I fear we have yet to truly refute Robin Hanson’s claim that EA is primarily a youth movement.
Wow. This is my first time reading that Robin Hanson blog post from 2015.
When I was around 18 to 20 or 21, I was swept up in political radicalism, and then I became a pretty strong skeptic of political radicalism afterward — although it always bears mentioning that such things are too complex to cram into an either/or binary and the only way to do them justice is try to sort the good from the bad.
I think largely because of this experience I was pretty skeptical of radicalism in EA when I got involved with my university EA group from around age 23 to 25 or 26. I don’t like it when ideas become hungry and try to take over everything. Going from a view on charity effectiveness and our moral obligation to donate 10% of our income to charity to a worldview that encompassed more and more and more was never a move I supported or felt comfortable with.[1]
It has always seemed to me that the more EA tried to stretch beyond its original scope of charity effectiveness and an obligation to give, which Peter Singer articulated in The Life You Can Save in 2009,[2] the more it was either endorsing dubious, poorly-supported conclusions or trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles for no particularly good reason.
I think this paragraph from Hanson’s blog post is devastatingly accurate:
Some observers see effective altruism as being about using formal statistics or applying consensus scientific theories. But in fact effective altruists embrace contrarian concerns about AI “foom” (discussed often on this blog), concerns based neither on formal statistics nor on applying consensus theories. Instead this community just trusts its own judgment on what reasoning is “careful,” without worrying much if outsiders disagree. This community has a strong overlap with a “rationalist” community wherein people take classes on and much discuss how to be “rational”, and then decide that they have achieved enough rationality to justify embracing many quite contrarian conclusions.
If you think that effective altruism has discovered or invented radically novel and radically superior general-purpose principles for how to think, live, be rational, or be moral, I’m sorry, but that’s ludicrous. EA is a mish-mash of ideas from analytic moral philosophy, international development, public health, a bit of economics and finance, and a bit of a few other things. That’s all.
I think the trajectory that is healthy is when people who have strong conviction in EA start with a radical critique of the status quo (e.g. a lot of things like cancer research or art or politics or volunteering with lonely seniors seem a lot less effective than GiveWell charities or the like, so we should scorn them), then see the rationales for the status quo (e.g. ultimately, society would start to fall apart if tried to divert too many resources to GiveWell charities and the like by taking them away from everything else), and then come full circle back around to some less radical position (e.g. as many people as possible should donate 10-20% of their income to effective charities, and some people should try to work directly in high-priority cause areas).
This healthy trajectory is what I thought of when Hanson said that youth movements eventually “moderate their positions” and “become willing to compromise”.
I think the trajectory that is unhealthy is when people repudiate the status quo in some overall sense, seemingly often at least partially because it fills certain emotional needs to make the world other than oneself and to condemn its wicked ways.
Many (though not all) effective altruists seem content to accept the consensus view on most topics, to more or less trust people in general, to trust most mainstream institutions like academia, journalism, and the civil service (of liberal democratic countries), and they don’t particularly seek out being contrarian or radical or to reject the world.
On the other hand, this impulse to reject the world and be other than it is probably the central impulse that characterizes LessWrong and the rationalist community. EA/rationalist blogosphere writer Ozy Brennan wrote an insightful blog post about rationalists and the “cultic milieu”, a concept from sociology that refers to new religious movements rather than the high-control groups we typically think of when we think of “cults”. (Read the post if you want more context.) They wrote:
People become rationalists because they are attracted to the cultic milieu—that is, people who distrust authority and want to figure things out for themselves and like knowing secrets that no one else knows. People who are attracted to the cultic milieu are attracted to stigmatized knowledge whether or not it is in fact correct.
In a similar vein, the EA Forum member Maniano wrote a post where they conveyed their impression of EAs and rationalists (abbreviating “rationalists” to “rats”, as is not uncommon for rationalists to do):
If I’d have to vaguely point to a specific difference in the vibes of an EAs and those of rats, I would say EAs feel more innocent whereas rats might, with possibly a little bit too much generalization, feel like they’d rank higher in some dark triad traits and feature more of chuunibyou tendencies sprinkled with a dash of narrative addiction.
