lastmistborn

• lastmistbornDec 31, 2022, 7:50 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: oivavoi’s comment on: What the heck hap­pened to EA’s pub­lic image?

  This is all pretty reasonable to me, although I do think some of the EA energy would still be go into other causes if EA werent around—but definitely not all. I’m looking forward to the book as well.

  Side note: I don’t know if your username is after the band, but I’ll be listening to Stitches and Runs for the next couple hours thanks to you.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 6:33 PM

  5 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Michael_2358 🔸’s comment on: What the heck hap­pened to EA’s pub­lic image?

  “We shouldn’t fund charity X because it’s harmful” is a very different argument than “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”, which is the argument I said no one is making. The authors aren’t arguing that we should be doing nothing and passively waiting for a systemic solution. They’re saying that funding charity X is harmful.

  But these adverse effects are not cause-specific or empirical, but rather assumed based on the high level EA philosophy.

  I do agree that this isn’t backed up in this very short blog post introducing a book (charitably, I would assume that it is backed up in one of the pieces in the collection this post is attached to, as that is how these types of introductions tend to function, but I could be wrong and can’t know until the book is published in February). That being said, this is a frequent criticism levied at charities from the Global North acting in the Global South. I don’t know enough about every “effective” charity functions to say confidently that it is or isn’t true, but the general climate of charitable giving and international aid tends enough in this direction that I see no reason to immediately assume it’s “assumed based on the high level EA philosophy” without more information. I’ll remain unconvinced in either direction until the actual book comes out.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 5:58 PM

  6 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Michael_2358 🔸’s comment on: What the heck hap­pened to EA’s pub­lic image?

  I’ve read the text you linked twice, to make sure I’m not missing something, and I don’t see where the authors argue that “it would be to leave money in a savings account than donate it to a de-worming charity or AMF”—which, incidentally, is very different than “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”. I guess the closest thing is “how funding an “effective” organization’s expansion into another country encourages colonialist interventions that impose elite institutional structures and sideline community groups whose local histories and situated knowledges are invaluable guides to meaningful action.”, which is not arguing that we should keep money in our bank accounts waiting for systemic change, but that funding these charities have adverse effects and so they shouldn’t be funded.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 1:36 PM

  8 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Michael_2358 🔸’s comment on: What the heck hap­pened to EA’s pub­lic image?

  It’s not like effective altruists are the first or only people to think critically about how to reduce suffering. EA philosophy doesn’t have a monopoly on trying to do good or trying to the most good, it doesn’t even have a monopoly of approaching doing good from an empirical standpoint. These aren’t original or new ideas at all, and they aren’t the ideas that are being critiqued.

  I don’t think it makes sense to separate what you’re calling EA tactics and EA philosophy. EA is its tactics, and those can change, but for the moment they are what they are. On a more concrete philosophical note, aspects of EA philosophy like cause prioritization, cause neutrality, utilitarian approaches, using metrics like cost-effectiveness, DALYs and QALY to measure outcomes, tendencies towards technocratic solutions, and top down approaches are among the things that are being critiqued. I don’t think these are all necessarily valid or representative of the whole of EA, but the first few are certainly very closely related to what I consider to be the constitutive and distinctive features of EA. That being said, I’m curious about how you define EA philosophy beyond the broad idea of thinking critically about how to reduce the most suffering, as that definition is broad enough that I’d say most people working in pretty much any field related to wellbeing, social policy or charity would be included.

  I understand your frustration, but I don’t think anybody making the arguments above is arguing that “we should sit on our hands and leave our money in savings accounts while we wait for a solution to systemic poverty”. They’re arguing that current EA approaches, both philosophical and tactical, are not satisfactory and that they don’t do the most good, and that there should be more effort and resources put into solutions that they think are.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 9:38 AM

  20 points

  7 ∶ 1

  on: What the heck hap­pened to EA’s pub­lic image?

  It is just people trying to figure out the best way to improve the world. What could be controversial about that?

  How to best improve the world is far from straightforward, and EA hardly has a bulletproof or incontrovertible position on what needs to be improved or how. Even if you can get broad agreement on something like “we should fix poverty”, there are dozens of questions about why poverty happens, how the root causes should or shouldn’t be approved, what is the most effective and most ethical ways of addressing it (which are not necessarily always the same), etc. I think the comments from S. E. Montgomery and bruce do an excellent job summing up a lot of the points where EA is open to (often well-deserved) critiques.

