alexherwix

Karma: 579

alexherwix 24 Feb 2023 18:52 UTC
34 points
14 ∶ 2
in reply to: Liv’s comment on: Consent Isn’t Always Enough
If you take this as your point of departure, I think that’s worth highlighting that the boundaries between community and organizations can become very blurry in EA. Projects pop up all the time and innocuous situations might turn controversial over time. I think those examples with second-order partners of polyamorous relationships being (more or less directly) involved in funding decisions are a prime example. There is probably no intent or planning behind this but conflicts of interest are bound to arise if the community is tight knit and highly “interconnected”.

While I think that you have a good starting point for a discussion here, I would expect the whole situation to be not as clear cut and easy as your argument suggests. So, I really agree with the post that getting to a state most people are happy with will require some muddling through.

alexherwix 5 Feb 2023 11:06 UTC
29 points
9 ∶ 0
in reply to: Barry Grimes’s comment on: The Capability Approach
Just to explain why I downvoted this comment. I think it is pretty defensive and not really engaging with the key points of the response, which made no indication that would justify a conclusion like: „You seem to be prioritising the options based on intuition, whereas I prefer to use evidence from self-reports.“

There is nothing in the capability approach as explained that would keep you from using survey data to consider which options to provide. On the opposite, I would argue it to be more open and flexible for such an approach because it is less limited in the types of questions to ask in such surveys. The capability approach simply highlights that life satisfaction or wellbeing are not necessarily the only measures that can be used. For instance, you could also ask what functionings provide meaning to your life, which may be correlated to life satisfaction but not necessarily the same thing (e.g., see examples that were given).

alexherwix 20 Dec 2018 9:42 UTC
27 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Meta Fund AMA: 20th Dec 2018
Hey,
as a person working on meta-projects I would be interested if there are any plans to broaden the amount of projects that you are considering for funding?
Your grants demonstrate that you seem to only fund very much established players and focus on “very safe” bets – probably due to time limitations. Have you considered pitching opportunities for project proposals, putting out requests for proposals regarding specific challenges, or topping up EA Grants so that more proposal have the chance of being considered and funded?
My concerns is that right now it is still pretty difficult to get funding if you are not an established player and I don’t really see any path for new players to emerge other than by personal connections which is strongly dependent on serendipity or physical location. Something like EA Grants is by far not a perfect solution (e.g., it’s too open which leads to unclear criteria and there is no feedback at all which disallows iterative improvements and learning) but at least more projects are even considered for funding.
What links here?
- Concept: EA Donor List. To enable EAs that are starting new projects to find seed donors, especially for people that aren’t well connected by nonzerosum (16 Mar 2019 21:12 UTC; 9 points)

alexherwix 9 Feb 2023 16:20 UTC
24 points
16 ∶ 3
on: In (mild) defence of the social/professional overlap in EA
I kind of skimmed this post, so hopefully I am not making of fool pf myself but I think you didn’t really address a key point which is raised by „critics“ and that are the challenges associated with the tendency for centralization in EA.

There are basically two to three handful of people who control massive amounts of wealth, many of which are interweaved in a web of difficult to untangle relationships ranging from friendly to romantic. The denser this web is, the more difficult it is for people to understand what is going on. Are rejections or grants based on emotion or merit? It’s simply difficult to say the more complex the interactions are.

I think having friendships and relationships is great if the people involved are happy but we have to develop appropriate means for dealing with the complexity of it all. For instance, in cooperatives relationships are often very highly valued and central to the whole experience of being part of the cooperative. There are formalized mechanisms in place to afford systematic discussion of relationships and negotiation of mutually acceptable forms of organization. In EA, we are lacking this kind of structure. While some participatory islands might exist, there are often streamlined but opaque processes in place that allow a few people to make huge decisions affecting countless people with very limited involvement from the community at large (or the people affected for that matter). This becomes pretty tricky to justify as “EA” if you cannot demonstrate that the decisions being made are “above reproach” and not influenced by romantic relationships, in-group favoritism or the like.

