Hmm, itās funny, this post comes at a moment when Iām heavily considering moving in the opposite direction with my EA university group (towards being more selective and focused on EA-core cause areas). Iād like to know what you think of the reason I thought for doing so.
My main worry is that as the interests of EA members broaden (e.g. to include helping locally), the EA establishment will have less concrete recommendations to offer and people will not have a chance to truly internalize some core EA principles (e.g. amounts matter, doubt in the absence of measurement).
That has been an especially salient problem for my group, given that we live in a middle-income country (Colombia) and many people feel most excited about helping within our country. However, when Iāve heard them make plans for how they would help, I struggle to see what difference we made by presenting them EA ideas. They tend to choose causes more by their previous emotional connection than by attributes that suggest a better opportunity to help (e.g. by using the SNT framework). My expectations are that if we emphasize more the distinctive aspects of EA (and the concrete recommendations they imply), people will have a better chance to update on the ways that mainstream EA differs from what they already believed and we will have a better shot at producing some counterfactual impact.
(Though, as a caution, itās possible that the tendency for members of my group to not realize when EA ideas differ from their own may come from my particular aversion to openly questioning or contradicting people, rather than from the memberās interest in less-explored areas for helping.)
A few points. First, I think we need to be clear that effective altruism is a movement encouraging use of evidence to do as much good as we canāand choosing what to work on should happen after gathering evidence. Listening to what senior EA movement members have concluded is a shortcut, and in many cases an unfortunate one. So the thing I would focus on is not the EA recommendations, but the concept of changing your mind based on evidence. Itās fine for people to decide to focus locally instead of internationally, or to do good, but not the utmost goodābut even when we congratulate them for doing good things, they shouldnāt tell themselves itās the most effective choice.
Second, it sounds like a basic EA fellowship would be beneficial. Instead of having members have conversations about EA, have them read and discuss sources, and the topics directly. Ask them to think about where they agree and disagree with the readings. And to address one of your issues more specifically, I definitely think that you should have more discussions about cause area choiceānot specific cause areas themselves. Some questions might include: what makes a cause more effective than another? How would you know? If evidence exists, what makes people disagree about where to focus? What sorts of evidence are needed to know if an intervention will generalize?
Lastly, I think that people should spend less time thinking about how *they* can help, and more about what needs to be prioritized globally. I think the idea that people should maximize their personal impact is often misleading, compared to asking what matters, and then figuring out where you can counterfactually contribute most. And even for people who want to dedicate their careers to effective interventions, sometimesāoftenāthat means building career capital in the short term, rather than direct work.
I agree that focusing on epistemics leads to conclusions worth having. I am personally skeptical of fellowships unless they are very focused on first principles and when discussing conclusions, great objections are allowed to take the discussion completely off topic for three hours.
Demonstrating reasoning processes well and racing to a bottom line conclusion donāt seem very compatible to me.
Changing minds and hearts is a slow process. I unfortunately agree too much with your statement that there are no shortcuts. This is one key reason why I think we can only grow so fast.
Growing this community in a way that allows people to think for themselves in a nuanced and intelligent way seems necessarily a bit slow (so glad that compounding growth makes being enormous this century still totally feasible to me!).
Hi, thanks for the detailed reply. I mostly agree with the main thrust of your comment, but I think I feel less optimistic about what happens when you actually try to implement it.
Like, weāve had discussions in my group about how to prioritize cause areas and in principle everyone agrees with how we should work on causes that are bigger, more neglected and tractable, but when it comes to specific causes it turns out that the unmeasured effects are the most important thing and the flow through effects of the intervention Iāve always liked turn out to compensate for its lack of demonstrated impact.
Iām not saying itās impossible to have those discussions, just that for a group constrained on people whoāve engaged with EA cause priorization arguments, being able to rely on the arguments that others have put forward (like we can often do for international causes) makes the job much easier. However, Iām open to the possibility that that the best compromise might be to simply to let people focus on local causes and double down on cultivating better epistemics.
(P.s.: I now realize that answering to every comment on your post might be quite demanding, so feel free to not answer. Iāll make sure to still update on the fact that you werenāt convinced by my initial comment. If anything at least your comment is making me consider alternatives that donāt restrict the growth and avoid the epistemic consequences I delineated. Iām not sure if Iāll find something that pleases me, but Iāll muse on it a little further)
You donāt need to convince everyone of everything you think in a single event. š You probably didnāt form your worldview in the space of two hours either. š
When someone says they think giving locally is better, ask them why. Point out exactly what you agree with (e.g. it is easier to have an in-depth understanding of your local context) and why you still hold your view (e.g. that there are such large wealth disparities between different countries that there are some really low hanging fruit, like basic preventative measures of diseases like malaria, that you currently guess that you can still make more of a difference by donating elsewhere).
