I lead Effective Altruism Lund in southern Sweden, while wrapping up my M.Sc. in Engineering Physics specializing in machine learning. Iām a social team player who likes high ceilings and big picture work. Scared of AI, intrigued by biorisk, hopeful about animal welfare.
My interests outside of EA, in hieroglyphs: šøš§š¼āāļøššŖš¼ššš¾š®āš¼š¹
Oscar Wilde once wrote that āpeople nowadays know the price of everything and the value of nothing.ā I can see a particular type of uncharitable EA-critic say the same about our movement, grossed out by how we try to put a price tag on human (or animal) lives. This is wrong.
What they should be appalled by is if a life was truly worth $3500, but thatās not what we are claiming. The claim is that a life is invaluable. The world just happens to be in such a way that we can buy this incredibly precious thing for the meager cost of a few thousand.
Nate Sores has written about this in greater detail here.
After hanging out with the local Moral Ambition group (sadly thereās only one in Malmƶ), Iāve found a shorthand to exprss the difference in methodology compared to EA. Both movements aim to find people who aready have the āA,ā and cultivate the other component in them.
Many effective altruism communities target people who already wish to help the world (Altruism), then guide and encourage them to reach further (be more Effective).
Moral Ambition meanwhile targets high achieving professionals and Ivy Leaguers (Ambition), then remind them that the world is burning and they should help put out the fire (be more Moral).
I grew up worrying a lot about the harms of our everyday consumption, and for a few years Iād just given up. I decided that the best we could do was give some value to the relatively tiny pool of people who meet us. So naturally, realizing that I could have a net positive effect on the world was huge! Iām still riding that high and I think we should pause more often to appreciate that. It acts as a strong source of satisfaction for me even when others work harder or donate more than I do.
This post also reminds me of this 80k episode. I particularly enjoy the framing that you might feel sorrow about not being Ilya Sutskever, but you shouldnāt feel guilt. You didnāt choose to be born with your particular set of IQ, health factors, surroundings etc so why think that theyāre your fault?
Hi, thanks to the forum team for running this and thank you to all advisors!
In December I get my MSc in Engineering Physics, where Iāve gone heavy on statistics, machine learning and mathematical modeling. Iāve also run several student orgs so Iām an adept administrator and leader. I want to leverage these skills to improve alternative proteins.
Core considerations currently:
Is it worthwhile to take a few years in conventional food industry to learn their needs and skill up?
Are any sub-fields (fermentation, cellag etc) in particular need of more engineers?
Which roles/ācompanies are best for building career capital in this field? Non-profits, startups, industrial companies?
Iām also very thankful for any general advice or considerations I might notāve thought of.
I see a huge opportunity here for university group organizers to connect promising group members with (AIM incubated or other) charities that could use volunteers. It builds motivation, connections and a CV for the student even if itās not ideal for the charity for the same reasons that volunteering rarely is. If we can make it mutually beneficial then all the better!
I donāt see the report considering the growth of money in recipientsā pockets. It treats giving like throwing money into a black hole, not as another investment with returns.
To put it concretely, letās say person A is in the global top 5% income wise and person B is below the poverty line. Person A (most on this forum) can then choose to invest their money, grow it and give at death.
Letās ignore risk of value drift and say you manage to grow it 7% annually. Thatās nice, but instead giving it away means person B can
Buy a bike to reach work more quickly, letting them work more
Buy an electrical lamp their child can use to do homework without poisoning the air of their home
Upgrade the walls and roofing of that home so theyāre all sick less often and can work their way out of poverty
All of these things make the money grow in person Bās pockets as well. My prior (medium epistemic status) is that this growth trumps the 7% an index fund can offer. I argue that after 60-odd years of compoundingāmost EAs are young and healthyāperson B has more than they wouldāve if they got the money all in one lump sum from person A at death.
So this model only considers the resources of person A at death, when what we really care about is the resources of persons A and B combined.
#2 is what changed my mind a few years ago. An index fund might give me 7% annual returns, but I suspect that investing in ridding a village of malaria has a much higher ROI, just not for me. The model wouldāve been much stronger if it had included this effect of increasing othersā resources.
Epistemic status: Iām community builder with a technical background and surface level understanding of alignment techniques from BlueDot.
This post is well-written and the core takeaway is important. Iād add one caveat: starting from weak priors should increase our urgency to seek out evidence, not delay action. Once thereās reasonable uncertainty that thereās something morally salient there, I worry weāll collectively shrug, defaulting to ājust a toolā or retreating behind epistemic modesty. We canāt let epistemic caution turn into neglect.
One concrete intervention is Forethoughtās proposal that future LLMs be able to end conversations theyāre uncomfortable with. I find this a plausible and robust way to fulfill potential preferences. We need more proposals like that.
On another note, please consider your use of adjectives.
To the extent that harshness is an EA norm, I think itās inherited from rationalist culture. In my experience with spaces like LessWrong, quite jarring critiques are fairly normal even for trivial things (e.g. āthat argument is stupidā). There, bluntness is viewed as efficiency, getting bad ideas off the table faster.
EA spaces are optimized for a different goal, and tone matters for that goal. We need people to feel welcomed, encouraged, and inspired to contribute; not like theyāre auditioning for a role in a debate team. A good measure of how well weāre doing on this is the fear people have of posting on the forum.
