EricHerboso

• EricHerboso 17 Apr 2021 18:24 UTC

  121 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  Although I am on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, everything I say on this thread is my own words only and represents solely my personal opinion of what may have been going on. Any mistakes here are my own and this should not be interpreted as an official statement from ACE.

  I believe that the misunderstanding going on here might be a false dilemma. Hypatia is acting as though the two choices are to be part of the social justice movement or to be in favor of free open expression. Hypatia then gives evidence that shows that ACE is doing things like the former, and thus concludes that this is dangerous because the latter is better for EA.

  But this is a false dichotomy. ACE is deliberately taking a nuanced position that straddles both sides. ACE is not in danger of becoming an org that just goes around canceling free thought thinkers. But nor is ACE is danger of ignoring the importance of providing safe spaces for black, indigenous, and people of the global majority (BIPGM) in the EAA community. ACE is doing both, and I think rightly so.

  Many who read this likely don’t know me, so let me start out by saying that I wholeheartedly endorse the spirit of the quoted comment from Anna Salamon at the end of Hypatia’s post. I strongly believe that the ideals of the enlightenment (open discussion of ideas, free speech, believing ideas based on argumentation and evidence) are necessary in order to do and achieve better. I have been known, in the past, of arguing even for more open discussion of infohazardous ideas, given appropriate spaces.

  But, at the same time, I simultaneously believe that the playing field in which we all live and work together is fundamentally biased against BIPGM. In order to ensure that BIPGM are able to also work in the EAA space, they can’t just be ignored; we have to take a positive effort in order to ensure that they are fairly included. As Howard Zinn once noted, you can’t stay neutral on a moving train.

  (I really don’t want EA to fall into the trap that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony did when they threw Frederick Douglass under the bus. We can simultaneously fight for EAA while also providing a space for BIPGM in the EAA community.)

  Hypatia made several points in the original post. I’ll reorganize them here, in their own words:

  • Blog Post on BLM

    • Making (in my view) poorly reasoned statements about anti-racism; and

    • encouraging supporters to support or donate to anti-racist causes and organizations of dubious effectiveness.

  • Withdrawal from 2020 CARE Conference

    • Attempting to cancel an animal rights conference speaker because of his (fairly liberal) views on Black Lives Matter;

    • withdrawing from that conference because the speaker’s presence allegedly made ACE staff feel unsafe; and

    • issuing a public statement supporting its staff and criticizing the conference organizers.

  • Penalizing Charities Based on Staff Statements

    • Penalizing charities in reviews for having leadership and/​or staff who are deemed to be insufficiently progressive on racial equity; and

    • stating ACE will deny funding to projects from those who disagree with its views on diversity, equity and inclusion.

  I’d like to respond to some of these points, as I think they are incorrect and/​or misleading. I will not be responding to the Blog Post on BLM bullet because I believe that ACE would be better able to clarify that issue.

  Withdrawal from 2020 CARE Conference

  “Attempting to cancel an animal rights conference speaker because of his (fairly liberal) views on Black Lives Matter, withdrawing from that conference because the speaker’s presence allegedly made ACE staff feel unsafe”

  My understanding is that ACE, as an organization, did not intend in any way to cancel this speaker in the sense that you mean here.

  What happened is much more nuanced than you make it out to be. In another comment on this thread, anonymous00 writes up much more of the context behind what was going on. In short, ACE had staff that were going to present at the CARE conference. After they learned that the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM, they indicated to ACE leadership that they felt unsafe going to the conference, and they pulled out. There was no capacity to replace them with other speakers. ACE informed CARE that they were withdrawing.

  At no point here did ACE as an organization deliberately decide to cancel anyone, even if some people affiliated with ACE did express dissatisfaction with him speaking on this topic at the conference. At no point do I think that ACE had any choice but to withdraw from the conference, given the feelings of ACE’s staff that pulled out. You might object that these staff members shouldn’t have felt unsafe. I can understand that point of view, because if I were in their position, I wouldn’t have felt unsafe, even though I am also a BIPGM. (I’m mixed indigenous, hispanic, and white, with the plurality being indigenous ancestry.) But you and I do not get to choose when others feel unsafe.