I don’t know for sure what “narrative addiction” means, but I suspect what the author meant is something similar to the sort of psychological tendencies Ozy Brennan described in the post about the cultic milieu. Namely, the same sort of tendency often seen among people who buy into conspiracy theories or the paranoid style in politics to think about the world narratively rather than causally, to favour narratively compelling accounts of events (especially those containing intrigue, secrets, betrayal, and danger) rather than awkward, clunky, uncertain, confusing, and narratively unsatisfying accounts of events.
From the linked Wikipedia article:
Chūnibyō (中二病; lit. ‘middle-school second-year syndrome’) is a Japanese colloquial term typically used to describe adolescents with delusions of grandeur. These teenagers are thought to desperately want to stand out and convince themselves that they have hidden knowledge or secret powers. It is sometimes called “eighth-grader syndrome” in the United States, usually in the context of localizations of anime which feature the concept as a significant plot element.
I think seeing oneself as other than the wicked world is not a tendency that is inherent to effective altruism or a necessary part of the package. But it is a fundamental part of rationalism. Similarly, EA can be kept safely in one corner of your life, even as some people might try to convince you it needs to eat more of your life. But it seems like the whole idea of rationalism is that it takes over. The whole idea is that it’s a radical new way to think, live, be rational, and be moral and/or successful.
I wonder if the kind of boredom you described, Michael, that might eventually set in from a simpler The Life You Can Save-style effective altruism is part of what has motivated people to seek a more expansive (and eventually maybe even totalizing) version of effective altruism — because that bigger version is more exciting (even if it’s wrong, and even if it’s wrong and harmful).
Personally, I would love to be involved in a version of effective altruism that felt more like a wholesome, warm, inclusive liberal church with an emphasis on community, social ties, and participation. (Come to think of it, one of the main people at the university EA group I was involved in said he learned how to be warm and welcoming to people through church. And he was good at it!) I am not really interested in the postmodernist cyberpunk novel version of effective altruism, which is cold, mean, and unhappy.
I think we should be willing to entertain radical ideas but have a very high bar for accepting them, noting that many ideas considered foundational today were once radical, but also noting that most radical ideas are wrong and some can lead to dangerous or harmful consequences.
Another thing to consider is how hungry these ideas are, as I mentioned. Some radical ideas have a limited scope of application. For example, polyamory is a radical idea for romantic relationships, but it only affects your romantic relationships. Polyamory doesn’t tell you to quit your current job and find a new job where you convince monogamous people to become polyamorous. Or provide services to people who are already polyamorous. Polyamory doesn’t tell you to have any particular opinions about politics — besides maybe narrow things like rights (e.g. hospital visitation rights) for people in polyamorous relationships — or technology or culture or the fate of the world.
When radical ideas become totalizing and want to be the axis around which the world turns, that’s when I start to feel alarmed.
The Life You Can Save is an example of a radical idea — one I think we should accept — that, similar to polyamory, may affect our lives in a significant way, but is naturally limited in scope. The Life You Can Save is an expression of a simple and straightforward version of effective altruism. As people have wanted the scope of effective altruism to get larger and larger over time, that has led to the accretion of a more complicated and eclectic version of effective altruism that I think is a lot more dubious.
Ha! Thanks for the great comment (also very funny!!) to a great post. Really resonates with me re:
warmth of community being a prime motivator for me to get involved in something or stick with something
Re the Less Wrong community and what you said about them teaching themselves rationality and then deciding at some point that they know enough to be more rational than the average person. Yes!! It is sooo counterproductive and often results in overconfidence and, frankly, often, misplaced arrogance and contrarian attitudes. It’s a shame, but I think with a name like that, Less Wrong was inevitably going to attract that kind of mindset.
Also, LOL about ‘chunibyo’ - will be using that word!
I also agree with OP that it can often feel like EA and its connected circles find it good to treat their members like disembodied thinking machines and often completely erase their wider personality from the picture, unlike other spaces like church which OP describes, where IRL embodied experiences are observed and valued, and real human needs such as the community aspect, are met. In my case it wasn’t church but I have really enjoyed being part of direct action environmental groups, BECAUSE of the human element and the thrill of doing things IRL with nice people.
It’s so draining not to be seen!… And no one lives their lives constantly thinking about EA topics.
