I thought the same thing when I read it. I got similar vibes from some of the other merch (but “do good better” the strongest).
I think that “moral consideration for all” reads similarly. Especially since most people reading it will read it out of context.
Also “maximise impact” a little bit.
I’ve been considering writing a post about my experience of receiving a grant, and the downsides I didn’t anticipate beforehand. It would probably look similar to this comment but with more info.
General encouragement for having done something risky (a wacky title) and then deciding against it and changing it. The first sentence of the changed post made me laugh.
(Removed this comment. Don’t know how to delete it.)
“Better” could mean lots of things here. Including: more entertaining; higher quality discussion; more engagement; it’s surpassed a ‘critical mass’ of people to sustain a regular group of posters and a community; better memes; more intellectually diverse; higher frequency of high quality takes; the best takes are higher quality; more welcoming and accessible conversations etc.
The aims of EA Twitter are different to the forum. But I think the most important metrics are the “quantity of discussion” ones.
My impression is that:
There are more “high quality takes” on EA Twitter now than a year ago (mostly due to more people being on it and people posting more frequently).
The “noise:quality ratio” is pretty bad on EA Twitter. Most of the space seems dominated by shit posting and in-group memes to me.
Obvs, shit posting is fine if that’s what you want. But I think it’s useful to be clear what you mean when you say “better”. If someone was looking for high quality discussion about important ideas in the world, I would personally not recommend them EA Twitter.
Thanks for sharing! That’s useful to know.
I’ll look into adding to the post later today.
If I was going to spend longer on this post, I’d make it more empirical and talk through evidence for/against the effectiveness of ACT.
As it is, I didn’t want to spend significantly longer writing it, so I’ve gone for a summary of the core ideas—so that readers can assess the vibe and see if it’s something that sounds interesting to them.
This might have been the wrong call though.
I also wanna give general encouragement for sharing a difficult rejection story.
Sorry that your experience of this has been rough.
Some quick thoughts I had whilst reading:
There was a vague tone of “the goal is to get accepted to EAG” instead of “the goal is to make the world better,” which I felt a bit uneasy about when reading the post. EAGs are only useful in so far as they let community members to better work in the real world.
Because of this, I don’t feel strongly about the EAG team providing feedback to people on why they were rejected. The EAG team’s goals isn’t to advise on how applicants can fill up their “EA resume.” It’s to facilitate impactful work in the world.
I remembered a comment that I really liked from Eli: “EAG exists to make the world a better place, rather than serve the EA community or make EAs happy.”
[EDIT after 24hrs: I now think this is probably wrong, and that responses have raised valid points.] You say”[others] rely on EA grants for their projects or EA organizations for obtaining jobs and therefore may be more hesitant to directly and publicly criticize authoritative organizations like CEA.” I could be wrong, but I have a pretty strong sense that nearly everyone I know with EA funding would be willing to criticise CEA if they had a good reason to. I’d be surprised if {being EA funded} decreased willingness to criticise EA orgs. I even expect the opposite to be true.
(Disclaimer that I’ve received funding from EA orgs)
Sorry that the tone of the above is harsh—I’m unsure if it’s too harsh or whether this is the appropriate space for this comment.
I’ve err-ed on the side of posting because it feels relevant and important.
(Currently reading the post and noticing that many of the links go to the top of the same google doc. I assume this isn’t supposed to be the case. This could be because I’m on mobile, but also could be an error with the links.)
(Also congrats on your first forum post! Go you :) )
This poem really made me smile; thanks for writing it Luke :)
This relates to a caveat in my recent post:
I’m concerned about too much EA meta conversation — about worlds where most of EA dialogue is talking about EAs talking about EAs (lots of social reality and not enough object-level).
These sorts of convos are often very far removed from {concrete things that help the world}, and I worry about them taking away attention from more important ones.
I think it’s probably much better (for the world) for conversations to stay focused on the real world, object-level claims and arguments.
Part of me wants to flesh this thought out properly soon. But even this conversation is meta! And I’m trying to encourage/ focus more on object-level ideas. So do I write it? I’m not sure.
A distinction I’ve found useful is “object-level” vs “social reality”. They are both adjectives that describe types of conversation/ ideas.
Object-level discussions are about ideas and actions (e.g. AI timelines, the mechanics of launching a successful startup). Object-level ideas are technical, empirical, and often testable. Object-level refers to what ideas are important or make sense. It is focused on truth-seeking and presenting arguments clearly.
Social reality discussions are about people and organisations (e.g. Will MacAskill, Open Philanthropy). Social reality is more meta, more abstract, and less testable than object-level. Social reality refers to which people are influential/powerful (and what they think), how to network with people, how to persuade people.
