Although early fundraising could be correlational with success rather than causal, if it’s an indicator of who can generate support from the electorate.
(I’d be pretty confident there’s an effect like this but don’t know how strong, and haven’t tried to understand if the article you’re quoting from tries to correct for it.)
I sort of guess the second thing?; although I never downvoted at least I felt a little defensive and negative about “tone-deaf, indeed chilling” and didn’t upvote despite having found your comment useful!
(I’ve now noticed the discrepancy and upvoted it)
On my impressions: relative to most epistemic communities I think EA is doing pretty well. Relatively to a hypothetical ideal I think we’ve got a way to go. And I think the thing is good enough to be worth spending perfectionist attention on trying to make excellent.
Communication channels which allow for lots of information and context to flow back and forth between people. e.g. if I read an article and then go to enact the plan described in the article, that’s low-bandwidth. If I sit down with the author for three hours and interrogate them about the reasoning and ask what they think about my ideas for possible plan variations, that’s high-bandwidth.
I vibe with the sentiment “particularly uncomfortable with people in the meta space deferring to authority”, but I think it’s too strong. e.g. I think it’s valuable for people to be able to organize big events, and delegate tasks among the event organizers.
Maybe I’m more like “I feel particularly uncomfortable with people in the meta space deferring without high bandwidth, and without explicit understanding that that’s what they’re doing”.
I’m fine with junior ops people at an AI org being not really at all bought into the specific research agenda.
I’m fine with senior technical people not being fully bought in—in the sense that maybe they think if it were up to them a different agenda would be slightly higher value, or that they’d go about things a slightly different way. I think we should expect that people have slightly different takes, and don’t get the luxury of ironing all of those differences out, and that’s pretty healthy. (Of course I like them having a go at discussing differences of opinion, but I don’t think failure to resolve a difference means that the they need to adopt the party line or go find a different org.)
[Without implying I agree with everything …]
This comment was awesome, super high density of useful stuff. I wonder if you’d consider making it a top level post?
No, that doesn’t work because epistemic deferring is also often about decisions, and in fact one of the key distinctions I want to make is when someone is deferring on a decision how that can be for epistemic or authority reasons, and how those look different.
I agree it’s slightly awkward that authorities often delegate, but I think that that’s usually delegating tasks; “delegating choices” to me has much less connotation of a high-status person delegating to a low-status person.
Although … one of the examples of “deferring to authority” in my sense is a boss deferring to the authority of a subordinate after the subordinate has been tasked with making a decision, even though the boss disagrees and has the power to override it. With this example, “delegating choice” has very much the right connotation, and “deferring to authority” feels a bit of a stretch.
Perhaps “deferring on views” vs “delegating choices” ?
“Deferring to experts” carries the wrong meaning, I think? At least to me that sounds more like epistemic deferring.
An alternative to “deferring to authority” a couple of people have suggested to me is “delegating”, which I sort of like (although maybe it’s confusing if one of the paradigm examples is delegating to your boss).
Interesting, thanks.
So, my immediate reaction is that I can feel that kind of concern, but I think the “see the truth, obey your leaders” is exactly the kind of dynamic I’m worried about! & then I’m trying to help avoid it by helping to disambiguate between epistemic deferring and deferring to authority (because conflating them is where I think a lot of the damage comes from).
So then I’m wondering if I’ve made some bad branding decisions (e.g. should I have used a different term for what I called “deferring to authority”? It’s meant to evoke that someone has authority in a particular domain, not some kind of general purpose authority, and not that they know a lot), or if I’m failing to frame my positions correctly? I guess at least a bit of the latter, since it sounds like you read my post as saying people should defer more? Which definitely wasn’t something I intended to say (I’m confused; I’d like to see more deferring of some types and less of other types; I guess overall I’d be into a bit less deferring but not confident enough about that that I’d want to make it a headline).
Yeah I briefly alluded to this but your explanation is much more readable (maybe I’m being too terse throughout?).
My take is “this dynamic is worrying, but seems overall less damaging than deferral interfering with belief formation, or than conflation between epistemic deferring and deferring to authority”.
I think this is getting downvotes and I’m curious whether this is because:
People are disagreeing with the conclusions?
It’s poorly explained/confusing?
Something about tone is rubbing people the wrong way?
Something else?
Nice, thanks!
Thanks! Constructive suggestions about good things to do seem great.
I think Carrick is getting a lot of support from a combination of making crucial issues like pandemic preparedness priorities, and also benefiting from reputation networks here (so people are justifiably confident that he isn’t going to be in it for himself or giving out political favours, which is just a super-important dimension). It’s certainly plausible that McLeod-Skinner’s campaign is a great opportunity to help out with, but my personal impression is that you haven’t (yet) made a comparably strong case, so I’m not sure how many people will be persuaded by what you’ve said so far. But if you (or anyone) wanted to dive into a deeper analysis of the value of supporting different campaigns from an impartial welfarist perspective, that could be useful, and I imagine you’d find a receptive (if critical!) audience here.
[Not me for US races; I’m not an American so won’t be giving anything. I’m following this one because Carrick is an ex-colleague and I think he’s a great guy.]
I might well be wrong (in which case hopefully someone will correct me), but my understanding is that your second $2,900 would be restricted for use in the general election so couldn’t be spent on the remainder of the primary. (Earlier in the campaign there were indirect benefits of total money raised, but it’s probably a bit late in the day for those.)
FWIW I’ve been trying to fly business class for transatlantic flights for a few years for these reasons. I think it’s an usually big effect size for me because otherwise long haul flights play badly with my chronic fatigue and can cost me effectively >1 day, but I expect that many people would get a few hours’ worth of extra productive time (I take advantage of both the lie-flat bed and the good work environment for writing that doesn’t need internet).
I’ve felt weird about expensing it so mostly just been paying for it myself (I don’t have many other big expenses in my life except childcare), but I have noticed that I’m sometimes wanting to make a strong recommendation that a particular other person try to fly business class, and offered to pay for it personally because I think this will help significantly more than what I can otherwise do with my donations. So I seem to be at “we should probably do a bit more of this at the margin”.
Thanks, I think this is really valuable.
Using votes to push towards the score we think it should be at sounds worse than just individually voting according to some thresholds of how good/helpful/whatever a post needs to be? I’m worried about zero sum (so really negative sum because of the effort) attempts to move karma around where different people are pushing in different ways, where it’s hard to know how to interpret the results, compared to people straightforwardly voting without regard to others’ votes.
At least, if we should be voting to push things towards our best guess I think the karma system should be reformed to something that plays nice with that—e.g. each individual gives their preferred score, and the displayed karma is the median.