Also, from the perspective of improving the quality of arguments, considering forum members as ‘disembodied thinking beings’ rather than very real human beings with different personalities, history, genders, bodies, nationalities, languages etc hurts the discourse in two ways:
It prevents us from monitoring demographic information of people taking part in debates to make sure we have a broad enough range of perspectives—because, yes, new perspectives are often the product of unique LIVED experiences (Eg feminist economics, etc).
Not paying attention to the person behind the arguments means missing an opportunity to be aware of any potential biases in the arguments. Encouraging people to bring ‘their whole selves to the discourse’ would also nudge them towards more intellectual rigour, as they will be scrutinised more.
I think it’s a shame that OP feels like he cannot contribute to the EA movement and surely it speaks to a failure to show people how they can contribute, but I think that for example the work that goes into making a community happy and engaged is just as important as whatever work that community does. A parallel I can think of is Reproductive Labour. For so long domestic work or the work of making and raising children (traditionally done by women) was considered economically useless or even harmful to the broader economy by mainstream (and often male) economists. But when feminist economists came along they explained that all that housework was a precondition to any economic work being done at all — you cannot go to work without food in your tummy, or if there’s no one to look after the children (or even make and raise the children who will become workers in turn!). So whatever your method for estimating, it’s immensely valuable (a quick Google estimates its value in the UK to be 1.24 Trillion pounds annually, compared to an overall size of the economy of about £2.7 trillion pounds.). This aspect of the economy, reproductive labour, doesn’t appear on GDP measures, but is absolutely essential to everything else happening.
There’s a parallel here because I think in order the support the amazing work that goes on in the more concrete sides of EA (eg research, fantastic blog posts, charity entrepreneurship, fundraising etc) we need the human fuel to sustain it. That can mean memes, or frankly fun meetups, and deep friendships that go beyond a purely corporate feel.
In the environmental groups I was a part of people would meet for random things like knitting or banner-making and although they weren’t ‘effective’ things to do they supported the rest of the work. It’s very hard to stay involved with a movement that sees everything through the lens of extreme productivity and effectiveness.
I think everyone on this forum agrees that taking time to do things just for fun is important for well being and long term productivity.
What if being REALLY serious about fun and play, in the way that Google and the other Silicon Valley companies used to be known for (toboggans in the offices, playrooms etc), was a way to make the EA community both more inclusive and more effective? I really believe there’s a good case to be made for this and would solve the problem that OP has of not feeling like his needs for community and fun are being met AND the uncertainty about what they can contribute.
Beautiful comment. I wholeheartedly agree that fun and friendship are not an extra or a nice-to-have, but are the lifeblood of communities and movements.
people who have strong conviction in EA start with a radical critique of the status quo (e.g. a lot of things like cancer research or art or politics or volunteering with lonely seniors seem a lot less effective than GiveWell charities or the like, so we should scorn them), then see the rationales for the status quo (e.g. ultimately, society would start to fall apart if tried to divert too many resources to GiveWell charities and the like by taking them away from everything else), and then come full circle back around to some less radical position
I agree that we probably shouldn’t just defund all arts/cancer/old people charities overnight, but there are lots of causes that plausibly ‘deserve’ way less funding on the margin which would be better spent by GiveWell without society falling apart.
I take a Chesterton’s fence sorta view here where I imagine a world which has zero arts funding and maybe that ends up being impoverished in a hard-to-quantify way, and that seems worth avoiding. But for the time being I’m happy to tell people to stop donating to the Cancer Research UK and send it to AMF instead.
Yes, there is an important difference between doing something yourself or recommending it to others (when you don’t expect to persuade the whole world) vs. a prescription for the whole world to universally follow. So, maybe it’s good to stop donating to anything but GiveWell-recommended charities and suggest the same to others, but maybe it would end up being bad if literally the whole world suddenly did this.
It’s also different to say that society’s priorities or allocation of resources, as a whole, should be shifted somewhat in one direct or another than to say, I don’t know, developed countries should abolish their welfare systems and give the money to GiveWell.
The real life example that sticks out in my mind is when someone who was involved in our university EA group talked about volunteering with seniors and someone else told her this was self-interested rather than altruistic. To me, that is just a deeply unwise and overzealous thing to say. (In that group, we also discussed the value of novels and funding for cancer research and we had people arguing both sides of each issue.)
