Are there tips for undergrads and graduate students on how to skip classes or do less during classes via mentioning that they are EAs and what they intend to accomplish with their time when classes don’t align with their goals?
Diego_Caleiro
Karma: 177
Would it be valuable to have edited books on many fields which are useful for EAs?
Things like Philosophy of Mind for Computationalists
Mega course for aspiring philosophers
Etc… but edited in a book. Like these here, here, and here.
Philosophy for EAs
Mathematics for EAs, a guide for the perplexed
Anthropology for EAs etc…
Is an academic’s influence more important in creating new EAs or on the research they do themselves?
Alternatively, is trying to influence a field and cause other researchers to be more interested in useful research possible, how?
Papers X Books
Long ago I had decided against writing papers. I had written some 4 papers, of mediocre writing and decent idea quality. I decided against it for two reasons, one is that anything I publish on lesswrong.com or effective-altruism.com will be read by hundreds of people within 24 hours of publication.
The other is that Paper reading and citation follow a power law distribution: http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.3890
With median number of readers being around 10 (that is about 100 times less than overall reading of lesswrong.com and maybe 50 less than effective-altruism.com)
Add to that the enormous cost of writing papers, having them reviewed, the randomness involved, and the 3 year long cost of publication, and you have sure a recipe for me not wanting to do it.
I think there are fields like math and times like before 1970 where the truth was a sufficiently strong attractor that the terrible hedging writing of the sort used in academic papers could become prominent as long as it was true. That however was before TV Internet, marketing fads, blogs, and soon google glasses and virtual reality. The truth is still an attractor, but far less strong in comparison now to aesthetics, marketing and other variables. So we have to add those adornments to true ideas, or they will perish. Also if my ideas are all wrong, I want them to be known by enough people that they can notice, give me feedback and make me change my mind. I care about consequences. I want my ideas to be consequential, because this has positive feedback, which increases probability that I’ll hit the truth over the long run. And if I don’t, someone else will. Writing papers will give me none of that.
Books however seem to be a different beast. First of all they are long enough to convey interesting ideas (of a more philosophical type) second, though they also follow exponential distributions, there are several marketing strategies that can aid publication and increase number of readers. They can be, like papers and unlike blogs, cited as decent academic evidence in good standing.
They can be monetized as well, whereas one must pay to publish papers.
In 2009 I have thus convinced myself that writing books is superior to writing papers, so I stopped writing papers and wrote a book.
Two top academics (Bostrom and Deacon) recently recommended to me to write papers, I decided to revisit the case for papers versus books.
So it’s 2015. On all accounts it seems to me that the case for papers is worse today than in 2008.
The power law continues for papers. Publishing them continues to be costly. Not paying to have them public is shooting oneself on the foot. Due to Kindle etc, authors have more control and a greater share of the money that goes for books. Though less money goes to printed books, more goes to authors. Paper’s usage decays over time for most authors, specially on empirical matters. Even papers by authors as brilliant as Hilary Putnam as less read today than before. Books can be eternalized. People still read “word and object”.
With exceptions that publish papers on places like arxiv.org (Garrett Lisi, Tegmark, Tononi) I don’t know who rose to intellectual prominence via papers in the last many years.
I am glad to hear counterarguments, because as it stands, this seems like the ultimate no-brainer, there is not a single thing papers are better than books for.
Number of readers
Conveying complex ideas
Getting feedback on ideas
Money
Career prospects
Author’s name being remembered and sought after
Resilience over long stretches of time
Compatibility with Technological advances (current and expected)
Odds of finding collaborators in virtue of having written them.
The few properties like “peer feedback” and “short and easier to write” that papers beat books at have are completely dominated by blogging, specially on public science or philosophy blogs.
My current evaluation is that in 2008 writing books was substantially better than papers, in 2015 I think writing books and not papers is the secret sauce of being a successful academic.
But I’m happy to be convinced otherwise if you think the arguments above don’t hold, or there are even stronger ones I forgot to consider that dominate over them all.
I’m starting a PHD in soon. That gives me freedom to research a large plethora of topics, some of which more valuable then others, ranging from information theory and the nature of information to the mathematics of altruism, and the formation of Singletons. In between all sorts of questions about genetic determination and behavioral genomics are allowed, as well as primatology. My current contention is to research potential paths for altruism in the future, where it can lead in naïve evolutionary models and in less naïve evolutionary models. I will also do research with other EAs on how to impart moral concepts to artificial general intelligences. Are there better counterfactual alternatives?
Questions about Effective Altruism in academia (RAQ)
Yes, and that is a very smart question! You’re right.