  Hopefully, anonymous00′s writeup may give more context into why they felt unsafe. If not, I could try to explain further, perhaps with an analogy to make it more clear. But I believe this is beside the point. Organizations cannot tell their employees when they have to feel safe. It’s up to people to make such determinations, and then organizations have to work around those facts.

  “issuing a public statement supporting its staff and criticizing the conference organizers.”

  I agree that the way that ACE handled the communication surrounding these events was ultimately quite poor. While I believe that ACE took appropriate actions here, I don’t think that its communications about those actions were appropriate nor ultimately good.

  In particular, ACE’s statement erred on the side of taking responsibility as an organization for the actions of its employees. I think this is generally good practice. But it gave an impression that ACE was trying to deplatform someone, when that is not what was going on at all. I think that the communications aspect of this situation could have been much better handled.

  Penalizing Charities Based on Staff Statements

  “Penalizing charities in reviews for having leadership and/​or staff who are deemed to be insufficiently progressive on racial equity”

  While your words here are technically correct, putting it like this is very misleading. Without breaking confidentiality, let me state unequivocally that if an organization had employees who had really bad views on DEI, that would be, in itself, insufficient for ACE to downgrade them from top to standout charity status. This doesn’t mean it isn’t a factor; it is. But the actions discussed in this EA forum thread would be insufficient on their own to cause ACE to make such a downgrade.

  “stating ACE will deny funding to projects from those who disagree with its views on diversity, equity and inclusion.”

  While this is true as stated, it is not as inappropriate as it sounds here. The text you pulled is from ACE Movement Grants, which is completely separate from the evaluations used for top and standout charities. This is relevant because the entire point of ACE Movement Grants is to foster the movement to become bigger and better through increased resiliency, and this includes being inclusive. It is entirely appropriate for ACE Movement Grants to have a clause like this, given what they are trying to do. There are further reasons why ACE has something like ACE Movement Grants in place, and that context might further explain why including a clause like this would be appropriate; but in the interest of brevity, I won’t include those reasons here.

  Potentially Harmful to the EA Movement

  “those who disagree with decisions to support that work shouldn’t be branded as racist or ignorant”

  I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, and I believe ACE does as well. Please remember that ACE is unusually lenient about others who hold ideals contrary to what ACE does. Unlike global poverty work, there are actual real companies whose business depends entirely on killing and effectively torturing animals. Yet ACE is continually willing to promote organizations who do corporate outreach with these companies. If anything, ACE is extremely strong on allowing cooperation and promotion with individuals and groups who have views that are completely contrary to what ACE believes in.

  Conclusion

  Ultimately, I think the misunderstanding here is a false dilemma. ACE is deliberately taking a nuanced view on the supposed (false dichotomy) axis of free open discussion and the encouragement of safe spaces. At times, ACE might err on one side or the other; hopefully you can understand that organizations like ACE can and will sometimes fail to live up to their own ideals. But the intended position that ACE is taking is one where we try to foster free open discussion while also trying to make the EAA community a place where BIPGM can more fairly live and work.

  What links here?

  • Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (17 Apr 2021 17:00 UTC; 274 points)
  • Jakub Stencel's comment on Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (21 Apr 2021 19:23 UTC; 241 points)

• EricHerboso 15 Oct 2020 4:17 UTC

  49 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Char­ity Nav­i­ga­tor ac­quired Im­pactMat­ters and is start­ing to men­tion “cost-effec­tive­ness” as important

  In July, Charity Navigator announced their new nonprofit rating system that they call Encompass. This system looks at four “beacons” to determine their rating of each charity. One of these beacons is Impact & Results. At the time, they did not specify how they would evaluate this beacon. Yesterday’s latest post from them finally sets down the initial methodology they will use.

  Some basic takeaways:

  • At the same time as releasing their new rating system, they intend to increase the number of charities they rate from 9,000 to 160,000. Clearly, most of the ratings must be automated to do this, so only a vanishingly small proportion of charities will be evaluated on the basis of Impact & Results. It’s not clear how they will prioritize which charities get rated in this beacon in the future, but they’re starting with this list of cause areas and they have a sign-up form for charities that want to be evaluated on Impact & Results.