In sum, I think I broadly agree that having friendly or even romantic relationships within the EA community can also have a good side but I am very skeptical that our current ways of organizing can handle all the complexity that is entailed by strong versions of this. If we want deeper and more relationships within the community, we should adapt our spaces and institutions to be ready for that. We owe it to ourselves and others to figure out how we can behave responsibly in this context.

alexherwix 24 Oct 2019 13:10 UTC
24 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: A single person decides about funding for community builders world-wide

This doesn’t seem to be quite comparing things at the right level to me. It compares ‘AI safety research’ as a priority cause area to ‘EA movement building’, which seems very reasonable, but then says that ‘EA movement building’ constitutes only funding local groups of a particular type (for example, it seems to be leaving out student groups run by current students, who get funding from their university for doing it; it seems to leave out work being done on thinking through how effective altruism might grow in China).

I think the main point of the post is not to highlight that there are no other possible ways of doing EA community building related efforts except CB grants – of course there are many things that aspiring EAs can do to support the movement. Rather it seems to highlight the fact that the institutional funding mechanisms available for a broad range of CB (be it for local groups, national groups, or smaller CB related projects) are more centralized than might be ideal. CB grants are not everything but they do cover a very broad scope where they are the only meaningful option available as other funders regularly defer to the CB grants project for funding. This makes them a very powerful force for directing the development of the EA community which may or may not be intended by the broader EA community.

From my perspective, I am, first, glad that institutional funding mechanisms like CB grants exist and appreciate the efforts that have gone (and continue to go) into the program. Second, I also see value in having a discussion about how to further improve the overall funding pipeline for EA CB. One straightforward step mentioned in the post could be that funders outside of CEA are sensitized to also consider EA CB efforts for funding (maybe even in consultation with CEA).

alexherwix 9 Nov 2022 9:38 UTC
17 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Google Scholar is now listing (some) EA Forum posts
I think the explanation for this happening is pretty simple. People writing academic articles (me included) have cited EA Forum articles… thus, google is finding them.
For better or worse, I am pretty sure there is no(t yet a) systematic attempt to integrate the EA Forum in the scholarly debate...

alexherwix 3 Feb 2023 17:41 UTC
15 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I think the kind of debate that you indicated to have had is exactly what we need to make sense of such emotionally difficult and complex topics.

Even if you come to the conclusion that other framings seem more useful to you, we can’t have confidence in such conclusions if they are made ex ante without deliberate engagement with the content. So thanks for doing that!

I personally think that we may need to take more time to really try to understand and explore the problem we are facing here, before focusing on solutions. I have the feeling that something broader than „isolated incidents“ of sexual harassment is the right way to frame the problem here. There have been „community-related“ issues after issues popping up over the last few months. We should step back and try to look at the whole picture here and try to understand the mechanisms and drivers that lead to such events. I think this is happening to some degree but it still feels like we could be doing this more explicitly and openly. I really think there’s a lot at stake regarding the future development of the movement.

Sorry, this got meta pretty quickly…

alexherwix 15 Nov 2019 13:27 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Which Community Building Projects Get Funded?
As I have highlighted in another comment, I appreciate the post as a conversation starter for thinking about EA CB grants in general but somewhat disagree with the strength of the evidence presented here. Nevertheless, I do see a kernel of truth in the proposition that CB grants might be skewed towards specific trust networks and people outside of those trust networks seem to be disadvantaged.

Taking this at my point of departure, I want to be constructive and propose to reconsider the structure of the CB funding pipeline. Currently, there are centralized funding bodies who make decisions about CB grants on an individual basis. No matter where you are from, you are judged to the standards of those grant makers and either you clear the bar or you don’t. This might be problematic as CB is not like funding a start up that needs to survive in a global competitive market, rather CB is much more of an contextual effort whose effectiveness depends on the local circumstances. Thus, it stands to reason that simply through the nature of the problem, a centralized funding pipeline with very few grant makers might not be optimal.

