I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
So the EA Forum has, like, an ancestor? Is this common knowledge? Lol
Felicifia: not functional anymore but still available to view. Learned about thanks to a Tweet from Jacy
From Felicifia Is No Longer Accepting New Users:
Update: threw together
some data with authors, post title names, date, and number of replies (and messed one section up so some rows are missing links)
A rather long PDF with the posts and replies together (for quick keyword searching), with decent but not great formatting
Ok so things that get posted in the Shortform tab also appear in your (my) shortform post , which can be edited to not have the title “___′s shortform” and also has a real post body that is empty by default but you can just put stuff in.
There’s also the usual “frontpage” checkbox, so I assume an individual’s own shortform page can appear alongside normal posts(?).
The link is: [Draft] Used to be called “Aaron Bergman’s shortform” (or smth)
I assume only I can see this but gonna log out and check
Youtube (w/ accurate subtitles, embedded below)
RSS feed url: https://www.spreaker.com/show/5706170/episodes/feed
Drive folder with some scripts and other resources; may add more later!
(Will try to clean the thumbnail of my name and Spreaker logo, but don’t want to wait to share! )
...
Not certain and might take a couple days, but should be pretty easy (though not instantaneous) to basically make readouts in any English accent the new IOS can handle (‘British full version.m4a’ in the Drive folder is a sample, but has pronunciation issues due to weird text encoding)
Update: provisional text to speech audio (Siri reading that text file haha) now linked the top of the post!
Should be up on all the main podcast apps soon, but until then, you can listen on Spreaker at https://bit.ly/3UmQS85
I’m working on getting this to be read in a high quality voice, but for anyone else who wants to try/do it better, here’s a txt with what I think the voice should actually read (like no reading out page numbers and stuff like that): https://drive.google.com/file/d/155pb6tMkE-rSmrizi1jbzPKTMSmYJRDX/view?usp=drivesdk
Not 100% certain it’s correct though, likely a missing word or two
I’ll just throw out the possibility of copy and pasting the whole thing (with anywhere from zero to a lot of formatting/editing) into an EA Forum post, which (I assume?) would trigger the Nonlinear Library system to turn it into audio. This would also get it into the feeds of people who only consume the forum via podcast app.
Not able to write a real post about this atm, though I think it deserves one.
MacAskill makes a similar point in WWOTF, but IMO the best and most decision-relevant quote comes from his second appearance on the 80k podcast:
There are possible views in which you should give more weight to suffering...I think we should take that into account too, but then what happens? You end up with kind of a mix between the two, supposing you were 50⁄50 between classical utilitarian view and just strict negative utilitarian view. Then I think on the natural way of making the comparison between the two views, you give suffering twice as much weight as you otherwise would.
I don’t think the second bolded sentence follows in any objective or natural manner from the first. Rather, this reasoning takes a distinctly total utilitarian meta-level perspective, summing the various signs of utility and then implicitly considering them under total utilitarianism.
Even granting that the mora arithmetic is appropriate and correct, it’s not at all clear what to do once the 2:1 accounting is complete. MacAskill’s suffering-focused twin might have reasoned instead that
Negative and total utilitarianism are both 50% likely to be true, so we must give twice the normal amount of weight to happiness. However, since any sufficiently severe suffering morally outweighs any amount of happiness, the moral outlook on a world with twice as much wellbeing is the same as before
A better proxy for genuine neutrality (and the best one I can think of) might be to simulate bargaining over real-world outcomes from each perspective, which would probably result in at least some proportion of one’s resources being deployed as though negative utilitarianism were true (perhaps exactly 50%, though I haven’t given this enough thought to make the claim outright).
Person A can nominate Person B and have the card sent to her own (person A’s) address to then give it in person to person B. The website is super clear that this is allowed, all on honor system. I didn’t emphasize this to minimize how sus the whole thing sounded, but I am happy to act as conduit for anyone’s donation this way, or mail the card, or something else. Anyone can reach out if interested!
Contextual note: this post is essentially a null result. It seemed inappropriate both as a top-level post and as an abandoned Google Doc, so I’ve decided to put out the key bits (i.e., everything below) as Shortform. Feel free to comment/message me if you think that was the wrong call!
On his recent appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Will MacAskill noted that Doing Good Better was significantly influenced by the book’s publisher:[1]
Rob Wiblin: …But in 2014 you wrote Doing Good Better, and that somewhat soft pedals longtermism when you’re introducing effective altruism. So it seems like it was quite a long time before you got fully bought in.
