The guy in the panda hat at EAG.
Cornelis Dirk Haupt
Karma: 604
Link to a Feature Suggestion of mine. Essentially it would be nice to be able to filter the Vote History by the actual reactions issued.
E.g. Imagine you wanted to find some comment from >1 year ago. You only remember it changed your mind on something important so you want to filter this list by “Changed my mind”.
iirc there were prominent thinkers in the 19th Century like Thomas Jefferson who decried Slavery as a moral monstrosity but lamented that things could not be any other way (TEDx animation is where I remember this from).
And they held this view and wrote about it mere months before abolition laws were to be passed. Social change can happen faster than people predict it possible.
Yea that’s the one thanx. I notice I could have found that by going to “Saved & Read” and then “Vote History” which was a bit hidden so didn’t know to go there.
Would be great if I could filter the Vote History page to only see comments I have reacted to in a particular way
E.g. I go there and filter to only show comments I have “helpful” reacted to would make finding Scott’s comment a lot easier in the future when this comment otherwise become buried under years of other comments.
In fact, most useful would be to be able to filter by “Changed my mind” reactions.
(Paging @Sarah Cheng with this feature request)
This kinda reminds me of a post that asked if EAs would have been as in favour as the abolition of slavery as a particular extremely hard-line anti-slavery activist at the time who we morally laud today as a moral exemplar, but who everyone at the time thought was a shocking PETA-type extremist. (Found the post)
The comment posed by @emre kaplan🔸 there I think is very illuminating.Scott Alexander somewhere on the forum wrote a comment I mostly agree with (where he was giving caution to a pro—Pause AI post, cant find) that most, or at least a significant amount that we cannot discount, amount of social change comes as a consequence of people that want change working from within the system and gaining high status from within the system to be able to affect change—because the people who have the power to then make change like these high status people and want their respect.
This all just leads me to the fairly obvious conclusion that like with AI Safety and Slavery Abolition, EAs—hypothetically placed at any place in history—are most likely to be found working within a system gaining enough status to slowly and reliably tweak the status quo in a positive direction.
There is no contradiction between being opposed to Prohibition but in favour of finding a reliable way to get people to drink less alcohol.
[Question] EAGs are back to being a cause area buffet?
Peter Turchin. He was the first guest on Julia Galef’s Rationally Speaking podcast and Scott Alexander did an article on his work. But outside of that I doubt he even knows EA as a movement exists. Would love to see him understand AI timelines and see how that influences his thinking and his models and vice-versa how respected members of our community make updates (or don’t) to their timelines based on Turchin’s models (and why).
Thank you for the perspective!
I certainly agree with your model on behaviour change. Likewise, my approach has over the years simplified from more convoluted ideas to one simple maxim: “Just make sure you feed them. The rest will often take care of itself.”
I’m concerned about animal welfare, human welfare and AI safety—without the urgency of AI dominating entirely.
I think what I highlight is similar to how many professional communities are optimized for matching prospective employers with employees rather than the happiness and enjoyment of their members. If there are 100 members but employers are only interested in one candidate you will have 99 less happy members. But this is not a bad thing as the goal of the community is to matching particular employers. It could easily be a mistake to find different employers and different events to make it more likely that you’ll have more happy members—risks include value drift and reducing your actual goal of maximizing impact. Still, 99% of your members are disgruntled as a tradeoff.
Professional-adjacent communities like say “computer tinkerers who just do it for fun” do not have this problem. If 99% in the community are not happy then you either change what you are doing to what the community of tinkerers are interested in or the community ceases to exist—or at least this is a much more likely outcome.
I’ve been thinking a bunch about a fundamental difference between the EA community and the LessWrong community.
LessWrong is optimized for the enjoyment of its members. Any LessWrong event I go to in any city the focus is on “what will we find fun to do?” This is great. Notice how the community isn’t optimized for “making the world more rational.” It is a community that selects for people interested in rationality and then when you get these kinds of people in the same room the community tries to optimize for FUN for these kinds of people.
EA as a community is NOT optimized for the enjoyment of its members. It is optimized for making the world a better place. This is a feature, not a bug. And surely it should be net positive since its goal should by definition be net positive. When planning an EAG or EA event you measure it on impact and say professional connections made and how many new high quality AI Alignment researchers you might have created on the margin. You don’t measure it on how much people enjoyed themselves (or you do, but for instrumental reasons to get more people to come so that you can continue to have impact).
As a community organizer in both spaces, I do notice it is easier that I can leave EA events I organized feeling more burnt out and less fulfilled than compared to similar LW/ACX events. I think the fundamental difference mentioned before explains why.
