This doesn’t add much to the conversation. Obviously people get over-excited by EA and the personal and philosophical opportunities it provides to make an impact will lead lots of people being overconfident in their long-term commitment, and they’ll turn out not to be as altruistic as they think. The OP is already concerned about a default state of people becoming less altruistic over time, and focuses on how we can keep ourselves more altruistic than we’d otherwise tend to be, long-term, through things like commitment mechanisms. So theories of psychology which don’t specify the mechanisms by which commitment devices fail aren’t precise enough to be useful in answering the question of what to do about value drift to our satisfaction.
I wasn’t commenting on the overall intention but on enumerations of causal levers outlined by economists in the talks given. I was objecting to the frame that these causal levers are obfuscated. I think presenting them as such is a way around them being low status to talk about directly.
Thanks for the context. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve undid my downvote on your parent comment, upvoted it, and also upvoted the above. (I think it’s important, as awkward as it might be, for rationalists and effective altruists to explicate their reasoning at various points throughout their conversation, and how they update at the end, to create a context of rationalists intending their signals to be clear and received without ambiguity. It’s hard to get humans to treat each other with excellence, so if our monkey brains force us to treat each other like mere reinforcement learners, rationalists might as well be transparent and honest about it.)
It would appear the causal levers aren’t obfuscated. Which ones do you expect are the most underrated?
This doesn’t add much to the conversation. Obviously people get over-excited by EA and the personal and philosophical opportunities it provides to make an impact will lead lots of people being overconfident in their long-term commitment, and they’ll turn out not to be as altruistic as they think. The OP is already concerned about a default state of people becoming less altruistic over time, and focuses on how we can keep ourselves more altruistic than we’d otherwise tend to be, long-term, through things like commitment mechanisms. So theories of psychology which don’t specify the mechanisms by which commitment devices fail aren’t precise enough to be useful in answering the question of what to do about value drift to our satisfaction.
I wasn’t commenting on the overall intention but on enumerations of causal levers outlined by economists in the talks given. I was objecting to the frame that these causal levers are obfuscated. I think presenting them as such is a way around them being low status to talk about directly.
Thanks for the context. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve undid my downvote on your parent comment, upvoted it, and also upvoted the above. (I think it’s important, as awkward as it might be, for rationalists and effective altruists to explicate their reasoning at various points throughout their conversation, and how they update at the end, to create a context of rationalists intending their signals to be clear and received without ambiguity. It’s hard to get humans to treat each other with excellence, so if our monkey brains force us to treat each other like mere reinforcement learners, rationalists might as well be transparent and honest about it.)
It would appear the causal levers aren’t obfuscated. Which ones do you expect are the most underrated?