This is a tough topic to discuss and I appreciate you being willing to discuss it on the forum.
ElliotTep
Karma: 2,275
In short, often yes.
This isn’t a symmetrical issue, but the risk of saying ‘EA is no worse or even better than some reference class’ in relative terms is sorta kinda like ‘sexual harrassment in EA is not that bad’ in absolute terms.
From speaking to some friends it seems like the many minor and occassional major harrassment incidents, and ways EA is unusually bad (e.g. misreading social cues and intense professional/social overlap), these ‘not that bad ’ issues might be burnout, leaving EA, needing to quite one’s job, panic attacks, which doesn’t even take into account all those people less able to do good in the world as a result.
One tension I grapple with in these conversations that I’m struggling to articulate is the difficulty between separating out the fact that bad things tend to be so much worse when you experience them, so that if the data isn’t that damning, as I man, I can feel good about EA and continue with my day. Whereas I imagine for women who bear the brunt of it, EA being not that bad is still pretty shitty, and if I knew this viscerally, I would be a whole lot more empathetic and do a lot more to try and combat it.
Maybe the point I’m trying to make is when engaging with topics like this there can be a muting of how bad ‘not that bad’ is.
I don’t think this invalidates or contradicts the main point of your post Nathan, more a potential missing mood to all those discussing in the comments (not calling out anyone in particular).
To your questions, depends on the person. Definitely some people and contexts where it would go poorly. And yes I do think you’re pointing at something that is probably true, but see my other comment, I think the risk of biasing things in these conversations can go both ways.
One thing I’ll add which I haven’t seen in the comments is some of the vibe of ‘EA is unusally bad’ is that EA is probably unusually bad in some ways due to the makeup and culture of our community, and less bad in others. Bluntly I think much of this comes down to things like being worse at reading social cues, a high male to female ratio, and a community that is an unusual mix of professional and social network.
I get the impression from female friends that being in EA means tolerating, for example, a lot more being hit on in unprofessional situations (e.g. EAG) down to creepier contexts, with the men missing being rebuffed multiple times.
This doesn’t discount your main argument Nathan, but to the extent that people complain about EA being worse, this might be what they’re pointing at some of the time.
I also agree with others’ comments that a lot of this conversation is about how EA is ‘bad’ rather than ‘worse’, and that as community builders we want to do better, even if we’re already above average.
Really well done documentary IMO. Well done! My hunch is that this could succeed, as intended, at opening up conversations with friends and family in a way that some of the other docos might not. Curious to see the numbers and anecdotes when they come in.
Has anyone talked about the role the Green Revolution probably played in making factory farming economically viable?
Among other enabling factors (e.g. antibiotics), factory farming, especially of pigs and poultry, depends on cheap grain feed. The system only works at scale if feed costs are low enough to make confinement viable relative to pasture. The Green Revolution roughly tripled global grain production between 1960 and 2000, and maize in particular became cheap enough to feed to animals at industrial volumes.
Every time I see a celebration of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, I can’t help but recoil a little, thinking about the unintended consequence on the tens of billions of non-human animals impacted.If this is true, I feel conflicted in how to think about the Green Revolution. Clearly good intentions, saved hundreds of millions of humna, condemned hundreds of billions to lives of animals to pain. I feel like the EA community has the right virtues to hold this complexity.
Which comes back to the question: how should we talk about the Green Revolution?
Cool news: Jesse Eisenberg donated a kidney to a stranger, and said it was after hearing a podcast on ‘effective altruism’ where they talked about kidney donations. He mentioned it in this podcast. I assume this might lead back to Dylan Matthews.
Curious if you disagree but this strikes me as red flags (I skimmed these so let me know if I got anything wrong).
I’m very skeptical of any theory of change that relies on large parts of society behaving differently, unless there is very compelling evidence that this would work. I see this a lot in non-EA vegan advocacy where there is a claim that if everybody just did x differently (e.g. debated differently). Everybody very very rarely just does anything differently. One of the big values I see in EA is, for example, contributing to companies going cage-free at scale, while the rest of the vegan movement was failing to win individual hearts and minds or developing some social movement theory about how we’re on the precipice of a new way of thinking spreading.
I’ve been curious what the metacrisis folks could produce because I respect some of the people involved and I take the critique seriously that EA doesn’t focus on systemic issues or interrelated problems enough.But it strikes me that folks looking at systemic/interrelated solutions should grapple with the fact that these are so much harder to do, and that, to me at least, the solutions proposed seem very unlikely to come close to remotely tackling the problem.
Caveat: I do appreciate all of this could just be due to my lack of deep engagement.
Amazon US store.
Wow great PSA. Claude tells me this could be the solution to vegan matza balls that don’t fall apart, as well as all the other desserts. Just ordered some to Australia.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply to the thoughtful reply. I appreciate the challenge of trying to bridge together two different frameworks you care about and the challenges of discussing it on the forum.
Two points I want to follow up on relate to the metacrsis.I’ve tried to learn about it and felt like I was reading continental philosophy where it seems like clarity wasn’t being optimised for.