  Even before the whole FTX thing, EAs were being vilified on social media and even in academia.

  I think there’s some value in separating the “public” image and criticism of EA from academic ones, and I wanted to comment on the academic aspect in particular. While I’m sure that, like all movements, EA has been subject to vilification by academics, the academically published critiques of EA I’ve read tend to be fair, reasoned critiques primarily stemming from different approaches to doing good:

  • Institutional critiques that argue that EA is too focused on “band-aid” solutions that don’t address the root causes of the problems it addresses, which would require institutional or radical change.

  • Methodological critiques: this includes critiques of utilitarianism as a method for cause and intervention prioritization in general, and specific criticisms of calculations that address biases or models.

  • More general critiques on what should be prioritized for doing good: utilitarian or deontological views

  • Critiques that argue the value of local (read: community based, bottom up) vs. global (read: top-down foreign aid and intervention) approaches

  • Critiques of the charity in general along the lines of the nonprofit industrial complex that are extended to EA.

  • Critiques of charity in general as a means of redistribution of wealth and prioritizing who gets access to which services as opposed to democratic methods.

  • Anti-capitalist critiques that argue that EA is too tied in with capitalist ideals and methods to affect real change when it comes to poverty, which is considered to be a symptom of capitalism.

  I don’t think that all these critiques are excellent or as well backed up as they could be, but I think it’s important to recognize that there are good reasons to find EA objectionable, controversial or even, on net, harmful based on any of these without having cognitive dissonance, resentment, or psychological effects involved.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 8:53 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: What the heck hap­pened to EA’s pub­lic image?

  This seems counterproductively uncharitable. Wall Street in particular and finance in general is perceived by many to be an industry that is overall harmful and has negative value, and that participating in it is contributing to harm and producing very little added value for those outside of high-earning elite groups.

  It makes a lot sense to me that someone who thinks the finance industry is, on net, harmful will see ETG in finance as a form of ends justify the means reasoning, without having to resort to reducing it to a caricature of “money bad = Wall Street bad = ETG bad, it doesn’t have to make sense”.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 8:37 AM

  2 points

  2 ∶ 2

  in reply to: peterhartree’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the EA Merch Store!

  Appear did make me think that it was at least partially focused on physical appearance. Although I’m not sure that it reads very differently still, since I’m not how else to take it, especially the “low-status” part. Arguing to gatekeep who can outwardly associate themselves with a social movement based on how they come across or who seems low-status or off putting feels needlessly exclusionary, particularly because those impressions are highly tied into social, racial, gendered and economic prejudices and, unavoidably, physical appearence.

  I’m not a fan of merch generally and will avoid branded clothing as much a possible, and I don’t think selling EA merchandise is a good idea overall, but objecting to it on the grounds of how attractive the person wearing it may be, physically or otherwise, seems wrong-headed.

• lastmistbornDec 30, 2022, 7:12 AM

  5 points

  5 ∶ 1

  in reply to: peterhartree’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the EA Merch Store!

  ″… the people who wear the merch, may appear low status, off-putting or otherwise unattractive.” seems like an extremely pointless and bad thing to consider.

• lastmistbornDec 28, 2022, 11:01 AM

  1 point

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Simon_M’s comment on: StrongMinds should not be a top-rated char­ity (yet)

  Oh no, I wasn’t trying to imply that that’s what you were doing. I wanted to comment on it because I was extremely doubtful that any kind of intervention could have very high impact (not even as high as SM claims, even something around 70-75% would have been surprising to me) when I first came across it and considered it very implausible until seeing the evidence base for GIPT, which made me think it’s not quite so outlandish as to be totally implausible (although, as I said, I still have my doubts and don’t think SM makes a strong enough case for their figures). Just wanted to share this for anyone else who was in my position.

• lastmistbornDec 28, 2022, 10:57 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Same here, I actually wasn’t aware of weighted voting until I noticed I was able to do it. I don’t think there’s a problem with voting (even voting + flat rate strong voting seems perfectly reasonable to me) by weighing votes according to karma seems very high cost to very little or no gain

• lastmistbornDec 28, 2022, 7:21 AM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Display a more detailed breakdown of karma and agreement karma by number of upvotes and downvotes rather than overall amount.