  • They will not be comparing causes nor sometimes even intervention types. Their system will only look at cost-effectiveness within a cause area in some cases, and only within a single intervention type for other cases. For example, they may rate the most highly cost-effective charity that provides emergency shelters for the homeless population. There will be no indication whatsoever that a cataract surgery charity scoring 100 points on Impact & Results might be more effective than a Veterans Disability Benefits charity scoring 100 points on Impact & Results.

  • Within each cause area, they give four possible scores for Impact & Results: 0 points for charities without publicly available data, 50 points if they provide data but are determined to be inefficient, 75 points if they are found to be effective, and 100 points if they are found to be highly effective. Assuming they successfully find the most highly effective charities, this would give the likely incorrect appearance that the most highly effective charities are only ¹⁄₃ better than charities who just barely do better than breaking even. It’s also not clear what percentage of charities within a cause area may be simultaneously rated at 100 points in the Impact & Results beacon.

  • Within each cause area, they use vastly simplified calculations to determine impact. For example, when it comes to emergency shelters, they assume that all beds are equally good; they disregard counterfactual beds that would be available if the charity not existed there; they give full marks for providing a bed, even if other beds were available at the time; and when determining costs, if the charity doesn’t specify what it costs for them to provide the cost of a bed, they instead just use the average cost as reported by HUD’s Housing Inventory Count dataset. While I believe these are humongous assumptions to be making, I don’t necessarily think these simplifications are bad considering their goal; if they’re serious about analyzing hundreds of thousands of charities, then they have to make simplifications somewhere. [EDIT 16 Oct: Elijah Goldberg of ImpactMatters clarifies in a comment below that this bullet point may be misleading.]

  They have noted that they are looking into additional alternative methodologies for the future.

  The system that Charity Navigator is using for its Impact & Results beacon was acquired from ImpactMatters, which was previously discussed on the EA Forum.

  What links here?

  • EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for Oc­to­ber 2020 by Aaron Gertler (11 Dec 2020 0:40 UTC; 33 points)

• EricHerboso 9 Dec 2022 13:10 UTC

  45 points

  10 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Magnus Hambleton’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?

  That may be the case with those in your social circle, but several existing EA donors have been vocally upset on the EA subreddit. One question we’ve had to answer there multiple times is whether GiveWell had anything to do with this, because, if so, they would cease their donations there.

  People on the EA subreddit are generally more casual than the people that come here to the EA Forum. But comments like this are typical in the last few days:

  “I really have trouble believing that someone who has even vaguely brushed up against the insights of EA would buy a mansion. In fact, I could think of few acts that would be more bluntly and vulgarly antithetical to EA.”

  These are not anti-EA zealots posting on social media about how this kind of thing disgusts them, using this opportunity as a chance to strike (though some of those also exist). No, these are actual EAs — they may not be as engaged as EA Forum users, but they care enough to join the subreddit, to donate to EA orgs, and to participate in light EA discussions on reddit. They are really not happy about the purchase of Wytham Abbey.

EA on r/​Place: An Art Pro­ject Post-mortem

• EricHerboso 20 Feb 2017 6:49 UTC

  34 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why I left EA

  Thank you, Lila, for your openness on explaining your reasons for leaving EA. It’s good to hear legitimate reasons why someone might leave the community. It’s certainly better than the outsider anti-EA arguments that do tend to misrepresent EA too often. I hope that other insiders who leave the movement will also be kind enough to share their reasoning, as you have here.

  While I recognize that Lila does not want to participate in a debate, I nevertheless would like to contribute an alternate perspective for the benefit of other readers.

  Like Lila, I am a moral anti-realist. Yet while she has left the movement largely for this reason, I still identify strongly with the EA movement.

  This is because I do not feel that utilitarianism is required to prop up as many of EA’s ideas as Lila does. For example, non-consequentialist moral realists can still use expected value to try and maximize good done without thinking that the maximization itself is the ultimate source of that good. Presumably if you think lying is bad, then refraining from lying twice may be better than refraining from lying just once.

