Thomas—excellent reply, and good points. I’ve written a bit about virtue signaling, and agree that there are good forms (reliable, predictive) and bad forms (cheap talk, deceptive, misguided) of virtue signaling.
I also agree that EA could be more creative and broad-minded about what kinds of virtue signaling are likely to be helpful in predictive future integrity, dedication, and constructiveness in EA. Historically, a lot of EA signaling has involved living frugally, being vegan, being a good house-mate in an EA shared house, collaborating well on EA projects, getting lots of upvotes on EA Forum, etc. Assessing those signals accurately requires a lot of first-hand or second-hand knowledge, which can be hard to do at scale, as the EA movement grows.
As EA grows in scale and becomes more diverse in terms of background (e.g. recruits more established professionals from other fields, not just recent college grads), we may need to get savvier about domain-specific virtue signals, e.g. how do medical researchers vs geopolitical security experts vs defense attorneys vs bioethicists vs blockchain developers show their true colors?
The very tricky trade-off, IMHO, is that often the most reliable virtue signals in terms of predicting personality traits (honesty, humility, conscientiousness, kindness) are often the least efficient in terms of actually accomplishing real-world good. For example, defense attorneys who do a lot of pro bono work doing appeals for death row inmates might be showing genuine dedication and altruism—but this might be among the least effective uses of their time in achieving criminal justice reform. So, do we want the super-trustworthy but scope-insensitive lawyers involved in EA, or the slightly less virtue-signaling but more rational and scope-sensitive lawyers?
That seems like a real dilemma. Traditionally, EA has solved it mostly by expecting a fair amount of private personality-signaling (e.g. being a conscientious vegan house-mate) plus a lot of public, hyper-rational, scope-sensitive analysis and discussion.
Thomas—excellent reply, and good points. I’ve written a bit about virtue signaling, and agree that there are good forms (reliable, predictive) and bad forms (cheap talk, deceptive, misguided) of virtue signaling.
I also agree that EA could be more creative and broad-minded about what kinds of virtue signaling are likely to be helpful in predictive future integrity, dedication, and constructiveness in EA. Historically, a lot of EA signaling has involved living frugally, being vegan, being a good house-mate in an EA shared house, collaborating well on EA projects, getting lots of upvotes on EA Forum, etc. Assessing those signals accurately requires a lot of first-hand or second-hand knowledge, which can be hard to do at scale, as the EA movement grows.
As EA grows in scale and becomes more diverse in terms of background (e.g. recruits more established professionals from other fields, not just recent college grads), we may need to get savvier about domain-specific virtue signals, e.g. how do medical researchers vs geopolitical security experts vs defense attorneys vs bioethicists vs blockchain developers show their true colors?
The very tricky trade-off, IMHO, is that often the most reliable virtue signals in terms of predicting personality traits (honesty, humility, conscientiousness, kindness) are often the least efficient in terms of actually accomplishing real-world good. For example, defense attorneys who do a lot of pro bono work doing appeals for death row inmates might be showing genuine dedication and altruism—but this might be among the least effective uses of their time in achieving criminal justice reform. So, do we want the super-trustworthy but scope-insensitive lawyers involved in EA, or the slightly less virtue-signaling but more rational and scope-sensitive lawyers?
That seems like a real dilemma. Traditionally, EA has solved it mostly by expecting a fair amount of private personality-signaling (e.g. being a conscientious vegan house-mate) plus a lot of public, hyper-rational, scope-sensitive analysis and discussion.