1a. This is intolerable. Adopt a maxim like “first, do no harm”
1b. This is tolerable. Adopt a maxim like “to make an omelette you’ll have to break a few eggs”
1c. This is desirable. Adopt a maxim like “blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne”
SBF violated EA community standards
2a. This is intolerable. Standards adherence should be prioritised above income-generation.
2b. This is tolerable. Standards violations should be permitted on a risk-adjusted basis.
2c. This is desirable. Standards violations should be encouraged to foster anti-fragility.
EA community standards are unclear
3a. This is intolerable. Clarity must be improved as a matter of urgency.
3b. This is tolerable. Improved clarity would be nice but it’s not a priority.
3c. This is desirable. In the midst of chaos there is also opportunity.
I’m a relative outsider and I don’t know which world the community thinks it is in, or which stance it is adopting in that world.
Some hypotheses:
When trying to guide altruists, it matters what problem-domain they are operating in.
In the obvious domain, solutions are known. If you have the aptitude, be a doctor rather than a small-time pimp.
In a complicated domain, solutions are found through analysis. Seems like the EA community is analytically minded, so may have a bias towards characterising complex and chaotic problems as complicated. This is dangerous because in the complicated domain, the value of iteration and incrementalism is low whereas in the complex domain it’s very high.
In a complex domain, solutions are found through experimentation. There should be a strong preference for ability to run more experiments.
In a chaotic domain, solutions are found through acting before your environment destroys you. There should be a strong preference for establishing easy to follow heuristics that are unlikely to introduce catastrophic risk across a wide range of environments.
2. Consequentialist ethics are inherently future-oriented. The future contains unknown unknowns and unknowable unknowns, so any system of consequentialist ethics is always working in the complex and chaotic domains. Consequentialism proceeds by analytical reasoning, even if a subset of the reasoning is probabilistic, and this is not applicable to the complex and chaotic domains, so it’s not a useful framework.
3. What’s actually happening when thinking through things from a consequentialist perspective is that you are imagining possible futures and identifying ways to get there, which is an imaginative process not an analytical one.
4. Better frameworks would be present-oriented, focusing on needs and how to sustainably meet them. Virtue ethics and deontological ethics are present-oriented ethical frameworks that may have some value. Orientation towards establishing services and infrastructure at the right scale and resilience level, rather than outputs (e.g. lives-saved) would be more fruitful over the long-term.
Some possible worlds:
SBF was aligned with EA
Some possible stances in these worlds:
I’m a relative outsider and I don’t know which world the community thinks it is in, or which stance it is adopting in that world.
Some hypotheses:
When trying to guide altruists, it matters what problem-domain they are operating in.
In the obvious domain, solutions are known. If you have the aptitude, be a doctor rather than a small-time pimp.
In a complicated domain, solutions are found through analysis. Seems like the EA community is analytically minded, so may have a bias towards characterising complex and chaotic problems as complicated. This is dangerous because in the complicated domain, the value of iteration and incrementalism is low whereas in the complex domain it’s very high.
In a complex domain, solutions are found through experimentation. There should be a strong preference for ability to run more experiments.
In a chaotic domain, solutions are found through acting before your environment destroys you. There should be a strong preference for establishing easy to follow heuristics that are unlikely to introduce catastrophic risk across a wide range of environments.
2. Consequentialist ethics are inherently future-oriented. The future contains unknown unknowns and unknowable unknowns, so any system of consequentialist ethics is always working in the complex and chaotic domains. Consequentialism proceeds by analytical reasoning, even if a subset of the reasoning is probabilistic, and this is not applicable to the complex and chaotic domains, so it’s not a useful framework.
3. What’s actually happening when thinking through things from a consequentialist perspective is that you are imagining possible futures and identifying ways to get there, which is an imaginative process not an analytical one.
4. Better frameworks would be present-oriented, focusing on needs and how to sustainably meet them. Virtue ethics and deontological ethics are present-oriented ethical frameworks that may have some value. Orientation towards establishing services and infrastructure at the right scale and resilience level, rather than outputs (e.g. lives-saved) would be more fruitful over the long-term.