Jess_Whittlestone

Karma: 615

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 11:44 UTC
4 points
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on: To Inspire People to Give, Be Public About Your Giving
Nice post, Peter!

Asides from seeming boastful, I think the other risk of talking publicly about giving is that it can risk seeming critical, or alienating people. I’ve definitely found some people respond to me talking about giving defensively—if I say I donate x%, they might look for reasons why I’m being unreasonable, or why my situation is very different from theirs. I think this is because they feel threatened—talking about giving can make some people feel like you are judging them for not giving, which provokes a defensive reaction.

Of course, in a lot of cases it may be that this risk is outweighed by the benefit of making giving seem more commonplace. And the more people talk about giving, the more of a “social proof” effect you get, and so the less likely this is to be an issue. But I think it’s something worth bearing in mind, especially in one-on-one interactions.

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 11:55 UTC
14 points
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on: Introduce Yourself
Hi, I’m Jess. I’m currently living in Oxford and doing a PhD in Behavioural Science—I’m looking at ways of making people more willing to consider evidence that conflicts with their existing views, and more likely to change their minds about important topics. I want to figure out how people can be more open-minded and truth-seeking, basically :)

I got involved in effective altruism after I finished my degree at Oxford, and came across 80,000 Hours. I’d always wanted to make a difference in the world, but was feeling a bit disillusioned about how to do it and unsure how this really fitted with my skills and interests. I ended up spending a year working for 80k—mostly designing and running the careers advising process—whilst learning more about effective altruism and thinking about what to do with my life. I’m still figuring a lot of this out!

I blog at www.jesswhittlestone.com and have written a number of EA-related posts for the 80,000 Hours blog.

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 11:59 UTC
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in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Open Thread
I think it originated with GiveWell—they used something like this framework for assessing cause areas, which 80k then based their framework on. It’s possible I’m misremembering this though.

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 13:30 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: vipulnaik’s comment on: Open Thread
There seem to be two questions here:

(1) Does believing in or identifying as EA require having a certain amount of hubris and arrogance?

(2) Is EA more likely to attract arrogant people than more modest people?

I think the answer to (1) is clearly no—you can believe that you should try to work out what the best way to use resources is, without thinking you are necessarily better than other people at doing it—it’s just that other people aren’t thinking about it. My impression is a lot of EAs are like this—they don’t think they’re in a better position to figure out the most effective ways of doing good than others, but given that most other people aren’t thinking about this, they may as well try.

I’m less sure about (2), and it depends what the comparison is—are we asking, “Is the average person who is attracted to EA more likely to be arrogant than the average person who is interested in altruism in a broader sense?”. It seems plausible that of all the people who are interested in altruism, those who are more arrogant are more likely to be drawn to effective altruism than other forms of altruism. But I’m not sure that EAs are on the whole more arrogant than people who promote other altruistic cause areas—in a way, EAs seem less arrogant to me because they are more willing to accept that they might be wrong, and less dogmatic in asserting that their specific cause is the most important one.

There’s a third question which I think is also important: is EA more likely to be perceived as arrogant from the outside than other similar social movements or specific causes? I think here there is a risk—stating that you are trying to figure out the best thing can certainly sound arrogant to someone else (even though, as I said above, it actually seems less arrogant to me than being dogmatic about a specific cause!) So maybe it’s important for us to think about how to present EA in ways that doesn’t come across as arrogant. One idea would be to talk more about ourselves as “aspiring” effective altruists that as simply effective altruists—we’re not trying to claim that we’re better at altruism than everyone else really, but rather that we are trying to figure out what the best way is.

Supportive Scepticism

Jess_Whittlestone18 Sep 2014 14:02 UTC

72 points

21 comments4 min readEA link

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 16:00 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Bernadette_Young’s comment on: Supportive Scepticism
Thanks Dette :)

I suspect sometimes we feel it’s tougher, stronger or somehow virtuous not to need support

Yeah, agree. I think the solution to this is just for more people to stand up and admit they need support, and for us to reward those people for doing so, so that it becomes more socially acceptable. This can be hard to do though, of course. But it’s easy to forget that everyone is trying to project their most confident image, and that we may not always be as confident as we try to project!

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 16:06 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Erica_Edelman’s comment on: Supportive Scepticism
Great points Erica, thanks! I’ve been using very similar ways of thinking recently, actually, and it’s helped a lot.

