Personally I think this problem boils down to how effective altruism represents itself, and how it is actually governed.
For instance in my own case, I became interested in effective altruism and started getting more involved in the space with the idea that it was a loose collection of aligned, intelligent people who want to take on the world’s most pressing problems. Over time, I’ve realize that like the post mentions, effective altruism is in fact quite hierarchical and not disposed to giving people a voice based solely on the amount of time and effort they put in the movement.
Admittedly, this is a pretty naive view to take when going into any social movement.
While I am sympathetic to the arguments that a small tightly knit group can get things done more quickly and more efficiently, there is a bit of a motte and bailey going on between the leadership of effective altruism and the recruiting efforts. From my perspective a lot of new folks that join the movement are implicitly sold on a dream, commit time and energy, then are not given the voice they feel they’ve earned.
Whether or not a more democratic system would be more effective, I still think many of the internal problems that have been surfacing recently would be fixed with better communication within effective altruism about how we make decisions and who has influence.
I can see why investing time and effort and then not receiving as much influence as you would like could be frustrating. At the same time, I guess I’ve always taken it for granted that I would need to be persuasive too. And sometimes I write things and people like it; other times I write things and people really don’t. I sometimes feel that my ideas don’t get as much attention as they should, but I imagine that most people think their ideas are great as well, so guess I accept that if I had a biased view of how good my ideas are, it wouldn’t necessarily feel that way. So I guess I’m suggesting that it might make sense to temper your expectations somewhat.
I definitely think that we should experiment with more ways of ensuring that the best ideas float to the top. I really appreciate the recent red-teaming competition and cause exploration competition; I think the AI worldviews competition is great as well. Obviously, these aren’t perfect, but we’re doing better than we were before and I expect we’ll do better as we iterate on these.
> I guess I’ve always taken it for granted that I would need to be persuasive too
I don’t mind having to be persuasive, my problem is that EA leadership is not available or open to hearing arguments. It doesn’t matter how persuasive one is if you can’t get into EAG, or break into the narrow social circles that the high-powered EAs hang out in.
Looking at Buck’s comment above, he makes it clear that the leadership doesn’t take EA forum comments or arguments here seriously, which is fair as they are busy.
I think we need better mechanisms to surface criticisms to decision makers overall.
I’m not sure I agree with this? I think “EA leadership” probably isn’t that open to arguments from unknown people. But if you show up and say sensible things you pretty quickly get listened to. I think that’s about as good as we can hope for: we can’t expect busy people to listen to every random piece of input; and it’s not that unreasonable to expect people to show up and do some good work before they get listened to.
I didn’t quite read him as saying that he didn’t take forum posts seriously, just that it wasn’t really written to engage people who disagreed with these ideas.
But we definitely figure out if there’s any other better mechanisms of floating ideas to the top.
My take on Buck’s comment is that he didn’t update from this post because it’s too high level and doesn’t actually argue for most of its object level proposals. I have a similar reaction to Buck where I evaluate a lot of the proposals to be pretty bad, and since they haven’t argued much for them and I don’t feel much like arguing against them. I think Buck was pretty helpful in saying (what I interpret to mean) “I would be able to reply more if you argued for object level suggestions and engaged more deeply with the suggestions you’re bringing”
Personally I think this problem boils down to how effective altruism represents itself, and how it is actually governed.
For instance in my own case, I became interested in effective altruism and started getting more involved in the space with the idea that it was a loose collection of aligned, intelligent people who want to take on the world’s most pressing problems. Over time, I’ve realize that like the post mentions, effective altruism is in fact quite hierarchical and not disposed to giving people a voice based solely on the amount of time and effort they put in the movement.
Admittedly, this is a pretty naive view to take when going into any social movement.
While I am sympathetic to the arguments that a small tightly knit group can get things done more quickly and more efficiently, there is a bit of a motte and bailey going on between the leadership of effective altruism and the recruiting efforts. From my perspective a lot of new folks that join the movement are implicitly sold on a dream, commit time and energy, then are not given the voice they feel they’ve earned.
Whether or not a more democratic system would be more effective, I still think many of the internal problems that have been surfacing recently would be fixed with better communication within effective altruism about how we make decisions and who has influence.
I can see why investing time and effort and then not receiving as much influence as you would like could be frustrating. At the same time, I guess I’ve always taken it for granted that I would need to be persuasive too. And sometimes I write things and people like it; other times I write things and people really don’t. I sometimes feel that my ideas don’t get as much attention as they should, but I imagine that most people think their ideas are great as well, so guess I accept that if I had a biased view of how good my ideas are, it wouldn’t necessarily feel that way. So I guess I’m suggesting that it might make sense to temper your expectations somewhat.
I definitely think that we should experiment with more ways of ensuring that the best ideas float to the top. I really appreciate the recent red-teaming competition and cause exploration competition; I think the AI worldviews competition is great as well. Obviously, these aren’t perfect, but we’re doing better than we were before and I expect we’ll do better as we iterate on these.
> I guess I’ve always taken it for granted that I would need to be persuasive too
I don’t mind having to be persuasive, my problem is that EA leadership is not available or open to hearing arguments. It doesn’t matter how persuasive one is if you can’t get into EAG, or break into the narrow social circles that the high-powered EAs hang out in.
Looking at Buck’s comment above, he makes it clear that the leadership doesn’t take EA forum comments or arguments here seriously, which is fair as they are busy.
I think we need better mechanisms to surface criticisms to decision makers overall.
I’m not sure I agree with this? I think “EA leadership” probably isn’t that open to arguments from unknown people. But if you show up and say sensible things you pretty quickly get listened to. I think that’s about as good as we can hope for: we can’t expect busy people to listen to every random piece of input; and it’s not that unreasonable to expect people to show up and do some good work before they get listened to.
I didn’t quite read him as saying that he didn’t take forum posts seriously, just that it wasn’t really written to engage people who disagreed with these ideas.
But we definitely figure out if there’s any other better mechanisms of floating ideas to the top.
My take on Buck’s comment is that he didn’t update from this post because it’s too high level and doesn’t actually argue for most of its object level proposals. I have a similar reaction to Buck where I evaluate a lot of the proposals to be pretty bad, and since they haven’t argued much for them and I don’t feel much like arguing against them.
I think Buck was pretty helpful in saying (what I interpret to mean) “I would be able to reply more if you argued for object level suggestions and engaged more deeply with the suggestions you’re bringing”