  I agree with Lila that many EAs act too glib about deaths from violence being no worse than deaths from non-violence. But to the extent that this is true, we can just weight these differently. For example, Lila rightly points out that “violence causes psychological trauma and other harms, which must be accounted for in a utilitarian framework”. EAs should definitely take into account these extra considerations about violence.

  But the main difference between myself and Lila here is that when she sees EAs not taking things like this into consideration, she takes that as an argument against EA; against utilitarianism; against expected value. Whereas I take it as an improper expected value estimate that doesn’t take into account all of the facts. For me, this is not an argument against EA, nor even an argument against expected value—it’s an argument for why we need to be careful about taking into account as many considerations as possible when constructing expected value estimates.

  As a moral anti-realist, I have to figure out how to act not by discovering rules of morality, but by deciding on what should be valued. If I wanted, I suppose I could just choose to go with whatever felt intuitively correct, but evolution is messy, and I trust a system of logic and consistency more than any intuitions that evolution has forced upon me. While I still use my intuitions because they make me feel good, when my intuitions clash with expected value estimates, I feel much more comfortable going with the EV estimates. I do not agree with everything individual EAs say, but I largely agree with the basic ideas behind EA arguments.

  There are all sorts of moral anti-realists. Almost by definition, it’s difficult to predict what any given moral anti-realist would value. I endorse moral anti-realism, and I just want to emphasize that EAs can become moral anti-realist without leaving the EA movement.

A Defense of Normality

• EricHerboso 10 Nov 2020 10:40 UTC

  27 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: omernevo’s comment on: New Ca­reer Guidance Or­ga­ni­za­tion: Prob­a­bly Good

  In addition to the other points brought up, I wanted to add that “probably good” has ~4 million google search results, and the username/​url for “ProbablyGood” has already been taken on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This may make the name especially difficult to effectively market.

Effec­tive Ad­ver­tis­ing and An­i­mal Char­ity Evaluators

• EricHerboso 2 Sep 2020 21:30 UTC

  18 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: EricHer­boso’s Shortform

  No need to apologize. It’s just a shortform, and I have enough cognitive dissonance on the topic to not be really sure what I think about it myself.

  I agree with you that the phrase “people of the global majority” sounds weird and naively seems to divide people into unintuitive groups unnecessarily. But in my post I was talking about friends that I personally know who have been hurt by things the EA movement has said in some introductory social media spaces, and their preferred name as a group is “people of the global majority”. By using it, I’m merely using the term they’ve taken for themselves, because it doesn’t seem to hurt anything and it generally is nice to use the names that people have adopted for themselves.

  Their reasoning for using “people of the global majority” is that:

  • “people of color” is too US-centric;

  • it centers whiteness as the norm;

  • it implies that white folks are devoid of race; &

  • many people may not identify as POC as it’s a U.S. social and cultural construct that does not translate universally.

  I believe that they find it empowering to identify as a larger group. Personally, I’ve always felt more empowered by being considered part of a smaller group, but I believe they would say that that is a another example of my privilege. Since it does no obvious harm to call them what they want to call themselves, that’s what I do.

  You also asked “how is anyone supposed to know that’s what you’ve decided to do, when first encountering this term?” To that, I don’t really have a good answer. I found the term BIPGM (black, indigenous, or person of the global majority) to be really unusual when I first came across it. It seemed to me to be another example of this new generation naming things unnecessarily differently. But it’s not any worse than what LessWrong does, where decades-old concepts are re-named in favor of whatever Yudkowsky titled it in the sequences. As weird as it may seem on first hearing the term PGM, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be used when talking about specific people who themselves prefer that term to be used.

• EricHerboso 3 Dec 2019 8:05 UTC

  18 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: A list of EA-re­lated podcasts

  Luke Muehlhauser’s Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot had an episode interviewing Toby Ord back in January 2011. This is from before the term “effective altruism” was being used to describe the movement. I think it may be the first podcast episode to really discuss what would eventually be called EA, with the second oldest podcast episode being Massimo Pigliucci’s interview with Holden Karnofsky on Rationally Speaking in July 2011.

