A secondary reason is that it is far more diversive than anything else we do … Michelle has previously written about this if I recall correctly.
Found it: Michelle responding to one particularly diversive example. Rob’s reply outlines the standard response to this argument, namely that politically causes might happen to be much more effective than apolitical ones, so we will just have to accept the associated costs.
Tibetan monks I think used to have a tradition of a physical circle of rope that you could step into to debate openly—the idea being that you leave offense and bad feelings about what’s said in the ring in the ring after the debate so you can have a free and open discussion. This kind of norm might be helpful but difficult over the internet. The costs of controversy for political action, however, seem to me to be something you should just factor in to your decision.
Sure. So if that’s the case, this discussion could be reframed as trying to estimate just how high those “controversy costs” are likely to be. My feeling is that the controversy costs are right-tailed, that is, there is a large probability of low/moderate costs but a small probability of large costs. Something that happens to controversies as they grow is that as they become more and more visible, it becomes harder and harder to avoid commenting on them, which reinforces their growth.
Personally, I think instead of working on policy in the near term, EA should think about how to think about policy… that is, why is it that policy discussions seem to predictably go wrong in a way that (say) effective malaria charity discussions don’t, and how to fix that. If we find plausible solutions, that’s valuable in order to
clarify our own political thinking as a movement and make sure that whichever policies we push for are the right ones
possibly improve the state of political discourse in general if our ideas are sufficiently compelling
replace zero-sum political competition between ideologically opposed people with a sensible nonpoliticized policy discussion where peoples views become more accurate
In the EA Facebook thread Larks mentions, I said this and got 9 likes:
Aligning ourselves with almost any prominent political pundit at this stage risks alienating people who disagree with that pundit. EA is mostly liberal now; if we have a liberal speaker, that will make it even harder to interest conservatives. (Ideological diversity is the most valuable kind of diversity, so this matters.) Choosing a conservative or neutral pundit is a safer choice from this perspective. Tyler Cowen seems relatively sensible, non-polarizing, and thoughtful: video link
I’m optimistic that EA will be able to tackle political issues in the long run. But we have to do it right. In the same way none of us can be expected to choose charities as well as Givewell does in our spare time, none of us should assume that whatever political beliefs we’ve acquired in our spare time correlate all that well with the truth on political topics. (Note that politics is far more epistemically hazardous than evaluating developing world charities. See filter bubbles, tribalism, politically motivated distortions, confirmation bias, etc.) I think the way to do it would be to put an ideologically diverse group of EAs together in the same office reading papers and discussing political issues full-time.
This is similar to a “think tank”, which already exists. I think nonpartisan groups like the RAND Corporation and maybe thoughtful news sources like Vox.com and the Center for Public Integrity are probably the closest thing to EA organizations in the US politics space. They’ve been accumulating prestige & influence for a while. So it’s not clear to me whether the best approach would be to create a rival org or try to influence those orgs to take a more EA approach (through funding them, joining up, etc.) Getting partisan think tanks to work together better (e.g. conduct studies together?) is a more interesting and exotic idea. Howie Lempel might have something to say since he used to work at a think tank.
Maybe this would be worth expanding in to a post on this forum with a more formal & fleshed-out proposal?
Yes, I think these ideas are pretty good—especially working more closely with politically enaged people and deeply engaging people from different ideational political traditions. I’m a little worried that some of these exercises might create the internal controversy and confusion without changing anything? It might be interesting to provide a platform for EAs engaging in political opportunities as they see them as individuals and catch up with the rest of the group about what they’re learning? There’s a lot you can do before having to transform the nature of political debates...
Found it: Michelle responding to one particularly diversive example. Rob’s reply outlines the standard response to this argument, namely that politically causes might happen to be much more effective than apolitical ones, so we will just have to accept the associated costs.
Tibetan monks I think used to have a tradition of a physical circle of rope that you could step into to debate openly—the idea being that you leave offense and bad feelings about what’s said in the ring in the ring after the debate so you can have a free and open discussion. This kind of norm might be helpful but difficult over the internet. The costs of controversy for political action, however, seem to me to be something you should just factor in to your decision.
Sure. So if that’s the case, this discussion could be reframed as trying to estimate just how high those “controversy costs” are likely to be. My feeling is that the controversy costs are right-tailed, that is, there is a large probability of low/moderate costs but a small probability of large costs. Something that happens to controversies as they grow is that as they become more and more visible, it becomes harder and harder to avoid commenting on them, which reinforces their growth.
Personally, I think instead of working on policy in the near term, EA should think about how to think about policy… that is, why is it that policy discussions seem to predictably go wrong in a way that (say) effective malaria charity discussions don’t, and how to fix that. If we find plausible solutions, that’s valuable in order to
clarify our own political thinking as a movement and make sure that whichever policies we push for are the right ones
possibly improve the state of political discourse in general if our ideas are sufficiently compelling
replace zero-sum political competition between ideologically opposed people with a sensible nonpoliticized policy discussion where peoples views become more accurate
In the EA Facebook thread Larks mentions, I said this and got 9 likes:
Maybe this would be worth expanding in to a post on this forum with a more formal & fleshed-out proposal?
Yes, I think these ideas are pretty good—especially working more closely with politically enaged people and deeply engaging people from different ideational political traditions. I’m a little worried that some of these exercises might create the internal controversy and confusion without changing anything? It might be interesting to provide a platform for EAs engaging in political opportunities as they see them as individuals and catch up with the rest of the group about what they’re learning? There’s a lot you can do before having to transform the nature of political debates...