I would expect there to be higher quality submissions if the team running this were willing to compile a list of (what they consider to be) all the high quality critiques of EA thus far, from both the EA Forum and beyond. Otherwise I expect you’ll get submissions rehashing the same or similar points.
tyleralterman
Effective altruism in the garden of ends
COVID-19 response as XRisk intervention
Why and how to assess expertise
“Allkind”
Should EAs influence corporate giving?
A call for mechanistic thinking in movement-building
$250 donation for best EA intro essay—deadline: March 10
How to save more lives today than in a year of earn-to-give
Thank you, David! I also worry about this:
When we model to the rest of the world that “Effective” “Altruism” looks like brilliant (and especially young) people burn themselves out in despair, we are also creating a second order effect where we broadcast the image of Altruism as one tiled with suffering for the greater good. This is not quite inviting or promising for long term engagement on the world’s most pressing problems.
Of course, if one believes that AGI is coming within a few years, then you might not care about these potential second order effects. I do not believe AGI is coming within a few years. Though if I did, I might actually believe that a culture of mutual dedication to one another’s full set of ends is also instrumentally useful for the level of trust & coordination that could be required to deal with short timelines. Big “might.”
- 27 Sep 2022 8:45 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Effective altruism in the garden of ends by (
Agree so much with the antidote of silliness! I’m happy to see that EA Twitter is embracing it.
Excited to read the links you shared, they sound very relevant.
Thank you, Oliver. May your fire bum into the distance.
The Multiple Stage Fallacy
Announcing EffectiveAltruism.org
I’m so happy to hear this!!
I’m not sure the right way to address this. My burnout and disabling depression predated my gut condition by something like 9 months. My doctors have told me that inciting events for gut symptoms like mine very often include a period of severe stress/burnout. Given that I was quite fit and healthy, without any history of chronic illness, it seems likely the causality of what you’re suggesting was reversed. However, it’s true that once my gut symptoms started this made my subsequent suffering much worse. =(
[Discussion] What does winning look like?
Should you start your own project now rather than later?
Moreover:
It’s not obvious to me that severe sacrifice and tradeoffs are necessary. I think their seeming necessary might be the byproduct of our lack of cultural infrastructure for minimizing tradeoffs. That’s why I wrote this analogy:
To say that [my other ends] were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.
Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits.
I believe it’s possible to find and build synergies that reduce tradeoffs. For instance, as a lone ancient human in the wilderness, time building shelter might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent foraging for food. However, if you joined a well-functioning tribe, you’re no longer forced to choose between [shelter-building] and [foraging]. If you forage, the food you find will power the muscles of your tribesmate to build shelter. Similarly, your tribesmate’s shelter will give you the good night’s rest you need to go out and forage. Unless there’s a pressing emergency, it would be a mistake for the tribe to allocate everyone only to foraging or only to shelf-building.
I think we’re in a similar place with our EA ends. They seem like they demand the sacrifice of our other ends. But I think that’s just because we haven’t set up the right cultural infrastructure to create synergies and minimize tradeoffs. In the essay, I suggest one example piece of infrastructure that might help with this: a fractal altruist community. But I’m excited to see what other people come up with. Maybe you’ll be one of them.
Hi Brad, I appreciate this reply. I wonder if we might have a fundamental disagreement!
I personally don’t regard my non-EA ends as “beastly” – or, if I do, my valuing of EA ends is just as beastly as my valuing of other ends. I can adopt a moral or cultural framework that disagrees with my pre-existing “value function,” and what it deems valuable. But something about this is a bit awkward: Wasn’t it my pre-existing value function that deemed EA ends to be valuable?
Fwiw “… Tyler Alterman who don’t glom with EA” Just to clarify, I glom very much with broad EA philosophy, but I don’t glom with many cultural tendencies inside the movement, which I believe make the movement a non-sufficient vehicle to implement the philosophy. There seem to be an increasing amount of former hardcore EA movement folks with the same stance. (Though this is what you might expect as movements grow, change, and/or ossify.)
(I used to do EA movement-building full time. Now I think of myself as an EA who collaborated with the movement from the outside, rather than the inside.)
Planning to write up my critique and some suggested solutions soon.