Hey James, thanks for posting this! I really liked your steelman of “Complexity-inclined James”. I think EAs should always be considering other perspectives, and being able to understand where others come from is incredibly important—especially critics, and especially those where both sides can be made better off through good-faith dialogues, even if we still disagree.
I get that this is the very tip of the iceberg, but I’ve got a few points that I’d like to hear your thoughts on:
In practice, those on the side of CIJ are usually a lot less epistemically humble and more vitriolic than he is. Not all of them, of course, but many of them aren’t calling for a ‘portfolio approach’ at all, but their approach. Cluelessness cuts both ways! And many activist critics of EA don’t seem to apply cluelessness concerns to their own theories of change.
I don’t quite think “looking under the streetlight” is a fair characterisation of the problem. I think it’s more like a Multi-Armed Bandit approach, where AMF is the top-scoring bandit[1] and it does pretty well, and options CIJ is looking at moving towards (‘protest’, ‘building class consciousness’, ‘put the whole system on trial’) look quite dubious in comparison. Tl;dr: Saving someone’s life from malaria is not a ‘narrow metric’ imo
Finally, I think you underestimate the extent to which a significant part of the community would actually be in favour of various kinds of systemic changes and interventions! My intuition is that people are very uncertain about what to propose here, cautious about backfiring effects from them, and in general may lack the experience and skills to make significant progress on them at the moment.
In any case, I liked the post, and look forward to seeing more posts from you along these lines :)
Hey James, thanks for posting this! I really liked your steelman of “Complexity-inclined James”. I think EAs should always be considering other perspectives, and being able to understand where others come from is incredibly important—especially critics, and especially those where both sides can be made better off through good-faith dialogues, even if we still disagree.
I get that this is the very tip of the iceberg, but I’ve got a few points that I’d like to hear your thoughts on:
In practice, those on the side of CIJ are usually a lot less epistemically humble and more vitriolic than he is. Not all of them, of course, but many of them aren’t calling for a ‘portfolio approach’ at all, but their approach. Cluelessness cuts both ways! And many activist critics of EA don’t seem to apply cluelessness concerns to their own theories of change.
I don’t quite think “looking under the streetlight” is a fair characterisation of the problem. I think it’s more like a Multi-Armed Bandit approach, where AMF is the top-scoring bandit[1] and it does pretty well, and options CIJ is looking at moving towards (‘protest’, ‘building class consciousness’, ‘put the whole system on trial’) look quite dubious in comparison. Tl;dr: Saving someone’s life from malaria is not a ‘narrow metric’ imo
Finally, I think you underestimate the extent to which a significant part of the community would actually be in favour of various kinds of systemic changes and interventions! My intuition is that people are very uncertain about what to propose here, cautious about backfiring effects from them, and in general may lack the experience and skills to make significant progress on them at the moment.
In any case, I liked the post, and look forward to seeing more posts from you along these lines :)
Adjusted to your most-effective option accordingly