Currently building a workshop with the aim to teach methods to manage strong disagreements (including non-EA people). Also community building.
Background in cognitive science.
Interested in cyborgism and AIS via debate.
https://typhoon-salesman-018.notion.site/Date-me-doc-be69be79fb2c42ed8cd4d939b78a6869?pvs=4
My position is quite the opposite: I put the symbol on my LinkedIn profile (and removed it from the URL) and WhatsApp profile.
I never dared to start a discussion about effective giving myself, but thanks to this, people around me started the discussion for me (“Oh, what does this emoji means btw? What’s the 10% pledge?”). I’ve been impressed at how curious, supportive and positive people were, and didn’t feel like proselytizing anything while doing so, merely answering their curiosity. And I’m speaking as someone who went as far as hiding my signing the pledge to my non-EA surrounding up until that point.
I don’t think anyone one the EA Forum would get interested in effective giving through this, and I actually don’t support targeting EAs first -I’d consider it a better outcome if people outside the community see the emoji as opposed as within the community. I think that EA has to be very outward facing, or it will fail.
The default trajectory for animal welfare looks grim, extremely grim, and does not seem about to reach a tipping point anytime soon. I do believe that a pig that shrieks is in pain, and that inflicting this pain is immoral.
I am more uncertain when it comes to tractability. I also favor pluralism and tend to view things with an inner preferential voting system to adjudicate my moral uncertainties.
At least in principle, different species may all be conscious, and all have the same range of capacities for hedonic intensity, but have very differently sized experiences. If so, they ought to be weighted accordingly. We should be indifferent between putting two individuals of a given species in the ice bath and putting one individual of a species that is very similar to the first but whose experiences are twice as large.
(Trigger warning: scenario involving non-hearing humans)
-If I think about a fish vs a fly, this makes some sense.
-If I think about a deaf person vs a hearing person, this starts to make less sense -empirically, I’d wager that there’s no difference.
-If I think about a deafblind person vs a hearing-and-sighted person, then my intuition is opposite: I actually care about the deafblind person slightly more, because their tactile phenomenal space has much higher definition than the one of the h.a.s person.
All else being equal, the only thing that matters is the aggregated intensity, no matter the size.
Expanding on this, and less on-topic:
-I’ve met a lot of people who had preferences over their size of experience (typically, deaf people who want to stay deaf, hearing people who wanted to be deaf, etc)
-Humans with a restricted field of experience seem to experience the rest more intensely. This intensity seems to matter to me.
-I also think that someone who is human-like except with respect to additional senses does not necessarily merit more moral consideration -only if such senses lead them to suffer, but in terms of potential hapiness, it does not move me.
-I also feel that people with less modalities and a preference over them should be included in an inclusive society, not forced to get the “missing” modalities -much like I’m not interested, at the moment, in additional modalities -such as feeling sexually attracted by animals (it is, after all, something I truly never felt).
I’m confused about how this fares under your perspective, and maybe your answer could help me get back the main distinctions you were trying to do in this article?
Please note that I’m not accusing you of discriminating over modal fields among humans, I’m genuinely curious about the implications of your view. I already wrote a post on something related (my views might have changed on this) and I understand that we disagree, but I’m not sure.
Thanks, I understand more of your background. Just to say, I really appreciate you posting on the forum! Hope I didn’t intimidate you, you’re absolutely in you’re right.
Despite agreeing on the general sentiment, I strongly disagree on the wording and specific arguments brought up. I’m sensing a slight soldier mindset (“only by” , “no matter how”, “the core reason we think”, “foolishly assuming”, “completely wrong”, “only if we assume” seem to be a collection of rethorical high confidence markers, including markers about the mental processes of all humans, something I believe should be modelled with utter respect to the highest standards).
My take would have been “should we do value tradeoff or CEV with, and/or respect the boundaries of everything ?”. I must say, I’m actually quite open to investigate this view. It comes with challenges -the hardest maximizer usually wins, so sovereignty should be strongly upheld, but then other issues appear. Joe Carlsmith looks like someone who attempted something along those lines (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BbAvHtorCZqp97X9W).