My attitude on those things was that there is no cost to me at least taking a cautious approach and trying to practice humility with these topics. I wasn’t trying to tell people to devote every ounce of their lives to effective altruism (not that I could convince people even if I wanted to) but actually proposing something much more modest — switching whatever they donated to a GiveWell charity, maybe pledging to give 10% of their income, things of that nature.
If we were pitching the Against Malaria Foundation to a student group planning a fundraiser, then I would see my goal as persuading them to donate to AMF and if they decided to donate to AMF, that would be success. If we did a presentation like a Giving Game, I didn’t mind trying to give people a little razzle dazzle — that was the whole idea.
But if someone came to our EA group alone, though, my attitude was more like: “Here’s the idea. What do you think?” I never felt like it was for me to try to convert anybody. (Does that actually even work?) I always wanted to respect people’s autonomy and their humanity. That felt sacred to me. And, honestly, I just don’t have the stomach to give someone a hard sell. I could never be a telemarketer.
Wow. This is my first time reading that Robin Hanson blog post from 2015.
When I was around 18 to 20 or 21, I was swept up in political radicalism, and then I became a pretty strong skeptic of political radicalism afterward — although it always bears mentioning that such things are too complex to cram into an either/or binary and the only way to do them justice is try to sort the good from the bad.
I think largely because of this experience I was pretty skeptical of radicalism in EA when I got involved with my university EA group from around age 23 to 25 or 26. I don’t like it when ideas become hungry and try to take over everything. Going from a view on charity effectiveness and our moral obligation to donate 10% of our income to charity to a worldview that encompassed more and more and more was never a move I supported or felt comfortable with.[1]
It has always seemed to me that the more EA tried to stretch beyond its original scope of charity effectiveness and an obligation to give, which Peter Singer articulated in The Life You Can Save in 2009,[2] the more it was either endorsing dubious, poorly-supported conclusions or trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles for no particularly good reason.
I think this paragraph from Hanson’s blog post is devastatingly accurate:
If you think that effective altruism has discovered or invented radically novel and radically superior general-purpose principles for how to think, live, be rational, or be moral, I’m sorry, but that’s ludicrous. EA is a mish-mash of ideas from analytic moral philosophy, international development, public health, a bit of economics and finance, and a bit of a few other things. That’s all.
I think the trajectory that is healthy is when people who have strong conviction in EA start with a radical critique of the status quo (e.g. a lot of things like cancer research or art or politics or volunteering with lonely seniors seem a lot less effective than GiveWell charities or the like, so we should scorn them), then see the rationales for the status quo (e.g. ultimately, society would start to fall apart if tried to divert too many resources to GiveWell charities and the like by taking them away from everything else), and then come full circle back around to some less radical position (e.g. as many people as possible should donate 10-20% of their income to effective charities, and some people should try to work directly in high-priority cause areas).
This healthy trajectory is what I thought of when Hanson said that youth movements eventually “moderate their positions” and “become willing to compromise”.
I think the trajectory that is unhealthy is when people repudiate the status quo in some overall sense, seemingly often at least partially because it fills certain emotional needs to make the world other than oneself and to condemn its wicked ways.
Many (though not all) effective altruists seem content to accept the consensus view on most topics, to more or less trust people in general, to trust most mainstream institutions like academia, journalism, and the civil service (of liberal democratic countries), and they don’t particularly seek out being contrarian or radical or to reject the world.
On the other hand, this impulse to reject the world and be other than it is probably the central impulse that characterizes LessWrong and the rationalist community. EA/rationalist blogosphere writer Ozy Brennan wrote an insightful blog post about rationalists and the “cultic milieu”, a concept from sociology that refers to new religious movements rather than the high-control groups we typically think of when we think of “cults”. (Read the post if you want more context.) They wrote:
In a similar vein, the EA Forum member Maniano wrote a post where they conveyed their impression of EAs and rationalists (abbreviating “rationalists” to “rats”, as is not uncommon for rationalists to do):
I don’t know for sure what “narrative addiction” means, but I suspect what the author meant is something similar to the sort of psychological tendencies Ozy Brennan described in the post about the cultic milieu. Namely, the same sort of tendency often seen among people who buy into conspiracy theories or the paranoid style in politics to think about the world narratively rather than causally, to favour narratively compelling accounts of events (especially those containing intrigue, secrets, betrayal, and danger) rather than awkward, clunky, uncertain, confusing, and narratively unsatisfying accounts of events.
