And FRI and SP both have articles on wild animals, not sure which is better for purposes here. SP’s is a bit more introductory/accessible maybe, and also expresses more philosophical arguments for why we should care; FRI’s a bit more academic and does not address some typical introductory reactions.
FRI’s: https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/
What about doing a poll on FB (instead or additionally, idk)? Or a private poll elsewhere? (FB is good because people can comment explanations.)
Mentioned this to Tee—I would love to see both (1) turnover data, and (2) previous (pre-EA) work with or donations to non-profits/other previous altruistic pursuits.
For the latter, the survey could maybe ask how much volunteer time, career hours, and money respondents previously put into charity, maybe in the last year and/or five and/or lifetime before finding EA. It could also offer categories for the charities’ cause areas.
Relatedly, whether the respondent was vegetarian or vegan before finding EA would be interesting, and/or some scale about how important they thought issues faced by nonhumans were. Maybe for each of several cause areas (not just the big three) a scale of how important (not necessarily relatively, just “not at all important” to “very important”?) they thought the issue was before coming to EA.
Seeing how e.g. depression correlates with cause area preferences would be interesting.
I would also be interested to see a question for what value people assign to life on Earth at present.
I imagine for instance this is much higher, and may even be the difference between highly positive and highly negative, for EAs who are most concerned with x-risk as compared to those more interested in animal farming. (And more obviously, s-risk, but it would still be interesting to quantify the difference, if just in terms of e.g. “highly negative” to “highly positive”.)
In addition to how people “think” about EA as an “opportunity” or “obligation” (and FYI I for one would have been unclear if I saw both “moral duty” and “obligation”), I’d be interested to see how many people “feel” like EA/A is an obligation as opposed to an opportunity.
Also, could respondents not say anything about being e.g. Native American, Middle Eastern, or at least “Other”? I’m sure the structure of these questions has been thoroughly discussed in social sciences literature and I don’t think the options shown here are in line with the standard style.
I didn’t mean to imply that — I just cited it as a source for the specific claims in that sentence. The other evidence I cite seems to imply it overall, and she doesn’t seem to account for all of that evidence.
I can’t tag here, but Georgia, if you see this I’d be curious for your opinion on how the totality of evidence weighs, particularly in expectation regardless of how robust it is.
That doesn’t seem like what I’m doing. Georgia doesn’t seem to be disagreeing with my post’s overall argument (that EA would benefit from diversity; she actually seems to explicitly agree with that in her last paragraph), and she doesn’t explicitly agree or disagree with the argument of that specific paragraph (that diversity tends to be net beneficial for groups). The quote you cite is about a “clear” effect on groups, from the evidence she evaluates, and I might not have the same bar for robustness that she’s thinking of with that claim.
Moreover, her post argues
If we look at [the effect of diversity] further, we can decompose it into two effects (one where diversity has a neutral or negative impact on performance, and one where it has a mostly positive impact)
and goes onto explore these effects. The negative ones seem related to something like tribalism (e.g. less identification with the group), and I hope the EA community is able to overcome these avoidable downsides so it can on net benefit from diversity. I didn’t mention them in the post because I think we can overcome them given our desire to de-bias ourselves, and given the tools that Georgia mentions we have to overcome them:
The more balanced a team is along some axis of diversity, the less likely you are to see negative effects on performance… recognition of less-obvious cognitive differences (e.g. personality and educational diversity) increases over time… diverse teams end up outperforming non-diverse teams [over time]… the longer a group works together, the less surface-level differences matter
I linked to her whole post so readers could see all of that. Linking directly to the citations I was pointing to in her post would have felt like cherry-picking. I could have given more explanation of her whole post in my own, and if I had spent more time writing this post, I probably would have done that.
[Edit: Georgia made a comment above that suggests she believes the statement without the robustness qualification, so we do have disagreement here.]
I only hold this view weakly, but yes, I’m worried that, as you put it, “E first, A second” people are less likely to stick around.
I don’t think “A first, E second” people are necessarily easier to get in the first place though, as they are more likely to already have a calling (and so to have less personally to gain) and to be committed to other altruistic pursuits that are hard for them to drop as “ineffective.”
That said, I’ve seen significant movement among heavily committed farmed animal advocates towards thinking more about and acting in the interest of maximizing impact… though farmed animal advocates are often already doing that advocacy because they’re already thinking about effectiveness: they see the issue as massively important and very tractable. So I suppose realistically I’m putting most of my investments in people who are A first, but still clearly already E.
I believe sexuality is a demographic we do well on.
Thanks! I added a note about the debate.
I’m not sure what your comments about critical discussion style are referring to in the post.
I haven’t thought about prioritization yet, and was hoping other people would discuss that here. Since a lot of these are actions individuals can take, it will vary a lot by what roles an individual plays and what they have the most room for improvement in.
That said… toning down jargon, I suspect you’d agree, is probably pretty cost-effective, as I would think is toning up the visibility of people from underrepresented groups. A Diversity & Inclusion Officer who could review and advise on social media communications, ads, community recruitment, website UX, conference speakers, talk content and descriptions, job postings and hiring processes, etc, and who could establish metrics and goals for and conduct annual reviews on inclusionary practices, sounds easily worth their salary, at the very least as an experiment for a year.
I couldn’t find it unfortunately, and was just relying on the veracity of that rather detailed extract and the credibility of the source publication. I considered not putting that in at all since what matters is that the prejudiced view doesn’t seem to have backing, but I figured this was still information, worth a “may be more likely” even if I couldn’t confirm that it’s been demonstrated.
The histories of many forms of prejudice are histories biological essentialism and biological determinism. Even if such claims are now made out of a “willingness to explore” alternative hypotheses despite this long history of precisely being an unwillingness to explore the much newer hypothesis of prejudice, they tend to be over-simplistic, as in the memo, and tend to have the effect—if not also the intention—of dismissing the other, newer hypothesis of prejudice, which is robustly supported by data that the memo’s author fails to include.
That’s not to say it’s a black and white matter of total biological similarity or total culturally-imposed disparities and prejudice. That’s what the author of the memo implies, and I disagree. The evidence that prejudice is a major problem that is holding people back is substantial nonetheless.
Some of his suggestions for ways to reduce the gender gap are worth considering, and charitably he’s not exceptionally prejudiced and is able to analyze information that has found its way to him, but is just very poorly informed and has no willingness to explore the alternative explanation of prejudice. At most charitable this still enables that prejudice.
Given the extent of my knowledge, which is just the words in the memo, I can agree he’s not an outright asshole, and I should have phrased my side note about this example of zero tolerance with a heavy hand differently. It may even be a poor example, as I would say corrective action should have been taken in his case before he was fired if it wasn’t, which I don’t know about either way.
Danke schoen :)
Unfortunately since the respondents would be members of the EA community, it would be hard to control that data for cultural fit in order to get at how robustly EA people from each demographic are. People have stuck around in the community for reasons other than how EA they are or can be, as I hope I’ve shed some light on.
“Altruism, numbers, and factory farms”: https://sentience-politics.org/philosophy/altruism-numbers-factory-farms
Sentience Politics recently published a page on the significance of factory farms, which also includes discussion on why it’s important to consider numbers and compare suffering.
(Disclaimer, I work at SP/EAF.)