I worry ‘wholesomeness’ overemphasizes doing what’s comfortable and convenient and feels good, rather than what makes the world better:
As mentioned, wholesomeness could stifle visionaries, and this downside wasn’t discussed further.
Fighting to abolish slavery wasn’t a particularly wholesome act, in fact it created a lot of unwholesome conflict. Protests aren’t wholesome. I expect a lot of important future work to look and feel unwholesome. (I’m aware you could fit it into the framework somehow, but it’s an awkward fit.)
I worry it’ll make EA focus even more on creating a cushy environment for its own members (further expanding its parental leave policy and mental health benefits for the third time and running wonderful team retreats in fancy retreat centers), rather than on getting important things done in the world.
Things like virtues and integrity in my opinion do a better job at addressing the naïve consequentialist failure modes that wholesomeness is supposed to address.
I definitely think it’s important to consider (and head off) ways that it could go wrong!
Your first two bullets are discussed a bit further in the third essay which I’ll put up soon. In short, I completely agree that sometimes you need visionary thought or revolutionary action. At the same time I think revolutionary action—taken by people convinced that they are right—can be terrifying and harmful (e.g. the Cultural Revolution). I’d really prefer if people engaging in such actions felt some need to first feel into what is unwholesome about them, so that they’re making the choices consciously and may be able to steer away from the most harmful versions.
On your third point, I kind of feel the other way? Like I think it feels wholesome to have a certain level of support for staff, but lots of cushy benefits doesn’t really feel wholesome, and I feel is more likely to come from people in an optimizing “how do we make ourselves attractive to staff?” mindset. (Am I an outlier here? Does it feel wholesome to you to have cushy benefits for staff?)
Edit: On the third point, I do think that emphasising wholesomeness would lead to fewer people pushing themselves to the point of burnout. I have mixed feelings about this. The optimistic view is that it would help people to find healthy sustainable balances, and also help reduce people being putoff because of seeing burnout. The pessimistic view is that it would lead to just less work, and also perhaps less of a culture of taking important things very seriously.
Eh, I’m in favour of people up- or down-voting based on what they feel like doing.
(Though if someone who’s downvoted wants to express what they wish I had done, given that I’ve been thinking about these topics and guess at least some readers would find the content useful, I’m interested. I’m currently unclear whether there’s something I’ve missed, or if people just feel kind of vaguely negative and want to express that without a particular view of what should have been done instead. I’m planning to post a brief discussion of how this relates to some of my mistakes on the second essay, which seemed to be the most natural place to include it.)
An even more modest ask for people who downvoted the post: please agreevote this comment if your downvote was significantly influenced by who the author is, and disagreevote this comment if it was not.[1]
I’m aware of the downsides of polls conducted in the comment section. I think that using a single comment to ask a binary question, rather than a multiple-choice mechanism requiring a bunch of comments to implement, at least mitigates those concerns.
I’m a little hesitant to comment here as I’m not sure whether its helpful, but it could potentially (lots of qualifiers...) come across as inappropriate to some folks for Owen to be writing a series on the specific topic of “wholesomeness” given what happened, and the recent very public reflection on the forum here. If the post was about some completely unrelated topic that might feel different? Especially because in this post there isn’t any self-reflection on the elephant in the room which feels a bit off—although this might be coming in future posts.
Another aspect I would be interested in exploring is a gendered analysis of what lead to the mistake. I think it is super helpful that reflections on what lead to the mistake is done in public, I think it is potentially super valuable for a movement like EA with quite skewed gender demographics. But while perhaps the exact circumstance around what happened is unique, I could imagine it to be part for something like “male entitlement” or other parts of a culture that has gendered elements. In other words, I think every time a male transgresses towards a female, it is possible to frame it in terms of wholesomeness, asocial behavior, etc. But this might miss the point that when it comes to the frequency of transgressions, they are much more frequent from males towards females than the other way around, so it seems such individualistic analysis misses an important driver of all such behavior.
