There does seem to be a lot of potential good in improving governments, just by the sheer math of it. However, I am generally worried when I see EAs engaging in politics. It seems a good majority of us are left-leaning, and I wonder if that may bias people towards suboptimal policy positions. If we undertake reform of governance, it is important that we should strive to critically question our beliefs lest we fall prey to unexamined political assumptions that we adopted because our filter bubble of friends had them. Examples 2 and even moreso 3 struck me as things with political charge.
One way to combat this is striving for intellectual and sociocultural diversity—this would help with the robustness value. We shouldn’t just talk to Western educated left-leaning white secular elites who agree with us. This probably applies to all of EA as well, but particularly it seems like something to beware of when it involves anything political, especially anything international in scope.
I am uncertain how much stock I should put in my intuitions here. My priors are that people of all stripes seem to easily get funny in the head about these subjects, and therefore caution is warranted. On the other hand, we’re talking about a lot of resources on the line, and the fact that we (as far as I’m aware) don’t seem to have good knowledge about the area, suggests this is a neglected topic worthy of further research.
Here are some numbers on government spending. It’s big.
I am generally worried when I see EAs engaging in politics.
I think my primary issue here is that I don’t think that left vs right is a very important divide for effectively-altruistic political decisionmaking. Aside from there being at least some good ideas on both sides, it seems like the weeds of policy are much different and more pragmatic in nature than what gets highlighted on national TV.
One way to combat this is striving for intellectual and sociocultural diversity—this would help with the robustness value. We shouldn’t just talk to Western educated left-leaning white secular elites who agree with us.
I haven’t looked into this closely, but I suspect that there is a fundamental barrier here in that people who are not Western educated white secular elites (or who are not at least two or three out of the above five) are much more likely to implicitly or explicitly disagree on assumptions which are core to EA. I don’t mean it in a “they have unique and interesting perspectives on how to change the world” kind of way, I mean it in “they actually don’t think the world has a list of problems to be solved in order from objectively severe to objectively minor” and “they’re not comfortable using quantification or subjective probabilities to measure and bound our expectations for improving the world” and “they don’t believe in weighting opinions based on the scientific strength of evidence” sorts of ways. If you are stuck to those perspectives (which are also present among plenty of Western educated white secular elites of course) then there’s less that you can say which is obviously valuable. Maybe we can talk about which methodological and ethical assumptions are actually true, but I think most of us are reasonably and rightfully confidently in our own.
Essentially, what I’m saying is that the EA mission rests on decent methodological and ethical assumptions over and above the mere mantra of ‘doing as much good as you can’, so there’s less room than people realize for alternative perspectives to add ideas. I think the intellectual diversity we have is actually fairly decent given this constraint. Not that more diversity isn’t better, of course.
Here are some numbers on government spending. It’s big.
Yes. All other things being equal, it is easier to take public money and turn it into other kinds of public money than it is to fight over it in the private sector and then donate it.
I like the desideratum. :)
There does seem to be a lot of potential good in improving governments, just by the sheer math of it. However, I am generally worried when I see EAs engaging in politics. It seems a good majority of us are left-leaning, and I wonder if that may bias people towards suboptimal policy positions. If we undertake reform of governance, it is important that we should strive to critically question our beliefs lest we fall prey to unexamined political assumptions that we adopted because our filter bubble of friends had them. Examples 2 and even moreso 3 struck me as things with political charge.
One way to combat this is striving for intellectual and sociocultural diversity—this would help with the robustness value. We shouldn’t just talk to Western educated left-leaning white secular elites who agree with us. This probably applies to all of EA as well, but particularly it seems like something to beware of when it involves anything political, especially anything international in scope.
I am uncertain how much stock I should put in my intuitions here. My priors are that people of all stripes seem to easily get funny in the head about these subjects, and therefore caution is warranted. On the other hand, we’re talking about a lot of resources on the line, and the fact that we (as far as I’m aware) don’t seem to have good knowledge about the area, suggests this is a neglected topic worthy of further research.
Here are some numbers on government spending. It’s big.
I think my primary issue here is that I don’t think that left vs right is a very important divide for effectively-altruistic political decisionmaking. Aside from there being at least some good ideas on both sides, it seems like the weeds of policy are much different and more pragmatic in nature than what gets highlighted on national TV.
I haven’t looked into this closely, but I suspect that there is a fundamental barrier here in that people who are not Western educated white secular elites (or who are not at least two or three out of the above five) are much more likely to implicitly or explicitly disagree on assumptions which are core to EA. I don’t mean it in a “they have unique and interesting perspectives on how to change the world” kind of way, I mean it in “they actually don’t think the world has a list of problems to be solved in order from objectively severe to objectively minor” and “they’re not comfortable using quantification or subjective probabilities to measure and bound our expectations for improving the world” and “they don’t believe in weighting opinions based on the scientific strength of evidence” sorts of ways. If you are stuck to those perspectives (which are also present among plenty of Western educated white secular elites of course) then there’s less that you can say which is obviously valuable. Maybe we can talk about which methodological and ethical assumptions are actually true, but I think most of us are reasonably and rightfully confidently in our own.
Essentially, what I’m saying is that the EA mission rests on decent methodological and ethical assumptions over and above the mere mantra of ‘doing as much good as you can’, so there’s less room than people realize for alternative perspectives to add ideas. I think the intellectual diversity we have is actually fairly decent given this constraint. Not that more diversity isn’t better, of course.
Yes. All other things being equal, it is easier to take public money and turn it into other kinds of public money than it is to fight over it in the private sector and then donate it.