What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with “mainstream common sense morality views” in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.
I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
I don’t know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.
Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage (“oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too”), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.
In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.
It’s also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.
I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn’t trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.
The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I’d be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?
For the groupthink point, I’m not sure if anything can be done. I’d be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here.
It’s fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I’m not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I’m uncertain, that “asking the audience” or democracy seem like a good way to use the “wisdom of crowds” effect to get a relatively good prior.
I’m actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I’m feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
Regarding the majority vote, I think “asking the audience” is not a good recipe when the audience is not very informed, which seems to be the case here (where would they get the information without much personal research?)
I understand trusting the wisdom of the crowds in situations where people reasonably understand the situation (to take a classic example, guessing the weight of a pig). However, most people here likely have little information about all the different ways animals are suffering, the scale, research about sentience, knowledge about scope insensitivity, and arguments in favour of things like speciesm. Which makes sense! Not everybody is looking at it deeply.
But this doesn’t provide a very good context for relying on the wisdom of the crowd.
One could also consider the general EA / EA-adjacent sentiment over time as a cross-check on the risk of current groupthink. Of course, later EAs could be responding to better evidence not available to earlier EAs. But I would also consider the possibility of changes in other factors (like perceived status, available funding for EAs, perceived lack of novel opportunities in a mature cause area that has strong interventions with near-limitless room for more funding) playing a major role.
What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with “mainstream common sense morality views” in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.
I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
I don’t know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.
Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage (“oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too”), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.
In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.
It’s also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.
I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn’t trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.
The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I’d be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?
For the groupthink point, I’m not sure if anything can be done. I’d be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here.
It’s fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I’m not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I’m uncertain, that “asking the audience” or democracy seem like a good way to use the “wisdom of crowds” effect to get a relatively good prior.
I’m actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I’m feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
Regarding the majority vote, I think “asking the audience” is not a good recipe when the audience is not very informed, which seems to be the case here (where would they get the information without much personal research?)
I understand trusting the wisdom of the crowds in situations where people reasonably understand the situation (to take a classic example, guessing the weight of a pig). However, most people here likely have little information about all the different ways animals are suffering, the scale, research about sentience, knowledge about scope insensitivity, and arguments in favour of things like speciesm. Which makes sense! Not everybody is looking at it deeply.
But this doesn’t provide a very good context for relying on the wisdom of the crowd.
One could also consider the general EA / EA-adjacent sentiment over time as a cross-check on the risk of current groupthink. Of course, later EAs could be responding to better evidence not available to earlier EAs. But I would also consider the possibility of changes in other factors (like perceived status, available funding for EAs, perceived lack of novel opportunities in a mature cause area that has strong interventions with near-limitless room for more funding) playing a major role.