  (There was plenty of discussion online about these issues in years prior to this, but as far as I can tell, discussion didn’t appear in podcast form until 2011.)

• EricHerboso 25 Nov 2021 20:06 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing my retirement

  Thank you so much for all your work managing the EA Forum. You’ve done an excellent job, and I’m sure that you’ll do many and varied good things at OpenPhil.

  Also, we’re so excited to have you join Effective Giving Quest as our first partnered streamer! I’m really looking forward to what we can accomplish in the gaming space for effective altruism. (c:

• EricHerboso 20 Apr 2021 3:28 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  I am concerned that although I explained that the views I put forward here are my own, they are being taken as though it is some official response from ACE. This is not the case. To eliminate any potential further misunderstanding on this, I will not be engaging further on this thread.

• EricHerboso 8 Sep 2020 8:05 UTC

  16 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Elityre’s comment on: Some thoughts on the EA Mu­nich //​ Robin Han­son incident

  Surely there exists a line at which we agree on principle. Imagine that, for example, our EA spaces were littered with people making cogent arguments that steel manned holocaust denial, and we were approached by a group of Jewish people saying “We want to become effective altruists because we believe in the stated ideals, but we don’t feel safe participating in a space where so many people commonly and openly argue that the holocaust did not happen.”

  In this scenario, I hope that we’d both agree that it would be appropriate for us to tell our fellow EAs to cut it out. While it may be a useful thing to discuss (if only to show how absurd it is), we can (I argue) push future discussion of it into a smaller space so that the general EA space doesn’t have to be peppered with such arguments. This is the case even if none of the EAs talking about it actually believe it. Even if they are just steel-manning devil’s advocates, surely it is more effective for us to clean the space up so that our Jewish EA friends feel safe to come here and interact with us, at the cost of moving specific types of discussion to a smaller area.

  I agree that one of the things that makes EA great is the quality of its epistemic discourse. I don’t want my words here to be construed that I think we should lower it unthinkingly. But I do think that a counterbalancing force does exist: being so open to discussion of any kind that we completely alienate a section of people who otherwise would be participating in this space.

  I strongly believe that representation, equity, and inclusiveness is important in the EA movement. I believe it so strongly that I try to look at what people are saying in the safe spaces where they feel comfortable talking about EA norms that scare them away. I will report here that a large number of people I see talking in private Facebook groups, on private slack channels, in PMs, emails, and even phone calls behind closed doors are continuously saying that they do not feel safe in EA spaces. I am not merely saying that they are “worried” about where EA is heading; I’m saying that right here, right now, they feel uncomfortable fully participating in generalized EA spaces.

  You say that “If people wouldn’t like the discourse norms in the central EA spaces…I would prefer that they bounce off.” In principle, I think we agree on this. Casual demands that we are being alienating should not faze us. But there does exist a point at which I think we might agree that those demands are sufficiently strong, like the holocaust denial example. The question, then, is not one of kind, but of degree. The question turns on whether the harm that is caused by certain forms of speech outweighs the benefits accrued by discussing those things.

  • Q1: Do you agree that this is a question of degree, not kind? If not, then the rest of this comment doesn’t really apply.

  • Q2: You mentioned having similar standards to academia. If it became standard for undergraduate colleges to disallow certain forms of racist speech to protect students, would you be okay with copying those norms over to EA? Or do you mean only having similar standards to what academics discuss amongst each other, setting aside completely how universities deal with undergraduate students’ spaces.

  I have significant cognitive dissonance here. I’m not at all certain about what I personally feel. But I do want to report that there are large numbers of people, in several disparate places, many of which I doubt interact between themselves in any significant way, who all keep saying in private that they do not feel safe here. I have seen people actively go through harm from EAs casually making the case for systemic racism not being real and I can report that it is not a minor harm.

  I’m extremely privileged, so it’s hard for me to empathize here. I cannot imagine being harmed by mere speech in this way. But I can report from direct experience watching private Facebook chats and slack threads of EAs who aren’t willing to publicly talk about this stuff that these speech acts are causing real harm.