If you can honestly communicate why you think what you do, the reasons your view differs from the person you are talking to, in a patient and kind way, I think your local group will be laying the groundwork for a much larger movement of people who care deeply about helping others as much as they can with some of their resources. A movement that also thinks about the hard but important questions in a really thoughtful and intelligent way.
The best way to change other peopleās minds for me is to keep in mind that I havenāt got everything figured out and this person might be able to point to nuance Iāve missed.
These really are incredibly challenging topics that no-one in this community or in any community has fully figured out yet. It didnāt always happen in the first conversation, but every person whose mind I have ever ended up changing significantly over many conversations added nuance to my views too.
Each event, each conversation, can be a small nudge or shift (for you or the other person). If your group is a nice place to hang out, some people will keep coming back for more talks and conversations.
Changing peopleās mind overnight is hard. Changing their minds and your mind over a year, while you all develop more nuanced views on these complicated but still important questions, is much more tractable and, I think, impactful.
If itās a question of giving people either a sense of this communityās epistemics or the bottom line conclusion, I strongly think you are doing a lot more good if you choose epistemics.
Every objection is an opportunity to add nuance to your view and their view.
If you successfully demonstrate great epistemics and people keep coming back, your worldviews will converge based on the strongest arguments from everyone involved in the many conversations happening at your local group.
Focus on epistemics and youāll all end up with great conclusions (and if they are different to the existing commonly held views in the community, thatās even better, write a forum post together and let that insight benefit the whole movement!).
Oh, I totally agree that giving people the epistemics is mostly preferable to hanging them the bottom line. My doubts come more from my impression that forming good epistemics in a relatively unexplored environment (e.g. cause prioritization within Colombia) is probably harder than in other contexts.
I know that at least our explicit aim with the group was to exhibit the kind of patience and rigour you describe and that I ended up somewhat underwhelmed with the results. I initially wanted to try to parse out where our differing positions came from, but this comment eventually got a little long and rambling.
For now Iāll limit myself to thanking you for making what I think itās a good point.
I donāt know if this is what you mean by cultivating better epistemics, but it seems super plausible to me that the comparative advantage of a Colombian EA university group is to work towards effective solutions to problems in Colombia. If you think most of your members will continue to stay in Colombia, and some of them might go into careers that could potentially be high impact for solving Colombian issues, that seems like a much more compelling thing to do than be the Nth group talking about AI or which GiveWell charity is better.
Hmm, itās funny, this post comes at a moment when Iām heavily considering moving in the opposite direction with my EA university group (towards being more selective and focused on EA-core cause areas). Iād like to know what you think of the reason I thought for doing so.
My main worry is that as the interests of EA members broaden (e.g. to include helping locally), the EA establishment will have less concrete recommendations to offer and people will not have a chance to truly internalize some core EA principles (e.g. amounts matter, doubt in the absence of measurement).
That has been an especially salient problem for my group, given that we live in a middle-income country (Colombia) and many people feel most excited about helping within our country. However, when Iāve heard them make plans for how they would help, I struggle to see what difference we made by presenting them EA ideas. They tend to choose causes more by their previous emotional connection than by attributes that suggest a better opportunity to help (e.g. by using the SNT framework). My expectations are that if we emphasize more the distinctive aspects of EA (and the concrete recommendations they imply), people will have a better chance to update on the ways that mainstream EA differs from what they already believed and we will have a better shot at producing some counterfactual impact.
(Though, as a caution, itās possible that the tendency for members of my group to not realize when EA ideas differ from their own may come from my particular aversion to openly questioning or contradicting people, rather than from the memberās interest in less-explored areas for helping.)
A few points. First, I think we need to be clear that effective altruism is a movement encouraging use of evidence to do as much good as we canāand choosing what to work on should happen after gathering evidence. Listening to what senior EA movement members have concluded is a shortcut, and in many cases an unfortunate one. So the thing I would focus on is not the EA recommendations, but the concept of changing your mind based on evidence. Itās fine for people to decide to focus locally instead of internationally, or to do good, but not the utmost goodābut even when we congratulate them for doing good things, they shouldnāt tell themselves itās the most effective choice.
Second, it sounds like a basic EA fellowship would be beneficial. Instead of having members have conversations about EA, have them read and discuss sources, and the topics directly. Ask them to think about where they agree and disagree with the readings. And to address one of your issues more specifically, I definitely think that you should have more discussions about cause area choiceānot specific cause areas themselves. Some questions might include: what makes a cause more effective than another? How would you know? If evidence exists, what makes people disagree about where to focus? What sorts of evidence are needed to know if an intervention will generalize?
Lastly, I think that people should spend less time thinking about how *they* can help, and more about what needs to be prioritized globally. I think the idea that people should maximize their personal impact is often misleading, compared to asking what matters, and then figuring out where you can counterfactually contribute most. And even for people who want to dedicate their careers to effective interventions, sometimesāoftenāthat means building career capital in the short term, rather than direct work.
