I don’t think talking about fraud right now is a good move. If somebody asks you whether EAs should do fraud, of course your answer should be an unqualified ‘no’. But if you bring it up, you are implying that SBF actually did fraud, which (1) may not be true and (2) is bad PR.
River
Karma: 515
Consider Financial Independence First
David, how do you reconcile your implication that there is a norm to get a “special dispensation” from with CEA’s claim that EA “doesn’t say anything about how much someone should give”?
[Question] Who owns “Effective Altruism”?
“predatory polyamorous rationalists” is pretty bigoted. What would we think if someone referred to “predatory gays”?
Why would you take the TIME article at face value on this?
It doesn’t even get the language right. I’m poly, and I have never once heard people talk about “joining a polycule” as the thing someone chooses to do. That’s not how it works. You choose to date someone. “Polycule” just describes the set of people who you are dating, who your partner(s) are dating, who their partner(s) are dating, and so on. Dating someone doesn’t imply anything about how you have to relate to your metamours, much less people farther distant in the polycule. Sometimes you may never even know the full extent of your polycule.
I don’t know of a single poly person who would approve of the dynamic that the TIME article seems to describe, or any reason to think it is an accurate description of how EA works. Of course you shouldn’t shame people into dating you. Of course you shouldn’t leverage professional power for sexual benefit. Of course it’s good to be an EA and buy bed nets whether you are poly or monogomous. Nobody that I know of, poly or monogomous, disagrees with this. The fact that you think poly people do is what shows your prejudice. I suggest you try getting to know a poly person, talk to a poly person about their relationship(s), before opening your mouth on the subject again.
There are different ways to read the signal that the lack of a statement gives. Someone could read it to mean that these two firms have rampant racism/sexism. Alternatively, someone could read it to mean that these two firms have the same low rates of racism/sexism as the other ten, and choose to focus their energies on software accounting rather than identity politics. A third possible reading is that the 10 firms put out statements precisely because they had more problems with racism/sexism, and therefor the two firms without the statements probably have the fewest racism/sexism problems. How you read the lack of a statement will depend a lot on your priors about the dynamics of racism/sexism in your particular place and time. But if you adopt the second or third readings, then the signal from the lack of a statement seems positive.
Suppose, hypothetically, that every individual EA would be just as effective, do just as much good, without an EA community as with one. In that case, how many resources should CEA and other EA orgs devote to community building? My answer is exactly 0. That implies that the EA community is a means to an end, the end of making EAs more effective.
That said, I wouldn’t necessarily generalize to other communities. And I agree that assessing a particular case of alleged wrongdoing should not depend on the perceived value of the accused’s contributions to EA causes, and I do not read CEA’s language as implying otherwise.
while it’s possible to get to the truth with enough effort
This comes off as naive. Usually you never know the truth no matter how much effort or investigation. If you think you do, you are probably doing more harm than good. (This applies to many areas, not just sexual misconduct.)
I am opposed to any norm that asks different behavior of men than women.
Even if the differences you pointed to in the OP are real on average (and for some of them that is a generous assumption), what makes you think they are large? Even where men and women are different on average, the differences are usually very small, much smaller than the variation within either gender.
Is it true that other successful institutions generally have norms against dating within them? (I don’t want to use the term “sleeping around”, which feels derogatory in this particular context). My company only prohibits dating people in your chain of command, and I am certainly aware of relationships within the company that have not caused any objections or issues that I know of. Though my company is tens of thousands of people, with thousands in my building, so maybe it doesn’t qualify as tight-nit. I also haven’t perceived any of my friend groups as having a norm against dating. Family seems obviously different, because there is that incest norm, and that impossibility of stepping away on the off chance that things go really badly. Though again, maybe you have a family with different dynamics—to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met a cousin’s spouse’s anything. Anyway, point is, I don’t think it’s actually true that the rest of society operates this way.
You think that dating a coworker or whatever without sleeping with them is less likely to cause problems than the reverse? That does not ring true to me at all. It does ring of Christian purity culture, which I would not have expected to encounter in EA.
synonyms might be “SJW” or “DEI”.
