Evan_Gaensbauer
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Neat post! Feedback:
One population neglected in a lot of conversation on moral circle expansion, and in Gwern’s consideration, is how the treatment of children after infancy has changed over time. I’m only knowledgeable of the history of the last couple hundred years as it relates to legal treatment, such as child labour laws. The study of how the treatment of children has changed will be complicated by the changing definition of ‘children’ over time; over time adulthood in societies has been treated to begin as early as the onset of puberty up to twenty years of age. That stated, people older than two or three and lower than the historical lower-bound for age of adulthood seem to have stably been regarded as ‘children’ throughout history.
Another kind of potential moral patient neglected in this conversation are abstract entities, such as concern for the overall health of a tribe, local community, or society; and, more recently in history, cultures and nations, the environment, and biodiversity. One thing all these entities have in common is there appears to be a common moral intuition one can evaluate their overall moral well-being that is greater than the sum of the well-being of their individual members (such as humans or other animals). This differs from how EA typically approaches similar entities, such as more often conflating their moral well-being with the aggregate well-being of their individual members. I’m guessing there are ways moral psychology regarding these entities differs significantly from how people think morally about individual moral patients. I don’t know enough about what those differences might be to comment on them, but to understand them better seems crucial to thinking about this topic.
My impression is the West hasn’t traditionally revered elders as highly as some other societies, but in the distant past the West revered elders more than we do now.
I agree. While the absolute size of the moral catastrophe that is wrongful treatment of prisoners is brought up a lot, that’s a different issue than either the proportion of the population presently in prison, or the amount of harm inflicted on each individual prisoner, relative to the past.
One argument for why people don’t proportionally care about future generations is because they’re such a distant concern. A pattern I notice with the moral shifts you describe is most people have become more distant from the relevant populations over time, such as prisoners and animals. We’re also more “distant” from our ancestors and deities in the sense we may care about them much less in large part because we’re exposed to memes promoting caring about them in our everyday lives much less frequently.
That makes sense. I’m not angling for a civil service career myself, but it makes sense. At least in the past for the U.K. 80,000 Hours has recommended entering the civil service as more impactful in expectation than trying to win in electoral politics (mostly because the expected value of generic/randomly selected candidates of winning and achieving their goals is so low; individuals with reason to think they could have a decisive edge in electoral politics should consider it more).
Yeah, I’ve seen EA community members talk about impacting politics on a national scale, and then also on a municipal scale. Nobody talks about a state-or-province-level much, so I don’t know much about it. I imagine the level of ease which one can get things done is somewhere between the national level and the municipal level, but I’ve yet to check it out.
What Are Effective Alternatives to Party Politics for Effective Public Policy Advocacy?
The Global Catastrophic Risks Institute (GCRI) has a webpage up with their research on this topic under the heading ‘cross-risk evaluation and prioritization.’ Alexey Turchin also made this map of ‘double scenarios’ for global catastrophic risk, which maps out the pairwise possibilities for how two global catastrophic risks could interact.
What strikes me as odd to me is this organization doesn’t appear to me to operate in a way considered necessarily effective or respectable by the standards of Christian international aid either, let alone EA standards, based on what I know of them. Like, most Christian organizations working in the developing world may have a hand in evangelism, yes, but they partially do so by materially benefiting the charitable recipients as well, such as teaching children how to read, or building and then teaching them in Christian schools. It’s not clear from the website this org does any of that.
This creates the issue where if the Pay It Forward Foundation, or its staff or supporters, identify as both Christian and EA, there are in fact some Christian EAs who believe evangelism in this manner is the most good they can do. Most EAs might not be comfortable with that, but the Pay It Forward Foundation might not take us seriously if we tell them they’re not effective, because obviously they’re going by their own standards of what they think ‘effective altruism’ means. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t bother associating with EA in the first place while being so different from the rest of EA.
While they are the minority, there are a significant number of Christian effective altruists. While how to approach the Pay It Forward Foundation seems awkward (at least to me), I think the next best step might be to ask some Christian community members what they think of the Pay It Forward Foundation, and how they believe the community should approach them, if approaching instead of ignoring them is something any of us decides is worthwhile.
I agree, and I was going to say something about this as well. As a Canadian, I notice the tacit America-centrism in EA discourse even more than what Ozy rightly notices is the assumption in much EA discourse we’re all left-of-centre. At the same time, going by the 2018 EA Survey, at least one third of EA community members are in the U.S. Other factors that would be missed by the EA survey are the fact that the majority of resources EA commands are in EA:
Between the Open Philanthropy Project and perhaps the majority of earners-to-give being in the U.S., the vast majority of funding/donations driven through EA comes through the U.S.
I haven’t definitively checked, but I’d expect at least half the NPOs/NGOs who identify as part as or are aligned with EA are in the U.S. This includes the flagship organizations in major EA cause areas, such as virtually all x-risk organizations outside Cambridge and Oxford universities; Givewell in global poverty alleviation; and ACE and the Good Food Institute working in farm animal welfare.
In terms of political/policy goals in the populations of different countries, the U.S. will still be of more interest to EA than any other country for the foreseeable future, because it seems one of the countries where EA is likeliest to impact public policy; where EA-impacted policy shifts may have the greatest humanitarian/philanthropic impact, due to the sheer population and economic size of the U.S.; and a country where EA-impacted policy gains can best serve as a model/template for how EA could replicate such successes in other countries.
As long as EAs writing about EA from an American perspective qualify in their articles/posts that’s what they’re doing, I think the realistic thing for non-Americans among us to do is expect for the foreseeable future a seemingly disproportionate focus on American culture/politics will still dominate EA discussions.
