You might be partially right, but in the early days we were largely memeing about free trade, immigration, and semi-ironic worship of central bankers. Most of that isn’t exactly the hot thing with the youths, but never underestimate the power of memes to make something ironically cool in a subculture.
JeremiahJohnson
Karma: 351
Loved the post you linked!
I second your hesitation about the upside/downside to “identifying as an EA”. But I honestly don’t think you can help this sort of thing happening. The most you can do is actively guide the values that are defining your group. In the early days of the neoliberal subreddit (the earliest large-scale group of modern self-identified neoliberals), one of the slogans we used was ‘evidence based policy’. The leaders and prominent members of the subreddit tried to instill ‘evidence based policy’ as a core value to the members, to offset the dangers of groupthink, to make people be willing to change their minds. EBP is a complicated subject and it’s not like most people are really out there reading research papers. But it’s important to at least have people signaling that they are open to changing their minds. Signaling can become reality.
If Eliezer Yudkowsky had spent 30% less time writing the sequences and used that time to shitpost a bunch of solid memes on twitter about the shorter version of the sequences, EA would probably be twice as large as it is now.
This is both a joke and directionally true. Twitter and reddit are community building tools and best at creating memes and viral content. I haven’t really thought this through in any detail, but I wonder if the EA/rationalist obsession with deeply analyzing and debating everything makes them bad at memes.
You need more emojis and memes.
Sounds like a joke, but it’s serious. My theory of politics is that basically all politics are identity politics. ‘Identity politics’ has traditionally been used to mean things like “Black person cares about race issues’ or ‘Woman cares about women’s issues’, but I think it goes beyond that. Tribalism is infecting virtually everything we do and every issue we care about, and when you get separated into tribes you develop identities. ‘Neoliberal’ and ‘Socialist’ are identities today, there are people who strongly identify as those things, whose sense of self is defined by them to some extent. ‘Trump fan’ is an identity. ‘Coal miner’ and ‘Gun owner’ and ‘Anti-racist’ and ‘Bayesian statistician’ and ‘Breastfeeding mother’ are identities. Every single one of these groups has their inside jokes, their memes, their semi-religious hero figures and iconography, their organizations, their hated outgroup, etc.
One thing that I really believe is that for a movement to grow, there has to be a coherent sense of identity uniting members of the movement. You can get a little ways purely on ideas and convincing people with long explanatory argumentation, but only a little. To grow further you’ve got to make people want to be part of the organization on a tribal level, to not just agree with you but identify as you. And one of the primary ways to do that is silly memes, insider jokes and symbols you all use together, etc. Group identifiers.
Even Julia Galef, leading rationalist/EA spokesperson, wrote a book about how to be a more rational thinker… and ended up endorsing identity formation. The entire point of The Scout Mindset is to stop letting your identity do your thinking for you, which I agree with… but in the end you can’t really escape the pull of identity unless you start to develop an identity as ‘the sort of person who doesn’t get sucked into tribal politics’. Galef calls this ‘developing the Scout Mindset’, which I would call identifying as a Scout.
So I’m very serious when I say that the lack of an EA emoji identifier to put in your twitter handle is holding you back. I really believe that matters. Neoliberals are globes. The DSA has the red rose. YIMBYs have the Avocado. Urbanists use a crane or a building emoji. There are specific emojis for crypto fans, Georgists, social democrats, free trade lovers, and even more niche topics. Why not EA?
Or I could just answer all of them :)
I wish it was more mainstream!
EA is basically a group of weirdos caring about very weird, abstract things. I think that’s great and we need weird people pursuing weird passion projects, because that’s how a lot of important shit has gotten done throughout history. But I also wish there was a more mainstream version of EA.
What I have in mind here is not an EA movement trying to get John Q Donor to give money to things like AI-alignment, or animal welfare studies, or any of the generally very weird and off-putting stuff that EA often focuses on. I’d like a Main Street Friendly version that instead focused on ‘Popular Charity Inc should change to do X instead of Y’ or ‘Donate to Popular Cause A instead of Popular Cause B’, where all of the suggestions are very mainstream and easily understandable (but efficient versions of that mainstream thing).
Most people are going to get turned off by abstract calculations, anything they see as weird, etc. They just want to do some good and not think too hard about it. Improving how those people donate—not by making them optimal, but by making them moderately better—seems to be an area where lots of good could be done.