One thing I’ve found, though, is that it’s easy to reflectively know that all of these points are true, but still not believe them on an emotional level, and so still find it difficult to make decisions. I think the main thing that’s helped me here is just time and persistence—I’m gradually coming to believe these things on a more gut level the more times I do just make a decision, even though I’m not certain, and it turns out ok. I think this is a classic situation where your system 2 can believe something, but your system 1 needs repeated experience of the thing actually happening—decisions you’re not certain of turning out ok, in this case—to really internalise it.

Jess_Whittlestone 18 Sep 2014 16:15 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Supportive Scepticism
Nice quote, and very relevant—thanks for sharing! A general worry is that EA is often framed as inherently critical—as being sceptical of typical ways of doing good, as debunking and criticising ineffective attempts at altruism etc. - and this will mean we naturally end up using a lot of negative words.

I think there’s some evidence that being critical outside of a group can make people within the group feel closer to each other—which makes sense, because it strengthens the feeling of “us” versus “them.” But doing this with EA seems actively harmful, both because we want to attract as many people to be part of the “group” as possible, and because it’s unclear exactly where the line of the “group” lies, so we inevitably end up being critical of each other too.

Jess_Whittlestone 20 Sep 2014 9:10 UTC
2 points
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on: Help spread the movement!
On the first page of the link, there’s a box at the bottom—it’s not clear what, if anything, should go in there?

Jess_Whittlestone 20 Sep 2014 15:07 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Supportive Scepticism
Yeah, agree that this is a simple but useful idea!

One concern I would have with this in some situations is that it might cause you to anchor on your initial option too much—you might miss some good alternatives because you’re just looking for things that most easily come to mind as comparable to your first option. But I don’t know how often this would actually be a problem.

Jess_Whittlestone 24 Sep 2014 8:55 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Dale’s comment on: Cooperation in a movement supporting diverse causes
My reading of Michelle’s point was not that we should be writing about and defending causes that we wouldn’t normally think of as EA (although this could also be beneficial!) - I think she meant, within the space of the causes EAs generally talk about, it would be good if people wrote about and defended causes different to the ones they normally do. So, for example, if a person is known for talking about and defending animal causes, they could spend some time also writing about and defending xrisk or poverty. This would then lessen the impression that many people are “fixed” to one cause, but wouldn’t have the problem you mention. I might be reading this wrong though.

Jess_Whittlestone 24 Sep 2014 9:13 UTC
8 points
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on: Cooperation in a movement supporting diverse causes
A nice middle ground between “not talking about our reasons for supporting different causes at all” and “having people try to persuade others that their cause is the most important one” could be to simply encourage more truth-seeking, collaborative discussion about causes.

So rather than having people lay out their case for different causes (which risks causing people to get defensive and further entrenching peoples’ sense of affiliation to a certain cause, and a divide between different “groups” in the movement) it would be nice to see more discussion where people who support different causes explicitly try and find out where their disagreements lie, and learn from each other. I’m thinking of the kind of discussion that was had between Eliezer, Luke and Holden, for example, where they discussed their views on the far future and eventually found they didn’t disagree as much as they thought they did. This kind of thing seems really valuable, both in terms of learning and bringing people closer together.

Jess_Whittlestone 24 Sep 2014 11:21 UTC
1 point
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on: Learning From Less Wrong: Special Threads, and Making This Forum More Useful

There are already has open threads

Think you’ve got an extra word in here :)

Jess_Whittlestone 27 Sep 2014 9:02 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: An epistemology for effective altruism?
When I hover over the 3 upvotes in the corner by the title, it says “100% positive”—which suggests people haven’t downvoted it, it’s just that not many people have upvoted it? But maybe I’m reading that wrong.

I thought it was a good and useful post, I don’t see any reason why people would downvote it—but would also be interested to hear why if there were people who did.

Jess_Whittlestone 28 Sep 2014 17:17 UTC
2 points
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on: Effective altruism as the most exciting cause in the world
Great post, and definitely agree we should focus on this more.

Another thing I personally find exciting about effective altruism is that the question “How do I do the most good?” (with my career, money etc.) is a really motivating, intellectually challenging question to spend my time thinking about. So for those who enjoy spending their time thinking about interesting questions, effective altruism offers an environment in which to discuss one of the most important and stimulating questions out there—that’s pretty exciting to me. I would imagine at least some others feel similarly.

Jess_Whittlestone 30 Sep 2014 11:52 UTC
2 points
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on: Career choice: Evaluate opportunities, not just fields
Great post Ben, this seems like a really good point to make clear. I think there’s a general point here that it’s much easier, and often better, to choose between specific options than general categories of options.

