I feel like this is true for me too. I’d guess I’ve got more spare time on my hands than you guys. I also don’t currently work for any EA charities. It’s really hard to make your beliefs pay rent when you’re in near mode and you’re constantly worried about how if you screw up a criticism you’ll lose connections and get ostracized, or you’ll hurt the trajectory of a cause or charity you like by association because as much as we like to say we’re debiased a lot of time affective rationalizations sneak into our motivations. Well, we all come from different walks of life, and a lot of us haven’t been in communities trying to be as intellectually honest and epistemically virtuous as EA tries to be. It’s hard to overcome that aversion to keeping our guard up because everywhere else we go in life our new ideas are treated utterly uncharitably, like, worse than anything in EA on a regular day. It’s hard to unlearn those patterns. We as a community need to find ways to trust each other more. But that takes a lot of work, and will take a while.
In the meantime, I don’t have a lot to lose by criticizing EA, or at least I can take a hit pretty well. I mean, maybe there are social opportunity costs, what I won’t be able to do in the future if I became low-status, but I’m confident I’m the sort of person who can create new opportunities for himself. So I’m not worried about me, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I’ve never had a cause selection. Honestly, it felt weird to talk about, but this whole model uncertainty thing people are going for between causes now is something I’ve implicitly grasped the whole time. Like, I never understood why everyone was so confident in their views on causes when a bunch of this stuff requires figuring out things about consciousness, or the value of future lives, which seem like some philosophically and historically mind-boggling puzzles to me.
If you go to my EAHub profile, you’ll notice the biggest donation I made was in 2014 for $1000 to Givewell for unrestricted funds. That was because I knew those funds would increase the pool of money for starting the Open Philanthropy Project. And it was matched. You’ll also notice I select pretty much every cause as something to consider, as I’m paranoid about myself or EA in general missing out on important information. All I can say about my politics is I’m a civil libertarian and otherwise I don’t get offended by reading things when they’re written by people who want to improve EA in earnest. I hope you’ll take my word that I didn’t just edit my EA Hub profile now. That’s what I got for a badge to show I really try to stay neutral.
If anyone wants to privately and/or anonymously send me their thoughts on an EA organization, and what they’re doing wrong, no matter what it is, I’ll give my honest feedback and we can have a back and forth and hopefully hammer something out to be published. I also don’t particularly favour any EA org right now as I feel like a lot of these organizations are people who’ve only been in academia, or the software industry, or are sometimes starting non-profits right out of college, who might just not have the type or diversity of experience to alone make good plans/models, or get skills for dealing with different types of people and getting things done. I’ve thought for a while all these organizations at different points have made little or big mistakes, which are really hard to talk about in public, and it feels a bit absurd to me they’re never talked about.
Feel free to send me stuff. Please don’t send me stuff about interpersonal drama. Treat what you send me like filing a bug report.
I feel like this is true for me too. I’d guess I’ve got more spare time on my hands than you guys. I also don’t currently work for any EA charities. It’s really hard to make your beliefs pay rent when you’re in near mode and you’re constantly worried about how if you screw up a criticism you’ll lose connections and get ostracized, or you’ll hurt the trajectory of a cause or charity you like by association because as much as we like to say we’re debiased a lot of time affective rationalizations sneak into our motivations. Well, we all come from different walks of life, and a lot of us haven’t been in communities trying to be as intellectually honest and epistemically virtuous as EA tries to be. It’s hard to overcome that aversion to keeping our guard up because everywhere else we go in life our new ideas are treated utterly uncharitably, like, worse than anything in EA on a regular day. It’s hard to unlearn those patterns. We as a community need to find ways to trust each other more. But that takes a lot of work, and will take a while.
In the meantime, I don’t have a lot to lose by criticizing EA, or at least I can take a hit pretty well. I mean, maybe there are social opportunity costs, what I won’t be able to do in the future if I became low-status, but I’m confident I’m the sort of person who can create new opportunities for himself. So I’m not worried about me, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I’ve never had a cause selection. Honestly, it felt weird to talk about, but this whole model uncertainty thing people are going for between causes now is something I’ve implicitly grasped the whole time. Like, I never understood why everyone was so confident in their views on causes when a bunch of this stuff requires figuring out things about consciousness, or the value of future lives, which seem like some philosophically and historically mind-boggling puzzles to me.
If you go to my EAHub profile, you’ll notice the biggest donation I made was in 2014 for $1000 to Givewell for unrestricted funds. That was because I knew those funds would increase the pool of money for starting the Open Philanthropy Project. And it was matched. You’ll also notice I select pretty much every cause as something to consider, as I’m paranoid about myself or EA in general missing out on important information. All I can say about my politics is I’m a civil libertarian and otherwise I don’t get offended by reading things when they’re written by people who want to improve EA in earnest. I hope you’ll take my word that I didn’t just edit my EA Hub profile now. That’s what I got for a badge to show I really try to stay neutral.
If anyone wants to privately and/or anonymously send me their thoughts on an EA organization, and what they’re doing wrong, no matter what it is, I’ll give my honest feedback and we can have a back and forth and hopefully hammer something out to be published. I also don’t particularly favour any EA org right now as I feel like a lot of these organizations are people who’ve only been in academia, or the software industry, or are sometimes starting non-profits right out of college, who might just not have the type or diversity of experience to alone make good plans/models, or get skills for dealing with different types of people and getting things done. I’ve thought for a while all these organizations at different points have made little or big mistakes, which are really hard to talk about in public, and it feels a bit absurd to me they’re never talked about.
Feel free to send me stuff. Please don’t send me stuff about interpersonal drama. Treat what you send me like filing a bug report.