  I think that the weighted voting system is counterproductive overall (it creates perverse incentives, it ascribes false authority to users who are more prolific or who may have expertise in one area and poor understanding in others, and it is needlessly undemocratic) and makes it harder to meaningfully understand the karma of a given post or comment, but this could go someway in making the actual impact of posts and comments more legible. I think there is a difference between how to read agreement karma for a comment that has 10 agreement karma overall from, say, 8 2 point upvotes and 2 −3 minus point downvote versus one that has 10 1-point upvotes, and the breakdown of how a comment achieved its agreement karma is not currently legible, which makes agreement karma a much less useful indicator than it could be otherwise.

  P.S.: Similar suggestions have been made below on how the karma and voting system can be tinkered with to make it more meaningful, but seems different enough to warrant a new top-level comment.

• lastmistbornDec 28, 2022, 6:26 AM

  18 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: StrongMinds should not be a top-rated char­ity (yet)

  I’m also pretty skeptical about the astronomical success rate SM professes, particularly because of some pretty serious methodology issues. Very significant confounding factors due to the recruitment method is, I think, the most important (recruitment from microfinance and employment training programs, to me, means that their sample would be predisposed to having improvements in depression symptoms because of improvement or even the possibility of improvement in material conditions), but the lackluster follow through with control groups and long-term assessment are also significant. I would love for them to have a qualitative study with participants to understand the mechanisms of improvement and what the participants feel has been significant in alleviating their depressive symptoms.

  That being said, I think it’s worth mentioning that SM is not the first to try this method of treatment, and that there are a considerable amount of studies that have similar results (their methods also leave something to be desired, in my opinion, but not so much so that I think they should be disregarded). Meta-analyses for IPT have found that IPT is effective in treating depression and noteworthy as an empirically tested treatment ^[1]. The original Bolton et al. study that I believe SM takes as a model for its intervention and six-month follow up study claims that benefits have held for that long. Another study in Uganda that Bolton and some other members of initial research team conducted 10 years later gives some more insight in how it actually works through a qualitative study (to be clear, though, this is not a follow up with the participants from the initial papers). There are more than a dozen other studies implementing GIPT in a variety of different context and for different target groups, and they all point to high decreases in symptoms of depression, although they all suffer from confounding factors and either lack of long-term follow ups or lack of meaningfully tracked control groups.

  This is not to say that SM’s estimates are probably correct, or that they for sure deserve their spot as top rated charity—I do think that they’re doing valuable work overall, and I have some confidence that providing this type of intervention that is somewhat self-sustaining with its focus on treating symptoms of depression by focusing on managing them and creating in-community support groups that are able to continue after the initial intervention is probably cost-effective for mental health treatment, and moreso in underserved communities, but I remain doubtful about the size and means of impact until I see some more evidence backing it up. That being said, I was surprised to see that SM’s purported results weren’t as out of left field as I initially assumed, so I wanted to share this for context.

  1. ^

     Two of these studies (1, 2) are for IPT and not GIPT, and are notably conducted by a group led by the same person; the third focuses on postpartum depression specifically.

• lastmistbornDec 27, 2022, 3:40 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  Thank you as well, it definitely is worth something. I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and I can’t come up with a very satisfying answer, and this will likely be a bit of a digression so I apologize for that.

  I think the short answer is perhaps not very much. (There may be others who are more imaginative than I who can come up with actual actionable things here.) The EA Forum in particular tends to value evidence based, well sourced and impartially argued posts. This is a good thing in many cases, but it does create trades offs in terms of being “welcoming”^[1], and I think this is one of them: I recognize and respect that many people who oppose abortion do it from a place of believing that a fetus is a person and caring very deeply about the lives of unborn children, but the corollary to that is a reduction to the rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination of a huge number of people. It’s very challenging for me personally to find the desire and follow through to sit down and spend hours putting together a post that argues for respect for my rights because, to put it simply, the idea that I need to argue that my rights and the rights of roughly half the worlds population should be valued and respected in this type of format (or at all, even) in the context of a movement that values doing good is extremely disheartening and demotivating, particularly when those rights are already being eroded across the world. I imagine that there are people who are invested enough in EA and/​or longtermism that the emotional and time costs of doing that will be worth it, but I don’t think I am.

  Also, this is a relatively minor point and I only mention because you do seem to care about this and I in no way mean to come off as accusatory as I sincerely believe it was without malice or bad intent, but writing off people’s sincerely held beliefs and priorities as a result of partisanship or tribalism or assuming that a question will fall on deaf ears does have a chilling effect, at least for me. I have done my best to engage with this post respectfully and in good faith, even when I strongly disagree with many parts of it, and these comments make me feel like my disagreements are being treated as incorrect received knowledge rather than considered and examined beliefs that are treated with respect.