From the linked Wikipedia article:
I think seeing oneself as other than the wicked world is not a tendency that is inherent to effective altruism or a necessary part of the package. But it is a fundamental part of rationalism. Similarly, EA can be kept safely in one corner of your life, even as some people might try to convince you it needs to eat more of your life. But it seems like the whole idea of rationalism is that it takes over. The whole idea is that it’s a radical new way to think, live, be rational, and be moral and/or successful.
I wonder if the kind of boredom you described, Michael, that might eventually set in from a simpler The Life You Can Save-style effective altruism is part of what has motivated people to seek a more expansive (and eventually maybe even totalizing) version of effective altruism — because that bigger version is more exciting (even if it’s wrong, and even if it’s wrong and harmful).
Personally, I would love to be involved in a version of effective altruism that felt more like a wholesome, warm, inclusive liberal church with an emphasis on community, social ties, and participation. (Come to think of it, one of the main people at the university EA group I was involved in said he learned how to be warm and welcoming to people through church. And he was good at it!) I am not really interested in the postmodernist cyberpunk novel version of effective altruism, which is cold, mean, and unhappy.
I think we should be willing to entertain radical ideas but have a very high bar for accepting them, noting that many ideas considered foundational today were once radical, but also noting that most radical ideas are wrong and some can lead to dangerous or harmful consequences.
Another thing to consider is how hungry these ideas are, as I mentioned. Some radical ideas have a limited scope of application. For example, polyamory is a radical idea for romantic relationships, but it only affects your romantic relationships. Polyamory doesn’t tell you to quit your current job and find a new job where you convince monogamous people to become polyamorous. Or provide services to people who are already polyamorous. Polyamory doesn’t tell you to have any particular opinions about politics — besides maybe narrow things like rights (e.g. hospital visitation rights) for people in polyamorous relationships — or technology or culture or the fate of the world.
When radical ideas become totalizing and want to be the axis around which the world turns, that’s when I start to feel alarmed.
The Life You Can Save is an example of a radical idea — one I think we should accept — that, similar to polyamory, may affect our lives in a significant way, but is naturally limited in scope. The Life You Can Save is an expression of a simple and straightforward version of effective altruism. As people have wanted the scope of effective altruism to get larger and larger over time, that has led to the accretion of a more complicated and eclectic version of effective altruism that I think is a lot more dubious.
Ha! Thanks for the great comment (also very funny!!) to a great post. Really resonates with me re:
warmth of community being a prime motivator for me to get involved in something or stick with something
Re the Less Wrong community and what you said about them teaching themselves rationality and then deciding at some point that they know enough to be more rational than the average person. Yes!! It is sooo counterproductive and often results in overconfidence and, frankly, often, misplaced arrogance and contrarian attitudes. It’s a shame, but I think with a name like that, Less Wrong was inevitably going to attract that kind of mindset.
Also, LOL about ‘chunibyo’ - will be using that word!
I also agree with OP that it can often feel like EA and its connected circles find it good to treat their members like disembodied thinking machines and often completely erase their wider personality from the picture, unlike other spaces like church which OP describes, where IRL embodied experiences are observed and valued, and real human needs such as the community aspect, are met. In my case it wasn’t church but I have really enjoyed being part of direct action environmental groups, BECAUSE of the human element and the thrill of doing things IRL with nice people.
It’s so draining not to be seen!… And no one lives their lives constantly thinking about EA topics.
Also, from the perspective of improving the quality of arguments, considering forum members as ‘disembodied thinking beings’ rather than very real human beings with different personalities, history, genders, bodies, nationalities, languages etc hurts the discourse in two ways:
It prevents us from monitoring demographic information of people taking part in debates to make sure we have a broad enough range of perspectives—because, yes, new perspectives are often the product of unique LIVED experiences (Eg feminist economics, etc).
Not paying attention to the person behind the arguments means missing an opportunity to be aware of any potential biases in the arguments. Encouraging people to bring ‘their whole selves to the discourse’ would also nudge them towards more intellectual rigour, as they will be scrutinised more.