To use a food analogy—EAs are very often like people examining tens of thousands of obscure recipes, trying to identify the optimal, perfect dish. Something like beluga caviar over the world’s most expensive wagyu cooked by a Michelin chef. Normal people just select a food and cook it and eat it—here’s some mac and cheese from a box, yum. Rather than trying to recruit more weirdos in the search for the ultra-perfect dish, there should be more focus on giving normal people tips to improve their mac and cheese. That would do more to increase the average culinary level of the population (and I’d expect any successful mass appeal strategy to recruit more weirdos than a weirdo-recruiting strategy would anyways).
One thing that I do is try to convince regular people who like to donate to charity to donate some portion (a quarter to a half, depending on how receptive they are) internationally. In the US only about 6% of charitable giving goes overseas, and money donated in the developing world is usually far more impactful. I don’t try to lecture them or explain the most optimal thing to do, just nudge them in the right direction. I often use explicitly the same thing they’re already doing—if they donate to cancer stuff here, I find an effect cancer charity in a poor country. If they donate to schools here, I find a good place to fund education in the third world. It’s an easy win and I have a pretty high success rate with this.
Neoliberalism is an explicitly globalist ideology, with heavy emphasis on free international trade, free immigration, and cooperative international institutions.
Of those
Free trade is something I see as incredibly beneficial to the world, but also an area where most of the hard work has already been done and the gains from further trade liberalization are small-to-medium sized. Not necessarily an EA area of focus.
Increasing immigration is something I think has enormous potential for EA action (I go into more depth in a different comment chain)
Cooperative international institutions are highly aligned with EA goals such as ‘preventing large scale war’ and ‘preventing nuclear explosions’ and other such global tail risk scenarios.
I also tend to think that advocacy for socially liberal causes in developing countries—women’s rights, ethnic minority rights/protections, LGBT rights—is a place where a little bit of political will can go a long way. I’m unsure how to set up a series of value calculations on this, but my instinct is that there’s a lot of opportunity in that area.
I’m someone who thinks of myself as an EA, but I don’t engage at a deep level with the community at all times, so this is my half-insider-half-outsider view of EA. My general sense is that EA famously focuses on a handful of areas—AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risk management, GiveWell-style medical interventions, etc. I very rarely see EAs talking about ‘normal politics’ as a place to do good, and I think there are some normal politics issues that have deep promise.
One example is advocacy for increased immigration for rich countries. The evidence seems incredibly strong to me that increased immigration is an enormously valuable opportunity. Estimates for this kind of drastic change are always a little fuzzy, but fully open borders would have an impact on the scale of doubling world GDP. It’s a multi-trillion dollar bill we’re passing on the sidewalk and refusing to pick up. Even making a small difference in immigration policy can produce extremely large benefits. And support for immigration is increasing over time, so there’s real promise for change.
There are probably some EA-oriented types thinking about this already, but I think it deserves more prominence. It would also make so many other EA favorites (like AI research) a lot easier to coordinate.
Yes, lobbying officials is part of what we do. We’re trying to talk to officials about all the things we care about—taking action on climate change, increasing immigration, etc etc etc. Truthfully I don’t have a ton of experience on this front yet—I’ve been part of the project since its inception in early 2017, but have only been formally employed by PPI for the last 8 months or so. So I’m not a fountain of wisdom on all the best lobbying techniques—this is somewhat beginner level analysis of the DC swamp.
One thing I’ve noticed is that an ounce of access is worth a pound of attention, which is worth ten pounds of idea. Access in DC is the real currency, not money. True high quality access directly to powerful congresspeople or cabinet-level people is phenomenally rare. Access to regular congresspeople, important congressional staffers or mid-level executive branch types is still limited and fought over. Access is golden. The number of hours in a day for any of these decision makers is finite and someone always wants their time.
If you can’t get direct access to decision makers, the next best thing is attention (which can lead to access later, if your ideas get traction). There are a lot of small think tanks with very bright people writing quality reports… that will then go on to be downloaded a grand total of 11 times ever (and maybe 1-2 of those downloads actually got read more than a third of the way through). Getting important people to pay attention to your work in DC is hard. There are quite a lot of think tanks and non-profits and people writing reports on every imaginable topic under the sun, and you have to stand out somehow.
Our model that we’re hoping to lean into as we grow is to take our natural talent for community building and getting online attention and leverage that into attention/access among people who matter in DC (and elsewhere). We have a network of politically active chapters in cities around the country and globe. We have a large, boisterous social media following that we can mobilize. That’s a reason for someone to court us, to pay attention and care what we’re telling them. I guess maybe that’s a piece of advice—if you want a decision maker’s attention, if you want access, recognize how that’s a limited resource to the decision maker and give them a reason to care beyond just yelling ‘My Idea Is Very Good!’ like everyone else.