To improve this situation, a reasonable strategy might be to consider more polycentric approaches to CB funding through the establishment of intermediate regional re-granting entities that are better positioned to appreciate the contextual nature of CB. The natural choice for these intermediate regional re-granting entities would be national EA organizations focused on regional CB. This set up would create a funding pipeline that is much more aligned with the nature of the problem. At the top is CEA which is contact with national CB organizations who in turn are in contact with local CB projects. Funding is allocated as a budget to national CB organizations based on aggregate metrics that are comparable across regions and allow for a fine-grained prioritization of funding across regions. Thus, national CB organizations are incentivized to consider their specific context and invest in those local CB projects which make the most sense for the region. Local CB would have a clear point of contact that is much more interested in them than a global entity ever could be. My hypothesis would be that a much more natural and distributed trust network would develop compared to the situation that we have at the moment.

If people here like these thoughts, I might be willing to write them up in a separate post. This thinking is inspired by prior work by other EAs and economics research which I would like to highlight more but don’t have the time to right now. Anyhow, would love to discuss along those lines.

alexherwix 21 Mar 2023 18:19 UTC
13 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Henry Howard’s comment on: Why I’m suss on wellbeing surveys
To me it seems like you have a wrong premise. A wellbeing focused perspective is explicitly highlighting the fact that Sentinelese and the modern Londoners may have similar levels of wellbeing. That’s the point! This perspective aims to get you thinking about what is really valuable in life and what the grounds for your own beliefs about what is important are.
You seem to have a very strong opinion that something like technological progress is intrinsically valuable. Living in a more technically advanced society is “inherently better” and, thus, everyone who does not see this is “objectively wrong”. That argument would seem strange to even the most orthodox utilitarian. Even if your argument is a little bit more nuanced in the sense that you are seeing technological progress only as instrumentally valuable to sustain larger population sizes at similar levels of wellbeing, this perspective is still somewhat naive because technological progress also has potentially devastating consequences such as climate change or AI risks. In that sense, one can actually make the case that the agricultural revolution was maybe the beginning of the end of the human race. So maybe if there would have been a way to grow our societies more deliberately and to optimize for wellbeing (rather than economic growth) from the beginning, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea? I just want to illustrate that the whole situation is not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Altogether, I would encourage you to keep more of an open mind regarding other perspectives. The post but also this comment of yours make it seem like you might be very quick in dismissing perspectives and being vocal about it even if you have not really engaged with them deeply. This makes you come across as naive to a somewhat more knowledgeable person which could put you at a personal disadvantage in the future and, in addition, could also be contributing to bad epistemics in your community if the people you are talking to are less informed and, thus, not able to spot where you might be cutting corners. Hope you don’t resent me for this personal side note, it’s meant in a constructive spirit.

alexherwix 3 Feb 2023 16:22 UTC
13 points
9 ∶ 0
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
While this is a simple comment, I am a little bit surprised by the down votes and strong disagreement signaled. Could people who strongly disagree with this comment point out their reasoning?

Without having thought too much about this, I do think that it seems plausible to consider the effects that centralized decision making has on enabling or at least not discouraging these types of behaviors.

alexherwix 5 Dec 2020 15:51 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My mistakes on the path to impact
Also a big thank you from my side. It really feels like an open and honest account and to me it seems to shine the light on some very important challenges that the EA community faces in terms of making the best use of available talent. I hope that your story can inspire some voices in the community to become more self-reflective and critical about how some of the dynamics are playing out, right under our own noses. For a community that is dedicated to doing better, being able to learn from stories like yours seems like an important requirement.

