Meta Trap #3: You Can’t Use Meta as an Excuse for Cause Indecisiveness
Somehow, meta-work became it’s own cause in this list, but I think that’s a mistake.
For me, I think the mistake is putting “movement growth” and “cause prioritization” under the same conceptual cause as “meta”. Sure, they’re both meta, but in practice carrying them out is very different. It’s as difficult to compare movement growth and cause prioritization as it is to directly compare any two object-level causes of effective altruism. I don’t know how much this has confused effective altruists when thinking about supporting meta-projects, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a lot. Defusing that confusion could undo much suboptimal thinking. For example, a funder of the Centre of Effective Altruism might realize, when making explicit their expected value calculations, they expect the Global Priorities Project to have a much greater impact than Effective Altruism Outreach, or visa-versa. Or, maybe they’d end up determining 80,000 Hours would do better than either. In that case, it would make sense to earmark a donation to the CEA as limited to one project rather than usable across all of them. Regardless of what cause or charity an effective altruist selects for donation, I want them to make fewer mistakes in how they think about that. This is probably a mistake I and others have already made. To the end of fixing that, I’d like us to unpack “meta” as a cause, and discriminate between its facets more.
For me, I think the mistake is putting “movement growth” and “cause prioritization” under the same conceptual cause as “meta”. Sure, they’re both meta, but in practice carrying them out is very different. It’s as difficult to compare movement growth and cause prioritization as it is to directly compare any two object-level causes of effective altruism. I don’t know how much this has confused effective altruists when thinking about supporting meta-projects, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a lot. Defusing that confusion could undo much suboptimal thinking. For example, a funder of the Centre of Effective Altruism might realize, when making explicit their expected value calculations, they expect the Global Priorities Project to have a much greater impact than Effective Altruism Outreach, or visa-versa. Or, maybe they’d end up determining 80,000 Hours would do better than either. In that case, it would make sense to earmark a donation to the CEA as limited to one project rather than usable across all of them. Regardless of what cause or charity an effective altruist selects for donation, I want them to make fewer mistakes in how they think about that. This is probably a mistake I and others have already made. To the end of fixing that, I’d like us to unpack “meta” as a cause, and discriminate between its facets more.