I think your description of what the skeptic movement possibly is is perfectly accurate, as are the unfortunate results you mention.
I have heard before that a person who currently holds a very high position within the EA movement predicted that it would fail precisely because of this lower level of connection that intensional movements have versus extensional ones. That person sure is glad now that they were wrong. It is much easier to grip an extensional movement to the ground, so to speak. EA now has traction, as long as we don’t push the breaks, let’s use it’s momentum.
The difficulty of finding intensional movements is related to some cognitive abilities. Science and philosophy took long to evolve though saints, religions and spirits are cheap. I recommend in particular “The prehistory of the mind” by Stephen Mithen to get a grasp of why levels of intentionality are one of the newest characteristics the human mind is able to entertain, and not all human minds are equally good at it. It is connected to levels of intensionality.
You have accidentally read the draft version that was automatically published by a reviewer. The section you asked for was precisely what the reviewers were helping me generate. Glad about the convergence!
Effective Altruism as an intensional movement
These points seem very dangerous to me:
Avoid images and videos unless you’re sure you can dissociate sufficiently. Academic prose is safer. Don’t visit the countries where you’re helping. There is great value in understanding the local conditions better to run better interventions, but the top charities and GiveWell are doing that already so you don’t have to. Related to that, try not to get to know anyone you might be helping. The decision to donate someplace and not someplace else may consign some to death so others (and hopefully more) can live. It helps to not know either to make better decisions.
As someone who’s been on academia for 10 years, and intends to be for 10 more. It seems clear to me that academia fosters working on the wrong problems, and that academic prose, besides awfully written—see Pinker’s Sense of Style on that—is unlikely to lead someone into fruitful EA behavior.
Not visiting countries sounds equally dangerous to me. People with first world problems, and in my experience, especially Americans who didn’t have luck in their parent’s school choice, have an incredibly distorted sense of what day to day life is in the world. I’m not particularly talking about the suffering from which you are trying to get people to dissociate, but particularly about the scarcity of money. In NY, SF, Sweden etc… I’ve seen people considering the prices of some things “reasonable” that are unfathomable in a small city in the Brazilian jungle, the Syrian desert or the Bolivian mountains. The important thing for EAs in this case of course is not to feel bad for buying a book or a Chai, but to understand how tremendously valuable their money and money acquiring capacity is.
Finally, not getting to know—at least a bit—who you are helping is a great way of being scammed, or, much worse, feeling paranoid of being scammed, or paralyzed into inaction by abstraction.
My claim is a little narrower than the one you correctly criticize.
I believe that for movements like EA, and for some other types of crucial consideration events (atomic bombs, FAI, perhaps the end of aging) there are windows of opportunity where resources have the sort of exponential payoff decay you describe.
I have high confidence that the EA window of opportunity is currently in force. So EAs en tant que telle are currently in this situation. I think it is possible that AI’s window is currently open as well, I’m far less confident in that. With Bostrom, I think that the “strategic considerations” or “crucial considerations” time window is currently open. I believe the atomic bomb time window was in full force in 1954, and highly commend the actions of Bertrand Russell in convincing Einstein to sign the anti-bomb manifesto. Just like today I commend the actions of those who caused the anti-UFAI manifesto. This is one way in which what I intend to claim is narrower.
The other way is that all of this rests on a conditional: assuming that EA as a movement is right. Not that it is metaphysically right, but some simpler definition, where in most ways history unfolds, people would look back and say that EA was a good idea, like we say the Russell-Einstein manifesto was a good idea today.
As for reasons to believe the EA window of opportunity is currently open, I offer the stories above (TED, Superintelligence, GWWC, and others...), the small size of the movement at the moment, the unusual level of tractability that charities have acquired in the last few years due to technological ingenuity, the globalization of knowledge—which increases the scope of what you can do a substantial amount—the fact that we have some, but not all financial tycoons yet, etc…
As to the factor of resource value decrease, I withhold judgement, but will say the factor could go down a lot from what it currently is, and the claim would still hold (which I tried to convey by Singer’s 1972 example).
Confused my techno-tycoons. Wozniak in mind. Fixed.
Thanks for noticing, fixed!
Should you give your best now or later?
Gustavo Bicalho seemed interested in doing a similar project. At least he described a very similar project to me.
Oh yeah, I’m assuming their salaries are just part of the labour market. So I mean here only the training cost, excluding salaries.
Is it worthwhile to teach a class on effective altruism as a special course for undergrads? I recently saw a GWWC pledge party where many new undergrads had decided to take the pledge after a few months taking one. Though selection effects might have been a large part of it.