What do you mean by ‘expert team’ in this regard? In particular, if you consider yourself or the other fund managers to be experts, would you being willing to qualify or operationalize that expertise?
I ask because when the EA Fund management teams were first announced, there was a question about why there weren’t ‘experts’ in the traditional sense on the team, i.e., what makes you think you’d be as good as managing the Long-Term Future Fund as a Ph.D. in AI, biosecurity, or nuclear security (assuming when we talk about ‘long-term future’ we mostly in practice mean ‘existential risk reduction’)?
I ask because when the new EA Funds management teams were announced, someone asked the same question, and I couldn’t think of a very good answer. So I figure it’d be best to get the answer from you, in case it gets asked of any us again, which seems likely?
Is there anything the EA community can do to make it easier for yourself and other fund managers to spend more time as you’d like to on grantmaking decisions, especially executive time spent on the decision-making?
I’m thinking of stuff like the CEA allocating more staff or volunteer time to helping the EA Funds managers take care of lower-level, ‘boring logistical tasks’ that are part of their responsibilities, outsourcing some of the questions you might have to EA Facebook groups so you don’t have to waste time doing internet searches anyone could do, etc. Stuff like that.
In the future, I think it’d make more sense to announce these kinds of AMAs with more advance notice. Most community members wouldn’t notice or be prepared for an AMA a day in advance. I’ve noticed in the last few months many community members, in particular those who’d otherwise be inclined to donate to the EA Funds, are still quite cynical about the EA Funds being worth their money. I appreciate the changes that have been made to the EA Funds, having said as much, and I am fully satisfied the changes made to the EA Funds in light of my requests that such changes indeed be made. So I thought if there was anyone in the EA community whose opinion on how much the EA Funds appear to have improved in the last several months that would be worth something, it’d be mine. There is a lot of cynicism in spite of that. So I’d encourage the CEA and the EA Funds management teams to take their roles very seriously.
On another note, I want to apologize if it comes across as if I’m being too demanding of Marek in particular, who I am grateful to for the singularly superb responsibility he has taken in making sure the EA Funds are functioning to the satisfaction of donors as much as is feasible.
Is there any chance there will be an AMA for the Global Health & Development EA Fund?
I didn’t know about that. That’s incredible!
In the examples I was talking about, it was ads in one of the biggest fast food franchises in the country, and the random people I talk to about AI safety are at bus stops and airports. This isn’t just from my social network.Like I said, it’s only a lot of people in my social network who have heard the words ‘effective altruism,’ or know what they refer to. I was mostly talking about the things EA has impacted, like AI safety and the Beyond Burger, receiving a lot of public attention, even if EA doesn’t receive credit. I took the outcomes of EA receiving attention to be a sign of steps toward the movement’s goals as a good thing without regard to whether people have heard of EA.
Effective Altruism Making Waves
I made the changes regarding RP in points 1 through 5. I’ll add the arrows as well.
Regarding point 6:
I don’t think Rethink Priorities has any volunteer partnerships with any other organizations yet.
Sentience Institute and ACE have also received grants from the EA Animal Welfare Fund.
I’m aware, but SI and ACE received grants funding activity related to farm animal welfare, not wild animal welfare. I’m also going to do an ecosystem map and directory for effective animal advocacy/farm animal welfare in EA as well. So I was going to include references to the Animal Welfare Fund’s grants to ACE and Si in that post. It’s ambiguous to me if I should include them in this post as well. What do you think?
Summary: One theory for the pattern of moral shifts over the last few hundred years from a perspective of social science and history is the apparent moral shifts have followed a transition from more traditionalist and religious worldviews to more liberal ones, as largely driven by economic and political changes produced by industrialization and modernization. While this narrative model has limitations, it definitely seems significant enough to change how EA thinks about moral circle expansion.
One possibility is the pattern of moral shifts observed in the last couple hundred years in the Western world, and other parts of the world to a lesser extent, is driven by modernization. With the modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization (i.e., integration of society with advanced science and technology) of societies, popular consideration of different populations of moral patients has shifted along common lines. The upshot for this is EA should consider the possibility moral shifts are driven more by the influence of a changing material and technological environment, and less to do with whole societies intentionally shifting the exercise of their moral agency.
Modernization has given rise to the modern nation-state and greater political centralization, giving the rise to various forms of liberal political ideologies. While liberalism started with the Enlightenment, its popular spread followed the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and greater urbanization. The increased contact between different groups, such as differing ethnic groups and the sexes in the workplace, accentuated societal prejudices by making apparent how superficial and arbitrary the material deprivation between different groups of people was, at a historically unprecedented growth in global material wealth. This has a lot of power to explain civil rights and more moral consideration being extended to ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and women and children.
At the same time, the decline of more agrarian and religious society alienated more people from traditional communities and religion. This is consistent with the analysis why moral consideration of elders, ancestors, deities, and other groups traditional local communities and religion gave people more moral exposure to.
On one hand, a single convenient narrative explaining how apparent moral progress across societies is actually a natural political and social progression driven almost exclusively by technological and economic changes seems too convenient in the absence of overwhelming evidence. It definitely seems to me intuitively unlikely apparent moral circle expansions would necessarily have happened in the course of history. On the other hand, the idea that the moral circle expansion is an apt evidence-based theory for explaining historical moral progress could be recognized by EA as a largely confused notion, and we could spend less time trying to frame moral shifts through a flawed lens. From there, we could view the theory of moral circle expansion as more of a prospective model for thinking about how various societies’ moral circles may likely expand in the present and near future.