Raemon

Karma: 1,875

Raemon 21 Sep 2014 3:46 UTC
2 points
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on: Supportive Scepticism

I think one thing that’s useful in itself is just for people to admit that they feel this pressure sometimes. Hearing that other people feel the way I do—that other people worry about whether they’re doing the best thing, and worry about what others think of them—helped me to realise that it wasn’t just me, and accept that what I was feeling was natural.

This is super important, but I think there’s actually another failure mode to worry about: at some point people in my communities started talking more openly about feeling pressure / burn-out. This was helpful. But then, when a bunch of people burned out at one, the result was that several people I knew were frequently very negative (myself included), and this created a cycle of despair.

My tentative solution is that if a community or organization seems at high risk of that, people should take vacations and/or change their environment more, so that the negative feelings don’t all get concentrated in one place.

Raemon 22 Oct 2014 21:07 UTC
12 points
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on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?
I was initially in favor of the change, but after reading comments from the people who are against it, I’m less sure.

I do currently donate to MIRI. I do this somewhat cautiously—there are good reasons to still be skeptical. If I didn’t donate to MIRI, I’d still think that global poverty would likely not be the best contender for “top charity”, except for PR reasons.

But I do acknowledge that there are already good flagship organizations and networks for non-Global-Poverty EA, and it may be important to preserve the brand integrity of GWWC and not having it bend towards “the generic EA ‘donate a lot of money’ charity.”

The flipside is it is good for the EA community to have a standard of giving larger amounts, and having GWWC represent that has been helpful.

I’m not certain, just wanted to note that as a “Future People” donor, there’s room to think that this is at least an open question.

Raemon 27 Jan 2015 16:16 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Donate to keep Charity Science running
This is a really interesting point, which I’d like to see more explored in EA transparency efforts.

Raemon 22 May 2015 18:11 UTC
1 point
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on: Don’t Be Discouraged In Reaching Out: An Open Letter
Where is the Ben post that this is referring to?

Raemon 24 May 2015 16:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: Don’t Be Discouraged In Reaching Out: An Open Letter
Gotcha. If thats the case it’d have relaxed my mind if that point was addressed briefly rather than left to be assumed.

Raemon 14 Sep 2015 15:01 UTC
1 point
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on: A new response to effective altruism
I basically divide my (classically parsed as “altruistic”) into two buckets: helping the world, and making my community a nice place to live. I do the former because I want to help people. I do the latter fairly selfishly (which seems fine)

When I help out my local community, I help the parts of it I actually use—the local Less Wrong and Sunday Assembly communities. I sometimes clean up parks and similar things because physical labor makes me feel good.

This isn’t “Effective Altruism” and shouldn’t be considered such, but I do think EA people should consider doing such things if they’re not already. (i.e. giving back to whatever communities they actually reap benefits from, in a pay-it-forward-passion)

Raemon 31 Oct 2015 16:52 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: The Effective Altruism Newsletter & Open Thread − 26 October 2015 Edition
Agora For Good is type 2. We’re building a donation platform that:

a) make it easy for donors (in particular, people outside the EA community who have attachments to causes other than Global Health, X-Risk or EA-Meta-Charities) to find the most impactful charities they can within their cause area.

b) makes it easy and cheap for donors to give online to any nonprofit they want, while tracking their giving over time. (And, through the same process, makes it easier for noprofits to set up online donation collecting and tracking)

c) Over time, develop a scalable process to short charities roughly into the buckets of “possibly high impact”, “probably high impact” and “definitely high impact”, so as the effective giving becomes mainstream we’re able to handle the increased flow of donations.

Raemon 14 Nov 2015 15:30 UTC
9 points
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on: We care about WALYs not QALYs
Hmm. I sort of thought “Quality Adjusted Life Year” effectively conveyed the thing I wanted (as opposed to Disability Adjusted Lifeyear, which definitely didn’t)

In any case, if people are getting confused on that point, WALY seems to be good as a term to hold in reserve to explain to people who think we’re all about health. (I think if we just popularized it as a new term, especially if we hadn’t worked out any way to actually measure things other than health in a robust fashion, it’d just end up with the same problems as QALY)

Raemon 26 Oct 2016 15:12 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Concerns with Intentional Insights

Tell it to them. Talk about it to other people. Run my organizations the way I see fit.

That’s what we did for a year+. The problem didn’t go away.

Raemon 27 Oct 2016 14:38 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Kathy’s comment on: Concerns with Intentional Insights
Huh, this is a good point. Having a clear sense of what to do with advertising (both within the community and without) would be really helpful.

Raemon 27 Oct 2016 22:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: Setting Community Norms and Values: A response to the InIn Open Letter
I think I like the ideas suggested here better than the various permutations suggested elsewhere. Or at least agree with the concerns raised.

Raemon 12 Jan 2017 16:34 UTC
23 points
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on: Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to “EA has a Lying Problem”, among other things)
Issue 1:

The title and tone of this post is playing with fire, i.e courting controversy, in a way that (I think, but am not sure) undermines its goals.

A, there’s the fact that describing these as “lying” seems approximately as true as the first two claims, which other people have mentioned. In a post about holding ourselves to high standards, this is kind of a big deal. Others have mentioned this.