Object-level: What’s the probability of extinction this century?
Social reality: What does Toby Ord think is the probability of extinction this century?
I have found it very helpful to start labelling whether I’m in object-level conversation mode vs social reality conversation mode. It helps me notice when I’m deferring without having thought about it (e.g. “well, Will MacAskill says [x]” instead of asking myself what I think about [x]), or when I fall into a mode of chit-chatting about the who’s-who of EA, instead of trying to truth-seek (of course, chit chatting sometimes is fine—I just want to be intentional about when I’m doing it).
And social reality isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s helpful to flag when a conversation enters “social reality mode.”
I do think it’s good for many/more/most conversations to centre around the object-level. I am personally trying to move my ratio more towards object-level.
(This was a core theme of an Atlas camp I attended, which I found extremely valuable. The above definitions are loosely based on a message from Jonas, but I didn’t run them by him before posting.)
Thanks for your comment!
this could’ve been mostly avoided by a consideration of Chesterton’s Fence
Meh, I don’t think so. This taken to its extreme looks like “be normie.”
I’m now worried about e.g. high school summer camp programs that prioritize the development of unbalanced agency.
I’m pretty confident that (for ESPR at least) this was a one off fluke! I’m not worried about this happening again (see gavin’s comment above).
Hey, thanks for writing.
I also used to feel extremely confused about this (e.g. I thought that in-person university groups were “woefully inefficient” compared to social media outreach). I did not understand why there weren’t EA youtubers or social media marketing campaigns. Much of my own social conscious had been shaped by online creators (e.g. veganism and social justice ideas), and it felt like a tragedy that EA was leaving so much lying on the table.
I now am less optimistic about short-form social media outreach. Mostly because:
It seems really hard to preserve epistemics in low fidelity mediums like TikTok;
I don’t see that much value in EA being a house-hold name, if it’s a meme-y, low-resolution version (but my mind could easily be changed on this);
I care about selecting for nerdiness and intellectual curiosity;
I’m cautious of EA being associated too much with specific influencers;
I don’t want EA to become (or be perceived as) a social media trend.
All that being said, I do think there are versions of social media outreach that could be great (and aren’t currently being done).
I’m excited about more longer form youtube content (e.g. Rob Miles). It would be cool if one of the LEEP founders/ CE incubatees started vlogging about the experience of running a high impact charity (or something similar).
Fwiw, youtuber Ali Abdaal has some videos promoting longtermism, 80k, and GWWC. And 80k is currently ramping up their marketing and starting to pay influencers to promote 80k.
If I ask three people for their time, they don’t know whether they’re helping me get from 0 to 1 person helping with this, 1 to 2 or 9 to 10 for all they know.
Nice, yup, agreed that the information asymmetry is a big part of the problem in this case. I wonder if it could be a good norm to give someone this information when making requests. Like, explicitly say in a message “I’ve asked one other person and think that they will be about as well placed as you to help with this” etc
I do also think that there’s a separate cost to making requests, in that it actually does impose a cost on the person. Like, saying no takes time/energy/decision-power. Obviously this is often small, and in many cases it’s worth asking. But it’s a cost worth considering.
(Now I’ve written this out, I realise that you weren’t claiming that the info asymmetry is the only problem, but I’m going to leave the last paragraph in).
to avoid resenting EA in the medium to long term
This is great and only something I’ve started modelling recently. Curious about what you think this looks like in practice. Like, is it more getting at a mindset of “don’t beat yourself up when you fall short of your altruistic ideals”? Or does it also inform real world decisions for you?
model EA as sort of an agent
Nice
Hmm, interesting. Thanks for clarifying, that does work better in this context (although it’s confusing if you don’t have the info above)
Yup, another commenter is correct in that I am assuming that the goals are altruistic.
Hey, thanks for asking.
On the first point:
Throughout both of my posts, I’ve been using a nicher definition than the one given by the Stanford philosophy dictionary. In my last post, I defined it as “the ability to get what you want across different contexts – the general skill of coming up with ambitious goals [1] and actually achieving them, whatever they are.”
But, as another commenter said, the term (for me at least) is now infused with a lot of community context and implicit assumptions.
I took some of this as assumed knowledge when writing this post, so maybe that was a mistake on my part.
On the second point:
I’m a bit confused by the question. I’m not claiming that there’s an ideal amount of agency or that it should be regulated.
Saying that, I expect that some types of agency will be implicitly socially regulated. Like, if someone frequently makes requests of others in a community, other people might start to have a higher bar for saying yes. Ie, there might be some social forces pushing in the opposite direction.
I don’t think that this is what you were getting at, but I wanted to add.
Maybe imperative sentences will always tend read as preachy. I’m not sure.