There’s the normal kind of drama which is discussed and moved past, and the weird kind of drama like Roko’s Basilisk which only becomes notable through obsessive overattention and collective self-consciousness. You can choose which one you want to have.
I think the second kind of drama is more likely in the absence of a governing body. See the vigilante action paragraph in this comment of mine.
Is this serious? EA is way more important than yet another obscure annal in Internet history.
If the limiting factor for a movement like Effective Altruism is being able to coordinate people via the Internet, then coordinating people via the Internet ought to be a problem of EA interest.
I see your objections to my proposal as being fundamentally aesthetic. You don’t like the idea of central authority, but not because of some particular reason why it would lead to bad consequences—it just doesn’t appeal to you intuitively. Does that sound accurate?
I think the second kind of drama is more likely in the absence of a governing body.
The second kind of drama was literally caused by the actions of a governing body. Specifically, one that was so self-absorbed in its own constellation of ideas that it forgot about everything that outsiders considered normal.
See the vigilante action paragraph in this comment of mine.
So you’re trying to say that the worst case scenario of setting up an official EA panel is not as bad as the worst case scenario of vigilantism. That’s a very limited argument. First, merely comparing the worst case scenarios is a very limited approach. Firstly because by definition these are events at the extreme tail ends of our expectations which implies that we are particularly incapable of understanding and predicting them, secondly because we also need to take probabilities into account, and thirdly because we need to take average, median, best case, etc. expectations into account. Furthermore, it’s not clear to me that the level of witch hunting and vigilantism currently present in programming, atheist, etc. communities, is actually worse than having a veritable political rift between EA organizations. Moreover, you’re jumping from Roko’s Basilisk type weird drama and controversy to vigilantism, when the two are fairly different things. And finally, you’re shifting the subject of discussion from a panel that excommunicates people to some kind of big organization that runs all the events.
Besides that, the fact that there has been essentially no vigilantism in EA except for a small number of people in this thread suggests that you’re jumping far too quickly to enormous solutions for vague problems.
If the limiting factor for a movement like Effective Altruism is being able to coordinate people via the Internet, then coordinating people via the Internet ought to be a problem of EA interest.
That’s way too simplistic. Communities don’t hit a ceiling and then fail when they run into a universal limiting factor. Their actions and evolution are complicated and chaotic and always affected by many things. And hardly any social movements are led by people who look at other social movements and then pattern their own behavior based on others’.
I see your objections to my proposal as being fundamentally aesthetic.
I prefer the term ‘common sense’.
You don’t like the idea of central authority, but not because of some particular reason why it would lead to bad consequences—it just doesn’t appeal to you intuitively.
The second kind of drama was literally caused by the actions of a governing body. Specifically, one that was so self-absorbed in its own constellation of ideas that it forgot about everything that outsiders considered normal.
If selection of leadership is an explicit process, we can be careful to select people we trust to represent the EA movement to the world at large. If the process isn’t explicit, forum moderators may be selected in an incidental way, e.g. on the basis of being popular bloggers.
So you’re trying to say that the worst case scenario of setting up an official EA panel is not as bad as the worst case scenario of vigilantism. That’s a very limited argument. First, merely comparing the worst case scenarios is a very limited approach. Firstly because by definition these are events at the extreme tail ends of our expectations which implies that we are particularly incapable of understanding and predicting them, secondly because we also need to take probabilities into account, and thirdly because we need to take average, median, best case, etc. expectations into account.
Governance in general seems like it’s mainly about mitigation of worst case scenarios. Anyway, the evidence I presented doesn’t just apply to the tail ends of the distribution.
Furthermore, it’s not clear to me that the level of witch hunting and vigilantism currently present in programming, atheist, etc. communities, is actually worse than having a veritable political rift between EA organizations.
This is an empirical question. I don’t get the impression that competition between organizations is usually very destructive. It might be interesting for someone to research e.g. the history of the NBA and the ABA (competing professional basketball leagues in the 1970s) or the history of AYSO and USYSA (competing youth soccer leagues in the US that still both exist—contrast with youth baseball, where I don’t believe Little League has any serious rivals). I haven’t heard much about destructive competition between rival organizations of this type. Even rival businesses are often remarkably civil towards one another.
I suspect the reason competition between organizations is rarely destructive is because organizations are fighting over mindshare, and acting like a jerk is a good way to lose mindshare. When Google released its Dropbox competitor Google Drive, the CEO of Dropbox could have started saying nasty things about Google’s CEO in order to try & discredit Drive. Instead, he cracked a joke. The second response makes me much more favorably inclined toward Dropbox’s product.
Vigilantes don’t typically think like this. They’re not people who were chosen by others to represent an organization. They’re people who self-select on the basis of anger. They want revenge. And they often do things that end up discrediting their cause.