Dunno if I am pointing at anything that resonates with anyone. I don’t see this discussed much among community organizers. Seems important to highlight.
Basically in LW/ACX spaces—specifically as an organizer—I more easily feel like a fellow traveller up for a good time. In EA spaces—specifically as an organizer—I more easily feel like an unpaid recruiter.
Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s Quick takes
By all means please do
This change is, in part, a response to common feedback that the name Impactful Animal Advocacy is too long (10 syllabus!), hard to remember, and difficult to recognize as the acronym IAA.
I just tried and failed to remember the name last night when I was trying to recommend IAA to a friend of mine interested in getting involved in animal welfare.Thankfully I was quickly able to say “Oh, they’re called Hive now, here’s their Slack invite link!” and all was well.
Shrugs, sure it’s possible. It’s also possible that if we employ counterfactual reasoning that had the UN not existed that a better institution would have arisen in its place. It is quite possible that the dynamics of post-WW2 just made it inevitable for some coordination-institution to be built out of sheer geopolitical necessity and that we got one of the worse possible outcomes.
If the US medical system didn’t get created in its current form that doesn’t mean that counterfactually what would have happened otherwise is that the US would just have no medical system whatsoever. Nobody seriously defends the US medical system by saying it is “better than nothing” because a world where something like it doesn’t exist at all is practically impossible—probably much like a world without something resembling the UN. Too many social, economic and political forces demand that both exist in some shape or form.
Of course you could say the exact same thing about Effective Altruism as well. Had EA not been created in its current form something—counterfactually—with a better foundation might have been culturally constructed. I suppose the difference for me is that it is probably orders of magnitude easier for me to picture a better US medical system or better UN that could have been constructed instead than it is for me to picture a better EA. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part.
Anyway, this game of “if this-thing-I-like-had-not-existed” is a fool’s errand and strongly susceptible to motivated reasoning. And that is true whether we do or do not employ counterfactual reasoning.
There are few organizations in the Western world that could survive with the allegations of mismanagement, scandal, and corruption that permeate the United Nations. For many delegates, officials, and employees, particularly those from developing nations, the UN is little more than an enormous watering hole.
Concerned about its shabby image, the UN recently developed a multiple-choice “ethics quiz” for its employees. The “correct” answers were obvious to everyone [Is it all right to steal from your employer? (A) Yes, (B) No, (C) Only if you don’t get caught].
The quiz was not designed to determine the ethical sense of UN employees or to weed out the ethically inept but to raise their level of integrity. How taking a transparent test could improve integrity is unclear. There has been no mention of how management and other officials did on the test
~ Snakes in Suits, a study of psychopaths in the workplaceAre there many EAs that consider the UN a serious institution from a “makes the world a better place” perspective? I thought most of us viewed it the same way we view the US medical system: which is to say woefully ineffective, credentialist, in some cases net-negative for public health and something that is ripe for systemic change to make the world better (It would be interesting to see how many “systemic change” criticisms of EA could apply just as well, if not more, to the UN).
That said, you do have a point. I still haven’t heard a pro-Israeli argument that properly parses the whole anti-Israel UN position. The most salient answer to me is still “Israel is actually in the wrong for a lot of things.” Otherwise surely the UN would be a tad bit more split on the issue?
I just wouldn’t place quite as much stock as you do in the UN. Same goes for the US medical system. Get multiple opinions. Always. Including from those from within the system that argue the entire system has systemic flaws (e.g. vegan doctors that face opposition from practically their entire field). The overall UN position is one signal among many, but it isn’t that strong of a signal.
since your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it.
There are multiple atrocities of similar moral urgency happening in Northern India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere that are still being ignored. The world has being paying disproportionate attention to the Palestine-Israeli compared to these other places. I’ve read of Indian reporters flying to Palestine to cover the way and Indians are asking “why are they leaving when there are just as bad things happening at home.” Well, because the world doesn’t care about other parts of the world. It isn’t newsworthy.
Obviously this doesn’t make ignoring Palestine justified. I’m just pointing out that anyone ignoring Palestine might just be actually focusing on something more important. There are a million things on fire in the world. We have to triage. Sometimes that looks like some people not caring when a genocide is happening but sometimes that does not mean they don’t care and it is incredibly uncharitable, rude and presumptuous to say what you did. How you feel about others and who they actually are, are two different things.
This was all extremely clear, as Scott Ritter clearly points out. Also Hamas literally spelled out their plans in documents like Jericho Wall.
It doesn’t matter what Hamas planned. It matters what they did.
If you are Muslim this concept is rooted in the Hadith, where it’s stated that actions are judged by intentions, but the ultimate value lies in the action itself. Any Muslim EA can feel free to tell me I’m wrong. I lived in the middle east for 3 years so I know a thing or two but not much. But this seems like an obvious moral truth all religions and secular moral institutions have at their core.