I agree that focusing on epistemics leads to conclusions worth having. I am personally skeptical of fellowships unless they are very focused on first principles and when discussing conclusions, great objections are allowed to take the discussion completely off topic for three hours.
Demonstrating reasoning processes well and racing to a bottom line conclusion donāt seem very compatible to me.
Changing minds and hearts is a slow process. I unfortunately agree too much with your statement that there are no shortcuts. This is one key reason why I think we can only grow so fast.
Growing this community in a way that allows people to think for themselves in a nuanced and intelligent way seems necessarily a bit slow (so glad that compounding growth makes being enormous this century still totally feasible to me!).
Hi, thanks for the detailed reply. I mostly agree with the main thrust of your comment, but I think I feel less optimistic about what happens when you actually try to implement it.
Like, weāve had discussions in my group about how to prioritize cause areas and in principle everyone agrees with how we should work on causes that are bigger, more neglected and tractable, but when it comes to specific causes it turns out that the unmeasured effects are the most important thing and the flow through effects of the intervention Iāve always liked turn out to compensate for its lack of demonstrated impact.
Iām not saying itās impossible to have those discussions, just that for a group constrained on people whoāve engaged with EA cause priorization arguments, being able to rely on the arguments that others have put forward (like we can often do for international causes) makes the job much easier. However, Iām open to the possibility that that the best compromise might be to simply to let people focus on local causes and double down on cultivating better epistemics.
(P.s.: I now realize that answering to every comment on your post might be quite demanding, so feel free to not answer. Iāll make sure to still update on the fact that you werenāt convinced by my initial comment. If anything at least your comment is making me consider alternatives that donāt restrict the growth and avoid the epistemic consequences I delineated. Iām not sure if Iāll find something that pleases me, but Iāll muse on it a little further)
You donāt need to convince everyone of everything you think in a single event. š You probably didnāt form your worldview in the space of two hours either. š
When someone says they think giving locally is better, ask them why. Point out exactly what you agree with (e.g. it is easier to have an in-depth understanding of your local context) and why you still hold your view (e.g. that there are such large wealth disparities between different countries that there are some really low hanging fruit, like basic preventative measures of diseases like malaria, that you currently guess that you can still make more of a difference by donating elsewhere).
If you can honestly communicate why you think what you do, the reasons your view differs from the person you are talking to, in a patient and kind way, I think your local group will be laying the groundwork for a much larger movement of people who care deeply about helping others as much as they can with some of their resources. A movement that also thinks about the hard but important questions in a really thoughtful and intelligent way.
The best way to change other peopleās minds for me is to keep in mind that I havenāt got everything figured out and this person might be able to point to nuance Iāve missed.
These really are incredibly challenging topics that no-one in this community or in any community has fully figured out yet. It didnāt always happen in the first conversation, but every person whose mind I have ever ended up changing significantly over many conversations added nuance to my views too.
Each event, each conversation, can be a small nudge or shift (for you or the other person). If your group is a nice place to hang out, some people will keep coming back for more talks and conversations.
Changing peopleās mind overnight is hard. Changing their minds and your mind over a year, while you all develop more nuanced views on these complicated but still important questions, is much more tractable and, I think, impactful.
If itās a question of giving people either a sense of this communityās epistemics or the bottom line conclusion, I strongly think you are doing a lot more good if you choose epistemics.
Every objection is an opportunity to add nuance to your view and their view.
If you successfully demonstrate great epistemics and people keep coming back, your worldviews will converge based on the strongest arguments from everyone involved in the many conversations happening at your local group.
Focus on epistemics and youāll all end up with great conclusions (and if they are different to the existing commonly held views in the community, thatās even better, write a forum post together and let that insight benefit the whole movement!).
Oh, I totally agree that giving people the epistemics is mostly preferable to hanging them the bottom line. My doubts come more from my impression that forming good epistemics in a relatively unexplored environment (e.g. cause prioritization within Colombia) is probably harder than in other contexts.
I know that at least our explicit aim with the group was to exhibit the kind of patience and rigour you describe and that I ended up somewhat underwhelmed with the results. I initially wanted to try to parse out where our differing positions came from, but this comment eventually got a little long and rambling.
For now Iāll limit myself to thanking you for making what I think itās a good point.
I donāt know if this is what you mean by cultivating better epistemics, but it seems super plausible to me that the comparative advantage of a Colombian EA university group is to work towards effective solutions to problems in Colombia. If you think most of your members will continue to stay in Colombia, and some of them might go into careers that could potentially be high impact for solving Colombian issues, that seems like a much more compelling thing to do than be the Nth group talking about AI or which GiveWell charity is better.