The biggest example I can think of re: organizations competing in a nasty way is rival political parties, and I think there are incentives that account for that. Based on what I’ve read about the details of how Australia’s system operates, it seems like Australian politicians face a slightly better set of incentives than American ones. I’d be interested to hear from Australians about whether they think their politicians are less nasty to each other.
Was there a particular case of destructive competition between organizations that you had in mind?
the fact that there has been essentially no vigilantism in EA except for a small number of people in this thread suggests that you’re jumping far too quickly to enormous solutions for vague problems.
Part of the reason this hasn’t been much of a problem is because the EA movement is sufficiently “elitist” to filter out troublemakers during the recruitment stage. (Gleb got through, which is arguably my fault—I’m the person who introduced him to other EAs and told them his organization seemed interesting. Sorry about that.) Better mechanisms for mitigating bad actors who get through means we can be less paranoid about growth.
Also, it makes sense to set something like this up well before it’s needed. If it’s formed in response to an existing crisis, it won’t have much accumulated moral authority, and it might look like a play on the part of one party or another to create a “neutral” arbiter that favors them.
And hardly any social movements are led by people who look at other social movements and then pattern their own behavior based on others’.
People in EA have done this a fair amount. I’ve heard of at least two EAs besides Jeff who have spent significant time looking at the history of social movements, and here is OpenPhil’s research in to the history of philanthropy. I assume a smart EA-type movement of the future would also do this stuff.
I also think that contributing to society’s stock of knowledge about how to organize people is valuable, because groups are rarely set up for the purpose of doing harm and often end up incidentally doing good (e.g. charitable activities of fraternal organizations).
Governance in general seems like it’s mainly about mitigation of worst case scenarios.
Doesn’t seem like that to me. And just because “governance in general” does something doesn’t mean we should.
This is an empirical question.
Yeah, and it’s unclear. I don’t see why it is relevant anyway. I never claimed that creating an EA panel would lead to a political divide between organizations.
Part of the reason this hasn’t been much of a problem is because the EA movement is sufficiently “elitist” to filter out troublemakers during the recruitment stage.
Better mechanisms for mitigating bad actors who get through means we can be less paranoid about growth.
We’re not paranoid about growth and we’re not being deliberately elitist. People won’t change their recruiting efforts just because a few people got officially kicked out. When the rubber hits the road on spreading EA, people just busy themselves with their activities, rather than optimizing some complicated function.
People in EA have done this a fair amount. I’ve heard of at least two EAs besides Jeff who have spent significant time looking at the history of social movements, and here is OpenPhil’s research in to the history of philanthropy. I assume a smart EA-type movement of the future would also do this stuff.
Yeah, EA, which is not a typical social movement. I’ve not heard of others doing this. Hardly any.
Saying that you want to experiment with EA because risking the stability of a(n unusually important) social movement just because it might benefit random people with unknown intentions who may or may not study our history is taking it a little far.
I also think that contributing to society’s stock of knowledge about how to organize people is valuable, because groups are rarely set up for the purpose of doing harm and often end up incidentally doing good (e.g. charitable activities of fraternal organizations).
Well most of them are relatively ineffective and most of them don’t study histories of social movements. As for the ones that do, they don’t look up obscure things such as this. When people spend significant time looking at the history of social movements, they look at large, notable, well documented cases. They will not look at a few people’s online actions. There is no shortage of stories of people doing online things at this low level of notability and size.
Saying that you want to experiment with EA because risking the stability of a(n unusually important) social movement just because it might benefit random people with unknown intentions who may or may not study our history is taking it a little far.
I think the second kind of drama is more likely in the absence of a governing body. See the vigilante action paragraph in this comment of mine.
If the limiting factor for a movement like Effective Altruism is being able to coordinate people via the Internet, then coordinating people via the Internet ought to be a problem of EA interest.
I see your objections to my proposal as being fundamentally aesthetic. You don’t like the idea of central authority, but not because of some particular reason why it would lead to bad consequences—it just doesn’t appeal to you intuitively. Does that sound accurate?
The second kind of drama was literally caused by the actions of a governing body. Specifically, one that was so self-absorbed in its own constellation of ideas that it forgot about everything that outsiders considered normal.
So you’re trying to say that the worst case scenario of setting up an official EA panel is not as bad as the worst case scenario of vigilantism. That’s a very limited argument. First, merely comparing the worst case scenarios is a very limited approach. Firstly because by definition these are events at the extreme tail ends of our expectations which implies that we are particularly incapable of understanding and predicting them, secondly because we also need to take probabilities into account, and thirdly because we need to take average, median, best case, etc. expectations into account. Furthermore, it’s not clear to me that the level of witch hunting and vigilantism currently present in programming, atheist, etc. communities, is actually worse than having a veritable political rift between EA organizations. Moreover, you’re jumping from Roko’s Basilisk type weird drama and controversy to vigilantism, when the two are fairly different things. And finally, you’re shifting the subject of discussion from a panel that excommunicates people to some kind of big organization that runs all the events.
