefore worth avoiding in some popular contexts. I liked your example of the made-up group 'Effective Marnaism' and how it can sound weird or ideological.

I would support your suggestion of using “part of the EA network”  as a way to communicate the wider context of local groups with locally working names. I'll add that — re: avoiding the unnecessary use of -ism, and re: EA sometimes having an air of elitism — I am decidedly not a part of the informal Goodreads group called Effective Altruists because of the problems I have with its name.

• Especially in English, it is tempting to use the shorthand (and/or signaling of ingroup membership) of speaking of "EAs" and "Non-EAs", which sounds to me idealistic and exclusive in a negative way.
• I  don't want to carry a visible badge of identifying as an effective altruist, because to me it sounds like an elitist claim of already being effective, which I see as an empirical and debatable claim. (Many people feel the need to specify their self-identity in the form of "aspiring X" instead of "X".)
• I would join a group called 'EA network', which sounds entirely unproblematic to me!

Hi Ann, thanks for the reply! I agree that self-compassion can be an important piece of the puzzle for many people with an EA outlook.

I am definitely still working on reframing EA-related ideas and motivations so that the default language would not so easily lead to 'EA guilt' and some other problems. Lately I've been focusing on more general alternatives to 'compassion', because people often have different (and strong) preexisting notions of what compassion means, and so I'm not sure if compassion will serve as the kind of integrative 'bridge concept'  that I'm looking for to help solve many (e.g. terminological) problems simultaneously. 

So unfortunately I don't have much (quickly publishable) stuff on compassion specifically, having been rotating abstract alternatives like 'dissonance minimalism' or 'complex harmonization'. But who knows, maybe I'll end up relating things via compassion again, at some point!

I'm not up-to-date on what are the existing EA-memesphere writings on (self-)compassion, but I love the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares (http://mindingourway.com/guilt), often mentioned on LW/EA. It has also been narrated as a podcast by Gianluca Truda. I believe it is a good recommendation for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the ambitions of EA.

Thanks for doing long interviews!

I was intrigued by the hypothesis, mentioned by Andrés, that symmetry may be an efficient diagnostic tool for quickly checking on whether bodily functions are doing okay. (The example given was that a problem with one arm suddenly breaks the default sense of resonance or symmetry between the two arms.)

Does this imply the experimental predictions that

(1) symmetric pains might be detected more slowly than asymmetric pains, and

(2) subtle, symmetric sensations might go unnoticed more easily than asymmetric ones?

Could e.g. QRI test this?

As a parallel comment, here is more (from a previous discussion) of why I am gravitating towards suffering as the only independent (dis)value and everything else as interdependently valuable in terms of preventing suffering:

––––

I experience all of the things quoted in Complexity of value,

"Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one's own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc."

but I don’t know how to ultimately prioritize between them unless they are commensurable. I make them commensurable by weighing their interdependent value in terms of the one thing we all(?) agree is an independent motivation: preventable suffering. (If preventable suffering is not worth preventing for its own sake, what is it worth preventing for, and is this other thing agreeable to someone undergoing the suffering as the reason for its motivating power?) This does not mean that I constantly think of them in these terms (that would be counterproductive), but in conflict resolution I do not assign them independent positive numerical values, which pluralism would imply one way or another.

Any pluralist theory begs the question of outweighing suffering with enough of any independently positive value. If you think about it for five minutes, aggregate happiness (or any other experience) does not exist. If our first priority is to prevent preventable suffering, that alone is an infinite game; it does not help to make a detour to boost/copy positive states unless this is causally connected to preventing suffering. (Aggregates of suffering do not exist either, but each moment of suffering is terminally worth preventing, and we have limited attention, so aggregates and chain-reactions of suffering are useful tools of thought for preventing as many as we can. So are many other things without requiring our attaching them independent positive value, or else we would be tiling Mars with them whenever it outweighed helping suffering on Earth according to some formula.)

My experience so far with this kind of unification is that it avoids many (or even all) of the theoretical problems that are still considered canonical challenges for pluralist utilitarianisms that assign both independent negative value to suffering and independent positive value to other things. I do not claim that this would be simple or intuitive – that would be analogous to reading about some Buddhist system, realizing its theoretical unity, and teleporting past its lifelong experiential integration – but I do claim that a unified theory with grounding in a universally accepted terminal value might be worth exploring further, because we cannot presuppose that any kind of CEV would be intuitive or easy to align oneself with.

[...]

People also differ along their background assumptions on whether AGI makes the universally life-preventing button a relevant question, because for many, the idea of an AGI represents an omnipotent optimizer that will decide everything about the future. If so, we want to be careful about assigning independent positive value to all the things, because each one of those invites this AGI to consider {outweighing suffering} with {producing those things}, since pluralist theories do not require a causal connection between the things being weighed.

Really cool thought, this is persuasive to me.

