Given the stratospheric karma this post has reached, and the ensuing likelihood it becomes a referenced classic, I thought it’d be a good time to descend to some pedantry.
“Scope sensitivity” as a phrase doesn’t click with me. For some reason, it bounces off my brain. Please let me know if I seem alone in this regard. What scope are we sensitive to? The scope of impact? Also some of the related slogans “shut up and multiply” and “cause neutral” aren’t much clearer. “Shut up and multiply” which seems slightly offputting / crass as a phrase stripped of context, gives no hint at what we’re multiplying[1]. “Cause neutral” without elaboration, seems objectionable. We shouldn’t be neutral about causes! We should prefer the ones that do the most good! They both require extra context and elaboration. If this is something that is used to introduce EA, which now seems likelier, I think this section confuses a bit. A good slogan should have a clear, and difficult to misinterpret meaning that requires little elaboration. “Radical compassion / empathy” does a good job of this. “Scout mindset” is slightly more in-groupy, but I don’t think newbies would be surprised that thinking like a scout involves careful exploration of ideas and emphasizes the importance of reporting the truth of what you find.
Some alternatives to “scope sensitivity” are:
“Follow the numbers” / “crunch the numbers”: we don’t quite primarily “follow the data / evidence” anymore, but we certainly try to follow the numbers.
“More is better” / “More-imization” okay, this is a bit silly, but I assume that Peter was intentionally avoiding saying something like “Maximization mindset” which is more intuitive than “scope sensitivity”, but has probably fallen a bit out of vogue. We think that doing more good for the same cost is always better.
“Cost-effectiveness guided” while it sounds technocratic, that’s kind of the point. Ultimately it all comes back to cost-effectiveness. Why not say so?
If I knew nothing else, I’d guess it’s a suggestion of the profound implications of viewing probabilities as dependent (multiplicative) instead of dependent (addictive) and, consequently, support for complex systems approaches /GEM modelling instead of reductive OLSing with sparse interaction terms. /Joke
Great piece. Short and sweet.
Given the stratospheric karma this post has reached, and the ensuing likelihood it becomes a referenced classic, I thought it’d be a good time to descend to some pedantry.
“Scope sensitivity” as a phrase doesn’t click with me. For some reason, it bounces off my brain. Please let me know if I seem alone in this regard. What scope are we sensitive to? The scope of impact? Also some of the related slogans “shut up and multiply” and “cause neutral” aren’t much clearer. “Shut up and multiply” which seems slightly offputting / crass as a phrase stripped of context, gives no hint at what we’re multiplying[1]. “Cause neutral” without elaboration, seems objectionable. We shouldn’t be neutral about causes! We should prefer the ones that do the most good! They both require extra context and elaboration. If this is something that is used to introduce EA, which now seems likelier, I think this section confuses a bit. A good slogan should have a clear, and difficult to misinterpret meaning that requires little elaboration. “Radical compassion / empathy” does a good job of this. “Scout mindset” is slightly more in-groupy, but I don’t think newbies would be surprised that thinking like a scout involves careful exploration of ideas and emphasizes the importance of reporting the truth of what you find.
Some alternatives to “scope sensitivity” are:
“Follow the numbers” / “crunch the numbers”: we don’t quite primarily “follow the data / evidence” anymore, but we certainly try to follow the numbers.
“More is better” / “More-imization” okay, this is a bit silly, but I assume that Peter was intentionally avoiding saying something like “Maximization mindset” which is more intuitive than “scope sensitivity”, but has probably fallen a bit out of vogue. We think that doing more good for the same cost is always better.
“Cost-effectiveness guided” while it sounds technocratic, that’s kind of the point. Ultimately it all comes back to cost-effectiveness. Why not say so?
If I knew nothing else, I’d guess it’s a suggestion of the profound implications of viewing probabilities as dependent (multiplicative) instead of dependent (addictive) and, consequently, support for complex systems approaches /GEM modelling instead of reductive OLSing with sparse interaction terms. /Joke
“Scale Matters” ?