Good points, though it’s worth noting that the people who comment on NYT articles are probably not representative of the typical NYT reader
nathan98000
I appreciate the fact that you took the time to reflect on what you’ve heard about longtermism. That said, I’ll highlight areas where I strongly disagree.
It is obvious that any plan that sacrifices the well-being of the present human population to serve a presumed larger future human population will not be morally justifiable
This is not at all obvious to me. We make justifiable sacrifices to well-being all the time. Consider a hospital that decides not to expend all of its resources on its current patients because it knows there will be future patients in a month, or a year, or a decade in the future. This seems entirely sensible. I see no difference in principle between this and a more longtermist attitude.
I wonder if the longtermist assumption of a far future containing lots of people with moral status is intended to slip in a theory of value supporting the idea that, all other things equal, a future containing more people is morally preferable to one that contains fewer people.
I don’t think longtermism requires adopting the assumption that more people is preferable to fewer people. One memorable thought experiment from MacAskill’s book that you reference involves dropping and breaking a glass bottle in a forest. It would be good to pick up the broken glass if you know someone in the future might step on it. This suggests that helping future people is good, and this judgment need not commit us to total utilitarianism or any other broad ethical theory.
I hope that longtermists will presume that creation of some utility in the experience of a being with moral status, when accomplished through control of that being in context, will contain errors
Endorsing longtermism doesn’t commit a person to favoring any kind of totalitarian control. In fact, you might think that a future of totalitarian control is bad, which might mean that it would be important to take actions to prevent that for the sake of the longterm future… Moreover, there are longterm causes that don’t involve “controlling” people in any standard sense at all (e.g. advocating for reductions in carbon emissions, direct work on AI alignment, creating institutions that can more easily detect the spread of pathogens in a population).
I only poked around the studies you listed a little, but there were a few things I noticed that made me more skeptical of the evidence:
I was initially surprised the SKY intervention made the list of primary recommendations. One of the studies comes from The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and the other is based off of a sample of 21 veterans with PTSD. Surely there are cheap interventions with better evidence bases?
It seems like you’re comparing apples and oranges for many of these interventions. Some interventions measure cortisol levels, some use self-reports, some use blood pressure. A 20% reduction in one will not translate to a 20% reduction in another. And presumably, what matters for the sake of this post is a reduction in stress, something that’s not measured directly by many of these studies.
It seems like you’re simply taking a raw average of all the studies within an intervention category to come up with an overall effect size. But this is invalid because some studies are higher quality and more informative than others (because of sample size, study design, etc.).
I think this post makes many correct observations about the EA movement, but it draws the wrong conclusions.
For example, it’s true that EAs will sometimes use uncommon phrases like “tail-risk” and “tractability”. But that’s because these are important concepts! Heck, just “probability” is a word that might scare off most people too. But it would be a mistake to water down one’s language to attract as many people as possible.
More generally, the EA movement isn’t trying to grow as fast as possible. It’s not trying to get everyone’s attention. Instead, it’s trying to specifically reach those people who are sympathetic to an evidence-based approach to helping others. Bare emotional appeals risk attracting the wrong kind of people and misrepresent what EA is all about.
There’s a place for stories to motivate and inspire, but if they’re divorced from engagement with data and careful reasoning, EA stops being EA.
This doesn’t seem like a great use of time. For one thing, I think it gets the psychology of political disagreements backwards. People don’t simply disagree with each other because they don’t understand each others’ words. Rather they’ll often misinterpret words to meet political ends.
I also question anyone’s ability to create such an “objective/apolitical” dictionary. As you note, even the term “woke” can have a negative connotation. (And in some circles it still has a positive connotation.) Some words are essentially political footballs in today’s climate. For example, in this dictionary what would be the definition of the word “woman”?
I’m also unconvinced that this is an EA type of activity. For the standard reasons, I think EA should be very cautious when approaching politics. It seems like creating a central hub for people to look up politically loaded terms is the opposite of this.
Upvoted for curating a list of other product recommendations. Very helpful!
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced sexism both within and outside EA.
Just to clarify your view, you said that:
there is data to suggest the variability hypothesis may be true in some places and for certain kinds of intelligence.
But an implication of the hypothesis is that men will make up a greater proportion of the “intelligent” people in those places for those kinds of intelligence.
Do you think it would be fine to use this information as a prior in those contexts?
Yes, I think it would be best to hold off. I think you’ll find MacAskill addresses most of your concerns in his book.
I didn’t downvote, but I’ll give my two cents after having read the abstract.
Your abstract didn’t leave me wanting to read the rest of your essay.
You say that the cause of our lack of coordination and management of x-risks is because of “human nature.” This is such a nebulous term, it’s unclear how to evaluate this claim, and given many people’s tendency to wax poetic without saying much of substance about human nature, I worry your essay is in this genre. You also say we cannot change human nature. It’s unclear how you would argue for this and why this wouldn’t immediately lead to a defeatist attitude. But given advances in neuroscience, genetics, and AI I strongly doubt that any conception of human nature is as fixed as you would claim. You do later say that a cooperative society is possible, which seems inconsistent with the earlier part of your abstract.
The key to cooperating and managing x-risks, you say, is acquiring an understanding life and human nature. Again, this is too vague to evaluate.