I’m curious, what more specifically do you find it persuasive of? I generally feel that people do not easily want to bite the bullets that experiences have no independent positive value (only interdependent value), and that value doesn’t aggregate, and that outweighing “does not compute” in a physical balancing kind of sense. (I haven’t yet read the 2016 Oxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomena, but I expect that hypo-egoic systems, like many or most kinds of Buddhism, may be an angle from which it’d be easier to bite these bullets, though I don’t know much about the current intersection of Buddhism and EA.)

If I can try to rephrase your beliefs: economic rationality tells us that tradeoffs do in fact exist, and therefore rational agents must be able to make a comparison in every case. There has to be some amount of every value that you'd trade for another amount of every other value, otherwise you'll end up paralyzed and decisionless.

You're saying that, although we'd like to have this coherent total utility function, realistically it's impossible to do so. We run into the theoretical problems you mention, and more fundamentally, some of our goals simply are not maximizing goals, and there is no rule that can accurately describe the relationship between those goals. Do we end up paralyzed and decisionless, with no principled way to tradeoff between the different goals? Yes, that's unavoidable.

And one clarification: Would you say that this non-comparability is a feature more of human preferences, where we biologically have desires that aren't integrated into a single utility function, or morality, where there are independent goals with independent moral worth?

Yes, we’ll unavoidably face quantitative resource splits between goals, none of which we can fully satisfy as long as we have even one infinitely hungry goal like “minimize suffering”, “maximize happiness”, or “maximize survival”. In practice, we can resolve conflicts between these goals by coming up with a common language to mediate trade between them, but how could they settle on an agreement if they were all independent and infinite goals? (My currently preferred solution is that happiness and survival are not such goals, compared to compassion.)

Alternatively, they could split from being a unified agent into being three agents, each independently unified, but they’d eventually run into conflicts again down the line (if they’re competing over control, space, energy, etc.). I’m interested in internal unity from the “minimize suffering” perspective, because violent competition from non-negotiating splitting causes suffering. In other words, I suppose my self-compassion wants my goals to play in harmony, and “self-compassion aligned with omnicompassion” is the unification that results in that harmony in the most robust way I can imagine.

More biological needs are more clearly in the domain of self-compassion, while omnicompassion is the theoretical attractor, asymptotically approximated ideal, or “gravity” that pulls self-compassion towards extended self-compassion, which is like a process of gradually importing more and more needs of others as my own, which increases expected harmony so long as it’s done slowly enough to maintain the harmony within the initial small self. For people with a chaotic life situation or who are working on a lot of unmet needs, this domain of self-compassion could occupy a lot of their attention for years while still being aligned with eventually extending self-compassion, which means that a seemingly non-helping person may be working on precisely the need areas that are long-term aligned with their role in minimizing suffering (or maximizing harmony or however one likes to think of it).

(I may have sidestepped your question of morality and moral worth, because I prefer to think in terms of needs and motivating tensions, and to see if the theoretical implications of unified consequentialism could be derived from our needs instead of abstract shoulds, obligations, imperatives, or duties.)

This would be my practical question as well, for the following reasons!

I don’t see a way to ultimately resolve conflicts between an (infinite) optimizing (i.e., maximizing or minimizing) goal and other goals if they’re conceptualized as independent from the optimizing goal. Even if we consider the independent goals as something to only suffice (i.e., take care of “well enough”) instead of optimize as much as possible, it’ll be the case that our optimizing goal, by its infinite nature, wants to negotiate to itself as much resources as possible, and its reasons for earning its living within me are independently convincing (that’s why it’s an infinite goal of mine in the first place).

So an infinite goal of preventing suffering wants to understand why my conflicting other goals require a certain amount of resources (time, attention, energy, money) for them to be sufficed, and in practice this feels to me like an irreconcilable conflict unless they can negotiate by speaking a common language, i.e., one which the infinite goal can understand.

In the case of my other goals wanting resources from an {infinite, universal, all-encompassing, impartial, uncompromising} compassion, my so-called other goals start to be conceptualized through the language of self-compassion, which the larger, universal compassion understands as a practical limitation worth spending resources on – not for the other goals’ independent sake, but because they play a necessary and valuable role in the context of self-compassion aligned with omnicompassion. In practice, it also feels most sustainable and long-term wise to usually if not always err on the side of self-compassion, and to only gradually attempt moving resources from self-compassionate sub-goals and mini-games towards the infinite goal. Eventually, omnicompassion may expect less and less attachment to the other goals as independent values, acknowledging only their interdependent value in terms of serving the infinite goal, but it is patient and understands human limitations and growing pains and the counterproductive nature of pushing its infinite agenda too much too quickly.

If others have found ways to reconcile infinite optimizing goals with sufficing goals without a common language to mediate negotiations between them, I’d be very interested in hearing about them, although this already works for me, and I’m working on becoming able to write more about this, because it has felt like an all-around unified “operating system”, replacing utilitarianism. :)