In danger of writing too long, it is a bit like safety incidents on airplanes: Each incident can be explained in terms of a missing bolt, or the missed replacement of some seal. However, all these incidents together might point at another causal factor: A lax safety culture.
I agree that it would have been better for Owen to at least briefly address that elephant early in the main text rather than noting in a comment that a brief discussion is planned for the second essay. I’m undecided on the broader question of whether it is advisable for him to be writing essays on “wholesomeness” at this point in time.
Thanks both. Yeah I kind of knew that writing on this topic was unusually likely to make people unhappy with me. But I’m still not certain what if anything I should have done differently. I don’t really want to not share thinking I think may be (nontrivially) helpful for some people just because it will make others unhappy with me (if there’s a deeper harm than “making people unhappy with me” which I’m not tracking, that might change my view). And I also don’t really want to make it about my issues, something I suspect that many people have spent more than enough time engaging with already (though I’m super happy to have peripheral conversation on that, it feels like putting it in the post proper would be an error by making it more about me than I think it should be).
I guess I’m leaning towards agreeing it would have been better to acknowledge the issue up-front, and posted a longer comment at the time of making the post talking a little about this, saying that of course people might reasonably have suspicion of my judgement on some of these topics, but for obvious reasons I’ve spent some time dwelling on them and wanting to share what I’ve got, etc.
BTW, as I’m alluding to there: it’s not total coincidence that this is a topic that I’ve been thinking about, since one of several generators for the thinking was “without fixing my mistaken beliefs, what kind of basic shift in orientation might nonetheless have helped me to avoid past errors”. I don’t think it’s a *majority* generator, and think e.g. SBF is a larger part. However, finding a frame which simultaneously seemed to give good answers to “how could things have been different to reduce issues with SBF” and also “how could I have oriented differently to reduce risk of harmful errors in the vicinity of attraction” provided some boost to my thinking that there was really something helpful and worth sharing.
Thanks for the post, Owen. Too bad it is being downvoted[1] based on considerations which presumably do not have to do with its own merit.
Now it has 20 karma in 28 votes.
I worry ‘wholesomeness’ overemphasizes doing what’s comfortable and convenient and feels good, rather than what makes the world better:
As mentioned, wholesomeness could stifle visionaries, and this downside wasn’t discussed further.
Fighting to abolish slavery wasn’t a particularly wholesome act, in fact it created a lot of unwholesome conflict. Protests aren’t wholesome. I expect a lot of important future work to look and feel unwholesome. (I’m aware you could fit it into the framework somehow, but it’s an awkward fit.)
I worry it’ll make EA focus even more on creating a cushy environment for its own members (further expanding its parental leave policy and mental health benefits for the third time and running wonderful team retreats in fancy retreat centers), rather than on getting important things done in the world.
Things like virtues and integrity in my opinion do a better job at addressing the naïve consequentialist failure modes that wholesomeness is supposed to address.
I definitely think it’s important to consider (and head off) ways that it could go wrong!
Your first two bullets are discussed a bit further in the third essay which I’ll put up soon. In short, I completely agree that sometimes you need visionary thought or revolutionary action. At the same time I think revolutionary action—taken by people convinced that they are right—can be terrifying and harmful (e.g. the Cultural Revolution). I’d really prefer if people engaging in such actions felt some need to first feel into what is unwholesome about them, so that they’re making the choices consciously and may be able to steer away from the most harmful versions.
On your third point, I kind of feel the other way? Like I think it feels wholesome to have a certain level of support for staff, but lots of cushy benefits doesn’t really feel wholesome, and I feel is more likely to come from people in an optimizing “how do we make ourselves attractive to staff?” mindset. (Am I an outlier here? Does it feel wholesome to you to have cushy benefits for staff?)
Edit: On the third point, I do think that emphasising wholesomeness would lead to fewer people pushing themselves to the point of burnout. I have mixed feelings about this. The optimistic view is that it would help people to find healthy sustainable balances, and also help reduce people being putoff because of seeing burnout. The pessimistic view is that it would lead to just less work, and also perhaps less of a culture of taking important things very seriously.
