Thanks for the feedback! Will add some costs in
james_aung
Karma: 555
Thanks for the great comment and suggestions!
8+ productivity tools for movement building
Some more discussion on competitive debating and EA https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DEuYo4zxDyY7h7n74/debate-and-effective-altruism-friends-or-foes
Minor typo: “it’s often to reasonable to act on the assumption” probably should be “it’s often reasonable to act on the assumption”
A small and simple change that CEA could do is to un-bold the ‘Effective’ in their ‘Effective Altruism’ logo which is used on https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ and EAG t-shirts
I find the bold comes across as unnecessarily smug emphasis in Effective Altruism.
I think you might have accidentally linked to the 2019 report. The 2020 report seems to be here https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/govai/govai-2020-annual-report/
(rough note) This seems to have strands of: ‘rich people focused’ ‘rich people are more moral’ ‘E2G focus’
Nice! Could you do a version which is 70% lower resolution? ὠ1
It might be that SF has more people who are kinda into EA such that they donate 10% to givewell, diluting out the people who are representative of more extreme self sacrifice
Interesting about the idea that EA let’s people off the moral hook easily: ‘I’m rich so I just donate and I’ve done my moral duty and get to virtue signal’
It’s interesting how that applies to people who are wealthy, work a conventional job, and donate 10% to charities, but doesn’t seem like a valid criticism against those who donate way more like 50%+. That normally seems to be met with the response “wow that’s impressive self sacrifice!”. Same with those who might drastically shift their career
‘Charity for nerds’ doesn’t sound like an awful low res version compared to others suggested like ‘moral hand-washing for rich people’.
‘Charity for nerds’ has nice properties like:
it’s okay if you’re not into EA (maybe you’re just not nerdy enough), compared to ‘EA things you’re evil if you don’t agree with EA’
selects for nerdy people, who are willing to think hard about their work
Effective Altruism and its Critics, Iason Gabriel, Journal of Applied Philosophy
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294288831_Effective_Altruism_and_its_Critics
Tyler Cowen’s low resolution version: “COWEN: A lot of giving is not very rational. Whether that’s good or bad, it’s a fact. And if you try to make it too rational in a particular way, a very culturally specific way, you’ll simply end up with less giving. And then also, a lot of the particular targets of effective altruism, I’m not sure, are bad ideas. So somewhere like Harvard, it has a huge endowment, it’s super non- or even anti-egalitarian. But it’s nonetheless a self-replicating cluster of creativity. And if you’re a rich person, Harvard was your alma mater, and you give them a million dollars, is that a bad idea? I don’t know, but effective altruists tend to be quite sure it’s a bad idea.” from https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/patrick-collison/
Seems mostly focused on the idea of ‘EA tries to shift existing philanthropy to be given using more rational decision making procedures’
Thanks for the reply and taking the time to explain your view to me :)
I’m curious: My friend has been trying to estimate the liklihood of nuclear war before 2100. It seems like this is a question that is hard to get data on, or to run tests on. I’d be interested to know what you’d recommend them to do?
Is there a way I can tell them to approach the question such that it relies on ‘subjective estimates’ less and ‘estimates derived from actual data’ more?
Or is it that you think they should drop the research question and do something else with their time, since any approach to the question would rely on subjective probability estimates that are basically useless?
Thanks for taking the time to write this :)
In your post you say “Of course, it is impossible to know whether $1bn of well-targeted grants could reduce the probability of existential risk, let alone by such a precise amount. The “probability” in this case thus refers to someone’s (entirely subjective) probability estimate — “credence” — a number with no basis in reality and based on some ad-hoc amalgamation of beliefs.”
I just wanted to understand better: Do you think its ever reasonable to make subjective probability estimates (have ‘credences’) over things? If so, in what scenarios is it reasonable to have such subjective probability estimates; and what makes those scenarios different from the scenario of forming a subjective probability estimate of what $1bn in well-target grants could do to reduce existential risk?
No worries, thanks!
Thanks for this write up! I’m excited about CE looking into this area. I was wondering whether you were able to share information about the breakdown of which organisations the 40 EAs you surveyed came from and/or which chapters were interviewed, or whether that data is anonymous?
Welcome, Roger! ὠA Congrats on moving towards a vegetarian diet, even though you previously thought you wouldn’t have attempted it ὄF
Hey Brian. I’d have to ask the individuals who wrote up their docs, but the plan is definitely to eventually share more of these type of group writeups widely. They weren’t written with a broad audience in mind, but I feel like several leaders would be keen to share their writeups more publicly after cleaning them up a bit. I’ll nudge people on this and ask if they’re keen