Generally when I think about career choice I think it’s useful to begin by narrowing down to a few different fields that seem best for impact and fit, and then within those fields seek out concrete opportunities—and ultimately the decision will come down to how good the opportunities are, not a comparison between the fields themselves. But you’ve still narrowed by field initially. This seems to be the case especially when the fields you’re comparing seem roughly as good as each other or each have different advantages.

I like the suggestion of putting a lot of effort into looking for really good opportunities, too—I imagine this is often neglected. A side point there is that obviously in some fields this is more worth doing than others, because some fields are going to be higher variance than others in terms of how good the opportunities are. e.g. I’d imagine there’s higher variance in software jobs than in certain academic ones.

Jess_Whittlestone 7 Oct 2014 7:38 UTC
4 points
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on: How a lazy eater went vegan
Thanks for posting this Topher. When I was vegan, my diet was very similar to the one you described, and all in all I didn’t find it that difficult. You’ll notice the “was” in that sentence though—the thing that got me was eating out or eating socially with friends—I found it very difficult to maintain a vegan diet then, and so I found myself slipping. I’d be interested in how you deal with this—do you stick to a vegan diet even when eating out or going to friends houses, and if so, how difficult do you find it?

My solution for a while was to have a strict rule that I am entirely vegan in what I cook and by for myself, and vegetarian in other situations—like eating out—where being vegan is very difficult or inconvenient. This worked pretty well for a while. It’s harder now because I’m living in a house with people who frequently cook together—which has a lot of benefits of saved time, money, and being more enjoyable and sociable—but aren’t vegan. So I’ve slipped back to just being vegetarian across the board, but I feel somewhat uncomfortable about it.

Jess_Whittlestone 22 Oct 2014 19:49 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Ervin’s comment on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that if the pledge were changed, GWWC would become a community of “singularitarians, rationalists and the like.” It would be a community of people who want to donate 10% of their income to most effectively improve the lives of others, which could include singularitarians and rationalists, but certainly wouldn’t be defined by it. Saying you wouldn’t want to take the pledge for this reason seems a bit like saying you don’t want to be part of the EA community because it contains those people.

Also, note that the current pledge doesn’t actually exclude singularitarians, rationalists etc.: “The change is not likely to make a difference to people who think that the best way to help others is to ensure that the future will go well, since the pledge already explicitly includes people who will live in the future, as well as those alive now.” So it’s unlikely that changing the pledge would result in the community changing in the way you’re concerned about.

Jess_Whittlestone 22 Oct 2014 19:56 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: AlasdairGives’s comment on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?

Making this change would basically allow other causes that may have significant philosophical and/or practical baggage to trade on that reputation while undermining the focus and work on extreme poverty. It does nothing to help the fight against extreme poverty and may harm it, while boosting those who are seeking to advance other causes.

This makes it sound like the causes are competing with each other, which I don’t think is true. Changing the pledge isn’t about undermining the focus on extreme poverty, it’s about recognising that what we ultimately care about is saving lives, no matter where or when they are, whether they are in the developing world, the developed world, or in the future. Some people think the best way to save lives is to donate to far-future oriented causes, others think the best way is to donate to poverty causes—these people disagree, but mostly they agree that what they ultimately care about is the same and this is just a really tough question. Given that none of us can be certain that poverty is the best cause to focus on, it seems beneficial to be more inclusive of other potentially effective cause areas, so we can encourage more discussion and debate amongst the people who disagree. It is not a competition or a matter of one cause trying to crowd out the other.

To be a little rude, we don’t need more ways for people looking to blur the lines between their “Institute for Rich White Guys to write Harry Potter Fan Fiction” (as it was described in one recent debate elsewhere) and the reputations of charities fighting malaria in the developing world—there are more than enough other avenues within effective altruism where this happens already as a historical accident of where it first found purchase.

Again, you’re assuming that there being a link between people focused on fighting malaria and those concerned about existential risk is a bad thing. I acknowledge that there are PR issues with xrisk, and there are concerns there—but ultimately, it seems a good thing to me to have a community where people from both these groups can acknowledge their shared values and have productive debates with one another.

Jess_Whittlestone 22 Oct 2014 20:03 UTC
14 points
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on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?
Thanks for writing this up and seeking feedback, Michelle!

I’m in favour of the change—you know this, but I’m saying it here because I’m concerned that only people with strong disagreements will respond to this post, and so it will end up looking like the community is more against the change than it in fact is.

I think ultimately having a broader pledge will better represent the views of those who take it and the community, and agree that having a clear action which becomes standard for all EAs could be very beneficial.

Jess_Whittlestone

Sup­port­ive Scepticism

Supportive Scepticism