In this light, I would love to see comments (or even better follow-up posts) address things like what their main takeaways are for the EA community. What can we do to help dedicated people who are starting out to make better decisions for themselves as well as the community?
What links here?
- Vaidehi Agarwalla's comment on Vaidehi Agarwalla’s Quick takes by Vaidehi Agarwalla (7 Jan 2021 2:24 UTC; 4 points)

alexherwix 30 Jun 2020 14:24 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Long-term investment fund at Founders Pledge
Some simple but possible consideration against patient philanthropy that comes to my mind are:
- Monetary investments are not necessarily value neutral but might actively cause harm, potentially over long time horizons (e.g., investments contributing to climate change). How do you account for this possible “mortage” of letting things run without taking action?
- Climate change is a good example for a problem that could have been solved most effectively with early but heavy investment. How do you guard against missing those opportunities if your general strategy is to “wait things out”? If there is no pressure to “show results” overall results in general are going to depend very much on the estimates of the fund managers which is a crucial failure mode.
- What is the actual value of having loads of money in the bank? There seem to be severe limits on how much money can effectively been used in a short time frame (without resorting to things like large indiscriminate payouts which are most likely not the most effective use of money). It already doesn’t seem to make sense to spend too much even if your goal is to get rid of money (see OpenPhil). Thus, it seems like we actually have to invest in capacity building to be able to effectively absorb more funding in the future—this is somewhat contradictory to an explicitly patient perspective. I think this even holds somewhat for catastrophes which have been mentioned elsewhere. Good preparation is likely to be cheaper than getting out the checkbook at the last minute (e.g., see Taiwans response to Covid, climate change).
That’s not to say that it seems not worthwhile to explore ways that one can profit from patience but I would personally prefer a term like “wise philanthropy” as a more appropriate goal that respects a more holistic perspective.

alexherwix 13 Nov 2023 21:37 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: MikhailSamin’s comment on: It’s OK to eat shrimp: EAs Make Invalid Inferences About Fish Qualia and Moral Patienthood
But how can you assume that humans in general have qualia if all the talking about qualia tells you only that qualia exist somewhere in the causal structure? Maybe all talking about qualia derives from a single source? How would you know? For me, this seems to be a kind of a reductio ad absurdum for your entire line of argument.

alexherwix 18 Mar 2023 20:53 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Why I’m suss on wellbeing surveys
I think that it may be helpful to unpack the nature of perceived happiness and wellbeing a little bit more than this post does. I think the idea of hedonic adaptation is pretty well known—most of us have probably heard of the hedonic treadmill (see Brickmann & Campbell, 1971). The work on hedonic adaptation points to the fact that perceived happiness and wellbeing are relative constructs that largely depend on reference points which are invoked. To oversimplify things a little bit, if everyone around me is bad off, I may already be happy if I am only slightly better of than them. At the same time, I might be unhappy if I am pretty good off but everyone around me is much better off. As such, it is entirely reasonable to expect that hunter-gatherers when asked about their life feel quite good and happy about it as long as they don’t feel like everyone else around them is much better off.
The conclusion of this post should not be that perceived happiness and wellbeing should not be used to compare the effects of interventions but that they simply measure something different than “objective measures”. They aim to measure how people feel about their life in general as they compare it to others, not how they score on a particular metric in isolation. Whether you prefer one or the other approach largely depends on your perspective on what is valuable in life. Some people may find making progress on metrics that they find particularly valuable is the way to go and others prefer a more self-organizing perspective where the affected people themselves are more involved in determining what is valuable.
In sum, this post seems a little bit confused on what the WELLBY debate is about. I can recommend the cited article to get some idea on why something like a WELLBY approach may be interesting to consider even if one doesn’t like it at first glance.
Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–305). Academic Press. https://archive.org/details/adaptationlevelt0000unse_x7d9/page/287/mode/2up
What links here?
- Samuel Dupret's comment on Why I’m suss on wellbeing surveys by Henry Howard (20 Mar 2023 11:09 UTC; 17 points)

alexherwix 23 Aug 2019 10:02 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: DM’s comment on: Keeping everyone motivated: a case for effective careers outside of the highest impact EA organizations
Not the author but still tempted to reply as I was somewhat involved in the discussion leading to this post :)

Regarding your first point:

I somewhat disagree to your assessment of the situation. Most PhDs seem to don’t even try to steer any stream but simply try to get through their studies. Imho there is no harm in trying to inject new thoughts and ideas through a paper here and there and hope for other researchers to pick up on it.

