Really devastating news. I had a pleasure to meet Steven. His dedication and warmth was deeply inspiring to me, and his down to earth character made him fun to be around. You will be missed. :(
Jakub Stencel
Karma: 1,321
This seems true to me, although I don’t have great confidence here.
For some years at times I had thought to myself “Damn, EA is pulling off something interesting—not being an organization, but at the same time being way more harmonious and organized than a movement. Maybe this is why it’s so effective and at the same time feels so inclusive.” Not much changed recently that would make me update in a different direction. This always stood out to me in EA, so maybe this is one of its core competencies[1] that made it so successful in comparison to so many other similar groups?
It’s possible that there is a limit on how long you can pull it off when community grows, but I would be a bit slow to update during turbulent waters—there is for sure valuable signal during these (like “how well are we handling harsh situations?”), but also not so valuable (“is our ship fast?”).
- ^
Good explanation of core competencies—https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kz3Czn5ndFxaEofSx/why-cea-online-doesn-t-outsource-more-work-to-non-ea
- ^
Thank you, Ubuntu. I love that post by Max Roser.
Thank you Shakeel, very good criticism.
My title was a bit gimmicky, I flagged it as such, but it was accepted (I think by Ben West to incriminate him). I like such titles, so it may be my bias. Nevertheless, it was built from a very true disappointment (or something along that) of people not mentioning/celebrating the wins of EA when discussing and criticizing it, but I think this “frustration” was built more on reading the external takes rather than the internal ones—which internally was hard to disentangle for me. I think I failed to make this clear in the post. And my disappointment touches all cause areas (I’d imagine all those lives saved would make a stronger impression on people), but I feel qualified the most to talk about animals one.
Interesting point about perpetuating the negative framework by the title phrasing—in hindsight, I would probably choose a different one if I had considered that risk. Thanks for this perspective.
It’s a very hard question to answer without much doubt, as I didn’t witness how things unfolded in crucial places, like US. My intuition is that it would not be the same, and EA itself had significant contributions, but some of the recent and big wins would still be achieved. This is especially true for wins secured by The Humane League (and probably other major groups, like Compassion in the World Farming at EU level), seeing how laser focused they were. I think someone from more Western countries would be better to answer here though. But I also think that if EA continues then most of its wins for animals are in the future and then the context of its culture matters more.
Locally, in our org I think engagement with EA culture (also in the form of mentioned forums, groups, conferences) makes our activists and our campaigns better. Also cross-pollination from other cause areas seems helpful, but I’m not that confident here and would need to think more about it. Overall, I’d rather bet that splitting EA from effective animal advocacy would be overall negative to the animal advocacy movement, even if there was no OP.
But for sure, Open Philanthropy’s effect is a very strong one, they seem to have been delivering exceptional results. And the funding was most likely the biggest driver of success here, because of how severely underfunded the space was (and still is). It’s also a bit hard to divorce in my mind EA from funding as one of the main premises of EA for me is to reallocate resources, like funding, effectively.
In the end, I think in its core, this question asks whether Open Philanthropy and their animal welfare team would be so effective without EA (and it’s worth noting that they have a whole team right now working on the animal cause area, so it’s not only Lewis on the pedestal). I feel deeply unqualified to answer this—I’m too separated from context and history here. You are probably better to answer.
BTW I want to point out that a random billionaire example would not work. While I have very limited insight into the representative billionaire’s mind, my intuition is that the people in this category are rather opinionated and pushing their ideas (for example a pet cause area). I think in this regard, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna are unique in their intellectual humility and deferring to experts they hire, at least this is my impression of them as people. It seems that without them not much would be possible.
This is incredible (especially Google Docs). Thank you for your great work.
I’m really excited for this. Wishing you all the best in this crucial and neglected work Dustin.
Please make sure to reach out to Anima International to use our resources whenever you’ll feel like we could help. We will also happily advertise any open positions here to our staff.
Yeah, this is what I meant in this point, but NunoSempere’s comment made me confused about strength of my model here and I interpret this confusion as either me getting something wrongly here or not fully getting his comment. I will think/discuss it more and update the phrasing here just to be sure it’s not misguided. Thank you for that.
Thanks for pointing this out Fai!