  Is the harm small enough to warrant just having these potential EAs bounce off? Or would we benefit from pushing such speech acts to smaller portions of EA so that newer, more diverse EAs can come in and contribute to our movement? I hope that you’ll agree that these are questions of degree, not of kind. After seeing the level of harm that these kinds of speech acts cause, I think my position of moving that discourse away from introductory spaces is warranted. But I also strongly agree with traditional enlightenment ideals of open discussion, free speech, and that the best way to show an idea is wrong is to seriously discuss it. So I definitely don’t want to ban such speech everywhere. I just want there to be some way for us to have good epistemic standards and also benefit from EAs who don’t feel safe in the main EA Facebook groups.

  To borrow a phrase from Nora Caplan-Bricker, they’re not demanding that EA spaces be happy places where they never have to read another word of dissent. Instead, they’re asking for a level of acceptance and ownership that other EAs already have. They just want to feel safe.

  What links here?

  • MichaelStJules's comment on Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (17 Apr 2021 19:48 UTC; 21 points)

Us­ing Odds in­stead of Prob­a­bil­ities with Bayes’ rule

• EricHerboso 31 Jul 2018 11:13 UTC

  15 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: trentb’s comment on: The EA Com­mu­nity and Long-Term Fu­ture Funds Lack Trans­parency and Accountability

  While I personally have trust that Nick Beckstead has been acting in good faith, I also completely understand why donors might choose to stop donating because of this extreme lack of regular communication.

  It’s important for EAs to realize that even when you have good intentions and are making good choices about what to do, if you aren’t effectively communicating your thinking to stakeholders, then you aren’t doing all that you should be doing. Communications are vitally important, and I hope that comments like this one really help to drive this point home to not just EA Funds distributors, but also others in the EA community.

• EricHerboso 11 Nov 2016 5:38 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What does Trump mean for EA?

  A few of us have experience working in politics and could conceivably accomplish some good by being an influencer in Trump’s White House. Others of us have the ability to pitch Thiel on stuff. Since Thiel has sway in the Trump transition, this means we could conceivably get an EA or two into positions of influence in the Trump administration.

  I’m not sure that it would be a good idea to actually do this, but I’m mentioning it because it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility to actually do it, and it could plausibly be highly effective. Here are some of the questions we’d need to answer:

  1. If we had an EA inside the Trump administration, would it do more good than if they stayed in their current position instead? This depends partly on what they’re currently doing and partly on how likely we estimate they could actually make a difference in policy. My intuition is that if we expect Trump’s policies to be very bad, then even a small influence could translate into a large amount of good.

  2. Who would be best suited for this, if we decided we wanted to try it? I’m not sure of what would count as experienced enough to do something like this. There are a few people at Effective Altruism Policy Analytics, and I believe there are a couple of people that have experience with lobbying in DC.

  3. Who would make the pitch to Thiel?

  4. What would the pitch consist of? We’d need to know exactly what parts of EA Thiel cares most about, and then we’d need to stress those aspects.

  5. How likely would Thiel be swayed by such a pitch? If he endorsed Trump because he wanted influence in the administration, then I believe Thiel would be fully on board with this idea. But if he endorsed Trump because he actually believes Trump’s positions are good, then I can see where he would hate this idea.

  6. Would Thiel be able to get the EA in a position high enough to actually influence policy? How high up would the position have to be in order for it to be influential? How influential are mid-level staffers?

  I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t know if this is even a workable idea. I certainly would hate to convince an EA to drop their current work for this if it doesn’t turn out to be an influential position. But it seems possible that this could be a high-value opportunity, so I’m bringing it to everyone here.

• EricHerboso 25 Aug 2015 18:48 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA risks fal­ling into a “meta trap”. But we can avoid it.

  Keep in mind that there are two senses of the word “meta” that I see used often; Peter is speaking specifically about “working not on [a] cause directly, but instead working on getting more people to work on that cause.”

  The other sense of “meta”, where you’re working not on the cause, but instead on figuring out the best interventions for that cause, is not what Peter is talking about here.

