SamuelKnoche
Patrick Collison on Effective Altruism
The Case for Education
Or you could say that EA is an ideology that has tolerance, open-mindedness and skepticism as some of its highest values. Saying that EA is an ideology doesn’t necessarily mean that it shares the same flaws as most other ideologies.
Though the hotel isn’t trying to have a big public presence so a boring name like CEEALAR might be just right.
Thanks for writing this post. I’m glad this incident is getting addressed on the EA forum. I agree with most of the points being made here.
However, I’m not sure if ‘becoming more attentive to various kinds of diversity’ and maintaining norms that allow for ‘the public discussion of ideas likely to cause offense’ have to be at odds. In mainstream political discourse it often sounds like this is the case, however I would like to think that EA might be able to balance these two concerns without making any significant concessions.
The reason I think this might be possible is because discussions among EAs tend to be more nuanced than most mainstream discourse, and because I expect EAs to argue in good faith and to be well intentioned. I find that EA concerns often transcend politics, and so I would expect two EAs with very different political views to be able to have more productive discussions on controversial topics than two non-EAs.
The Best Educational Institution in the World
I agree with this. I was just pushing back against the “somewhere between never-before-done and impossible” characterization. Mutiny definitely goes wrong more often than not, and just blindly smashing things without understanding how they work, and with no real plan for how to replace them is a recipe for disaster.
The idea that people always act selfishly is probably a bit extreme. But there’s something very important pointed out in this post: considering selfish incentives is extremely important when thinking about how EA can become more sustainable and grow.
Just a few selfish incentives that I see operating within EA: the forum cash prize, reputation gains within the EA community for donating to effective charities, reputation gains for working for an EA org, being part of a community...
The point here is not that these are bad, but that we should acknowledge that these
are selfish incentives, and think about how to best design these selfish incentives to align them with EA goals.To answer technicalities’ comment, I’m pretty sure that even the people he lists did what they did at least in part because of a hope for future recognition or because they hoped for approval from only one or two people in their immediate vicinity. Of course, their main motivation was just to do good, but saying they were driven by no selfish incentive whatsoever would be denying human nature.
Also, book recommendation: The Elephant in the Brain
Here are some resources about the case against the current education system for those not familiar with the arguments:
The Case Against Education (LW)
The Case For Dropping Out of College (my best summary of the arguments)
Another example that comes to mind is Japan’s Meiji Restoration. I don’t think it fits neatly in any of the categories. It’s a combination of mutiny, steering and rowing. But just like the American revolution, I think it illustrates that very rapid and disruptive change in political and economic systems can be undertaken successfully.
The ability to maintain, or improve steering and/or rowing seem to be two important preconditions for a successful mutiny.
Also, the various revolutions that swept Eastern Europe and led to the end of the Soviet Union also seem to be successful mutinies. Of course, the reason these countries ended up under Soviet communism and needed to rise up was because of the Bolshevik mutiny, but still.
I feel like people in EA are mostly anti-mutiny because the only people advocating for it seem to be far left, anti-capitalist types who don’t seem to have a realistic plan for how to go about it, or a coherent plan for what could replace it. But I don’t think EA should be closed to the idea of mutiny in principle. It’s just that any mutiny proposal has to pass a really high bar.
I agree that in practice, EA does have an ideology. The majority of EAs share the assumptions of rationality, scientific materialism, utilitarianism and some form of techno-optimism. This explains why the three cause areas you mention aren’t taken seriously by EA. And so if one wants to defend the current focus of most EAs, one also has to defend the assumptions—the ideology—that most EAs have.
However, in principle, EA does not prevent one from adopting the proposed cause areas. If I became convinced that the most effective way to do good was to fight for theocracy, Marxism and against the depletion of natural resources, I would do so and still call myself an EA.
Maybe it would be useful to distinguish between EA the general idea, which can be seen as just a question, and EA the real world movement. Though I’m not sure if defining EA the general idea as a question is really that accurate either. It seems to me that in practice, the ideology of rationality, utilitarianism… comes first, and EA is just the injunction to actually do something about it. “If you think that a rational, consequentialist approach to utilitarianism constitutes ‘good’, then be consistent and act accordingly.” And so maybe EA is at its core an ideological movement and the question of “How can I do the most good, with the resources available to me?” is just one of its tenets.
I agree that the US revolution was unusual and in many ways more conservative than other revolutions.
I guess you could think of the US revolution as being a bit like a mutiny that then kept largely the same course as the previous captain anyway.
I feel like this is really underselling what happened, though I guess it might be subjective. Sure, they didn’t try to reinvent government, culture and the economy completely from scratch, but it was still the move from a monarchy to the first modern liberal constitutional republic.
I have argued for a more “mutiny” (edit: maybe “exit” is a better word for it) style theory of change in higher education so I really like the idea of an EA university where learning would be more guided by a genuine sense of purpose, curiosity and ambition to improve the world rather than a zero-sum competition for prestige and a need to check boxes in order to get a piece of paper. Though I realize that many EAs probably don’t share my antipathy towards the current higher education system.