Besides that, the fact that there has been essentially no vigilantism in EA except for a small number of people in this thread suggests that you’re jumping far too quickly to enormous solutions for vague problems.
That’s way too simplistic. Communities don’t hit a ceiling and then fail when they run into a universal limiting factor. Their actions and evolution are complicated and chaotic and always affected by many things. And hardly any social movements are led by people who look at other social movements and then pattern their own behavior based on others’.
I prefer the term ‘common sense’.
It rings lots of lots of alarm bells.
If selection of leadership is an explicit process, we can be careful to select people we trust to represent the EA movement to the world at large. If the process isn’t explicit, forum moderators may be selected in an incidental way, e.g. on the basis of being popular bloggers.
Governance in general seems like it’s mainly about mitigation of worst case scenarios. Anyway, the evidence I presented doesn’t just apply to the tail ends of the distribution.
This is an empirical question. I don’t get the impression that competition between organizations is usually very destructive. It might be interesting for someone to research e.g. the history of the NBA and the ABA (competing professional basketball leagues in the 1970s) or the history of AYSO and USYSA (competing youth soccer leagues in the US that still both exist—contrast with youth baseball, where I don’t believe Little League has any serious rivals). I haven’t heard much about destructive competition between rival organizations of this type. Even rival businesses are often remarkably civil towards one another.
I suspect the reason competition between organizations is rarely destructive is because organizations are fighting over mindshare, and acting like a jerk is a good way to lose mindshare. When Google released its Dropbox competitor Google Drive, the CEO of Dropbox could have started saying nasty things about Google’s CEO in order to try & discredit Drive. Instead, he cracked a joke. The second response makes me much more favorably inclined toward Dropbox’s product.
Vigilantes don’t typically think like this. They’re not people who were chosen by others to represent an organization. They’re people who self-select on the basis of anger. They want revenge. And they often do things that end up discrediting their cause.
The biggest example I can think of re: organizations competing in a nasty way is rival political parties, and I think there are incentives that account for that. Based on what I’ve read about the details of how Australia’s system operates, it seems like Australian politicians face a slightly better set of incentives than American ones. I’d be interested to hear from Australians about whether they think their politicians are less nasty to each other.
Was there a particular case of destructive competition between organizations that you had in mind?
Part of the reason this hasn’t been much of a problem is because the EA movement is sufficiently “elitist” to filter out troublemakers during the recruitment stage. (Gleb got through, which is arguably my fault—I’m the person who introduced him to other EAs and told them his organization seemed interesting. Sorry about that.) Better mechanisms for mitigating bad actors who get through means we can be less paranoid about growth.
Also, it makes sense to set something like this up well before it’s needed. If it’s formed in response to an existing crisis, it won’t have much accumulated moral authority, and it might look like a play on the part of one party or another to create a “neutral” arbiter that favors them.
People in EA have done this a fair amount. I’ve heard of at least two EAs besides Jeff who have spent significant time looking at the history of social movements, and here is OpenPhil’s research in to the history of philanthropy. I assume a smart EA-type movement of the future would also do this stuff.
I also think that contributing to society’s stock of knowledge about how to organize people is valuable, because groups are rarely set up for the purpose of doing harm and often end up incidentally doing good (e.g. charitable activities of fraternal organizations).
Doesn’t seem like that to me. And just because “governance in general” does something doesn’t mean we should.
Yeah, and it’s unclear. I don’t see why it is relevant anyway. I never claimed that creating an EA panel would lead to a political divide between organizations.
We’re not paranoid about growth and we’re not being deliberately elitist. People won’t change their recruiting efforts just because a few people got officially kicked out. When the rubber hits the road on spreading EA, people just busy themselves with their activities, rather than optimizing some complicated function.
Yeah, EA, which is not a typical social movement. I’ve not heard of others doing this. Hardly any.
Saying that you want to experiment with EA because risking the stability of a(n unusually important) social movement just because it might benefit random people with unknown intentions who may or may not study our history is taking it a little far.
Well most of them are relatively ineffective and most of them don’t study histories of social movements. As for the ones that do, they don’t look up obscure things such as this. When people spend significant time looking at the history of social movements, they look at large, notable, well documented cases. They will not look at a few people’s online actions. There is no shortage of stories of people doing online things at this low level of notability and size.
That’s fair.