For example, I am by no means in a special position in my field but wrote a small workshop paper about what my field could learn from EA and have send that around quite heavily and now I am in a collaboration working to make it into a conference and then a journal paper. Time investment so far was maybe a week of fun work. Still I am by no means a sure hire at any of the top EA orgs and have trouble getting funding from anything EA related.

All in all, I think that trying to leverage what you already have and can influence is undervalued compared to trying to “hitchhike” impact (that’s obviously “tongue-in-cheek”). A word one could use for this may be: micro-entrepreneurship.

Regarding your second point:

I guess you have a good point here, the post doesn’t really add much in the role of concrete advice to local groups but I also think that it doesn’t have to. Just highlighting that there is a connection between the role of local groups and what kind of careers we value is something which I haven’t seen much discussion about.

As you highlight student groups are a specific form of a local group which is quite common but doesn’t really respond to the needs outlined in the post. Thus, it would be interesting to start thinking about the systematic coordination of local groups in specific regions. Right now, it seems like groups are popping up and dwindeling along somewhat spontaneously. Some EA hotspots like Oxford, London, Boston, BayArea, etc. might be in a phase with more systematic networking and coordination going on but the vast majority of local groups is just starting to think about connecting and coordinating more systematically.

What I take away from this post is that this kind of regional coordination is important if we want to ensure motivation of EAs in the medium- and long-term. This perspective seems (at least based on personal experience) underdeveloped at the moment. Thus, I am quite happy about this post and your thoughtful engagement with it :)

alexherwix 28 Jan 2023 15:11 UTC
9 points
7 ∶ 1
on: Excalidraw: Why and How to Use it
As a meta point for these types of tutorials, I would recommend a short section on alternative tools with a short discussion of pros and cons for each alternative.

Right now, this feels more like an advert for excalidraw rather than an open exploration of the options out there.

alexherwix 5 Jul 2019 7:42 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: Announcing plans for a German Effective Altruism Network focused on Community Building
Dear Jonas,

thank you for your comment and inputs :) I am responding from my personal perspective and may not represent the full team.
1. That’s a great point! We would love to have a more diverse team and if you have interested people in mind, please direct them to the survey or our current email address: info@eakoeln.de. We are actively looking for new members and generally don’t plan to have any limit on members if they fulfill some EA and CB related criteria. Thus, hopefully we will be more diverse soon :)
2. As you mention there has been some coordination with the big players (CEA, EAF, LEAN) but it could obviously always be more and is generally limited by the time that we get from them. We also tried to coordinate with some community builders in Germany but have to say that we are rooted in a mostly regional phenomenon of cooperating local groups that has been slowly spreading from NRW. At the moment, we are trying to onboard and integrate the (interested) rest of Germany.
3. The list is just a short list of some concrete things that we can measure. We are very much engaged with the question of how to track and improve quality in community building and over time this will hopefully become one of our key value propositions – that we are able to assess and advise what is likely to work in a given context. This is why we have added a special role for quality management.
I hope this answers the most relevant parts of your question. I am happy to elaborate in more detail if necessary :)