  1. ^

     I put this in quotes because it doesn’t quite sit well with me, but I’m not sure what would work better—it’s not that I feel that a post that is of “lower quality” by these standard wouldn’t be welcome, necessarily, but that it would probably be met with a lot of questions and demands to have it conform more to those standards—which is, to some extent, fair enough, as every space is obviously allowed to have its own discursive norms, but it does come with costs in some cases.

• lastmistbornDec 27, 2022, 2:57 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: nonn’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  I agree with everything you’ve said here.

  What I was saying is that, for the type of longtermism that assumes that the average persons life will be of positive value, and that it is morally good to maximize the total number of people to maximize total happiness, and assumes that allowing a life to come into existence is as good as saving a life, abortion seems to be morally bad, unless you argue that abortion being banned will have enough of a negative effect to outweigh all the lives that would not have existed if it were banned (which I think one could definitely argue). I say type of longtermism because there are definitely different approaches to longtermism and these assumptions are not representative of all, and I disagree with many of the assumptions here. I particularly disagree that total value or wellbeing, as opposed to aggregate as you mention in your comment, is a meaningful metric, but I realize there are different views on that.

• lastmistbornDec 25, 2022, 7:58 AM

  8 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  If you find this disturbing, there are a few philosophical outs:

  I would like to object to framing these as “outs”: I disagree with several assumptions that aren’t stated here (that possibly existing people or fetuses have equivalent moral value to currently existing people, that we have equal moral duties to safeguard the well being of both groups, that allowing a life to come into existence is equally as good as saving a life), but it isn’t because I’m looking for an out from an inconvenient conclusion. I believe we have a duty to try and make the world a better place for future generations, and that we must avoid making it a worse one, but I don’t consider myself a longtermist and I strongly disagree that maximising the total number of people who are happier than the critical level is a worthwhile goal, as opposed to trying to maximise the median or average happiness of a smaller number of people. These are normative disagreements, and they are why I don’t find this argument compelling. Your case isn’t falling on deaf ears, I understand it and I simply disagree.

  Partisanship and tribalism likely explain a majority of why it consumes so much of the public attention, including why you and I care about it so much.

  I also strongly disagree with this. I did not grow up somewhere where abortion was a hot-button or partisan issue the way it is in the US, and I don’t believe that it’s a partisan or tribal issue. This may be the case for you, but I care about this issue because a) as bruce points out below, the right to have abortions is an issue that deeply affects an enormous number of people and I would very much like them, and myself, to have option to exercise my free will and bodily autonomy on issues that have huge impacts on my life, and b) I highly value rights, particularly social and positive rights, as a moral good, and this is one among many that are vitally important.

  Instead of distancing yourself from EA, what’s preventing you from advocating for more “explicit countervailing frameworks prioritizing the rights and needs of already existing people?”

  Again, bruce’s comment articulates my feelings on this very well. This is not the only problem I have with EA as it currently operates, but this is a major ideological one. I want to make it clear that the problem for me isn’t only “longtermist EA might be anti-abortion”, it’s how longtermist EA can be extended to reach this conclusion and the further implications of that. Overlooking or writing off the needs and rights of currently existing people in service of creating more future people is, overall, a stance that I find morally unacceptable and actively harmful. While I know that there are longtermist EAs who feel and think similarly, longtermist EA in general seems likely to tend towards (or in fact may actively be tending towards) this direction unless this is addressed in some way. That this issue exists in the first place is, to me, either indicative of willful oversight and disregard (which is possible and also obviously perfectly fine, if that is what longtermist EAs believe, but in my opinion morally bad), or a serious blindspot that is so enormous in size and implications that it lowers my regard of the intellectual rigor of longtermist EA. I’d also like to add that, in addition to asymmetrical costs and time issues, one reason why I’m not writing advocating for “maybe we should care about the human rights of currently existing people, and maybe we should care about it more than creating more people in the future” is that having to argue for caring about human rights in a social movement that is about doing the most good possible is, to me, a clear indicator that that movement is not the right place for me.

• lastmistborn 25 Dec 2022 7:04 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: bruce’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  This pretty much hits the nail on the head, thank you for articulating it so well.