Seems like a major oversight on my part to not make it clearer. Will edit the blog post.
Thank you Oscar.
I’ll use this opportunity to underline again that the biggest push influencing the changes in our organization in this area was Weronika Żurek who made the tremendous work challenging some of the premises held by more senior people. Not to mention that she is very early in her career (still studies) which makes me even more in awe of her reasoning.
Thanks for the comment Michael. It’s really informative.
Do you have any good sources that describe your points in more depth? These would be good for us to follow.
In regards to robustness and cluelessness—I agree. This is probably the strongest update based on the new considerations highlighted in the blog post. Similar conclusion was formed, especially among senior campaigners, although we used different phrases for that during discussions.
(Disclaimer: I’m from an animal advocacy group and working in the field for over 10 years.)
Just a point on how the footage from farms is representative, based on your point about not trusting them.
I think you are correct to be skeptical to some of the claims made by documentaries, I feel like some are exaggerating and trying to increase the weight of the claims to make the documentary more appealing. Apart from my personal problem with bending the truth, it’s also, I quite confidently think, a bad long-term strategy for the movement. But it highly depends on the filmmaker.
But I really want to note that it’s very hard to convey the message to the public about the conditions that animals live in. You may expect that the more brutal footage the better, but it’s not the case. We do investigations without knowledge of farm owners (you can check our footage here—https://animainternational.org/resources/investigations—and use it if needed!) and very often we have to use the less inhumane conditions, because our data shows that on average most people are not receptive to faithfully brutal material. It has to be the milder content with enough context for people to sympathize with animals. So you may expect “cherry-picking” in a different direction that you are worried about in terms of them being representative.
There is also an unsurprising problem of not understanding specie welfare needs and animals not showing their suffering in a human’s perception compatible way (especially if these are not mammals), so you may see a picture of an animal without any wounds, but it may be in a great suffering because of behavioral needs deprivation (example—repetitive behavior). This is very hard to convey.
So for me, quantitative assessments of suffering between species in farming conditions is the best tool to understand whether animals suffer and to which degree. But I’ll add personally that there is an intuition that you get by working with footage/being on farms/working in field that is sometimes hard to capture just by looking at literature (kinda in a similar direction as a point about ground visits when distributing bednets made here). I also wonder how measurement is skewing the results sometimes.
Generally, my bet is that the more data we will get, the more it will show animals suffer more than we expected. My very strong view is that there is sufficient information and it’s mostly due to biases that make us discriminate needs of other beings welfare that some people remain undecided on this issue (i.e. we treat interests of non-similar beings to us as less important—animals, future people, digital minds, etc. based on evolutionary heuristics instead of reasoning). That is, unless someone has Yudkowsky’s view of sentience with which I strongly disagree (or to be more correct—I disagree with my understanding of that view), but seems logical and coherent to me.
Thank you again for this work and posting it on EA Forums. I love the presentation of the research summary.
I was considering writing something similar, but investing time in writing a post is hard, so thank you for writing this.
While I understand emotions we all feel, I’m under an impression that effective altruism community is now reacting in a way that they try to educate public NOT to—to use anecdotal examples and emotional states to guide the decision making. While it’s very human to react in such a way I see that I’m growing more and more anxious of this direction observing the discourse.
Of course what happened is devastating and that there is a lot of constructive feedback and good questions to be asked, but I hope we can preserve our commitment to compassion and truth-seeking even in hard moments like this. The things that worry me can be seen in how demanding people are to the EA leaders—to the point of almost blaming them for this without enough evidence or sympathy. And that even not that good proposals earn a lot of support because I feel we are all incentivizied to be critical of EA (and it’s good to feel better about ourselves by distancing ourselves from the misery that FTX caused).
I’m also worried about EA doing things now (both community here and established orgs) to influence optics rather than for the sake of integrity. It would be worrying if true, because if so it may lead to the recreating potentials errors, like people silencing themselves instead of having good-faith arguments. I hope that accountability will prevail and both community and people will be open where we screwed up and, if needed, there will be consequences, instead of us protecting the brand of EA at any cost.
