No-one’s saying he’s a master strategist. Quite the opposite—his approach is to try stuff out and see what happens. It’s the EA movement that strongly favours reasoning everything out in advance.
What I’m contesting is the claim that he has ‘at least some things to learn from the effective altruism community’, which is far from obvious, and IMO needs a heavy dose of humility. To be clear, I’m not saying no-one in the community should do a shallow (or even deep) dive into his impact—I’m saying that we shouldn’t treat him or his employees like they’re irrational for not having done so to our satisfaction with our methods, as the OP implies.
Firstly, on the specific issue of whether bunkers are a better safeguard against catastrophe, that seems extremely short termist. Within maybe 30-70 years if SpaceX’s predictions are even faintly right, a colony on Mars could be self-sustaining, which seems much more resilient than bunkers, and likely to have huge economic benefits for humanity as a whole. Also, if bunkers are so much easier to set up, all anyone has to do is found an inspiring for profit bunker-development company and set them up! If no-one has seriously done so at scale, that indicates to me that socially/economically they’re a much harder proposition, and that this might outweigh the engineering differences.
Secondly, there’s the question of what the upside of such research is—as I said, it’s far from clear to me that any amount of a priori research will be more valuable than trying stuff and seeing what happens.
Thirdly I think it’s insulting to suppose these guys haven’t thought about their impact a lot simply because they don’t use QALY-adjacent language. Musk talks thoughtfully about his reasons all the time! If he doesn’t try to quantify the expectation, rather than assuming that’s because he’s never thought to do so, I would assume it’s because he thinks such a priori quantification is very low value (see previous para) - and I would acknowledge that such a view is reasonable. I would also assume something similar is true for very many of his employees, too, partly because they’re legion compared to EAs, partly because the filtering for their intelligence has much tighter feedback mechanisms than that for EA researchers.
If any EAs doing such research don’t recognise the validity of these sorts of concerns, I can imagine it being useless or even harmful.
It seems like we have some pretty different intuitions here. Thanks for sharing!
I was thinking of many of my claims as representing low bars. To me, “at least some things to learn from a community” isn’t saying all that much. I’m sure he, and us, and many others, have at least some things that would be valuable to learn from many communities.
”Thirdly I think it’s insulting to suppose these guys haven’t thought about their impact a lot simply because they don’t use QALY-adjacent language” → A lot of the people I knew, in the field (including the person I mentioned), pretty clearly hadn’t thought about the impact a whole lot. It’s not just that they weren’t using QALYs, it’s just that they weren’t really comparing it to similar things. That’s not unusual, most people in most fields don’t seem to be trying hard to optimize the impact globally, in my experience.
I really don’t mean to be insulting to them, I’m just describing my impression. These people have lots of other great qualities.
One thing that would clearly prove me wrong would be some lengthy documents outlining the net benefit, compared to things like bunkers, in the long-term. And, it would be nice if it were clear that lots of SpaceX people paid attention to these documents.
A lot of the people I knew, in the field (including the person I mentioned), pretty clearly hadn’t thought about the impact a whole lot. It’s not just that they weren’t using QALYs, it’s just that they weren’t really comparing it to similar things.
Re this particular example, after you had the conversation did the person agree with you that they clearly hadn’t thought about it? If not, can you account for their disagreement other than claiming that they were basically irrational?
I seem to have quite strongly differing intuitions from most people active in central EA roles, and quite similar ones (at least about the limitations to EA-style research) to many people I’ve spoken to who believe the motte of EA but are sceptical of the bailey (ie of actual EA orgs and methodology). I worry that EA has very strong echo chamber effects reflected in eg the OP, in Linch’s comment below, and Hauke’s about Bill Gates, in various other comments in this thread suggesting ‘almost no-one’ thinks about these questions with clarity and in countless of other such casual dismissals I’ve heard by EAs of smart people taking positions not couched in sufficiently EA terms.
FWIW I also don’t think claiming someone has lots of other great qualities is inconsistent with being insulting to them.
I don’t disagree that it’s plausible we can bring something. I just think that assuming we can do so is extremely arrogant (not by you in particular, but as a generalised attitude among EAs). We need to respect the views of intelligent people who think this stuff is important, even if they can’t or don’t explain why in the terms we would typically use. For PR reasons alone, this stuff is important—I can only point to anecdotes, but so many intelligent people I’ve spoken to find EAs collectively insufferable because of this sort of attitude, and so end up not engaging with ideas that might otherwise have appealed to them. Maybe someone could run a Mechanical Turk study on how such messaging affects reception of theoretically unrelated EA ideas.