Yes, I saw it, and have it in mind as well! I’ll reach back to you in the not so far future ;)
Hello Mako, thanks for your interest ^^
I’m planning to open a negotiation training module later, probably next year.
I personally agree. I’m a bit on repeat-mode on this, but outside of EA, it’s actually very hard to have a productive rational conversation with someone who disagrees with us without relying on storytelling. People tend to reject arguments they view as coming from the opposite side. Stories establish positive rapport and empathy, which subsequently allows more rigorous conversations.
I may get back to you at some point for a collaboration!
Thank you very much for this work, this was a core missing piece in the effort of those of us who are interested in X-risk communication.
I broadly wish we could get to a point where this is applicable, but I’m unsure whether the strategy outlined by the OP is the best one. Although, I’m by no means saying it is exactly comparable, but having experienced it myself, an oppressed minority has no solution but to get transparent about it. If you feel that you belong to a group with a bad reputation, you might experience fear and anxiety when opening up about it.
A small detail I’d add is that, as far as I perceive it, no one actually tries to debunk false ideas and over-generalizations related to EA. When I suggested doing so in the past, a few people actively discouraged me to do it. Some of those false ideas are emotionally hard to bear, others are completely outlandish. What made my coming-out possible, in contrast, was the wealth of ressources and arguments I could throw to people, or just knowing they’ll run into them at some point.
This might be caused by us not owning our affiliation.
Yet EA is starting to become a well-identified group, something that people can have clichés about, and who can suffer unfair ostracisation. It’s very hard for me to publish my affiliation if I don’t feel defended from such downsides. So the circle continues.
Information on the current context, not directly related to the AMA:
There seems to be new concerning claims and discussions about Mr. Beast and the illegality of his business model.
See : https://youtu.be/DJvDLqDAM60?si=5Rc78_1GTBgmmRrP https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I?si=caiCJ0u7AaUeL2VX And more that will pop up with a simple YouTube search.
I’m not weighing anything in terms of credence, I haven’t done any dutiful scrutinizing myself. However this is reminiscing enough of previous mistakes that were made that I hope a constructive conversation can be had on the side of any willing partner before further engaging with Beast Philanthropy if this ever becomes an option.
Related to this, Julius Bauman has made an excellent talk about inward facing vs outward facing communities. In general, you don’t find inward facing communities among the large social movements who succeed at their goals.
I’m still very worried about the fact that the community hasn’t seemingly caught up on this and is not promoting outward facing practices more than in the past. I myself often get advised to orient my work to the EA community when I actually want to be outward facing.
I would definitely understand if you felt that giving areas outside of short term, human centered philanthropy feels riskier or unrelated to your brand image.
I’m wondering however, in what conditions would you plan to engage in animal philanthropy, e.g. the open wings alliance? In a parallel world where this is something you regularly do, what happened for you to do it?
Similarly, what would be needed for you to engage in messaging about more abstract cause areas, such as AI risk/ethics or biosecurity (if you feel convinced by any)?
My commentary would be that promoting political ideologies (or connecting to them) sound usually bottom-lined to me about the nature of reality. I think that bundling concepts under the tag “socialism” or “capitalism” makes it hard to sift through it and find the occasional diamond (see this). It’s hard to “check” whether socialism works, because it refers to too many things at the same time.
Let’s suppose the government spends money, not on subsidies for national activities X or Y, but for interventions X or Y in the global south. Is this socialism? I don’t care. The real question is : does it work? What are the costs? What are the benefits? How does it compare with my pondered ethical beliefs?
Some people would be happy to denounce legislation on AI frontier model as excessive governmental regulation, and thus socialism. But this is not important. What is important is : does it work? Does it help reduce X-risks? What do superforecasters say?