There was friendly fire which caused many civilian deaths, and possibly the majority of them. Please do some basic research.
There is not a single credible source I can find that says this—including sources highly critical of Israel. Even the Palestinian Authority has taken back their claim that friendly fire from Israeli helicopters caused a whole lot of friendly-fire deaths.
Incredible how the Palestinians crimes are so exaggerated, while all of the unending horrors from the Zionist side are either downplayed or ignored.
Exaggerated how exactly? I said Hamas, not Palestine. Those are two different things just like Israel and the Knesset and Zionists are three different things.
“Resistance Raid” is a bizarre framing of deliberately targeting and slaughtering defenceless women and children in their homes with the deliberate goal of mass terror.
Unlike say the ANC from my home country of South Africa that deliberately tried to only target government targets… that is clearly not what Hamas did. They aren’t freedom fighters, maybe some are, but not their organisation as a whole. Any support for the organisation—given what their charter said pre-2017 - can under no reasonable lens not be seen as tantamount to, at the very least, be supporting ex-Nazis insofar as explicit genocidal antisemitism is concerned. What reasonable counterargument justifying support for Hamas is there that isn’t “Israel is much worse”?
I do not understand why it is so hard for some people to comprehend that both the IDF and Hamas can be net-negative and evil. You don’t have to support the one you judge as the lesser evil and use euphemisms to describe their actions. You can oppose both and say both are savagely genocidal against the other.
“You claim responding against the emotional propaganda is wrong, but writing even close to the parallel from the Palestinian side would result in a perma-ban.”
I don’t believe this is the true given the contentious posts I’ve seen here over the years. I presume you have evidence of someone who is Palestinian and identifies as an EA that was perma-banned for writing from the Palestinian side? (i.e. not a political bot, someone who is actually part of the community) Because I’d be just as interested in reading that as I was reading this piece. And I wouldn’t be putting the two against each other, but be extending empathy to both authors as fellow human beings.
Also during the Oct 7th raid we know Israel killed many of it’s own civilians and it was a highly planned out military operation. If that’s a “terrorist” attack then what israel is doing is even worse than a genocide.
I had to do a double-take and am now only rereading this part after writing my response. You actually believe Israel deliberately perpetuated part of the Oct 7 raid? I’m at a complete loss for words...
Robin Hanson—the guy that came up with the grabby aliens hypothesis that seems to have solidified itself within the EA-rat zeitgeist—also has some very interesting and fun ideas on what UAPs might be—some that actually answer some of your questions:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ufos-what-the-hellhtml
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ufos-what-the-further-hell
I’m surprised I don’t see his blog cited anywhere by you or mentioned anywhere in the comments.
Given it is the Giving Season, I’d be remiss not to point out that ACE currently has donation matching for their Recommended Charity Fund.
I am personally waiting to hear back from RC Forward on whether Canadian donations can also be made for said donation matching, but for American EAs at least, this seems like a great no-brainer opportunity to dip your feet in effective animal welfare giving.
The forum has a thing where people with more karma have more upvote/downvote power (at least this was a thing last year. I presume it still is).
This means that even though you got −14 in minutes, that might just be 2 people downvoting in total.
Worth keeping in mind.
Someone else feel free to point out I am mistaken if I am indeed mistaken.
If you’re an animal welfare EA I’d highly recommend joining the wholesome refuge that is the newly minted Impactful Animal Advocacy (IAA).
Website and details here. I volunteered for them at the AVA Summit which I strongly recommend as the premier conference and community-builder for animal welfare-focused EAs. The AVA Summit has some features I have long thought missing from EAGs—namely people arguing in good faith about deep deep disagreements (e.g. why don’t we ever see a panel with prominent longtermist and shorttermist EAs arguing for over an hour straight at EAGs?). There was an entire panel addressing quantification bias which turned into talking about some believing how EA has done more harm than good for the animal advocacy movement… but that people are afraid to speak out against EA given it is a movement that has brought in over 100 million dollars to animal advocacy. Personally I loved there being a space for these kind of discussions.
Also, one of my favourite things about the IAA community is they don’t ignore AI, they take it seriously and try to think about how to get ahead of AI developments to help animals. It is a community where you’ll bump into people who can talk about x-risk and take it seriously, but for whatever reason are prioritizing animals.
Hi there, I submitted my application before February 2nd for the April 7 to June 27, 2025 round.
However the email I received says I will hear back:
On the website I see this is the deadline for the 29 September − 19 December, 2025 round. Did the date change or was I placed in the wrong cohort accidentally perhaps?