Will MacAskill: Yeah. I should say for 2014, writing Doing Good Better, in some sense, the most accurate book that was fully representing my and colleagues’ EA thought would’ve been broader than the particular focus. And especially for my first book, there was a lot of equivalent of trade — like agreement with the publishers about what gets included. I also wanted to include a lot more on animal issues, but the publishers really didn’t like that, actually. Their thought was you just don’t want to make it too weird.
Rob Wiblin: I see, OK. They want to sell books and they were like, “Keep it fairly mainstream.”
Will MacAskill: Exactly...
I thought it was important to know whether the same was true with respect to What We Owe the Future, so I reached out to Will’s team and received the following response from one of his colleagues [emphasis mine]:
Hi Aaron, thanks for sending these questions and considering to make this info publicly available.
However, in contrast to what one might perhaps reasonably expect given what Will said about Doing Good Better, I think there is actually very little of interest that can be said on this topic regarding WWOTF. In particular:
I’m not aware of any material that was cut, or any other significant changes to the content of the book that were made significantly because of the publisher’s input. (At least since I joined Forethought in mid-2021; it’s possible there was some of this at earlier stages of the project, though I doubt it.) To be clear: The UK publisher’s editor read multiple drafts of the book and provided helpful comments, but Will generally changed things in response to these comments if and only if he was actually convinced by them.
(There are things other than the book’s content where the publisher exerted more influence – for instance, the publishers asked us for input on the book’s cover but made clear that the cover is ultimately their decision. Similarly, the publisher set the price of the book, and this is not something we were involved in at all.)
As Will talks about in more detail here, the book’s content would have been different in some ways if it had been written for a different audience – e.g., people already engaged in the EA community as opposed to the general public. But this was done by Will’s own choice/design rather than because of publisher intervention. And to be clear, I think this influenced the content in mundane and standard ways that are present in ~all communication efforts – understanding what your audience is, aiming to meet them where they are and delivering your messages in way that is accessible to them (rather than e.g. using overly technical language the audience might not be familiar with).
One thing I intuitively think could help a ton is an opt-out-only “First Post” (and also maybe “Second Post” and “Third Post”) tag placed on such posts.
I think it’s both good and true that Forum users would/do shift their qualitative feedback and voting in a more charitable direction if and when they knew that a particular post was a user’s first. But it currently takes a couple clicks to discern this information which I assume most people don’t actually go through upon reading every post by an author they don’t recognize. Of course charitable voting/commenting could go too far, but that seems like a fixable problem
To share a bit of my motivation for this idea, here’s my comment on “Your first posts will be cringe. It’s fine.” :
Literally true for me, down to the physical motion of cringing (maybe more like a grimace lol), a minute ago when I stared into the abyss.
Thanks to the 13 people who gave it a like to spare me some trauma at the time, though; in all seriousness, if it had gotten 3 karma instead of 20 I don’t think I would have tried again
Oh man that is not a pretty graph…
Same data, better resolution (and feel free to move this to the main post Vaidehi or Amber)
Haha thanks! But be sure to only read this comment if it’s a good use of your time
I have largely similar thoughts, but one disagreement:
“On the first level, you could say that money is really valuable…Against that you could argue that, well, we have an insane amount of money for the size of the movement” [cant see block quote option]
Yes, and I’d argue this (I.e. the interaction between these two levels) is where marginal changes and critiques should be directed because it’s where in practice reasons-responsive decisions about gazzilions of dollars are made.
That is, “EA” (really, a number of different people to different degrees, some of whom have >$10^9) have decided not to fully fund [both of our top charities] this coming year for some set of reasons having to do with cause prioritization. At the top, “EA” can decide that the next marginal dollar should go to GiveWell instead of wherever it’s implicitly going now. Unless I’m missing something it really is a $1-$1 tradeoff
But afaik saving $100 on total top-down EA Global-related spending doesn’t result in $100 going to GiveWell. I don’t understand the funding landscape/mechanisms well enough to know where it goes, but I’d guess it essentially winds up in slightly more slack in the system at the top, which might result in, i don’t know, $5 (?) going to GiveWell, and $95 (??) coming back down in the form of nicer food at some retreat in 2024 (or something, I really don’t know)
If I have this mostly right, I think the main implication is that any argument against waste should mostly be an argument about where money gets directed some number of layers up.
