Executive summary: The author argues that people’s prior beliefs and ideological influences can lead to intractable disagreements and wasted efforts, but a “randomista” approach focused on empirical experiments can enable collaboration and progress.
Key points:
The author imagines an alternate “Effective Samaritan” movement influenced by socialist thought, in contrast to the rationalist-influenced Effective Altruism movement, to illustrate how prior beliefs shape people’s preferred interventions.
The author’s experience with the game Starcraft, where players tend to believe their chosen faction is the weakest, is used as an analogy for how people’s early influences arbitrarily shape their beliefs in a way that is hard to overcome.
The author and the hypothetical Effective Samaritan end up donating to opposing charities that cancel out each other’s efforts, illustrating the problem of people working at cross purposes due to differing priors.
To enable collaboration, the author proposes a “randomista” approach of relying on empirical experiments with random control groups, which can generate knowledge that fits into both worldviews.
By focusing on interventions validated by randomized experiments, people with differing priors can pool their resources and make progress together.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The author argues that people’s prior beliefs and ideological influences can lead to intractable disagreements and wasted efforts, but a “randomista” approach focused on empirical experiments can enable collaboration and progress.
Key points:
The author imagines an alternate “Effective Samaritan” movement influenced by socialist thought, in contrast to the rationalist-influenced Effective Altruism movement, to illustrate how prior beliefs shape people’s preferred interventions.
The author’s experience with the game Starcraft, where players tend to believe their chosen faction is the weakest, is used as an analogy for how people’s early influences arbitrarily shape their beliefs in a way that is hard to overcome.
The author and the hypothetical Effective Samaritan end up donating to opposing charities that cancel out each other’s efforts, illustrating the problem of people working at cross purposes due to differing priors.
To enable collaboration, the author proposes a “randomista” approach of relying on empirical experiments with random control groups, which can generate knowledge that fits into both worldviews.
By focusing on interventions validated by randomized experiments, people with differing priors can pool their resources and make progress together.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.