I agree that we don’t want EA to be distinctive just for the sake of it. My view is that many of the elements of EA that make it distinctive have good reasons behind them. I agree that some changes in governance of EA orgs, moving more in the direction of standard organisational governance, would be good, though probably I think they would be quite different to what you propose and certainly wouldn’t be ‘democratic’ in any meaningful sense.
I don’t have much to add to my first point and to the discussion below my comment by Michael PJ. Boiled down, I think the point that Cowen makes stripped of the rhetoric is just that EAs did a bad job on the governance and management of risks involved in working with SBF and FTX, which is very obvious and everyone already agrees with. It simply has no bearing on whether EAs are assessing existential risk correctly, and enormous equivocation on the word ‘existential risk’ doesn’t change that fact.
Since you don’t want diversity essentially along all dimensions, what sort of diversity would you like? You don’t want Trump supporters; do you want more Marxists? You apparently don’t want more right wingers even though most EAs already lean left. Am I right in thinking that you want diversity only insofar as it makes EA more left wing? What forms of right wing representation would you like to increase.
The problem you highlight here is not value alignment as such but value alignment on what you think are the wrong focus areas. Your argument implies that value alignment on non-TUA things would be good. Correspondingly, if what you call ‘TUA’ (which I think is a bit of a silly label—how is it techno-utopian to think we’re all going to be killed by technology?) is actually good, then value alignment on it seems good.
You argued in your post that people often have to publish pseudonymously for fear of censure or loss of funding and the examples you have given are (1) your own post, and (2) a forum post on conflicts of interest. It’s somewhat self-fulfilling to publish something pseudonymously and then use that as an argument that people have to publish things pseudonymously. I don’t think it was rational for you to publish the post pseudonymously—I don’t think you will face censure if you present rational arguments, and you will have to tell people what you actually think about the world eventually anyway. (btw I’m not a researcher at a core EA org any more.)
I don’t think the seniority argument works here. A couple of examples spring to mind here. Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a critique of EA views on economic growth, for which we was richly rewarded despite being a teenager (or whatever). The recent post about AI timelines and interest rates got a lot of support, even though it criticises a lot of EA research on timelines. I hadn’t heard of any of the authors of the interest rate piece before.
The main example you give is the reception to the Cremer and Kemp pice, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they did actually get the reception they claimed.
I’m not sure whether intelligence can be boiled down to a single number if this claim is interpreted in the most extreme way. But at least the single number of the g factor conveys a lot of information about how intelligent people are and explains about 40-50% of the variation in individual performance on any given cognitive task, a large correlation for psychological science! This widely cited recent review states “There is new research on the psychometric structure of intelligence. The g factor from different test batteries ranks people in the same way. There is still debate about the number of levels at which the variations in intelligence is best described. There is still little empirical support for an account of intelligence differences that does not include g.”
“In fact, this could be argued to represent the sort of ideologically-agreeable overconfidence we warn of with respect to EAs discussing subjects in which they have no expertise.” I don’t think this gambit is open to you—your post is so wide ranging that I think it unlikely that you all have expertise in all the topics covered in the post, ten authors notwithstanding.
Of course, there are more things to life and to performance at work than intelligence.
As I mentioned in my first comment, it’s not true that the things that EAs are interested in are especially popular among tech types, nor are they aligned with the interests of tech types. The vast majority of tech philanthropists are not EA, and EA cause areas just don’t help tech people at least relative to everyone else in the world. In fact, I suspect a majority view is that most EAs would like progress in virology and AI to be slowed down if not stopped. This is actively bad for the interests of people invested in AI companies and biotech. “the fact that e.g. preventing wars does not disproportionately appeal to the ultra-wealthy is orthogonal.” One of the headings in your article is “We align suspiciously well with the interests of tech billionaires (and ourselves)”. I don’t see how anything you have said here is a good defence against my criticism of that claim.
There’s a few things to separate here. One worry is that EAs/me are neglecting the expert consensus on the aggregate costs of climate change: this is emphatically not true. The only models that actually try and quantify the costs of climate change all suggest that income per person will be higher in 2100 despite climate change. From memory, the most pessimistic study, which is a massive outlier (Burke et al), projects a median case of a ~750% increase in income per person by 2100, with a lower 5% probability of a ~400% increase, on a 5ºC scenario.
A lot of what you say in your response and in your article seems inconsistent—you make a point of saying that EAs ignore the experts but then dismiss the experts when that happens to be inconsistent with your preferred opinions. Examples:
Defending postcolonialism in global development
Your explanation of why Walmart makes money vs mainstream economics.
Your dismissal of all climate economics and the IPCC
‘Standpoint theory’ vs analytical philosophy
Your dismissal of Bayesianism, which doesn’t seem to be aware of any of the main arguments for Bayesianism.