And you say this knowledge can be made quick and easy to acquire, which seems… utopian? So I strongly doubt that the essay would lead to actionable advice.
For someone not familiar with Farrell’s work, what’s the main problem with it?
I have no idea, I’ve spent less than a half hour looking into this. The Cochrane Review shows that there’s maaaybe an advantage to water flossing, but there just haven’t been that many studies on it. And the studies do assume that participants are flossing/water flossing at the same frequency. If the pleasant sensation you get from water flossing motivates you to keep doing it, I think that’s great!
Good post! Spencer Greenberg has a post with similar thoughts on this:
https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2021/05/is-learning-from-just-one-data-point-possible/
On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation (Iklé, Aronson, Madansky, 1958)
Just to reiterate your original claim, you said that Scott “has done a lot, entirely deliberately in my view, to spread that view [that black people have lower IQs for genetic reasons].”
And your evidence for this claim is that:
He linked to neo-reactionaries on his blogroll who hold this view.
He privately told friends that HBD (which isn’t exclusively about the causes of racial IQ differences) is “probably partially correct or at least very non-provably non-correct.” And he demanded they never reveal this publicly.
He isn’t “repulsed” or “creeped out” or “upset” by reactionaries.
I find this extremely unpersuasive and misleading.
I don’t know which neo-reactionaries you’re referring to when you say he linked to them on his blogroll, but he very clearly doesn’t agree with everything they say. He has explicitly disagreed with the neo-reactionary movement at length.
Telling something to friends in private and demanding secrecy seems like the exact opposite of trying to spread a view. And saying a view is “probably partially correct or at least non-provably non-correct” is hardly a ringing endorsement of the view.
Come on… He doesn’t have the right emotional vibes, therefore he must be deliberately spreading the view?? I’m personally a vegan for ethical reasons. In fact, I think factory farming is among the worst things humanity has ever done. But I’m not “creeped out” or “repulsed” by people who eat meat.
Your evidence is extremely weak, and it’s disappointing that as of my response, it has 18 upvotes.
I think any discussion of race that doesn’t take the equality of races as a given will be considered inflammatory. And regardless of the merits of the arguments, they can make people uncomfortable and choose not to associate with EA.
The concept of self-esteem has a somewhat checkered history in psychology. Here, an influential review paper finds that self-esteem leads people to speak up more in groups and to feel happier. But it fails to have consistent benefits in other areas of life such as educational/occupational performance or violence. And it may have detrimental effects, such as risky behavior in teens.
Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) causes benefits. Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-esteem, indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences. Instead, we recommend using praise to boost self-esteem as a reward for socially desirable behavior and self-improvement.
I don’t think advocating for libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism is a tractable way to improve the world. I also think it’s not at all obvious that it would even be desirable.
And in the US at least, the term “social justice” has become extremely politically loaded, and I think it would be unwise for EAs to explicitly associate themselves with the term.
I like this list!
Just a heads up for the studies about water flossing:
Two of them were funded by WaterPik and another is published in the “Journal of Baghdad College of Dentistry,” which looks… suspicious from my naive perspective.
A recent Cochrane Review compares toothbrushing against tooth brushing + water flossing (aka “oral irrigating”):
Very-low certainty evidence suggested oral irrigators may reduce gingivitis measured by GI at one month (SMD −0.48, 95% CI −0.89 to −0.06; 4 trials, 380 participants), but not at three or six months. Low-certainty evidence suggested that oral irrigators did not reduce bleeding sites at one month (MD −0.00, 95% CI −0.07 to 0.06; 2 trials, 126 participants) or three months, or plaque at one month (SMD −0.16, 95% CI −0.41 to 0.10; 3 trials, 235 participants), three months or six months, more than toothbrushing alone.
It also compares water flossing with regular flossing:
Low- to very low-certainty evidence suggested oral irrigation may reduce gingivitis at one month compared to flossing, but very low-certainty evidence did not suggest a difference between devices for plaque.
Of course it’s clickbait, and I don’t see anything wrong with using clickbait titles as long as they aren’t misleading.
It is misleading. The title is “You (Probably) Shouldn’t Go To College.” But you complain specifically about arts, language, and literature majors at private universities. This is not most people who go to college.
Are you disagreeing with that analysis?
Asserting that humanities professors are pretentious jackoffs with dumbass interpretations is more easily interpreted as angry venting than as reasonable argument.
I don’t care if you graduated top of your class with a music degree from Julliard, since it tells me nothing about what type of music you’re capable of composing.
Think of it like this: People care if you graduated top of your class with a music degree from Julliard. Is it stupid? Maybe, but that’s how it is. I didn’t make the rules.
One trouble I’ve always had with the capabilities approach is with how one figures out what counts as a capability worth having. For example, I agree it’s good for people to be able to choose their career and to walk outside safely at night. But it seems to me like this is precisely because people generally have strong preferences about what career to have and about their safety. If there was a law restricting people from spinning in a circle and clapping one’s hands exactly 756 times, this would be less bad than restricting people from walking outside at night, and there’s a simple preference-satisfaction explanation for this. What would be the capabilities approach explanation for this?
It also seems odd to me that capabilities would matter intrinsically. That is, it doesn’t seem intrinsically important to me that people are merely able to satisfy their preferences. It seems more important that their preferences are actually satisfied.