This is the relevant section of the third essay on visionaries/revolutionaries.
Eh, I’m in favour of people up- or down-voting based on what they feel like doing.
(Though if someone who’s downvoted wants to express what they wish I had done, given that I’ve been thinking about these topics and guess at least some readers would find the content useful, I’m interested. I’m currently unclear whether there’s something I’ve missed, or if people just feel kind of vaguely negative and want to express that without a particular view of what should have been done instead. I’m planning to post a brief discussion of how this relates to some of my mistakes on the second essay, which seemed to be the most natural place to include it.)
An even more modest ask for people who downvoted the post: please agreevote this comment if your downvote was significantly influenced by who the author is, and disagreevote this comment if it was not.[1]
I’m aware of the downsides of polls conducted in the comment section. I think that using a single comment to ask a binary question, rather than a multiple-choice mechanism requiring a bunch of comments to implement, at least mitigates those concerns.
I’m a little hesitant to comment here as I’m not sure whether its helpful, but it could potentially (lots of qualifiers...) come across as inappropriate to some folks for Owen to be writing a series on the specific topic of “wholesomeness” given what happened, and the recent very public reflection on the forum here. If the post was about some completely unrelated topic that might feel different? Especially because in this post there isn’t any self-reflection on the elephant in the room which feels a bit off—although this might be coming in future posts.
Or I could be off base here.
Another aspect I would be interested in exploring is a gendered analysis of what lead to the mistake. I think it is super helpful that reflections on what lead to the mistake is done in public, I think it is potentially super valuable for a movement like EA with quite skewed gender demographics. But while perhaps the exact circumstance around what happened is unique, I could imagine it to be part for something like “male entitlement” or other parts of a culture that has gendered elements. In other words, I think every time a male transgresses towards a female, it is possible to frame it in terms of wholesomeness, asocial behavior, etc. But this might miss the point that when it comes to the frequency of transgressions, they are much more frequent from males towards females than the other way around, so it seems such individualistic analysis misses an important driver of all such behavior.
In danger of writing too long, it is a bit like safety incidents on airplanes: Each incident can be explained in terms of a missing bolt, or the missed replacement of some seal. However, all these incidents together might point at another causal factor: A lax safety culture.
I agree that it would have been better for Owen to at least briefly address that elephant early in the main text rather than noting in a comment that a brief discussion is planned for the second essay. I’m undecided on the broader question of whether it is advisable for him to be writing essays on “wholesomeness” at this point in time.
Thanks both. Yeah I kind of knew that writing on this topic was unusually likely to make people unhappy with me. But I’m still not certain what if anything I should have done differently. I don’t really want to not share thinking I think may be (nontrivially) helpful for some people just because it will make others unhappy with me (if there’s a deeper harm than “making people unhappy with me” which I’m not tracking, that might change my view). And I also don’t really want to make it about my issues, something I suspect that many people have spent more than enough time engaging with already (though I’m super happy to have peripheral conversation on that, it feels like putting it in the post proper would be an error by making it more about me than I think it should be).
I guess I’m leaning towards agreeing it would have been better to acknowledge the issue up-front, and posted a longer comment at the time of making the post talking a little about this, saying that of course people might reasonably have suspicion of my judgement on some of these topics, but for obvious reasons I’ve spent some time dwelling on them and wanting to share what I’ve got, etc.
BTW, as I’m alluding to there: it’s not total coincidence that this is a topic that I’ve been thinking about, since one of several generators for the thinking was “without fixing my mistaken beliefs, what kind of basic shift in orientation might nonetheless have helped me to avoid past errors”. I don’t think it’s a *majority* generator, and think e.g. SBF is a larger part. However, finding a frame which simultaneously seemed to give good answers to “how could things have been different to reduce issues with SBF” and also “how could I have oriented differently to reduce risk of harmful errors in the vicinity of attraction” provided some boost to my thinking that there was really something helpful and worth sharing.