• lastmistborn 24 Dec 2022 4:51 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 2

  in reply to: GreenByrdhouse’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  I mean, what really are the chances that effective altruism, a largely liberal, left-of-center (i.e., pro-choice) community would broadly endorse the view that terminating a pregnancy is morally wrong?

  For me the problem is, without explicit countervailing frameworks prioritizing the rights and needs of already existing people baked into it, abortion is morally wrong is a direct logical extension of a longtermist view that highly values maximizing the number of people on assumption that the average existing persons life will have positive value. This is deeply disturbing to me and a reasons I’ve been growing increasingly distant from EA despite, like the commentor you’re replying to, being involved in it for close to 8 years.

• lastmistborn 24 Dec 2022 3:38 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  (On mobile and can’t do quotes)

  Re: your characterization of my argument, framng personally autonomy as a right or an ability is a distinction without much difference here unless you argue that external forces that would change your right to have a child or an abortion doesn’t effect your ability to have one, which is obviously untrue. If someone wants to have an abortion where it’s illegal, their ability to get an abortion is seriously constrained. Of someone wants to have a child where having children is illegal, their ability to have a child is seriously constrained as well. Ignoring this is either a myopic oversight or ignorant of the way political, economic, legal and social systems impact people’s choices and ability to make choices in the world. This also applies to your point on “Credence in deontology vs. utilitarianism”—I don’t see how a utilitarian or deontological framework changes this at all.

  More importantly, the framing of voluntary abortion reduction means that people should choose to not do a certain thing, not they should or should be able to choose it. This doesn’t immediately clash with personal autonomy as either of us have defined it when your proposition is formed as “people who want to have children should be able to have them”, but when you form it as “people who are pregnant should have their children” (which seems to me to be the actual argument of the post, based on the post and your comments) it is no longer a question of ability but of choice.

  The reason I find the use of personal autonomy in the post objectionable is because using a term that is central to extant debates in a way that is disconnected from and unrelated to its use in those debates implies that it is response to those arguments without actually engaging with them. This was a bigger problem when the title was personal autonomy does not preclude intervention, but i still think the bidyif the section itself reads as disingenuous in a similar way. Debates around personal autonomy in relation to abortion are not about how one should exersize their personal autonomy, they are about whether or not pregnant people should have the right to exercise their personal autonomy. These are two different arguments and the language functions as semantic tool to separate them. Treating them as if they are the same is unproductive and incorrect, so differentiating between them is necessary.

  “where I argue that even though free speech is a very important norm, we shouldn’t make the choice to use our free speech to spread hate.”

  I think this comparison fails because, although personal autonomy is a very important norm, the right to personal autonomy if pregnant people is being weakened or completely stripped away in many places in the world. Additionally, you are ostensibly making an argument in favor of personal autonomy (people should be able to have and raise ot adopt children if they want to), not against it (people should not be able to have abortions). This, to me, makes personal autonomy irrelevant to your proposal because you are arguing for a moral prescription because it is a prescription on how one should choose to act not on how they have the ability to act.

  “As for your perspective, I’m not sure whether your opinion is (a) that this post’s scope should be broader or (b) that even given this post’s stated scope, it’s still worth it to address the external forces you brought up.”

  I think that arguing against abortion without bringing up these external forces and the realities of pregnancy is deeply flawed. Although you make a passing concession to the costs of pregnancy in your post, I do think that these costs are severely minimized. Being pregnant and giving birth to a child, particular particularly an unwanted one, is extremely burdensome for women economically, socially, mentally and physically. Somewhere in a comment thread you argued that if kidneys were regenerative, EAs would be arguing that everyone should donate kidneys once a year. I think this comparison makes it clear how much these costs are being minimized; having a child once a year, even if they didn’t raise the children themselves, would likely have disastrous effects for the women doing it very quickly. Likewise, arguing that personal autonomy should be using in a certain way without recognizing that many women do not have the personal autonomy to make a choice at all feels callous at best.

• lastmistborn 23 Dec 2022 6:54 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  I can imagine that even the suggestion of diverting funding from charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people to charities which accomplish similar object-level goals without that externality would have been met far more charitably without the priming on “voluntary abortion reduction” as a goal.

  To be fair, I don’t think your post has been met uncharitably—in fact, I’d argue that the response has been extremely charitable despite the mismatch between stated goals and policy suggestions.

  How about I change the section title to “Exercising Personal Autonomy to Help Others”?