  While the second sense of “meta” also might be a trap of sorts, since you could conceivably spend all your time/​money doing meta-studies and never actually helping individuals, I don’t think we’re anywhere near that point for any EA causes. Even the most well-researched interventions deserve continued evaluation (such as evaluating the recent Cochrane review on deworming) and, in some cases, the research still requires a lot of work.

  Reducing animal suffering is a prime example of this. Helping direct animal charities is important, but I believe it is far more important to continue working on research instead. Consider that in the field of animal welfare most intervention types have yet to be evaluated, and even the most highly regarded interventions come with caveats like “in the absence of strong reasons to believe the effects are negative, we expect the effects to be positive on balance” on corporate outreach, or the even more extreme “no difference found in the total change in consumption of animal products between the two groups”, after which the leafleting intervention is nevertheless recommended. (This is not to say that these interventions are poor; to the contrary, they’re the best that have so far been found by ACE. I just think more money should go toward research to either find better interventions or better understand the current top interventions.)

  So while Peter might be correct when it comes to meta-work in the sense of recruiting, I don’t believe it would be correct in the sense of research.

  What links here?

  • Peter Wildeford's comment on EA risks fal­ling into a “meta trap”. But we can avoid it. by Peter Wildeford (26 Aug 2015 2:43 UTC; 3 points)

• EricHerboso 1 Sep 2020 6:53 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EricHer­boso’s Shortform

  I was going to write a comment on the EA Munich/​Hanson incident post, but I realized that what I really wanted to say was a bit more general and had a different intended audience: those people in EA who (1) believe banning topics is wrong in general, (2) think that people are not really all that harmed by open discussion of certain topics, and (3) don’t understand why a fellow effective altruist of all people would ever try to ‘cancel’ another EA just because some of their discussed ideas are controversial. I don’t believe that all (or even all that many) people in this forum correspond to all (1), (2), and (3). But I think I may have felt that way at one point in the past, and I wanted to explain to that group why I no longer solely feel that way. (I currently have cognitive dissonance with regard to this issue.)
  
  (I say the following because it is how I feel. I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone else nor any organization I’m with.)
  
  Some speech is harmful. Even speech that seems relatively harmless to you might be horribly upsetting for others. I know this firsthand because I’ve seen it myself.
  
  I’m extremely privileged. I’m white, male, CIS, well-educated, and I don’t have to work to earn a living. Sure, I have a few non-privileged parts of me (hispanic, asexual, polyamorous), but ultimately I find that speech is rarely harmful to me. So it comes as no surprise that I have historically found no issue with the ideals of the enlightenment: open discussion of ideas, free speech, believing ideas based on argumentation and evidence. Yet we all know that not all speech is harmless. You can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, nor command another to cause direct harm.
  
  Racist speech might not affect me very much, but it can really and truly hurt people of the global majority that have to deal with it constantly. I have friends who I have watched first hand having to read through a racist Facebook thread who were subsequently unable to focus for hours afterward. The exhaustion from having to deal with even just questions about the legitimacy of systemic racism was equivalent to what I would feel if I had to dig a hole for two hours straight. It’s not because my friends are weak-willed, or that they cannot take criticism well. It’s because they live day-in and day-out in a system that actively oppresses their ability to succeed, and people who are supposedly their peers, people who have also decided to live their lives in the service of achieving effective altruism, people who otherwise claim to be dedicated to good — these people were just casually questioning whether blacks even had it that bad in today’s society.
  
  I believe that if people were honestly trying to be rational, then open discussion and debate would eventually kill off racist memes in society. And since I’d like to believe that the EA community is trying to be both honest and rational, I naively thought that open discussion and debate in EA spaces, above all other spaces, would be the perfect way to deal with ordinarily divisive issues like the black lives matter movement. But I was wrong.
  
  I know that I was wrong because people of the global majority continuously speak in safe spaces about they feel unsafe in EA spaces. They speak about how they feel harmed by the kinds of things discussed in EA spaces. And they speak about how there are some people — not everyone, but some people — who don’t seem to be just participating in open debate in order to get at the truth, but rather seem to be using the ideals of open discussion to be a cloak that can hide their intent to do harm.
  