But I want to mention that I’m also incredibly impressed by some people here and generally very happy to consider myself part of this community. I admire the courage, integrity and sobriety of thinking of many people here. After spending recently way more time on EA Forums than I should, I came to conclusion that I would want to especially mention Habryka for his behavior and comments during the last period . It’s really a privilege to have such people in EA community (and I’m really sorry for not mentioning other people behaving in a similar way who I didn’t notice).
I applaud that you wrote how you feel against social incentives.
It seems to me that the main way for our community to avoid allowing future devastating mistakes like with SBF/FTX is to have more posts like this and norms that encourage dissenting opinions and go against hype (anti-hype?).
Especially if it’s true that people had heard rumors about some problems or had some reasons to act on pieces of information in regards to SBF character, but silenced themselves. Punishing socially these kind of posts seems like recreating the environment for such moral and truth-seeking failure.
On a relevant note, it’s a bit problematic that main posts don’t have disagree voting though, because maybe people vote on whether they agree and don’t necessary want to punish you for expressing your feelings.
This is very helpful and transparent.
Thank you for sharing this with community and emphasizing the role of integrity for effective altruists.
I think this is a good point in itself to distinguish domestication from exploitation (and I upvoted it for this), but I think it doesn’t necessarily address what the comment about exploitation is pointing at.
I believe that the argument is that any use of animals in an efficient way will lead to industrialization of breeding, farming, etc. and it’s hard then to align incentives to make the results net positive for both humans and other species. At least I believe we have an extremely poor track record here.
I really enjoyed your frankness.
From reading what you wrote I have a suspicion that you may not be a bad person. I don’t want to impose anything on you and I don’t know you, but from the post you seem mainly to be ambitious and have a high level of metacognition. Although it’s possible that you are narcissistic and I’m being swayed by your honesty.
When it comes to being “bad”—have you read Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors? It discusses at length what it means to be a bad actor. You may want to see how much of these applies to you. Note that these traits are on dimension and have to be somewhat prevalent in population due to increasing genes fitness in certain contexts, so it’s about quantity.
Regarding status. I would be surprised if a significant portion of EAs or even the majority is not status-driven. My understanding is that status is a fundamental human motive. This is not a claim whether it’s good or bad, but rather pointing out that there may be a lot of selfish motivations here. In fact, I think what effective altruism nailed is hacking status in a way that is optimal for the world—you gain status the more intellectually honest you are and the more altruistic you are which seems to be a self correcting system to me.
Personally, I have seen a lot of examples of people who are highly altruistic / altruistic at first glance / passing a lot of purity tests that were optimizing for self-serving outcomes when having a choice, sometimes leading to catastrophic outcomes for their groups in the long term. I have also seen at least a dozen examples of people who broadcast strong signals of their character to be exposed as heavily immoral. This also is in accordance to what the post about malevolent actors points:
Such individuals might even deliberately display personality characteristics entirely at odds with their actual personality. In fact, many dictators did precisely that and portrayed themselves—often successfully—as selfless visionaries, tirelessly working for the greater good (e.g., Dikötter, 2019).
So, it seems to me that the real question is whether:
your output is negative (including n-order effects),
you are not able to override your self-serving incentives when there is a misalignment with the community.
So, I second what was mentioned by NunoSempere that what you [are able to] optimize for is an important question.
Personally, when hiring, the one of the things that scares me the most are people of low integrity that can sacrifice organizational values and norms for a personal gain (e.g. sabotaging psychological safety to be liked, sabotaging others to have more power, avoiding truth-seeking because of personal preferences, etc.). So basically people who do not stand up to their ideals (or reported ideals) - again with a caveat that it’s about some balance and not 100% purity—we all have our shortcomings.
In my view, a good question to ask yourself (if you are able to admit it to yourself) is whether you have a track record of integrity—respecting certain norms even if they do not serve you. For example, I think it’s easy to observe in modern days by watching yourself playing games—do you respect fair play, do you have a respect for rules, do you cheat or have a desire to cheat, do you celebrate wins of others (especially competitors), etc. I think it can be a good proxy for real world games. Or recalling how you behaved toward others and ideals when you were in a position of power. I think this can give you an idea of what you are optimizing for.
I also heavily recommend topics that explore virtues / values for utilitarians to see if following some proposals resonates with you, especially Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians by Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola.
Thanks for the info. Subscribed.