Before Will MacAskill’s book gets released tomorrow (which will probably have a much greater effect than “The Precipice” two years ago), I think it’s a good idea for everyone to be prepared for a horrible catastrophe.
Many of the new people interested in EA will be coming from a very, very bad place. Over the last month or so, political polarization has reached a fever pitch. We have already entered a world where the vast majority of people see the Enemy Political Party™ as the obvious primary X/S-risk facing humanity, and that the central task of humanity is eliminating that particular political party. Anyone who doesn’t see the threat from polarization hasn’t been reading the news; tens of millions of people have been losing their minds.
For the last several years, EA has had a gradual trickle of new people, which meant that the newcomers could learn new things at their own pace, and gradually come to see that virtually everything in the political world is too vague or labyrinthine for competent people to work with. They would still assert their worldview on others as a badge of honor, as any dignified political person would, but it was manageable.
But that status quo was predicated on a massive asymmetry between old-guarders and newcomers. When the newcomers were outnumbered, there was a relatively large amount of experienced laborers per person, and we handled the problem of outspoken political activists by waiting for each newcomer to collide with dozens and dozens of experienced old-guarders who understand the concepts well enough to explain them.
If What We Owe the Future succeeds, then that auto-pilot approach won’t work anymore. When it isn’t radicalizing people, social media automatically course-corrects people to return to strong political views if they start to waver. We’ve been relying on environments where each newcomer gets to exchange ideas in a room with twelve old-guarders, and we’re approaching an environment where each old-guarder will be in a room with twelve newcomers.
The idea that newcomers are harmless/powerless is even more naive. Only 10% of the newcomers in that scenario need to end up disaffected, in order to develop into the passionate anti-EA critics that plagued the world with low-quality buzzfeed hit pieces. All it takes is one disgruntled newcomer and one journalist to create one shallow article criticizing EA, in a way that nobody will ever see the EA response because of how clickbait gets shown to people on social media. What we’re looking at here is increasing the number of disgruntled newcomers by orders of magnitude.
I’ve thought of several ways to mitigate the damage, but no solutions, because social media is too complicated and powerful for a catch-all cure to the core problem. These are the suggestions I have for treating the symptoms (and not the disease):
Be nice to newcomers and do everything possible to help them learn and grow at their own pace:
ere:
2. Instead of attacking their worldviews right off the bat (that will provoke an intense negative reaction), focus on ways to become stronger. It’s really hard to find a way to steer the subject away from politics without them realizing something’s up, let alone suspecting that you are secretly in the Enemy Camp, so maybe it’s worth it to find some other strategy?
3. Prepare for really bad outcomes:
If social media decides to send them our way, there could be a large number of dogmatic partisans, toxic trolls, or even opportunistic fake news bloggers. In that scenario, the damage will be incredibly massive and outweigh the benefits. High-impact smears are inevitable and the effects might last decades. The only thing to do is find an intelligent way beforehand to batter down the hatches before the storm, and make sure that enough people know eachother; if people are going to withdraw into bubbles, it would be best to plan it intelligently rather than have each individual do it as an emotional reflex.
How to handle the onslaught of naive newcomers
Before Will MacAskill’s book gets released tomorrow (which will probably have a much greater effect than “The Precipice” two years ago), I think it’s a good idea for everyone to be prepared for a horrible catastrophe.
Many of the new people interested in EA will be coming from a very, very bad place. Over the last month or so, political polarization has reached a fever pitch. We have already entered a world where the vast majority of people see the Enemy Political Party™ as the obvious primary X/S-risk facing humanity, and that the central task of humanity is eliminating that particular political party. Anyone who doesn’t see the threat from polarization hasn’t been reading the news; tens of millions of people have been losing their minds.
For the last several years, EA has had a gradual trickle of new people, which meant that the newcomers could learn new things at their own pace, and gradually come to see that virtually everything in the political world is too vague or labyrinthine for competent people to work with. They would still assert their worldview on others as a badge of honor, as any dignified political person would, but it was manageable.
But that status quo was predicated on a massive asymmetry between old-guarders and newcomers. When the newcomers were outnumbered, there was a relatively large amount of experienced laborers per person, and we handled the problem of outspoken political activists by waiting for each newcomer to collide with dozens and dozens of experienced old-guarders who understand the concepts well enough to explain them.
If What We Owe the Future succeeds, then that auto-pilot approach won’t work anymore. When it isn’t radicalizing people, social media automatically course-corrects people to return to strong political views if they start to waver. We’ve been relying on environments where each newcomer gets to exchange ideas in a room with twelve old-guarders, and we’re approaching an environment where each old-guarder will be in a room with twelve newcomers.
The idea that newcomers are harmless/powerless is even more naive. Only 10% of the newcomers in that scenario need to end up disaffected, in order to develop into the passionate anti-EA critics that plagued the world with low-quality buzzfeed hit pieces. All it takes is one disgruntled newcomer and one journalist to create one shallow article criticizing EA, in a way that nobody will ever see the EA response because of how clickbait gets shown to people on social media. What we’re looking at here is increasing the number of disgruntled newcomers by orders of magnitude.
I’ve thought of several ways to mitigate the damage, but no solutions, because social media is too complicated and powerful for a catch-all cure to the core problem. These are the suggestions I have for treating the symptoms (and not the disease):
Be nice to newcomers and do everything possible to help them learn and grow at their own pace:
ere:
2. Instead of attacking their worldviews right off the bat (that will provoke an intense negative reaction), focus on ways to become stronger. It’s really hard to find a way to steer the subject away from politics without them realizing something’s up, let alone suspecting that you are secretly in the Enemy Camp, so maybe it’s worth it to find some other strategy?
3. Prepare for really bad outcomes:
If social media decides to send them our way, there could be a large number of dogmatic partisans, toxic trolls, or even opportunistic fake news bloggers. In that scenario, the damage will be incredibly massive and outweigh the benefits. High-impact smears are inevitable and the effects might last decades. The only thing to do is find an intelligent way beforehand to batter down the hatches before the storm, and make sure that enough people know eachother; if people are going to withdraw into bubbles, it would be best to plan it intelligently rather than have each individual do it as an emotional reflex.