Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate
The CEA research team just published a new paper—Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate (PDF version). The paper is co-authored by Stefan Schubert, Ben Garfinkel, and Owen Cotton-Barratt.
Summary
When interacting with others you can be considerate of their preferences, for instance by being friendly or reliable. This normally has small positive direct effects. But, by improving your reputation or strengthening aspects of culture that make a community more cooperative, the positive indirect effects can be large.
We present the case that these indirect effects are further strengthened when you are acting as part of a community of people doing important work. For instance, being considerate can improve the level of trust and collaborativeness among members of the community. It can also improve the reputation of the community. Conversely, failing to be considerate can harm the community, both internally and in its reputation.
This means that for communities of people striving to do good, such as the effective altruism community, considerateness should be a surprisingly high priority. It could be that, in order to do the most good, they should be considerably more considerate than common sense morality requires.
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Thanks for this. I think I strongly agree with what you’ve said. I’ve often noticed/got the impression that lots of EAs seem to be quite interested in pursuing their own projects and don’t help each other very much. I worry this results in an altruistic tragedy of the commons problem; it would be better if people helped each other, but instead we chose to do our own good in our own way, resulting in less good done overall. Now I think of it, I’ve probably done this myself.
The real challenge, as you noted, is the following:
This seems to be quite a common problem, at least in academia. VIPs (very important people) will often deliberately make themselves unavailable so they have time for their own projects. Presumably, this has some reciprocal costs to the VIP too: if they had helped you, you would be more inclined to help them in future.
Relatedly, suppose people accept more considerate norms and so are reluctant to bother some VIP in case it’s annoying to the VIP. We can imagine this backfiring. Take an extreme scenario where considerate people dont ask VIPs (or indeed anyone) else for help. This means people don’t get help from the VIPs, and VIPs only get requests from inconsiderate people. Presuming these VIPs do grant some requests for help and the requests from considerate people would have done more good, this is now a worse situation overall. Extreme considerateness, call it ‘meekness’, seems bad.
It strikes me that it would be important to develop some community norms for navigating this difficulty. Perhaps people asking for help should be encouraged to do so, ask once or twice and leave the other person plenty of room to turn the request down. Perhaps receipients of requests should make a habit of replying to them but being polite and honest about their current capacity to help.
I think you’re right that there’s a failure mode of not asking people for things. I don’t think that not-asking is in general the more considerate action, though—often people would prefer to be given the opportunity to help (particularly if it feels like an opportunity rather than a demand).
I suppose the general point is: avoid the trap of overly-narrow interpretations of considerateness (just like it was good to avoid the trap of overly-narrow interpretations of consequences of actions).
I agree. In which case it’s possibly worth pointing out one part of considerateness is giving people the opportunity to help you, which they may well want to do anyway.
If there was any community that it might apply to, it’s probably effective altruists.
Not as pithy, but just a flag that I think the question implicitly raised by Tom’s comment and the answer in David’s are pretty important. This is a community which is willing to update actions based on theoretical arguments about what’s important. Of course I don’t expect an article to totally change people’s beliefs—let alone behaviours—but if it has a fraction of that effect I’d count it as cheap.
I doubt it’ll have much direct effect on friendliness, but it might convince people to work harder on concrete projects to improve the community.
One issue not addressed is the potential of weaponised requests for niceness (I have kept this post purposefully abstract).
Often these will involve defecting from certain niceness norms, whilst justifying it (implicitly or explicitly) by the pursuit of other niceness norms. One example would be aggressively attacking other members of the community for relatively minor mistakes. Another example would be people threatening to the leave the community unless they get their way in this particular issue for things that are relatively minor. These people may not actually be involved with the community to any significant degree in the first place. And obviously, anyone can leave for anyone reason, no matter how trivial, it’s just when someone is trumpeting it loudly without good cause we should be careful not to pay too much attention and hence incentivise such behaviour.
On the other hand, people may have valid critiques, even if they aren’t going about making them in the best way. I think the guide here is to look at how willing the person is to engage in conversation. If someone does not want to engage in collaborative discussion there is no point unless they are particularly insightful.
Brief note: one important norm of considerateness which it is easy to neglect is not talking about people behind their back. I think there are strong consequentialist reasons not to do this: it makes you feel bad, it’s hard to remain authentic when you next see that person, it makes others think a lot less of you
I’m not sure I agree. There’s an argument that gossip is potentially useful. Here’s a quote from this paper:
I can’t access the linked to studies. Even if true, this only justifies talking behind people’s backs as a sanction for uncooperative behaviour. And I suspect that there are much better ways to sanction uncooperative behaviour.
I never really understood this concept. It seems to me a helpful process to be able to discuss disagreements you are having with other people, and some interpret this as talking behind the original person’s back. Clearly spreading false rumors is harmful. But are there other aspects that are objectionable like telling more people than necessary about the disagreement?
With all the talk of “societal social capital”, it’s interesting to consider groups like the Make a Wish Foundation that EA has historically dismissed. It seems plausible to me that improving societal social capital is a really hard problem and the Make a Wish Foundation accomplishes it in a relatively cost-effective way.
Nice article. When you say “published” do you mean submitted to a journal?
I believe in respecting people who are respectable and care about others, like Gleb Tsipursky, and standing up to frauds. Very few people in your EA movement are sincere. Most are atheist extremists hijacking EA to advance their religion, which often includes the murder of all life on Earth. CEA is in the latter group because it promotes and financial supports these atheist terrorism cells (ie. “Effective Altruism Foundation”).
CEA isn’t being very considerate when they promote killing everyone. In fact, I would say that is decidedly INconsiderate! Couldn’t help but notice that “genocide” is not on your list of considerate behaviours. You sickos consider that an act of altruism.
I, for one, am okay if “EAs” don’t want to work with me. Knowing that they want to kill as much as possible, I would be happy if I never met one!
Who hurt you?