I also found the solutions to to be very lacking, where the only answers I could ascertain were sensemaking and raising awareness and then some complicated things I couldn’t understand. For example here is a quote from transcript of a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger on the metacrisis:
So it’s not a solution, it’s a whole ecosystem of solutions that we have to work on, but they all have to be informed by understanding the problems and the interconnection of the whole well enough that you don’t advantage one part while externalizing the cost to the other areas. So I think we’ve got to do… And I appreciate you being available late at night your time, I think we got to do the beginning first part of this thing that is I found meaningful in your work and was valuable for me to make more central of the embedded growth obligation in finance being coupled to diminishing returns in energy that are not easily overcomeable through the current renewable technologies and process or the efficiencies in process and that being a major fucking thing that we have to deal with and that being connected to so many of the other things. I think we did a good job of starting that and maybe starting to get to what some of the transition looks like, some of the cultural parts, some of the advanced policy parts can be our next conversation.
I’d be curious to hear from you, what are some wins the metacrisis movements have had, or proposed solutions?
I appreciate the efforts to try and bridge two projects you think are valuable. A few thoughts/comments/disagreements:
1. One way to read this seems to me like it could boil down to: if you like EA, but also want some more metacrisis/sensemaking/systems thinking than what EA typically offers, then that’s us. Come say hi.
2. I feel like there’s some irony here where EA conversation norms tend towards very direct communication, and sensemaking folks tend to speak in a more indirect way. In pitching integral altruism I can’t help but get the feeling it is framed in fairly indirect language at times. It’s hard to name the exact dynamic but I found myself working hard to understand parts of what this paragraph is trying to say (maybe that’s just me):
Psychological, emotional and spiritual development can help us cultivate a genuine desire for the wellbeing of others, resulting in altruism grounded in truth rather than being driven by guilt or pride. Such growth can also improve our epistemics by shining light on What’s Going On For Us and inspire action by deeply connecting us to the value we’re fighting for.
3. Some of these points seem surprising to include as what is added by integral altruism as they seem to me as a regular part of EA discourse. I’m thinking about the sections that discuss valuing other things in life besides impact, and that inner work can lead to more impact.
4. I think a big decision point here is whether or not the merits of integral altruism will be argued on the territory of EA assumptions or not, and this post seems to move between the two. For example, you make the claim that there are real downsides to seeing x-risk in isolation rather than in the way it is interconnected with other problems. This seems big and important if true, and seems like something that could be argued comfortably within the framework of EA norms. I appreciate that puts the burden on you, but if you persuade folks here, I imagine that would be a big win for everyone. FWIW whenever I’ve listened to folks talk about the metacrisis I’ve literally not been able to understand the arguments. Could be a huge service to try and make the case for the metacrisis in EA friendly language.
Yeah I have, and my impression from those I’ve spoken with is that this has not been the case. You don’t think most people whose job primarily involves sitting at a computer could have much of their job automated by a software engineer on call? For example:
I know grantmakers who have significantly automated parts of their work.
I know people who have classified 1,000 people in their CRM across a range of people using AI instead of manually.
I’ve seen some impressive use of AI to go through 1000′s of academic papers looking for novel solutions to a welfare that might exist but is not widely known.
How organisations with low AI usage can and should be using it more
There is a lot of discussion about how everyone should be using AI more, and efforts to increase use and literacy. So far in animal advocacy spaces where I work I’ve seen the following efforts to increase usage so far:
Orgs provide model subscriptions to their teams.
People share the ways they’ve been using AI in slack channels or recurring meetings.
There are educational webinars or fellowships.
The above has made a real dent in AI usage, but much less than we should be aiming for given the gains left on the table. My sense is that the reason these actions have only seen incremental improvements is that:
Significantly upgrading usage requires a lot of dedicated time to experiment and learn in ways that can feel hard during a busy work week.
A great way to learn can be trying a task just outside of one’s ability with someone on hand to help, which is quite hard to set up in the age of remote work.
For folks who don’t have a coding/IT background, it’s hard to know what activities could be automated, or what supportive infrastructure is needed to pull it off.
I think the following would meaningfully improve how much individuals and organisations use AI:
Extended time for peer-to-peer co-working on trying to solve problems with AI (e.g. every second Friday afternoon.)
A full week of staff training on AI use, so that lessons can be followed by practice (HT to Eleanor McAree for this one).
Organisations with 20+ staff should hire an AI specialist who goes from team to team and person to person to help them use AI to increase their productivity on an ongoing basis (I think if someone builds a technical solution, it usually requires maintenance by someone with that level of proficiency).
Smaller organisations could have fractional AI specialists on retainer to do the same thing.
What do people think? What have I missed?
This is very sweet. Made my day :)
Seconded
I had in mind the EA Animal Welfare fund where small orgs is a reasonable part of its giving portfolio (I don’t have exact numbers off the top of my head)
I really like this post, and in general appreciate the ways you’ve been thinking about the EA community over the last few years, as someone who has been very close to community building, dissatisfied, and engaging to improve it, where I think most people just check out/give up.
One dynamic I see in this problem, that I don’t think you talked about, is that formal community building is focused on serving new EAs and growth partly because formal community doesn’t serve the most engaged members very well. This is because:
1. More engaged EAs in hubs often work in EA roles, and their cup is full, they don’t want more events.
2. Community builders are often not well placed to serve them, as they’ve been around longer than the community builders have.
3. People who have been in EA for a while often have their community experience be in their friendship groups, coworking spaces, or with colleagues, that I think does fill that role quite well. These places all have filters where they’re not open to everyone, which makes sense, but does create an awkward dynamic where the public EA community space ends up serving the newer EAs.
I do think more work could be done to move CEA’s strategy in the direction you point towards. But they do have to grapple with these dynamics, which I think are just pretty hard to change dramatically.