  I’m honestly quite opposed to the use of personal autonomy in this context. This is very related to the extant debates about abortion and public debates in general, where personal autonomy is broadly framed in terms of rights rather than as a synonym for “choosing to do something”. Your section starts with “When discussing abortion, it is crucial for us to emphasize the importance of personal autonomy”, and I think that it is at best poorly worded and misleading to use personal autonomy in that way because of the way the term is generally used and understood in public and political debate. The reason personal autonomy is important to discussions about abortion is because there are a lot of external forces, most importantly legal ones, that prevent people from exercising their personal autonomy to get an abortion. The opposite of this isn’t true for choosing to have a child. There is an argument to be made that the positive social right to have a child and to have the state subsidize the care of that child in one way or another is not being met and that diminishes the capacity of individuals to have as many children as they want because they don’t have the means to care them, and that this is a question of personal autonomy, but I disagree with that argument and find it a stretch at best, and in any case that argument isn’t being made. In it’s current form, using personal autonomy in that section reads like either a result of a poor understanding of the role of personal autonomy in debates about abortion or like a semantic maneuver the preemptively undermine objections on the ground of personal autonomy, which is particularly problematic because of suggestions to defund charities and intervention providing family planning and abortion services.

• lastmistborn 22 Dec 2022 7:26 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: EA is prob­a­bly un­der­go­ing “Eva­po­ra­tive Cool­ing” right now

  Sorry, I spaced on this comment and am replying quite late.

  In terms of what I think is missing, intellectually, the thing that stands out to me the most is a lack of rights-based perspectives. I think this is a good and necessary countervailing normative framework for utilitarianism. I didn’t think was necessary when EA was mostly about charity evaluation and charitable donations to mostly global health interventions, but I do think it’s very necessary now that there is a burgeoning tendency towards policy and even political campaigns, particularly in the context of longtermism. EA has traditionally stayed away from areas arounds rights advocacy, and for good reason, but I think it’s vital if the movement is going to become more involved in policy and politics. I think it’s also important to avoid some of the more repugnant logical extensions of longtermism when it comes to tradeoffs between current and future people in intervention design and prioritization.

  I’d like to see more discussions around philanthropy and state vs. non-state provision for need satisfiers, particularly in the developing world. I think this is also increasingly important as EA tends more towards a policy and politics direction and ideas like charter cities and fields AI governance are cropping up. I think it was fair enough to handwave objections to the unintended effects of “Western” charities when EA was mainly focused on directing charitable donations to where they would be most effective, but at this scale and within this new framework, I think acting more deliberately and thinking seriously about the meta-level (hopefully with the aid of thinkers and studies from outside EA—I’ve seen the same few books and SSC or ACX posts mentioned whenever these issues come up and there is an enormous wealth of higher quality, more rigorous extant research on the topic that can be helpful, as well as academic who have devoted their career to studying these things) will be extremely helpful.

  I also think that there’s probably a lot missing in terms of perspectives from communities that EA is trying to target, and from people who work in the fields of charitable giving, impact assessment, and EA-adjacent areas who are not EAs. There seems to be a bit of an uptick and increased interest in these perspectives lately, but there’s probably a need for direct solicitation to get these voices more visible in the community, and I’m not sure how much is actually being done in that regard.

  On a more meta-level, a significant reason I feel that way is to with discussion norms, particularly on the Forum. A lot of discussions are very jargon heavy (and I’d argue that a lot of the jargon is pointless and borders on affectation, and I say this as someone who is involved in academia which is ridiculously jargon-ified, but that’s obviously a personal observation), and my impression is that comments can be explicitly or implicitly hostile to posts that aren’t presented with an air of impartiality and a certain style of argumentation, with highly coted comments addressing the tone and style over the substance. I understand that every space has it’s own idiosyncratic tendencies, and I don’t intend to argue that EA needs to change this on the Forum or in person, but as someone who has a lot of pressure on my time (as I assume many others do), writing a post in line with some controversial-ish stances that conforms to the Forum style is too high cost and too little reward for me. I really don’t think that me not having the time or urge to write up my ideas is a huge loss for the EA community, but I imagine there are some people who have great and innovative ideas who are being lost in this dynamic where the Forum is sometimes treated like an academic journal rather than an online forum. I imagine this effect is particularly strong for people who don’t have direct EA involvement but work in EA-adjacent fields, whose insight could be seriosuly beneficial.

  Again, sorry for the late and unnecessarily long and not very well written reply.