One downside of EA universities I can think of is that it might slow movement growth since EAs will be spending less time with people unfamiliar with the movement / fewer people at normal universities will come across EA.
Though if it becomes really successful and prestigious, it could also raise the profile of EA.
The very quick summary: Japan used to be closed off from the rest of the world, until 1853 when the US forced them to open up. This triggered major reforms. The Shogun was overthrown and replaced with the emperor, and in less than a century, Japan went from an essentially medieval economic and societal structure, to a modern industrial economy.
I don’t know of any books exclusively focused on it, but it’s analyzed in Why Nations Fail and Political Order and Political Decay.
Certainly, but I still think that it counts as an example of a successful “mutiny.” If overthrowing the government and starting a new country isn’t mutiny, I don’t know what is. And I don’t think anyone sympathetic to the mutiny theory of change wants to restart from the state of nature and reinvent all of civilization completely from scratch.
If the Everett interpretation is true, then all experiences are already amplified exponentially. Unless I’m missing something, a QC doesn’t deserve any special consideration. It all adds up to normality.
″...cryptocurrencies makes stopping the funding of terrorists basically impossible.”
No. Really, really, no. I could talk a lot more about this, but if you think terrorist groups can manage infosec well enough to overcome concerted attacks by the NSA, or Mossad, or FSB, etc., you’re fooling yourself.
“Impossible” might be an exaggeration, but it does seem to make it much easier. That’s also what the article you link to suggests. Edit: Are you skeptical because of the on/off ramps, the security of terrorist’s computer infrastructure or something else?
Other than the misunderstanding and conflating nodes for hash power, this is also not true. Has power is concentrated, so you’d need to somehow convince the biggest mining groups that they don’t care about countries keeping their operations legal, and as we’ve seen, they do. That means they will continue to run to embrace KYC/AMF regulation, and will do whatever else makes their investments go well—including cooperating with nation-states in almost any way you can imagine.
So far, the only serious KYC/AMF happens at the level of centralized exchanges. Nation-states cannot enforce KYC/AMF at the level of decentralized exchanges. They can also use chain-analysis and put pressure on mining groups within their countries to do KYC/AMF or to create address “black lists” but so far there hasn’t been much political will for this, and probably would lead to a big backlash from the crypto community. And this becomes impossible for privacy coins such as Zcash and Monero.
If something dangerous occurs when driving, slamming on the brakes is often a pretty good heuristic, regardless of the specific nature of the danger.
What if you’re being chased by a dragon?
I think we can make a similar analogy for Anchoring, because some the same reasons that make Steering more attractive now than in the past also apply for Anchoring. If there are an unusually large number of icebergs up ahead, or you are afraid the Mutineers will steer us towards them, or you are attempting to moor up alongside a larger vessel, reducing speed could be a generally prudent move—and this is the case even if full speed ahead was the optimal strategy in the past when you were on the open seas.
What if you think that the people currently Steering are the ones blindly heading towards the icebergs? Wouldn’t Mutiny be an option worth considering? What if the ship is taking on water and people in the lower decks are drowning? Wouldn’t you want to Speed up and get to land as fast as possible?
This metaphor doesn’t seem too informative until we’ve made sense of what world we actually live in.
Ideally, people would get the opportunity to get up to speed, “bridge the inferential gap” and get to start thinking about how to have an impact full time during their undergraduate studies. The way most university programs are set up right now, people spend years on often irrelevant content and wasteful busywork. I was thus pleased to see Ben Todd and Will MacAskill mention the idea of creating some kind of EA University during their EAG appearances.
See also my own “case for education.”
Thanks for the post. I agree that the promotion of democratic institutions as an EA cause area is worth a closer look. I think you might find this EA Forum post by Ben Kuhn interesting: “”Why Nations Fail” and the long-termist view of global poverty.”
Though I’m skeptical. A lot of the benefits from democracy require liberal democracy. For example, both Iran and Russia are technically democracies, yet neither seems like a force for domestic welfare or international peace. In The Great Delusion, John Mearscheimer also casts some doubt on the democratic peace theory, pointing out that the US has toppled a number of democratically elected governments: “Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973.” He also references a 1994 paper, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace”:
I don’t know how strong these objections really are, but I would take the democratic peace theory with a grain of salt.
Then there is China. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that China’s model is unsustainable in the long run, that it will end up having to liberalize in order to maintain economic growth, but this is disputed. China seems to be quite unique in terms of competence among authoritarian countries. Human rights would definitely improve if China were to become a liberal democracy, but the effects on long-term growth seem less obvious.
One issue is that the evidence in this area is fairly weak. See Kuhn’s post for more details on that.
With respect to neglectedness and tractability, I think it is best to do an analysis on a country by country basis. Promoting democracy in China for example seems not to be very tractable, and also carries some downside risk (making China hostile to EA). The question of whether promoting democracy might be an EA cause probably depends on whether it is possible to find a single country where there exists any examples of neglected and tractable interventions.
I think it is possible to find such interventions. Kuhn speculates that sponsoring independent investigative media in Senegal might be effective. Maybe there are some specific effective interventions in pro-democracy aid or election monitoring. I would love to see more research into similar interventions.