I am a cognitive scientist who specialized in rationality under radical uncertainty.
For many years I worked full-time in effective altruism community building, communication, and outreach.
annaleptikon
Karma: 347
We all pay for a government to ensure internal safety in general, from which everyone benefits. Everyone benefits from general safety and having these conditions to determine in a non-violent way who succeeds and who doesn’t.
And being wealthy is a good thing! “The wealthy” should never be the enemy. Many wealthy people have contributed so much value to their society that rational people would vote on how much to pay them for their contribution; their current wealth is precisely what they should get, given what they contributed.
The only problematic wealth is the one that was achieved by unlawful means (in which you don’t need redistribution but law enforcement and taking back money that wasn’t acquired in a way anyone would agree with!).
And who should be thought as the outgroup are rent-seekers independent of their current wealth.
https://preview.redd.it/miemgnhsvut71.jpg?auto=webp&s=f1588d524f52635e41ce99110bb71bdb94d02a1e
Because you will also select the people who will make the “consciously planned economy” from the population and can most optimistically assume normal distribution of these traits in people in power. It is, however, more likely that the less unselfish people will aspire to these positions and ultimately use them for their own ends, resulting in a redistribution of power to more selfish people. Centralized systems inherently offer more affordances of seizing power to selfish ends.
Reading the history of Mao, the Russian Revolution, and the Gulag Archipelago helps with some context.
Firstly, thank you in general for writing this up, this is an important piece of information and creates common knowledge and norms around how to behave related to the topic.
”You still control your own social circle—you don’t have to be friends with jerks just because they are EAs.”
Joining EA at a subjectively still young and starry-eyed age, I equated anyone associating with EA as “living up to the EA principles”. Now being older and more experienced, I see many younger people in EA making the same mistake. By now, I’m convinced that e.g. interest in ethics and actual ethical behavior and character correlate only very mildly. Similarly, there are many people in EA who are not particularly ethical either. Humans are still humans.
“utilitiarians should self-efface their utilitarianism” “Parfit suggests adopting whatever moral system seems to be most likely to produce the highest utility” “you may instead need to forget that you ever believed in utilitarianism”
This sounds plausible: you orient yourself towards the good and backpropagate over time how things play out and then learn through it which system and policies are reliable and truly produce good results (in the context and world you find yourself). This is also exactly what has played out in my own development, by orienting toward what produces good consequences and understanding how uncertain the world is (and how easily I fooled myself by saying I was doing the thing with the best consequences when I didn’t) I came out with virtue ethics myself.
”For a while, I have been thinking of writing a post with many similar themes and maybe I still will at some point.” I would read it with joy and endorse a full post being devoted to this topic (happy to read drafts and provide thoughts)
Focusmate has changed a lot since this post was published; maybe invite links are disabled by now.
Glad you enjoy it!
Thank you for reading and reviewing the book for the rest of us!
Disappointed to hear it is close minded in regards to the political framework it comes from.
I do think there are many valid arguments to be made to criticize EA on its own terms and hope this is what the book set out to do.
During EAG London 2021 @Emerson Spartz and I initiated a informal but successful “Complexity and EA” meetup.
@Michael Hinge wrote “Complexity Science, Economics and the Art of Zen” inspired by the meeting
We now have a Telegram Chat and Discord Server for people interested in the topic, please reach out if you want to get added. (Not posting the link to keep entry selective) (“ComplexitEA”)
Further resources we collected or found relevant:
Making Sense of Complexity (Introduction to Complexity) Comic by Sarah Firth
The Map of the Complexity Sciences by Brian Castellani
- Meditations on Moloch (Slate Star Codex)
Seeing like a State (Slate Star Codex)
Complexity Podcast (Michael Garfield)
Jim Rutt Show Podcast (Jim Rutt)
Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows) (start here) -- Reading Group
Applied Complexity Science (Joe Norman)
Game B Movement (e.g. Daniel Schmachtenberger)
Nassim Taleb: Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, Black Swan
The Systems Bible (John Gall)
Origin of Wealth (complexity economics)
Physics of Life (and his second book, Freedom and Evolution)
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (novelty search)
Scale (by Geoffrey West)
Order Without Design
Map of Cybernetics and Systems Science (Bob Horn)
Complexity Explorer Courses by SFI
Graphic design showing difference between systems thinking/change etc.
Principles of Systems Science George E. Mobus, Michael C. Kalton
More than ever as far as I can tell
People who like Logan’s post on EA burnout will love Tyler Alterman’s post on Effective altruism in the garden of ends. Both are close to my own experience.
Effective Altruism Reading List Information Design Poster (2/2)
Hey Jay,
Over the years, I have talked to many very successful and productive people, and most do, in fact, not work more than 20 productive hours per week. If you have a job with meetings and low-effort tasks in between, it’s easy to get to 40 hours plus. Every independent worker who measures hours of real mental effort is more in the 4-5 hours per day range. People who say otherwise tend to lie and change their numbers if you pressure them to get into the detail of what “counts as work” to them. It’s a marathon, and if you get into that range every day, you’ll do well.
Thank you for putting this together!
Recommend the book “Sometimes Brilliant” about Larry Brilliant’s life in this context! I read it with so much joy this year.
As mentioned in the article Effective Altruism as “nish kam karma yoga” [Larry Brilliant]
It’s already been removed from the final selection for various other reasons. Mostly redundancy of the values promoted, which are already covered in other works that will be on the list!
Thank you! And yes, excellent points.
Haven’t personally read Deutsch yet, does he reflect evolutionary thought well?
Both the systems books on the list (explicitly) and Taleb’s book (implicitly) describe a lot of the evolutionary process notion. Are there major points lacking?
Thank you! Added Lean Startup on the current list and removed the two books.
My personal stance on books is that it is to be expected that everyone has their strong points and their epistemic low points, Joy’s book was very important to my own understanding and I personally easily felt like I could ignore the minor faults in relation to the main argumentation. Different readers have different preferences regarding the distribution of knowledge and error in a book, I’d personally be okay with this.
In consulting this is also referred to as the “Minto pyramid” or “pyramid principle of communication”: you put the key message and main insight concisely as the first step.
In a fast-paced environment, this means the one piece with the highest information density is ensured to be delivered before e.g. getting interrupted. It also enables the listener to decide whether this topic is relevant early on in the communication and therefore shows respect for their attention.
After delivering the key message you can elaborate on the underlying insights or what brought you to the conclusion. If further elaboration is necessary or there is time for it the receiver of the message can ask further questions.
Here is an image to visualize the principle. The related book is called: “The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking” by Barbara Minto.
Solved by Ozempic?