As with Jordan, correct me if/where I’m wrong!
If it’s not too late (and apologies if asked elsewhere)
Is there a (probably true) evolutionary story for why our brains “beat themselves up?”
If so, when or in what circumstances is this cluster of emotions/actions/moods useful (at least in some sense)?
Assuming this cluster is indeed generally counterproductive, is this mostly because we live in an environment very unlike the ancestral one, or more because the goals we’re talking about (like “write a good EA Forum post”) aren’t highly correlated with “maximize reproductive fitness”?
Really good post, and I feel like I have way too many thoughts for this one comment. But anyway here are a few...
Maybe I’m the odd one out (or wrong about my intuition) but I don’t think I ever got the sense-even intuitively or in a low-fidelity way- that “agency” was identical to/implied/strongly overlapped with “a willingness to be social domineering or extractive of others’ time and energy”
Insofar as I have something like a voice in my head giving me corrective advice on this front, it saying asking “if not you than who?” much more than it’s saying “go get it!”
Of course,”if not you, then who?” isn’t always rhetorical; sometimes, you really should refrain from doing something you’re not qualified to do or don’t understand!
Worth distinguishing between being a “team player” in a vibes/aesthetic sense and in a moral/functional sense. If skipping school meant that you were getting out of, say, a tutoring commitment that you had signed up for, I’d say that yeah, you should think hard about whether it’s worth reneging
But what you wrote seems to imply that there was no functional or causally attributable harm to anyone from your missing school. If so, I think doing the weird rationalist thing and resisting the dysfunctional social norm of going to school was completely the right thing to do.
Also, while emotional reactions often encode valuable information, I think the negative emotional reaction you got from being scolded by your teachers was more like a non-functional misfiring due to being out of the evolutionary context; in a 100 person tribe, being scolded by two others indicates that your behavior is indeed likely to harm you, and in a pseudo-moral sense may be meaningfully uncooperative. In this case, (probably) it’s fine for you, your teachers, and whomever else if your teachers don’t think highly of you
[Meta] A bunch of my screen looks like this—not sure if anyone else having the same issue
Wow awesome analysis! Haven’t read super carefully just yet but does seem to point in the opposite direction of the evidence I present insofar as it relates to uni CB. I think this would be worth making a normal high-level post! Blame it on me and link this comment if anyone disagrees lol
My only super brief thought, which I don’t think is controversial but I’ll make explicit, is that reverse causality (i.e. Stanford signal->success metric) is one reason you might not want to take this as knockdown evidence in favor of “Ivies select for talent,” though I really don’t have a great guess as to how much this is indeed the case
Good post! I mostly agree with sections. (2) and (4) and would echo other comments that various points made are under-discussed.
My “disagreement”—if you can call it that—is that I think the general case here can be made more compelling by using assumptions and arguments that are weaker/more widely shared/more likely to be true. Some points:
The uncertainty Will fails to discuss (in short, the Very Repugnant Conclusion) can be framed as fundamental moral uncertainty, but I think it’s better understood as the more prosaic, sorta-almost-empirical question “Would a self-interested rational agent with full knowledge and wisdom choose to experience every moment of sentience in a given world over a given span of time?”
I personally find this framing more compelling because it puts one in the position of answering something more along the lines of “would I live the life of a fish that dies by asphyxiation?” than”does some (spooky-seeming) force called ‘moral outweighing’ exist in the universe”
Even a fully-committed total utilitarian who would maintain that all amounts of suffering are in principle outweighable can have this kind of quasi-empirical uncertainty of where the equilibrium moral balance lies
More, utilitarians of all types would find it better to create less future suffering, all else equal, which is a question I don’t recall Will directly addressing.
Maybe this is relying too much on generalizing from my own intuitions/beliefs, but I’d also guess that objecting to the belief that it’s “good to make happy people” both weakens the argument as a whole and distracts from its most compelling points
You can agree with Will on all his explicit claims made in the book (as I think I do?) and still think he made a pretty major sin of omission by failing to discuss whether the creation of happiness can/does/will cause and justify the creation of suffering
80k great as always! Though I wish, of all episodes, this one was longer
Infinitely easier said than done, of course, but some Shortform feedback/requests
The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
I can imagine it being near/stylistically like:
“All Posts” (top of sidebar)
“Recommendations” in the center
“Frontpage Posts”, but to the main section’s side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
I’d really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can’t easily do that atm.