I think part of the difficulty here is that “wokism” seems to refer to a cluster of ideas and practices that seem to be a genuine cluster, but don’t have especially clear boundaries or a singular easy definition.
What I do notice is that none of the ideas you listed, at least at the level of abstraction at which you listed them, are things that anyone, woke or anti-woke or anywhere in between, will disagree with. But I’ll try to give some analysis of what I would understand to be woke in the general vicinity of these ideas. Note that I am not asserting any normative position myself, just trying to describe what I understand these words to mean.
I don’t think veganism really has much to do with wokism. Whatever you think about EA event catering, it just seems like an orthogonal issue.
I suspect everyone would prefer that EA spaces be welcoming of trans people, but there may be disagreement on what exactly that requires on a very concrete level, or how to trade it off against other values. Should we start meetings by having everyone go around and give their pronouns? Wokism might say yes, other people (including some trans people) might say no. Should we kick people out of EA spaces for using the “wrong” pronouns? Wokism might say yes, other might say no as that is a bad tradeoff against free speech and epistemic health.
I suspect everyone thinks reports of assault and harassment should be taken seriously. Does that mean that we believe all women? Wokism might say yes, others might so no. Does that mean that people accused should be confronted with the particular accusations against them, and allowed to present evidence in response? Wokism might say no, others might say yes, good epistemics requires that.
I’m honestly not sure what specifically you mean by “so-called ‘scientific’ racism” or “scourge”, and I’m not sure if that’s a road worth going down.
Again, I’m not asserting any position myself here, just trying to help clarify what I think people mean by “wokism”, in the hopes that the rest of you can have a productive conversation.
I agree on food. I was careless with my qualifications, sorry about that.
Lastly and probably most significantly, there is obviously the loss of an additional individual who would likely have been economically productive over the course of their lifetime
From a common-sensical point of view, it’s difficult to know exactly where to “draw the line”; it seems crazy to imagine a baby dying during labour as anything other than a rich, full potential liife lost, but if we extend that logic too far backwards then we might imagine any moment that we are not reproducing to be costing one “life’s worth” of DALYs.
There seems to be an obvious route of inquiry to address this quandary, which is to ask what impact a stillbirth has on the number of children a woman has during her life. I imagine some nontrivial fraction of women who have stillbirths go on to become pregnant again in relatively short order, and end up having just as many children as they would have had the pregnancy succeeded. If, hypothetically, 90% of women who have stillbirths go on to have just as many children as they would have without the stillbirth, and 10% have one fewer children, then it seems straightforward to me that we should count a stillbirth as costing 0.1 lives. I don’t know actual numbers about how stillbirths impact women’s later reproductive choices, but presumably somebody has studied this.
I do not like this. One of the fundamental premises of EA is to be neutral about who we are helping—people here, people there, people now, people later, all get weighted the same. Specifically setting out to help only Muslims therefor seems non-EA. If Muslims want to do it, I guess they have that right, but EA shouldn’t be touching it.
I guess my fundamental question right now is what do we mean by intelligence? Like, with humans, we have a notion of IQ, because lots of very different cognitive abilities happen to be highly correlated in humans, and this allows us to summarize them all with one number. But different cognitive abilities aren’t correlated in the same way in AI. So what do we mean when we talk about an AI being much smarter than humans? How do we know there even are significantly higher levels of intelligence to go to, since nothing much more intelligent than humans has ever existed? I’m not sure why people seem to assume that possible levels of intelligence just keep going.
My other question, related to the first, is how do we know that more intelligence, whatever we mean by that, would be particularly useful? Some things aren’t computable. Some things aren’t solvable within the laws of physics. Some systems are chaotic. So how do we know that more intelligence would somehow translate into massively more power in domains that we care about?
I love this intro! I especially like that it defines EA in terms of finding the most effective interventions, the ones that do good most efficiently with whatever inputs they take, rather than doing the most good in an absolute sense.