I think it’s a shame that OP feels like he cannot contribute to the EA movement and surely it speaks to a failure to show people how they can contribute, but I think that for example the work that goes into making a community happy and engaged is just as important as whatever work that community does. A parallel I can think of is Reproductive Labour. For so long domestic work or the work of making and raising children (traditionally done by women) was considered economically useless or even harmful to the broader economy by mainstream (and often male) economists. But when feminist economists came along they explained that all that housework was a precondition to any economic work being done at all — you cannot go to work without food in your tummy, or if there’s no one to look after the children (or even make and raise the children who will become workers in turn!). So whatever your method for estimating, it’s immensely valuable (a quick Google estimates its value in the UK to be 1.24 Trillion pounds annually, compared to an overall size of the economy of about £2.7 trillion pounds.). This aspect of the economy, reproductive labour, doesn’t appear on GDP measures, but is absolutely essential to everything else happening.
There’s a parallel here because I think in order the support the amazing work that goes on in the more concrete sides of EA (eg research, fantastic blog posts, charity entrepreneurship, fundraising etc) we need the human fuel to sustain it. That can mean memes, or frankly fun meetups, and deep friendships that go beyond a purely corporate feel.
In the environmental groups I was a part of people would meet for random things like knitting or banner-making and although they weren’t ‘effective’ things to do they supported the rest of the work. It’s very hard to stay involved with a movement that sees everything through the lens of extreme productivity and effectiveness.
I think everyone on this forum agrees that taking time to do things just for fun is important for well being and long term productivity.
What if being REALLY serious about fun and play, in the way that Google and the other Silicon Valley companies used to be known for (toboggans in the offices, playrooms etc), was a way to make the EA community both more inclusive and more effective? I really believe there’s a good case to be made for this and would solve the problem that OP has of not feeling like his needs for community and fun are being met AND the uncertainty about what they can contribute.
Beautiful comment. I wholeheartedly agree that fun and friendship are not an extra or a nice-to-have, but are the lifeblood of communities and movements.
I agree that we probably shouldn’t just defund all arts/cancer/old people charities overnight, but there are lots of causes that plausibly ‘deserve’ way less funding on the margin which would be better spent by GiveWell without society falling apart.
I take a Chesterton’s fence sorta view here where I imagine a world which has zero arts funding and maybe that ends up being impoverished in a hard-to-quantify way, and that seems worth avoiding. But for the time being I’m happy to tell people to stop donating to the Cancer Research UK and send it to AMF instead.
Yes, there is an important difference between doing something yourself or recommending it to others (when you don’t expect to persuade the whole world) vs. a prescription for the whole world to universally follow. So, maybe it’s good to stop donating to anything but GiveWell-recommended charities and suggest the same to others, but maybe it would end up being bad if literally the whole world suddenly did this.
It’s also different to say that society’s priorities or allocation of resources, as a whole, should be shifted somewhat in one direct or another than to say, I don’t know, developed countries should abolish their welfare systems and give the money to GiveWell.
The real life example that sticks out in my mind is when someone who was involved in our university EA group talked about volunteering with seniors and someone else told her this was self-interested rather than altruistic. To me, that is just a deeply unwise and overzealous thing to say. (In that group, we also discussed the value of novels and funding for cancer research and we had people arguing both sides of each issue.)
My attitude on those things was that there is no cost to me at least taking a cautious approach and trying to practice humility with these topics. I wasn’t trying to tell people to devote every ounce of their lives to effective altruism (not that I could convince people even if I wanted to) but actually proposing something much more modest — switching whatever they donated to a GiveWell charity, maybe pledging to give 10% of their income, things of that nature.
If we were pitching the Against Malaria Foundation to a student group planning a fundraiser, then I would see my goal as persuading them to donate to AMF and if they decided to donate to AMF, that would be success. If we did a presentation like a Giving Game, I didn’t mind trying to give people a little razzle dazzle — that was the whole idea.
But if someone came to our EA group alone, though, my attitude was more like: “Here’s the idea. What do you think?” I never felt like it was for me to try to convert anybody. (Does that actually even work?) I always wanted to respect people’s autonomy and their humanity. That felt sacred to me. And, honestly, I just don’t have the stomach to give someone a hard sell. I could never be a telemarketer.