(So long as this alternative movement has good epistemics and doesn’t seem likely to be positively counterproductive and bad for the world, that is!)
I think this parenthetical misses what is actually hard about forming solidarity out of good intentions, which is in fact that disagreements may run so deep that it may feel mutually negative sum, or like the alt team has to lose necessarily in order for us to win. I’m not saying it’s definitely like this, but it’s kind of worstcase/securitarian thinking to prepare your model for that kind of scenario.
I have some anecdotes.
A guy at my last job bounced off EA quickly because he didn’t like a conversation he had with one of us about mental health. He felt like mental health was obviously the number one cause area, and thought the fact that for us it’s only vaguely in the top 10-15 if that was a signal that we were totally borked. I was gravely disappointed that he didn’t reason more like “the reason they’re not serious about mental health is that they haven’t met me yet, I better post my arguments on the forum” or “wow, someone should really do something about that, it might as well be me” and found an org. I encouraged him to do both of these things, but that wasn’t his mindset at all. I think this is what missed opportunities for alt-EA look like, people have their pet criticisms but fail to take themselves seriously.
I was talking with one of my oldest friends, not an EA whatsoever at this point (she eventually grokked the idea that 1 in 900 mosquito nets saves a life and signed up for the newsletter, still is far from card-carrying, but this was prior to any of that anyway), about the popularity of climate change. It seems like few beliefs are more conventional right now than “climate change really bad”, and I asked her why anecdotally every single person who’s told me they don’t want to have kids because of climate change (not because the broader GCR conversation, but strictly because of climate change) was failing to do energy science or related engineering, and heck I’d even settle for policy theories of change or serious activism. She said, and this is a point for intellectual diversity, because I don’t think I would’ve encountered this if I only talked to EAs, “no, that’s a militaristic ‘draft’ mindset. If everyone has to fight, then what is there left to fight for?”, and broadly defended peoples’ entitlement to believe there be problems that they’re not personally fixing. This, plausibly, explains a cluster of the memespace around what we interpret as missed opportunities to start alt-EA movements! Is the mentality of observing broken stuff and deciding to fix it unusually soldiery? Can we slip some cash to a viral marketing expert to instill that mentality in people, without associating it with EA? Is this plausibly an actual crux separating the alt-EAs we’d like to see from actually-existing critics?
One more comment:
Others may be broadly enthusiastic about the idea of Effective Altruism, but have some concerns about the current state of the movement as it actually stands. From here one might offer friendly/internal critiques of EA: “Here’s how you might do better by your own lights!” And my sense is that good-faith critiques of this sort tend to get a very positive reception on the EA forum.
I think EA has “a borg property”, i.e. the entity/civilization from star trek that could assimilate anything which expresses fear of homogeny that some critics have called an affectation from the west-end of the cold war. I think EA is nimble, a minimal set of premises that admits lots of different stuff and adapts, and I think is genuine about it’s enjoyment of criticism. But this means that it literally eats everyone above a certain quality bar (which is good). There’s an old saying “who exactly is a rationalist? Simply someone who disagrees with Eliezer Yudkowsky”, which I think sums up a lot about our culture. The difficult thing about separating a critic (someone who helps you find a path through action space that deletes their complaint) from a complainer (someone who’s the opposite of that) is that, while you have to protect your attention from complainers to a nontrivial degree, you may accidentally block a high quality adversary because what seems like a complaint is actually a criticism that’s just really really hard to address, and you don’t know the difference. Trashing your progress and going back to the drawing board is painful, we should expect cognitive biases to make it feel even more unpleasant or to tip the scale against doing that! “So you’re saying I have to throw out bourgeois economics and arm the malaria patients so they can fight imperialism?” may appear like a hostile interaction to you while also being the critic’s earnest attempt to help you be more morally correct with respect to their empirical beliefs. We have, as a tradition, heuristics for honing our sense of who’s epistemics we trust, who’s beliefs are most true, and so on, but they’re not infallible. This only gets worse when you remember that if you’re serious about intellectual diversity, you have to actually tolerate very different norms. We can’t stay in our comfort-zone norms of discourse -wise, even if we think our norms of discourse are superior, if we’re serious about actual intellectual diversity.