I havenāt read titotalās post, so I wonāt comment on that case, but Iāve definitely noticed the broader pattern Alfredo is pointing out. And I think we should be intentional about whether it serves the kind of community we want to build.
Iām interested in hearing more about the cases you found for and against EA ideas/āarguments applying without utilitarianism. I personally am very much consequentialist but not necessarily fully utilitarian, so curious both for myself and as a community builder. Iām not a philosopher so my footing is probably much less certain than yours.
The first quote you mention sounds more like a dog whistle to me. I actually think itās great if we can āweaponize capitalist enginesā against the worldās most pressing problems. But if you hate capitalism, it sounds insidious.
The rest I agree is uncharitable. Like, surely you wouldnāt come out the shallow pond feeling moral guily, youād be extatic that you just saved a child! To me, Singerās thought experiment always implied I should feel the same way about donations.
EAās goal is impact, not growth for its own sake. Because cost-effectiveness can vary by 100x or more, shifting one personās career from a typical path to a highly impactful one is equivalent to adding a hundred contributors. I agree with the EA stance that the former is often more feasible.
This doesnāt fully address why we maintain a soft tone outwardly, but it does imply we could afford to be a bit less soft inwardly. I predict that SMA will surpass EA in numbers, while EA will be ahead of SMA in terms of impact.
Do you expect to be more of a mentor or a mentee?
Ready to share my community building insights and experiences, but there to hash out some professional cruxes
I have a post about this sitting in my drafts. I think Iāll just delete it and tell people to read this quick take instead. Strong upvote.
As a community builder, Iāve started donating directly to my local EA groupāand I encourage you to consider doing the same.
Managing budgets and navigating inflexible grant applications consume valuable time and energy that could otherwise be spent directly fostering impactful community engagement. As someone deeply involved, I possess unique insights into what our group specifically needs, how to effectively meet those needs, and what actions are most conducive to achieving genuine impact.
Of course, seeking funding from organizations like OpenPhil remains highly valuableātheyāve dedicated extensive thought to effective community building. Yet, donāt underestimate the power and efficiency of utilizing your intimate knowledge of your groupās immediate requirements.
Your direct donations can streamline processes, empower quick responses to pressing needs, and ultimately enhance the impact of your local EA community.
Iām sad to hear that youād feel manipulated by my reply to the QALY-doubting response, but Iām very happy and thankful to get the feedback! We do want to show that EA has some useful tools and conclusions, while also being honest and open about whatās still being worked on. Iāll take this to heart.
I feel the need to clarify that none of these responses are meant to be āsales-yā or to trick people into joining a movement that doesnāt align with their values. My reply was more based on the ideas that we need more skeptics. If they have epistemic (as opposed to ethical) objections, I think itās particularly important to signal that theyāre invited. My condolences for having gotten such awful advice from whatever organization it was, but thatās not how we do things at EA Lund.
For a more realistic example, I talked to one person who said that theyād focus significantly on homelessness in their own city as well as homelessness in Rwanda, because itās unfair to not divide the resources. Theyāre not doing the most good, because they find it more ethical to divide their resources.
So I think your professorās description is good, but Iām not sure it helps discuss egalitarianism/āprioritarianism with laymen in their terms. When I say Iād give everything to Rwanda, Iām answering āwhat does the most good?ā and not āwhatās the most fair/ājust?ā Nonetheless Iāll consider raising this response next time the objection comes up.
Thatās a mistake, thanks for pointing it out! That final sentence wasnāt meant to stay in. That is, I think institutional trust is part of the trunk and not the branches.
I agree with your side point that there are some ideas & tools within EA that many would find useful even while rejecting all of the EA institutions.
Iām sorry if the title was misleading, that was not my intention. I think you and I have different views on the average forum userās population ethics. If I believed that more people reading this had a totalist (or similar) view, I would have been much more up front about my take not being valid for them. Believing the opposite, I put the conclusion youād get from non-person-affecting views as a caveat instead.
That aside, Iād be happy to see the general discourse spell out more that population ethics is a crux for x-risks. Iāve only gottenāand probably at some points givenāthe impression that x-risks are similarly important to other cause areas under all population ethics. This runs the risk of baiting people into working on things they logically shouldnāt believe to be the most pressing problem.
On a personal note, I concede that extinction is much worse than 10 billion humans dying. This is however for non-quantitative reasons. Tegmark has said something along the lines of a universe without sapience being terribly boring, and that weighs quite heavily into my judgement of the disutility of extinction.
EA Lund hasnāt been myopically focused on career changes, regardless of what would make CEA fund us more. We focus on a breadth of goals for our members, and my impression is that most local groups think similarly, some actively encouraging critique of EA blind spots. I think this generalizes, as the Groups Resource Center recommends posts like this one to new community builders. I also experience that community builders are more principled and value-aligned than most, and therefore least likely to Goodhart by only pushing career changes.
That said, I agree about the truth-seeking being lacking at times. My go-to example is the often repeated selling point of x-risk, here quoted from the new 80k book:
Emphasis mine, to highlight an assumption of the total view of population ethics. Rejecting that importantly shifts priorities in ways that arenāt talked about, despite most EAs being wildly uncertain about their population ethics.