I’m a researcher at London School of Economics and Political Science, working in the intersection of moral psychology and philosophy.
Stefan_Schubert
Karma: 5,879
Fwiw I’m not sure it badly damages the publishability. It might lead to more critical papers, though.
The NYT article isn’t an opinion piece but a news article, and I guess that it’s a bit less clear how to classify them. Potentially one should distinguish between news articles and opinion pieces. But in any event, I think that if someone who didn’t know about EA before reads the NYT article, they’re more likely to form a negative than a positive opinion.
My impression is that the coverage of EA has been more negative than you suggest, even though I don’t have hard data either. It could be useful to look into.
I agree. This has been discussed for quite some time (it was first raised three years ago) so it would be good to reach a decision.
EA is anarchy. No one is even a little in charge.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve worked at CEA myself, and I know that CEA wields considerable influence.
I also think your way of discussing is inappropriate.
CEA/EV can prevent people from coming to the most important in-person meetups (EAG) and from participating in the most important EA online space (the EA Forum). In that sense, they’re not just offering services, but have a lot of power. (That power also manifests itself in many other ways, including ways that are more directly relevant to the subject of the post.) And with that power comes responsibility.
I think that in a relevant sense, there is an EA Leadership, even if EA isn’t an organisation. E.g. CEA/EV has been set up to have a central place in the community, and runs many coordinating functions, including the EA Forum, EA Global, the community health team, etc. Plus it publishes much of the key content. I think this comment overstates how decentralised the EA community is (for better or worse).
I don’t think that change makes much difference.
It could be better to be more specific—e.g. to talk about value changes, human extinction, civilisational collapse, etc. Your framing may make it appear as if a binary distribution entails that, e.g. value change interventions have a low impact, and I don’t think that’s the case.
For example, if future value is roughly binary, the increase in its value is directly proportional to the decrease in the likelihood/severity of the worst outcomes, in which case existential risk reduction seems particularly useful. On the other hand, if value is roughly uniform, focussing on trajectory changes would make more sense.
That depends on what you mean by “existential risk” and “trajectory change”. Consider a value system that says that future value is roughly binary, but that we would end up near the bottom of our maximum potential value if we failed to colonise space. Proponents of that view could find advocacy for space colonisation useful, and some might find it more natural to view that as a kind of trajectory change. Unfortunately it seems that there’s no complete consensus on how to define these central terms. (For what it’s worth, the linked article on trajectory change seems to define existential risk reduction as a kind of trajectory change.)
I think that among non-EAs, flatsharing is much more common in the UK than in the Nordic countries. Relatedly, average household size is afaik bigger.
https://landgeist.com/2021/07/27/household-size/
I think this difference largely ultimately has economic causes.
Might correlate with other sorts of prosocial behaviour (though there may also be specific norms about meetings). Below is a Science wallet return study, “Civic honesty around the globe”. Could also look at surveys of social trust.
Fwiw my view is that this isn’t true of most effective altruists I see on Twitter.
No, if an individual forecast would prove to be off, that wouldn’t entail they’re not good at forecasting.
Though the other factors could still partially explain why the level (as opposed to the trend) isn’t better, and arguably the level is what we’re ultimately interested in.
They’re pretty different kinds of things—an abstract concept vs an organisation—so I don’t think it will cause confusion.
Dunbar’s number has received scholarly criticism.
A widespread and popular belief posits that humans possess a cognitive capacity that is limited to keeping track of and maintaining stable relationships with approximately 150 people. This influential number, ‘Dunbar’s number’, originates from an extrapolation of a regression line describing the relationship between relative neocortex size and group size in primates. Here, we test if there is statistical support for this idea. Our analyses on complementary datasets using different methods yield wildly different numbers. Bayesian and generalized least-squares phylogenetic methods generate approximations of average group sizes between 69–109 and 16–42, respectively. However, enormous 95% confidence intervals (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) imply that specifying any one number is futile. A cognitive limit on human group size cannot be derived in this manner.
“Icky” feels like pretty strong language.
I rather think it’s sound advice, and have often given it myself. Besides it being, in my judgement, good from an impact point of view, I also guess that it has direct personal benefits for the advisee to figure out how people at hubs are thinking. It seems quite commonsensical advice to me, and I would guess that people in other movements give analogous advice.
That’s a good point, that I agree with.
Separately, I think the criticisms in this thread are exaggerated. I don’t think the post only captures “what a very, very small group of people in a very, very small community in Berkeley think”.
Thanks, I thought this was a thoughtful post. I largely agree with the empirical analysis—that EA relies a lot on personal connections. Normatively, I’m a bit more positive to the current approach, though. For instance, I think it can make it easier to make fast, low-cost decisions. It can also help you find good projects.
Thank you!