I’m not interested in evaluating the general tendency to act like a socialist, but specific interventions, no matter which tribe identifies to it. It doesn’t seem like healthy thinking to me to bundle interventions in packages and call them “socialist” and have the entire package be considered either as working or not working, worthy trying or not trying. I’ll be very happy to have one kind of systemic change such as massive governmental subsidy for a medical system in one country, and zero subsidies in another, if the end results are equally counterfactually optimal regarding my set of moral credences.
In contrast, charter cities experimenting with various interventions, or analyzing data resulting from the application of distinct policies, all sound like a more promising idea to me -and I be damned if the end intervention is socialist, capitalist, or whatever. For a more zoomed-out alternative, stuff like Reasoned Politics sounds less confusing to me.
Caveat: conflict of interest
I agree. However, I also think that doing more surveys do not prevent the failure mode of EAs “doing comms” as doing more surveys over actual interventions for aligning the general opinion with more rational takes on this particular topic. Shyness and low socio-emotional skills among leaders seems to me commonplace in EA, far too much compared to the rest of the world, up to the point where the best interventions targetting communications skills seems neglected to me.
Skills in communications, and funds for paying skilled individuals responsible for communications in any particular org is, imho, generally lacking. I have eavesdropped to a certain number of (non-sensitive) meetings of a small AIS org, and the general level of knowledge on how to convey any given message (especially outside of EA, especially to an opponent) is, in my opinion, insufficient, despite good knowledge of the surveys and their results. People in this org mostly generated their own ideas, judged them using their intuition, and did them, rather than using established knowledge or empirical expertise to pick the best ideas. Most of the people in the process are AIS researchers with background in CS, rather than people with both a background in AIS and communications, who are also excellent communicators (to a non-EA audience). One person I met openly shared their concern of not having enough funding for paying a PR and Comms responsible, as well as them growing tired of managing something they have no background in. Surveys didn’t really help with this bottleneck.
My fear is that there is not enough money, and that most people don’t care enough because they trust their intuitions too much / are afraid to actualy remedy to this lack of skills and would rather do surveys (on my side, I definitely feel fear and worry about talking to journalists or carefully balancing epistemics whilst not hurting common sense).
My only not-so-real data point is this (compare karma on LW vs EAF for a better sense). In a world where people saw a technical problem in communications, I would have expected this post to have more success. In short, I’d bet that most communications-skills related interventions/hires are usually considered with reluctance.
I do aknowledge that surveys could be an even lower-hanging fruit, of course. But I think that they should not distract us from improving skills per se.
Someone working on the topic once told me they had a discussion with politicians, who told them something along those lines: “If I successfully prevent a pandemic, I will never get credit for it, because it will have not happened. If it happens, ever so slightly, I will get blamed for it. Either way it won’t lead anyone to perceive me well, so I have other priorities”
Call me obsessed, but : Street Epistemology, Deep Canvassing, Smart Politics. Those are ways to talk to people who are hostile and yet turn the conversation into an object-level disagreement, and you can get fast training, for free (see my post “Effectively Handling Disagreements” -conflict of interest explicit). Notoriously relied upon by constructive atheists, by the way.
I do agree, however, that polite critiques should be boosted by default, e.g. with a karma boost on the forum, and doing this might be more effective than what I just stated above.
Workshops:
https://deepcanvass.org/ organizes introductions to Deep Canvassing regularly. My personal take is that the workshop is great, but I don’t find it entirely aligned with a truth-seeking attitude (it’s not appalling either), and I would suggest rationalists to bring it their own twist.
https://www.joinsmart.org/ also organizes workshops who often vary in theme. Same remark as above.
There is a discord server accessible from https://streetepistemology.com/, they organize regular practices sessions.
Motivational Interviewing and Principled Negotiation are common enough for you to find a workshop near where you live, I guess.
There’s also the elephant in the room -my own eclectic workshop, which mostly synthesizes all of the above with (I believe) a more rationalist orientation and stricter ethics.
Someone told me about people in the US who trained on “The Art of Difficult Conversations”, I’d be happy to have someone leave a reference here! If you’re someone who’s used to coaching for managing disagreements, feel free to drop your services below as well.