TLDR, a tepid defense of admitting more things that seem like complaints into the overton window of proper criticisms.
I think this parenthetical misses what is actually hard about forming solidarity out of good intentions, which is in fact that disagreements may run so deep that it may feel mutually negative sum, or like the alt team has to lose necessarily in order for us to win. I’m not saying it’s definitely like this, but it’s kind of worstcase/securitarian thinking to prepare your model for that kind of scenario.
I have some anecdotes.
A guy at my last job bounced off EA quickly because he didn’t like a conversation he had with one of us about mental health. He felt like mental health was obviously the number one cause area, and thought the fact that for us it’s only vaguely in the top 10-15 if that was a signal that we were totally borked. I was gravely disappointed that he didn’t reason more like “the reason they’re not serious about mental health is that they haven’t met me yet, I better post my arguments on the forum” or “wow, someone should really do something about that, it might as well be me” and found an org. I encouraged him to do both of these things, but that wasn’t his mindset at all. I think this is what missed opportunities for alt-EA look like, people have their pet criticisms but fail to take themselves seriously.
I was talking with one of my oldest friends, not an EA whatsoever at this point (she eventually grokked the idea that 1 in 900 mosquito nets saves a life and signed up for the newsletter, still is far from card-carrying, but this was prior to any of that anyway), about the popularity of climate change. It seems like few beliefs are more conventional right now than “climate change really bad”, and I asked her why anecdotally every single person who’s told me they don’t want to have kids because of climate change (not because the broader GCR conversation, but strictly because of climate change) was failing to do energy science or related engineering, and heck I’d even settle for policy theories of change or serious activism. She said, and this is a point for intellectual diversity, because I don’t think I would’ve encountered this if I only talked to EAs, “no, that’s a militaristic ‘draft’ mindset. If everyone has to fight, then what is there left to fight for?”, and broadly defended peoples’ entitlement to believe there be problems that they’re not personally fixing. This, plausibly, explains a cluster of the memespace around what we interpret as missed opportunities to start alt-EA movements! Is the mentality of observing broken stuff and deciding to fix it unusually soldiery? Can we slip some cash to a viral marketing expert to instill that mentality in people, without associating it with EA? Is this plausibly an actual crux separating the alt-EAs we’d like to see from actually-existing critics?
One more comment:
I think EA has “a borg property”, i.e. the entity/civilization from star trek that could assimilate anything which expresses fear of homogeny that some critics have called an affectation from the west-end of the cold war. I think EA is nimble, a minimal set of premises that admits lots of different stuff and adapts, and I think is genuine about it’s enjoyment of criticism. But this means that it literally eats everyone above a certain quality bar (which is good). There’s an old saying “who exactly is a rationalist? Simply someone who disagrees with Eliezer Yudkowsky”, which I think sums up a lot about our culture. The difficult thing about separating a critic (someone who helps you find a path through action space that deletes their complaint) from a complainer (someone who’s the opposite of that) is that, while you have to protect your attention from complainers to a nontrivial degree, you may accidentally block a high quality adversary because what seems like a complaint is actually a criticism that’s just really really hard to address, and you don’t know the difference. Trashing your progress and going back to the drawing board is painful, we should expect cognitive biases to make it feel even more unpleasant or to tip the scale against doing that! “So you’re saying I have to throw out bourgeois economics and arm the malaria patients so they can fight imperialism?” may appear like a hostile interaction to you while also being the critic’s earnest attempt to help you be more morally correct with respect to their empirical beliefs. We have, as a tradition, heuristics for honing our sense of who’s epistemics we trust, who’s beliefs are most true, and so on, but they’re not infallible. This only gets worse when you remember that if you’re serious about intellectual diversity, you have to actually tolerate very different norms. We can’t stay in our comfort-zone norms of discourse -wise, even if we think our norms of discourse are superior, if we’re serious about actual intellectual diversity.
TLDR, a tepid defense of admitting more things that seem like complaints into the overton window of proper criticisms.
I found this comment really interesting and helpful. Thank you!