Your dismissal of the g factor, which doesn’t seem to be aware of the literature in psychology.
The claim that we need to take on board Kuhnian philosophy of science (Kuhn believed that there has been zero improvement in scientific knowledge over the last 500 years)
Your defence of critical realism
Similarly, Cremer (life science and psychology) and Kemp (international relations) take Ord, MacAskill and Bostrom to task for straying out of their epistemic lane and having poor epistemics, but then go on in the same paper to offer casual ~1 page refutations of (amongst other things) total utlitarianism, longtermism and expected utility theory.
Your discussion of why climate change is a serious catastrophic risk kind of illustrates the point. “For instance, recent work on catastrophic climate risk highlights the key role of cascading effects like societal collapses and resource conflicts. With as many as half of climate tipping points in play at 2.7°C − 3.4°C of warming and several at as low as 1.5°C, large areas of the Earth are likely to face prolonged lethal heat conditions, with innumerable knock-on effects. These could include increased interstate conflict, a far greater number of omnicidal actors, food-system strain or failure triggering societal collapses, and long-term degradation of the biosphere carrying unforeseen long-term damage e.g. through keystone species loss.”
Bressler et al (2021) model the effects of ~3ºC on mortality and find that it increases the global mortality rate by 1%, on some very pessimistic assumptions about socioeconomic development and adaptation. It’s kind of true but a bit misleading to say that this ‘could’ lead to interstate conflict or omnicidal actors. Maybe so, but how big a driver is it? I would have thought that more omnicidal actors will be created by the increasing popularity of environmentalism. The only people who I have heard say things like “humanity is a virus” are environmentalists.
Can you point me to the studies involving formal models that suggest that there will be global food system collapse at 3-4ºC of warming? I know that people like Lenton and Rockstrom say this will happen but they don’t actually produce any quantitative evidence and it’s completely implausible on its face if you just think about what a 3ºC world would be like. Economic models include effects on agriculture and they find a ~5% counterfactual reduction in GDP by 2100 for warming of 5ºC. There’s nothing missing in not modelling the tails here.
ok
What is the rationale for democratising? Is it for the sake of the intrinsic value of democracy or for producing better spending decisions? I agree it would be more democratic to have all EAs make the decision than the current system, but it’s still not very democratic—as you have pointed out, it would be a load of socially awkward anglophone white male nerds deciding on a lot of money. Why not go the whole hog and have everyone in the world decide on the money, which you could perhaps roughly approximate by giving it to the UN or something?
We could experiment with setting up one of the EA funds to be run democratically by all EAs (however we choose to assign EA status) and see whether people want to donate to it. Then we would get some sort of signal about how it performs and whether people think this is a good idea. I know I wouldn’t give it money, and I doubt Moskovitz would either. I’m not sure what your proposal is for what we’re supposed to do after this happens.
I actually think corporations are involved in collaborative mission-driven work, and your Mondragon example seems to grant this, though perhaps you are understanding ‘mission’ differently to me. The vast majority of organisations trying to achieve a particular goal are corporations, which are not run democratically. Most charities are also not run democratically. There is a reason for this. You explicitly said “Worker self-management has been shown to be effective, durable, and naturally better suited to collaborative, mission-oriented work than traditional top-down rule”. The problems of worker self-management are well-documented, with one of the key downsides being that it creates a disincentive to expand, which would also be true if EA democratised: doing so would only dilute each person’s influence over funding decisions. Another obvious downside is division of labour and specialisation, i.e. you would empower people without the time, inclination or ability to lead or make key decisions.
“Finally, we are not sure why you are so keen to repeatedly apply the term “left wing environmentalism”. Few of us identify with this label, and the vast majority of our claims are unrelated to it.” Evidently from the comments I’m not the only one who picked up on this vibe. How many of the authors identify as right wing? In the post, you endorse a range of ideas associated with the left including: an emphasis on identity diversity; climate change and biodiversity loss as the primary risk to humanity; postcolonial theory; Marxist philosophy and its offshoots; postmodernist philosophy and related ideas; funding decisions should be democratised; and finally the need for EA to have more left wing people, which I take it was the implication of your response to my comment.
If you had spent the post talking about free markets, economic growth and admonishing the woke, I think people would have taken away a different message, but you didn’t do that because I doubt you believe it. I think it is is important to be clear and transparent about what your main aims are. As I have explained, I don’t think you actually endorse some of the meta-level epistemic positions that you defend in the article. Even though the median EA is left wing, you don’t want more right wing people. At bottom, I think what you are arguing for is for EA to take on a substantive left wing environmentalist position. One of the things that I like about EA is that it is focused on doing the most good without political bias. I worry that your proposals would destroy much of what makes EA good.
Thanks for the detailed response.