  We in the EA community need to figure out how to do better. We need a diverse set of people to at least feel safe in our community. That doesn’t mean we should quash discussion on weird issues. We need that. But we don’t need it in the places where everyone keeps doing it. It doesn’t need to be at local public EA events. It doesn’t need to be in the main Facebook group chat. It doesn’t need to be anywhere near places that are primarily or secondarily used as public ways to encourage people new to EA.
  
  In the field of communications, a distinction is made between interactive, push, and pull communication. Push communication is exemplified by email; it’s stuff you send out to your audience. You generally don’t want the weird unattractive stuff to be in your push communications. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. To the contrary, I want there to be a space for people to legitimately debate in open, non-private discussion about even topics with Hansonian-levels of weirdness. But it needs to not be in our push or interactive-online communications. I want my friends to feel safe in public introductory EA spaces. Let diverse representative people join the movement first, and then let them choose of their own accord where they want to put in their efforts. Just as we let individual people work unmolested on longtermism, or animal suffering, or even mental health, so too should we allow people to work in spaces safe from constant racist questioning, even while others volunteer to work in less safe spaces where open debate and serious steel-manning of controversial ideas occur.
  
  I implore others to consider the harm caused when bigotry is so casually discussed on the EA Facebook group or in a local EA meetup. This is real harm. Not just PR harm. Real harm. Let’s move that kind of discussion to pull-communications-only spaces. They needn’t be private; they should definitely be public and open (though I’d warn about trolls masquerading as devil’s advocates there). But they have no place in the spaces that we use for attracting new talent. The EA movement is too white and male as it is; if we are to succeed in truly achieving effective altruism at scale, then we need representativeness, equity, and inclusion in the movement, and that means, at a minimum, introductory EA spaces must be free from casual bigotry.

  What links here?

  • MichaelStJules's comment on Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (17 Apr 2021 19:48 UTC; 21 points)
  • EricHerboso's comment on Some thoughts on the EA Mu­nich //​ Robin Han­son incident by Aaron Gertler (8 Sep 2020 8:05 UTC; 16 points)

• EricHerboso 2 Apr 2022 19:27 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ini­ti­a­tive to draw the EA logo on Red­dit’s r/​place

  While the OP’s effort didn’t end up working, a much smaller alternate effort has been somewhat successful. The logo is at (1644,570) and coordination is at r/​EffectiveAltruism.

  Note that I don’t actually believe this is a good use of our time; it is unlikely to result in any sort of outreach without text next to the logo, and not only does it seem unlikely that text will persist, but also the small size means it will likely get no play when the final r/​Place image gets shared around online. Nevertheless, it seems like a number of EAs are interested in doing this, so I thought it might be relevant to post their success here.

  EDIT: I crossed out the above because we had to relocate to (1906,587). However, we have successfully been able to put up the EA logo plus the EffectiveAltruism.org url! I’m impressed by the effort that some of our redditors have.

  While it may not exactly be the best use of any one person’s time, and there was somewhat significant effort (by 2–3 redditors) put into negotiating with nearby subreddits, it appears that a discord channel of relatively few EAs has been successful at this communications project. Please check out the image live by clicking the coordinates above, or you can see a screenshot here.

  The intention from here is to defend the text from trolls so that it makes it to the final canvas when the r/​Place event ends.

  EDIT 2: The EA logo+text is now located at (957,1772). We are stable in this new location, thanks to help from several surrounding communities. You can see what we look like by clicking the coordinates link.

• EricHerboso 23 Feb 2017 17:27 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Global 2017 Update

  Please try to announce specific EAG dates soon.

  My original plan was to prioritize EAG over any other conferences happening at the same time. But early bird pricing and limited ticket availability on other conferences has forced me to purchase tickets to three separate conferences in June, July, and August. I am hoping that these will not conflict with EAG, but, if they do, now I will have to skip EAG rather than these other conferences.

  I’m sure I’m not the only one in this position. EAG is likely losing out on attendees because it is taking so long to finalize dates.

  What links here?

  • Red Team­ing CEA’s Com­mu­nity Build­ing Work by AnonymousEAForumAccount (1 Sep 2022 14:42 UTC; 296 points)