Without going into specific details of each of your counter-arguments your reply made me ask myself: why would it be that for across a broad range of arguments I consistently find them more compelling than you do? Do we disagree on each of these points or is there some underlying crux?
I expect if there is a simple answer here it is that my intuitions are more lenient towards many of these arguments as I have found some amount of convergence to be a thing time and time again in my life to date. Maybe this would be an argument #11 and it might go like this:
#11. Having spent many years doing EA stuff, convergence keeps happening to me.
When doing UK policy work the coalition we built essentially combined long- and near-termist types. The main belief across both groups seemed to be that the world is chronically short term and if we want to prevent problems (x-risks, people falling into homelessness) we need to fix government and make it less short-term. (This looks like evidence of #1 happening in practice). This is a form of improving institutional decision making (which looks like #6).
Helping government make good risk plans, e.g. for pandemics, came very high up the list of Charity Entrepreneurship’s neartermist policy interventions to focus on. It was tractable and reasonably well evidenced. Had CE believed that Toby’s estimates of risks were correct it would have looked extremely cost-effective too. (This looks like #2).
People I know seem to work in longtermist orgs, where talent is needed, but donate to neartermist orgs, where money is needed. (This looks like #5).
In the EA meta and community building work I have done covering both long- and near-term causes seems advantageous. For example Charity Entrepreneurship’s model (talent + ideas > new charities) is based on regularly switching cause areas. (This looks like #6.)
Etc.
It doesn’t feel like I really disagree with any thing concrete that you wrote (except maybe I think you overstate the conflict between long- and near-term animal welfare folk), more that you and I have different intuitions on how much this all points push towards convergence being possible, or at least not suspicious. And maybe those intuitions, as intuitions often do, arise from different lived experiences to date. So hopefully the above captures some of my lived experiences.
Without going into specific details of each of your counter-arguments your reply made me ask myself: why would it be that for across a broad range of arguments I consistently find them more compelling than you do? Do we disagree on each of these points or is there some underlying crux?
I expect if there is a simple answer here it is that my intuitions are more lenient towards many of these arguments as I have found some amount of convergence to be a thing time and time again in my life to date. Maybe this would be an argument #11 and it might go like this:
#11. Having spent many years doing EA stuff, convergence keeps happening to me.
When doing UK policy work the coalition we built essentially combined long- and near-termist types. The main belief across both groups seemed to be that the world is chronically short term and if we want to prevent problems (x-risks, people falling into homelessness) we need to fix government and make it less short-term. (This looks like evidence of #1 happening in practice). This is a form of improving institutional decision making (which looks like #6).
Helping government make good risk plans, e.g. for pandemics, came very high up the list of Charity Entrepreneurship’s neartermist policy interventions to focus on. It was tractable and reasonably well evidenced. Had CE believed that Toby’s estimates of risks were correct it would have looked extremely cost-effective too. (This looks like #2).
People I know seem to work in longtermist orgs, where talent is needed, but donate to neartermist orgs, where money is needed. (This looks like #5).
In the EA meta and community building work I have done covering both long- and near-term causes seems advantageous. For example Charity Entrepreneurship’s model (talent + ideas > new charities) is based on regularly switching cause areas. (This looks like #6.)
Etc.
It doesn’t feel like I really disagree with any thing concrete that you wrote (except maybe I think you overstate the conflict between long- and near-term animal welfare folk), more that you and I have different intuitions on how much this all points push towards convergence being possible, or at least not suspicious. And maybe those intuitions, as intuitions often do, arise from different lived experiences to date. So hopefully the above captures some of my lived experiences.