I agree that we don’t want EA to be distinctive just for the sake of it. My view is that many of the elements of EA that make it distinctive have good reasons behind them. I agree that some changes in governance of EA orgs, moving more in the direction of standard organisational governance, would be good, though probably I think they would be quite different to what you propose and certainly wouldn’t be ‘democratic’ in any meaningful sense.
I don’t have much to add to my first point and to the discussion below my comment by Michael PJ. Boiled down, I think the point that Cowen makes stripped of the rhetoric is just that EAs did a bad job on the governance and management of risks involved in working with SBF and FTX, which is very obvious and everyone already agrees with. It simply has no bearing on whether EAs are assessing existential risk correctly, and enormous equivocation on the word ‘existential risk’ doesn’t change that fact.
Since you don’t want diversity essentially along all dimensions, what sort of diversity would you like? You don’t want Trump supporters; do you want more Marxists? You apparently don’t want more right wingers even though most EAs already lean left. Am I right in thinking that you want diversity only insofar as it makes EA more left wing? What forms of right wing representation would you like to increase.
The problem you highlight here is not value alignment as such but value alignment on what you think are the wrong focus areas. Your argument implies that value alignment on non-TUA things would be good. Correspondingly, if what you call ‘TUA’ (which I think is a bit of a silly label—how is it techno-utopian to think we’re all going to be killed by technology?) is actually good, then value alignment on it seems good.
You argued in your post that people often have to publish pseudonymously for fear of censure or loss of funding and the examples you have given are (1) your own post, and (2) a forum post on conflicts of interest. It’s somewhat self-fulfilling to publish something pseudonymously and then use that as an argument that people have to publish things pseudonymously. I don’t think it was rational for you to publish the post pseudonymously—I don’t think you will face censure if you present rational arguments, and you will have to tell people what you actually think about the world eventually anyway. (btw I’m not a researcher at a core EA org any more.)
I don’t think the seniority argument works here. A couple of examples spring to mind here. Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a critique of EA views on economic growth, for which we was richly rewarded despite being a teenager (or whatever). The recent post about AI timelines and interest rates got a lot of support, even though it criticises a lot of EA research on timelines. I hadn’t heard of any of the authors of the interest rate piece before.
The main example you give is the reception to the Cremer and Kemp pice, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they did actually get the reception they claimed.
I’m not sure whether intelligence can be boiled down to a single number if this claim is interpreted in the most extreme way. But at least the single number of the g factor conveys a lot of information about how intelligent people are and explains about 40-50% of the variation in individual performance on any given cognitive task, a large correlation for psychological science! This widely cited recent review states “There is new research on the psychometric structure of intelligence. The g factor from different test batteries ranks people in the same way. There is still debate about the number of levels at which the variations in intelligence is best described. There is still little empirical support for an account of intelligence differences that does not include g.”
“In fact, this could be argued to represent the sort of ideologically-agreeable overconfidence we warn of with respect to EAs discussing subjects in which they have no expertise.” I don’t think this gambit is open to you—your post is so wide ranging that I think it unlikely that you all have expertise in all the topics covered in the post, ten authors notwithstanding.
Of course, there are more things to life and to performance at work than intelligence.
As I mentioned in my first comment, it’s not true that the things that EAs are interested in are especially popular among tech types, nor are they aligned with the interests of tech types. The vast majority of tech philanthropists are not EA, and EA cause areas just don’t help tech people at least relative to everyone else in the world. In fact, I suspect a majority view is that most EAs would like progress in virology and AI to be slowed down if not stopped. This is actively bad for the interests of people invested in AI companies and biotech. “the fact that e.g. preventing wars does not disproportionately appeal to the ultra-wealthy is orthogonal.” One of the headings in your article is “We align suspiciously well with the interests of tech billionaires (and ourselves)”. I don’t see how anything you have said here is a good defence against my criticism of that claim.
There’s a few things to separate here. One worry is that EAs/me are neglecting the expert consensus on the aggregate costs of climate change: this is emphatically not true. The only models that actually try and quantify the costs of climate change all suggest that income per person will be higher in 2100 despite climate change. From memory, the most pessimistic study, which is a massive outlier (Burke et al), projects a median case of a ~750% increase in income per person by 2100, with a lower 5% probability of a ~400% increase, on a 5ºC scenario.
A lot of what you say in your response and in your article seems inconsistent—you make a point of saying that EAs ignore the experts but then dismiss the experts when that happens to be inconsistent with your preferred opinions. Examples:
Defending postcolonialism in global development
Your explanation of why Walmart makes money vs mainstream economics.
Your dismissal of all climate economics and the IPCC
‘Standpoint theory’ vs analytical philosophy
Your dismissal of Bayesianism, which doesn’t seem to be aware of any of the main arguments for Bayesianism.