alexherwix 14 Sep 2023 17:49 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Radical Longtermism and the Seduction of Endless Growth: A Critique of William MacAskill’s ‘What We Owe the Future’
Yeah, I mean I understand that people don’t really like Torres and this style of writing (it is pretty aggressive) but still there are some interesting points in the post, which I think deserve reflection and discussion. Just because “the other side” does not listen to the responses does not mean there is nothing to learn for oneself (or am I too naive in this belief?). So, I still think downvoting into oblivion is not the right move here.
Just to give an example, I think the end of the post is interesting to contemplate and cannot just be “dismissed” without at least some level of critical engagement.
We end by noting a final, terminal irony about MacAskill’s book. The book is called ‘What We Owe the Future.’ But consider the following thought-experiment: in World A, 20 billion humans live all at once, trash everything, but party hard until the end. In World B, only 1 million exist per generation, but humanity persists, Earth-bound, into the future until a total of 10 billion people have existed. Assuming that a generation is 30 years, this means that people would exist in World B for another 300,000 years, which is roughly the same amount of time that Homo sapiens has so far existed, and 50 times longer than civilization has been around. Hence, twice as many people exist in World A than World B, but in World A, humanity’s future ends within a lifetime, while in World B, humanity’s future extends into the distant future. The question is: would World A be better or worse than World B?
‘Longtermists’ would surely argue that, other things being equal, World A is better, since it would contain more ‘happy’ people and, therefore, more total value. In contrast, we claim that World B would be better—this is, in our view, a more humane, a more beautiful, a more decent scenario than its alternative, which bears some alarming resemblances to the way we live right now: as Homo eversor, ‘man’ the endless destroyer. But MacAskill asks us to be impressed by the sheer weight of numbers. In a forced-choice situation, he would presumably pick World A over World B. Hence, the final irony is that ‘longtermists’ don’t actually care about the future after all. This is the ultimate irony, given the title of his book.
Caring about the future is more than wanting to maximize the total human population. It’s about preserving, protecting, and sustaining the succession of cohorts that extends from the distant past, through the present, into the indefinite future, and under conditions that favor the flourishing of those who come after us—whether human or nonhuman. People aren’t the mere ‘vessels’ of ‘value.’ Rather, we are one small link in an indefinitely long chain of being and becoming, and it is our collective parenting of the future that reveals to us who we really are. Perhaps ‘Homo curans’ is a good name for what our species should aspire to: the ‘caring human,’ or ‘humans who are defined by our capacity to care, not just for each other right now, but those who will likely come to exist in the future.’

alexherwix 29 Sep 2020 12:32 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Against neglectedness
I know this is a late reply to an old comment but it would be awesome to know in how far you think you have addressed the issues raised? Or if you did not address them what was you reason for discarding them?
I am working through the cause prio literature at the moment and I don’t really feel that 80k addresses all (or most) of the substantial concerns raised. For instance, the assessments of climate change and AI safety are great examples where 80k’s considerations can be quite easily attacked given conceptual difficulties in the underlying cause prio framework/argument.

alexherwix 10 Jun 2020 18:03 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
Thanks for writing this post, very interesting! I haven’t read all of the comments but wanted to share one point that came to me over and over again while reading the post. Apologies if it has already been mentioned in another comment.

It seems like you assume a strong (and relatively simple) causal relationship from genetics to malevolent traits to bad behavior. I think this view might make the problem seem more tractable than it actually might be. Humans are complex systems that are nested in other complex systems and everything is driven by complex and interacting feedback loops. Thus, to me it seems very difficult to untangle causality here. To me it would be much more intuitive to think about malevolence as a dynamic phenomenon that is emergent based on a history of interactions rather than a static personality trait. If you accept this characterization as plausible the task of screening for malevolence in a valid and reliable way seems much more difficult than just designing a better personality test. I think the main difference between those two perspectives is that in the simple case you have a lot of corner cases to keep in mind (e.g., what is if people have malevolent traits but actually want to be good people?) whereas the complex case is more holistic but also much more, well, complex and likely less tractable.

Nevertheless, I agree with the general premise of the post that mental health is an important aspect in the context of X/S-risk related activities. I would go even further than this post and argue that mental health in the context of X/S-risk related activities in general is a very pressing cause area that would score quite well in terms of ITN-Analysis. Thus, I would really love to see an organization or network being set up dedicated to the serious exploration of this area because existing efforts in the mental health space seem only to be focus on happiness in the context of global development. If some interested in this topic reads this, don’t hesitate to reach out, I would love to support such efforts.