Many of the considerations regarding the influence we can have on the deep future seem extremely hard, but not totally intractable, to investigate. Offering naive guestimates for these, whilst lavishing effort to investigate easier but less consequential issues, is a grave mistake. The EA community has likely erred in this direction.
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Yet others, those of complex cluelessness, do not score zero on ‘tractability’. My credence in “economic growth in poorer countries is good for the longterm future” is fragile: if I spent an hour (or a week, or a decade) mulling it over, I would expect my central estimate to change, although my remaining uncertainty to be only a little reduced. Given this consideration has much greater impact on what I ultimately care about, time spent on this looks better than time further improving the estimate of immediate impacts like ‘number of children saved’. It would be unwise to continue delving into the latter at the expense of the former. Would that we do otherwise.
At current, I straightforwardly disagree with both of these claims; I do not think it is a good use of ‘EA time’ to try and pin down exactly what the long term (say >30 years out) effects of AMF donations are, or for that matter any other action originally chosen for its short term benefits (such as...saving a drowning child). I feel very confused about why some people seem to think it is a good use of time, and would appreciate any enlightenment offered on this point.
The below is somewhat blunt, because at current cluelessness arguments appear to me to be almost entirely without decision-relevance, but at the same time a lot of people who I think are smarter than me appear to think they are relevant and interesting for something and someone, and I’m not quite clear what the something or who the someone is, so my confidence is necessarily more limited than the tone would suggest. Then again, this thought is clearly not limited to me, e.g. Buck makes a very similar point here. I’d really love to get an example, even a hypothetical one, of where any of this would actually matter at the level of making donation/career/etc. decisions. Or if everybody agrees it would not impact decisions, an explanation of why it is a good idea to spend any ‘EA time’ on this at all.
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For the challenge of complex cluelessness to have bite in the case of AMF donations, it seems to me that we need something in the vicinity of these two claims:
The expected long term consequences of our actions dominate the expected short term consequences, in terms of their moral relevance.
We can tractably make progress on predicting what those those long term consequences are, beyond simple 1-to-1 extrapolation from the short term consequences, by considering those consequences directly.
In short, I claim that once we truly believe (1) and (2) AMF would no longer be on our list of donation candidates.
For example, suppose you go through your suggested process of reflection, come to the conclusion AMF will in fact tractably boost economic growth in poorer countries, that such growth is one of the best ways to improve the longterm future, and that AMF’s impact on growth is morally far more important than the considerations which motivated the choice of AMF in the first place, namely its impact on child mortality in the short term. Satisfied that you have now met the challenge of cluelessness, should you go ahead and click the ‘donate’ button?
I think you obviously shouldn’t. It seems obvious to me that at minimum you should now go and find an intervention that was explicitly chosen for the purpose of boosting long term growth by the largest amount possible. Since AMF was apparently able to predictably and tractably impact the long term via incidentally impacting growth, it seems like you should be able to do much better if you actually try, and for the optimal approach to improve the long term future to be increasing growth via donating to AMF would be a prime example of Surprising and Suspicious Convergence. In fact, the opening quote from that piece seems particularly apt here:
Oliver: … Thus we see that donating to the opera is the best way of promoting the arts.
Eleanor: Okay, but I’m principally interested in improving human welfare.
Oliver: Oh! Well I think it is also the case that donating to the opera is best for improving human welfare too.
Similar thoughts would seem to apply to also other possible side-effects of AMF donations; population growth impacts, impacts on animal welfare (wild or farmed), etc. In no case do I have reason to think that AMF is a particularly powerful lever to move those things, and so if I decide that any of them is the Most Important Thing then AMF would not even be on my list of candidate interventions.
Indeed, none of the people I know who think that the far future is massively morally important and that we can tractably impact it focus their do-gooding efforts on AMF, or anything remotely like AMF. To the extent they give money to AMF-like things, it is for appearences’ sake, for personal comfort, or a hedge against their central beliefs about how to do good being very wrong (see e.g. this comment by Aaron Gertler). As a result, cluelessness arguments appear to me to be addressing a constituency that doesn’t actually exist, and attempts to resolve cluelessness are a ‘solution looking for a problem’.
If cluelessness arguments are intended have impact on the actual people donating to short term interventions as a primary form of doing good, they need to engage with the actual disagreements those people have, namely the questions of whether we can actually predict the size/direction of the longterm consequences despite the natural lack of feedback loops (see e.g. KHorton’s comment here or MichaelStJules’ comment here), or the empirical question of whether the impacts of our actions do in fact wax or wane over time (see e.g. reallyeli here), or the legion of potential philosophical objections.
Instead, cluelessness arguments appear to me to assume away all the disagreements, and then say ‘if we assume the future is massively morally relevant compared to the present, that we can tractably and predictably impact said future, and a broadly consequentalist approach, one should be longtermist in order to maximise good done’. Which is in fact true, but unexciting once made clear.
I want to open by saying that there are many things about this post I appreciate, and accordingly I upvoted it despite disagreeing with many particulars. Things I appreciate include, but are not limited to:
-The detailed block-by-block approach to making the case for both cancel culture’s prevalence and its potential harm to the movement.
-An attempt to offer a concrete alternative pathway to CEA and local groups that face similar decisions in future.
-Many attempts throughout the post to imagine the viewpoint of someone who might disagree, and preempt the most obvious responses.
But there’s still a piece I think is missing. I don’t fault Larks for this directly, since the post is already very long and covers a lot of ground, but it’s the area that I always find myself wanting to hear more about in these discussions, and so would like to hear more about from either Larks or others in reply to this comment. It relates to both of these quotes.
Given that this post is titled ‘advice for CEA and local groups’, reading this made me hope that this post would end with some suggested ‘rules and standards’ for who we do and do not invite to speak at local events/EAG/etc. Where do we draw the line on ‘behaving immorally’? I strongly agree that whatever rules are being applied should be applied consistently, and think this is most likely to happen when discussed and laid down in a transparent and pre-agreed fashion.
While I have personal views on the Munich case which I have laid out elsewhere, I agree with Khorton below that little is being served by an ongoing prosecution-and-defence of Robin’s character or work. Moreover, my commitment to consistency and transparency is far stronger than my preference for any one set of rules over others. I also expect clear rules about what we will and won’t allow at various levels to naturally insulate against cancel culture. To the extent I agree that cancel culture is an increasing problem, the priority on getting this clear and relying less on ad hoc judgements of individuals has therefore risen, and will likely continue to rise.
So, what rules should we have? What are valid reasons to choose not to invite a speaker?