No-one’s saying he’s a master strategist. Quite the opposite—his approach is to try stuff out and see what happens. It’s the EA movement that strongly favours reasoning everything out in advance.
What I’m contesting is the claim that he has ‘at least some things to learn from the effective altruism community’, which is far from obvious, and IMO needs a heavy dose of humility. To be clear, I’m not saying no-one in the community should do a shallow (or even deep) dive into his impact—I’m saying that we shouldn’t treat him or his employees like they’re irrational for not having done so to our satisfaction with our methods, as the OP implies.
Firstly, on the specific issue of whether bunkers are a better safeguard against catastrophe, that seems extremely short termist. Within maybe 30-70 years if SpaceX’s predictions are even faintly right, a colony on Mars could be self-sustaining, which seems much more resilient than bunkers, and likely to have huge economic benefits for humanity as a whole. Also, if bunkers are so much easier to set up, all anyone has to do is found an inspiring for profit bunker-development company and set them up! If no-one has seriously done so at scale, that indicates to me that socially/economically they’re a much harder proposition, and that this might outweigh the engineering differences.
Secondly, there’s the question of what the upside of such research is—as I said, it’s far from clear to me that any amount of a priori research will be more valuable than trying stuff and seeing what happens.
Thirdly I think it’s insulting to suppose these guys haven’t thought about their impact a lot simply because they don’t use QALY-adjacent language. Musk talks thoughtfully about his reasons all the time! If he doesn’t try to quantify the expectation, rather than assuming that’s because he’s never thought to do so, I would assume it’s because he thinks such a priori quantification is very low value (see previous para) - and I would acknowledge that such a view is reasonable. I would also assume something similar is true for very many of his employees, too, partly because they’re legion compared to EAs, partly because the filtering for their intelligence has much tighter feedback mechanisms than that for EA researchers.
If any EAs doing such research don’t recognise the validity of these sorts of concerns, I can imagine it being useless or even harmful.
It seems like we have some pretty different intuitions here. Thanks for sharing!
I was thinking of many of my claims as representing low bars. To me, “at least some things to learn from a community” isn’t saying all that much. I’m sure he, and us, and many others, have at least some things that would be valuable to learn from many communities.
”Thirdly I think it’s insulting to suppose these guys haven’t thought about their impact a lot simply because they don’t use QALY-adjacent language” → A lot of the people I knew, in the field (including the person I mentioned), pretty clearly hadn’t thought about the impact a whole lot. It’s not just that they weren’t using QALYs, it’s just that they weren’t really comparing it to similar things. That’s not unusual, most people in most fields don’t seem to be trying hard to optimize the impact globally, in my experience.
I really don’t mean to be insulting to them, I’m just describing my impression. These people have lots of other great qualities.
One thing that would clearly prove me wrong would be some lengthy documents outlining the net benefit, compared to things like bunkers, in the long-term. And, it would be nice if it were clear that lots of SpaceX people paid attention to these documents.
Re this particular example, after you had the conversation did the person agree with you that they clearly hadn’t thought about it? If not, can you account for their disagreement other than claiming that they were basically irrational?
I seem to have quite strongly differing intuitions from most people active in central EA roles, and quite similar ones (at least about the limitations to EA-style research) to many people I’ve spoken to who believe the motte of EA but are sceptical of the bailey (ie of actual EA orgs and methodology). I worry that EA has very strong echo chamber effects reflected in eg the OP, in Linch’s comment below, and Hauke’s about Bill Gates, in various other comments in this thread suggesting ‘almost no-one’ thinks about these questions with clarity and in countless of other such casual dismissals I’ve heard by EAs of smart people taking positions not couched in sufficiently EA terms.
FWIW I also don’t think claiming someone has lots of other great qualities is inconsistent with being insulting to them.
I don’t disagree that it’s plausible we can bring something. I just think that assuming we can do so is extremely arrogant (not by you in particular, but as a generalised attitude among EAs). We need to respect the views of intelligent people who think this stuff is important, even if they can’t or don’t explain why in the terms we would typically use. For PR reasons alone, this stuff is important—I can only point to anecdotes, but so many intelligent people I’ve spoken to find EAs collectively insufferable because of this sort of attitude, and so end up not engaging with ideas that might otherwise have appealed to them. Maybe someone could run a Mechanical Turk study on how such messaging affects reception of theoretically unrelated EA ideas.