Your dismissal of the g factor, which doesn’t seem to be aware of the literature in psychology.
The claim that we need to take on board Kuhnian philosophy of science (Kuhn believed that there has been zero improvement in scientific knowledge over the last 500 years)
Your defence of critical realism
Similarly, Cremer (life science and psychology) and Kemp (international relations) take Ord, MacAskill and Bostrom to task for straying out of their epistemic lane and having poor epistemics, but then go on in the same paper to offer casual ~1 page refutations of (amongst other things) total utlitarianism, longtermism and expected utility theory.
Your discussion of why climate change is a serious catastrophic risk kind of illustrates the point. “For instance, recent work on catastrophic climate risk highlights the key role of cascading effects like societal collapses and resource conflicts. With as many as half of climate tipping points in play at 2.7°C − 3.4°C of warming and several at as low as 1.5°C, large areas of the Earth are likely to face prolonged lethal heat conditions, with innumerable knock-on effects. These could include increased interstate conflict, a far greater number of omnicidal actors, food-system strain or failure triggering societal collapses, and long-term degradation of the biosphere carrying unforeseen long-term damage e.g. through keystone species loss.”
Bressler et al (2021) model the effects of ~3ºC on mortality and find that it increases the global mortality rate by 1%, on some very pessimistic assumptions about socioeconomic development and adaptation. It’s kind of true but a bit misleading to say that this ‘could’ lead to interstate conflict or omnicidal actors. Maybe so, but how big a driver is it? I would have thought that more omnicidal actors will be created by the increasing popularity of environmentalism. The only people who I have heard say things like “humanity is a virus” are environmentalists.
Can you point me to the studies involving formal models that suggest that there will be global food system collapse at 3-4ºC of warming? I know that people like Lenton and Rockstrom say this will happen but they don’t actually produce any quantitative evidence and it’s completely implausible on its face if you just think about what a 3ºC world would be like. Economic models include effects on agriculture and they find a ~5% counterfactual reduction in GDP by 2100 for warming of 5ºC. There’s nothing missing in not modelling the tails here.
ok
What is the rationale for democratising? Is it for the sake of the intrinsic value of democracy or for producing better spending decisions? I agree it would be more democratic to have all EAs make the decision than the current system, but it’s still not very democratic—as you have pointed out, it would be a load of socially awkward anglophone white male nerds deciding on a lot of money. Why not go the whole hog and have everyone in the world decide on the money, which you could perhaps roughly approximate by giving it to the UN or something?
We could experiment with setting up one of the EA funds to be run democratically by all EAs (however we choose to assign EA status) and see whether people want to donate to it. Then we would get some sort of signal about how it performs and whether people think this is a good idea. I know I wouldn’t give it money, and I doubt Moskovitz would either. I’m not sure what your proposal is for what we’re supposed to do after this happens.
I actually think corporations are involved in collaborative mission-driven work, and your Mondragon example seems to grant this, though perhaps you are understanding ‘mission’ differently to me. The vast majority of organisations trying to achieve a particular goal are corporations, which are not run democratically. Most charities are also not run democratically. There is a reason for this. You explicitly said “Worker self-management has been shown to be effective, durable, and naturally better suited to collaborative, mission-oriented work than traditional top-down rule”. The problems of worker self-management are well-documented, with one of the key downsides being that it creates a disincentive to expand, which would also be true if EA democratised: doing so would only dilute each person’s influence over funding decisions. Another obvious downside is division of labour and specialisation, i.e. you would empower people without the time, inclination or ability to lead or make key decisions.
“Finally, we are not sure why you are so keen to repeatedly apply the term “left wing environmentalism”. Few of us identify with this label, and the vast majority of our claims are unrelated to it.” Evidently from the comments I’m not the only one who picked up on this vibe. How many of the authors identify as right wing? In the post, you endorse a range of ideas associated with the left including: an emphasis on identity diversity; climate change and biodiversity loss as the primary risk to humanity; postcolonial theory; Marxist philosophy and its offshoots; postmodernist philosophy and related ideas; funding decisions should be democratised; and finally the need for EA to have more left wing people, which I take it was the implication of your response to my comment.
If you had spent the post talking about free markets, economic growth and admonishing the woke, I think people would have taken away a different message, but you didn’t do that because I doubt you believe it. I think it is is important to be clear and transparent about what your main aims are. As I have explained, I don’t think you actually endorse some of the meta-level epistemic positions that you defend in the article. Even though the median EA is left wing, you don’t want more right wing people. At bottom, I think what you are arguing for is for EA to take on a substantive left wing environmentalist position. One of the things that I like about EA is that it is focused on doing the most good without political bias. I worry that your proposals would destroy much of what makes EA good.
I don’t disagree with what is written here but the tone feels a bit aggressive/adversarial/non-collegial IMHO.