Have you seen Nick Beckstead’s slides on ‘How to compare broad and targeted attempts to shape the far future’?
He gives a lot of ideas for broad interventions, along with ways of thinking about them.
Richard_Batty
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Announcing the Good Technology Project
I not sure I understand your argument. Could you help me out with some examples of:
Effective Altruists “wandering in a vast intellectual wasteland wearing blindfolds and talking about how great it would be if you could direct humanity to the Great Lakes”
How an understanding of human evolution would help us to find out what we ought to do.
And if Australia joins in then the sun will never set on the .impact workathon :)
I’ll join in for a bit this week and then for the next one I’ll publicise to more people and set up a London location for it.
We held a similar thing in London a few weeks ago and I was planning to organise another one. But we could join in with your .impact workathon instead.
The only difficult thing is that Pacific time is quite far from UK time. We could at least have some overlap though.
Do you have any examples of successful ‘broad tent’ social movements that we can learn from?
One example would be science, which is like effective altruism in that it is defined more by questions and methods than by answers.
One counterexample might be liberal christianity, which is more accepting of a diversity of views but has grown much more slowly than churches with stricter theology. This phenomenon has been studied by sociologists, one paper is here: http://www.majorsmatter.net/religion/Readings/RationalChoice.pdf
I started the ball rolling on a London EA house just by posting to the London EA facebook group asking if anyone was interested. Lots were, and we ended up with two houses. It’s been a huge boost to my happiness and productivity.
One piece of advice: don’t overanalyse things, just get going. I watched a huge email thread develop on the London LessWrong google group about setting up a rationalist house. It never got anywhere because they just spent ages arguing about the best way to handle housework, resolve disputes etc. With the London EA house we just worked out which locations we wanted to live in and then we started looking.
This is nice and practical—it’s good that it focusses on specific behaviours that people can practice rather than saying anything that could come across as “you’re alienating people and you should feel bad”.
One thing I’d add to this is to try to debate less and be curious more. Often discussions can turn into person A defending one position and person B rebutting this position and defending their own. I’ve found that it is often more helpful for both people to collaborate on analysing different models of the world in a curious way. Person A proposes a model of how the world works and person B the starts trying to understand person A’s model—what its assumptions are, where it applies, and where it doesn’t. They can then contrast this with other models of the world and try to work together to find out which is best. If you want to get really into it, drawing diagrams can help both because it helps you think and because it increases the sense that you are working together on a problem, rather than arguing against one another. But it doesn’t have to be this formal—it could just be a friendly discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of different ideas.
On a related note, I think it’s important to realise that people don’t always believe the positions they’re arguing for. I’ll often tell my friends an idea because I’m interested in working out it’s strengths, weaknesses, and implications. If they’re dismissive and try to argue against it I feel that they’re missing the point—it would be more helpful to explore the idea’s strengths and weaknesses together rather than turning it into a debate. This would help us to be more accepting of new ideas that don’t come from the usual EA sources.
This is a really interesting and well-written post. I particularly liked the Jane Addams story and the Paul Farmer quote—they really drive home the message.