B: Personal integrity/honesty is only one element you need to have a good epistemic culture. Other elements you need include trust, and respect for people’s time, attention, and emotions.

Just as every decision to bend the truth has consequences, every decision to inflame emotions has consequences, and these can be just as damaging.

I assume (hope) it was a deliberate choice to use a provocative title that’d grab attention. I think part of the goal was to punish the EA Establishment for not responding well to criticism and attempting to control said criticism.

That may not be a bad choice. Maybe it’s necessary but it’s a questionable one.

The default world (see: modern politics, and news) is a race to the bottom of outrage and manufactured controversy. People love controversy. I love controversy. I felt an urge to share this article on facebook and say things off the cuff about it. I resisted, because I think it would be harmful to the epistemic integrity of EA.

Maybe it’s necessary to write a provocative title with a hazy definition of “lying” in order to get everyone’s attention and force a conversation. (In the same way it may be necessary to exaggerate global warming by 4x to get Jane Q Public to care). But it is certainly not the platonic ideal of the epistemic culture we need to build.

Raemon 12 Jan 2017 17:19 UTC
20 points
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on: Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to “EA has a Lying Problem”, among other things)
Issue 2: Running critical pieces by the people you’re criticizing is necessary, if you want a good epistemic culture. (That said, waiting indefinitely for them to respond is not required. I think “wait a week” is probably a reasonable norm)

Reasons and considerations:

a) they may have already seen and engaged with a similar form of criticism before. If that’s the case, it should be the critic’s responsibility to read up on it, and make sure their criticism is saying something new. Or, that it’s addressing the latest, best thoughts on the part of the person-being-criticized. (See Eliezer’s 4 layers of criticism)

b) you may not understand their reasons well. Especially with something off-the-cuff on facebook. The principle of charity is crucial because our natural tendency is to engage with weaker versions of ideas.

c) you may be wrong about things. Because our kind have trouble cooperating because we tend to criticize a lot, it’s important for criticism of Things We Are Currently Trying to Coordinate On to be made as-accurate-as-possible through private channels before unleashing the storm.

Controversial things are intrinsically “public facing” (see: Scott Alexander’s post on Trump that he specifically asked people not to share and disabled comments on, but which Ann Coulter ended up retweeting). Because it is controversial it may end up being people’s first exposure to Effective Altruism.

Similar to my issue 1, I think Sarah intended this post as tit-for-tat punishment for EA Establishment not responding enough to criticism. Assuming I’m correct about that, I disagree with it on two grounds:
- I frankly think Ben Todd’s post (the one most contributing to “EA establishment is defecting on meta-level epistemic discourse norms”) was totally fine. GWWC has limited time. Everyone has limited time. Dealing with critics is only one possible use of their time and it’s not at all obvious to me it’s the best one on the margin. Ben even notes a possible course of action: communicate better about discussions GWWC has already had.
- Even in the maximally uncharitable interpretation of Ben’s comments… it’s still important to run things by People You Are Criticizing Who Are In the Middle of a Project That Needs Coordination, for the reasons I said. If you’re demanding time/attention/effort on the part of people running extensive projects, you should put time/effort into making sure your criticism is actually moving the dialog forward.
What links here?
- Jeff Kaufman's comment on Run Posts By Orgs by Jeff Kaufman (29 Mar 2023 14:01 UTC; 23 points)
- jefftk's comment on Run Posts By Orgs by jefftk (LessWrong; 30 Mar 2023 0:31 UTC; 3 points)

Raemon 13 Jan 2017 5:29 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: erikaalonso’s comment on: Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to “EA has a Lying Problem”, among other things)
Major props for the response. Your new social media policy sounds probably-wise. :)

Raemon 13 Jan 2017 5:30 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Daniel_Dewey’s comment on: Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to “EA has a Lying Problem”, among other things)
Wanted to offer something stronger than an up vote in starting the prediction-making: that sounds like a great idea and want to see how it goes. :)

Raemon 13 Jan 2017 12:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Brian_Tomasik’s comment on: Building Cooperative Epistemology (Response to “EA has a Lying Problem”, among other things)
I agree that these are tradeoffs and that that’s very sad. I don’t have a very strong opinion on the overall net-balance of the policy. But (it sounds like we both agree?) that they are probably a necessary evil for organizations like this.

Raemon 19 Jan 2017 16:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Why I donated to the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative
Sort of related to that—is there a place this sort of post (and the other recent Tostan post) can get aggregated?

Raemon 25 Feb 2017 22:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Paul_Crowley’s comment on: What Should the Average EA Do About AI Alignment?
Thanks, fixed.

Actually, is anyone other than DeepMind in London? (the section I brought this up was on volunteering, which I assume is less relevant for DeepMind than FHI)

Raemon 26 Feb 2017 6:14 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: What Should the Average EA Do About AI Alignment?
Heh, correct. Will update soon when I have a non phone to do it.

Raemon 27 Feb 2017 5:25 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: What Should the Average EA Do About AI Alignment?
Thanks, fixed. I had gotten partway through updating that to say something more comprehensive, decided I needed more time to think about it, and then accidentally saved it anyway.