Thank you so much for writing this.
Effective altruists talk a lot about ethics. It’s fun to get into the nitty-gritty of virtue ethics versus deontology. But, frankly, the core effective altruist beliefs are platitudes, the kind of thing I teach my four-year-old. “It is bad to hurt animals.” “Every person matters equally, even if they are poor or black or far away.” “We should care about the effects of our actions on future generations.” “We should try to figure out what ways of helping people work the best and do those instead of ones that don’t work as well.”
But if you actually take those platitudes seriously they lead to bizarre actions. You donate a kidney to a stranger. You skip a vacation to pay for children you don’t know not to get a disease you can’t pronounce. You shut down a charity that donors love because the evidence isn’t good enough. You decide that rather than being a doctor you’ll help sentient beings more if you become a food scientist and make soybeans taste really really good. You spend a lot of time talking about worries that sound like science fiction movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This is just so powerful and so true, tbh it almost made me tear up, really describes well what we should be about here.
This is just speculation, but maybe this is also why women are less likely to participate in forecasting tournaments? It does take a certain level of confidence / arrogance to see a question about e.g. NATO expansion and think “Yeah, of course I can come up with a prediction on that”.
I think it is very good that FRI is looking to create a diverse team, but I also think that forecasting has a pipeline problem where the participants in tournaments seem to be overwhelmingly male. Maybe they are also the kind of organization that could do some work on figuring out why this is the case and what we can do to solve this?