Totally frivolous question: why chairs?
willbradshaw
Karma: 1,540
I have a few responses to this:
This should probably be a question, not a post.
The question in the title is completely different from the question in the post. A better title would be something like “How are the EA Funds default allocations chosen?”
Actually answering the question, I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that whichever EA Funds staff member selected the default allocation thinks that this is the theoretically optimal way to allocate resources – in fact I think that’s very unlikely. So the real question is what higher-level method, if any, was being used to select that allocation.
I don’t think anyone except a member of the appropriate team at CEA can answer that. Have you asked them?
FYI, the final paragraph is duplicated.
Interesting. I’m used to two hyphens for an en dash and three for an em dash.
I personally would lean towards the “most AMAs” approach of having most dialogue be with the AMA-respondent. It’s not quite “questions after a talk”, since question-askers have much more capacity to respond and have a conversation, but I feel like it’s more in that direction than, say, a random EA social. Maybe something like the vibe of a post-talk mingling session?
I think this is probably more important early in a comment tree than later. Directly trying to answer someone else’s question seems odd/out-of-place to me, whereas chiming in 4 levels down seems less so. I think this mirrors how the “post-talk mingling” would work: if I was talking to a speaker at such an event, and I asked them a question, someone else answering before them would be odd/annoying – “sorry, I wasn’t talking to you”. Whereas someone else chiming in after a little back-and-forth would be much more natural.
Of course, you can have multiple parallel comment threads here, which alters things quite a bit. But that’s the kind of vibe that feels natural to me, and Pablo’s comment above suggests I’m not alone in this.
Thanks, Abraham. It’s really valuable to get these perspectives, and it’s helpful to get people discussing these issues under their real names where they feel they can. I agree that there is a lot of overlap between the impulses that lead people into EA and those that lead many people into SJ.
I’m too tired right now to respond to this in the depth and spirit it deserves – I’ll try and do so tomorrow – so just wanted to flag that this is a positive and valuable contribution to the discussion. I hope any responses to it in the meantime are made in the same spirit.
A mixture of conversations and shared Google Docs. Nothing publicly citable as far as I know.
Thanks Vaidehi, great comment. If those numbers are right then the drops in both absolute and relative poverty in both South Asia and Indonesia seem pretty amazing.
Do you think it matters who’s right?
I think it matters quite a lot when it comes to assessing where to go from here: in particular, how cautious and conservative to be, and how favourable towards untested radical change.
If things have gotten way better and are likely to continue to get way better in the foreseeable future, then we should probably broadly stick with what we’re doing – some tinkering around the edges to fix obvious abuses, but no root-and-branch restructuring unless something goes obviously and profoundly wrong.
Whereas if things are failing to get better, or are actively getting worse, then it might be worth taking big risks in order to get out of the hole.
I’ve often had conversations with people to my left where they seem way too willing to smash stuff in the process of getting to deep systemic change, which is potentially sensible if you think we’re in a very bad place and getting worse but madness if you think we’re in an extremely unusually good place and getting better.
I have relatively little exposure to Hickel, save for reading his guardian piece and a small part of the dialogue that followed from that, but I don’t get the impression he’s coming from a position of putting more weight on Sanctity/purity or Authority/respect; in general I’d guess that few people in left-wing social-science academia are big on those sorts of moral foundations, except indirectly via moral/cultural relativism.
Taking Haidt’s moral foundations theory as read for the moment, I’d guess that the Fairness foundation is doing a lot of the work in this disagreement. In general, leftists and liberals seem to differ a lot in what they consider culpable harm, and Fairness/exploitation seems like a big part of that.
Information hazards: a very simple typology
So far the comments here have overwhelmingly been (various forms of) litigating the controversy I discuss in the OP. I think this is basically fine – disagreements have all been civil – but insofar as there is still interest I’d be keen to hear people’s thoughts on a more meta level: what sorts of things could we do to help increase understanding and goodwill in the community over this issue?
I’m still pretty sceptical that the post in question was deliberately made with conscious intention to cause harm. In any case, I know of at least a couple of other EAs who have good-faith worries in that direction, so at worst it’s exacerbating a problem that was already there, not creating a new one.
(Also worth noting that at this point we’re probably Streisanding this dispute into irrelevance anyway.)
(I have now cut the link.)
This comment does a good job of summarising the “classical liberal” position on this conflict, but makes no effort to imagine or engage with the views of more moderate pro-SJ EAs (of whom there are plenty), who might object strongly to cultural-revolution comparisons or be wary of SSC given the current controversy.
As I already said in response to Buck’s comment:
I agree that post was very bad (I left a long comment explaining part of why I strong-downvoted it). But I think there’s a version of that post, that is phrased more moderately and tries harder to be charitable to its opponents, that I think would get a lot more sympathy from the left of EA. (I expect I would still disagree with it quite strongly.)
As you say, there aren’t many right-wing EAs. The key conflict I’m worried about is between centre/centre-left/libertarian-leaning EAs and left-wing/SJ-sympathetic EAs[1]. So suggesting I need to find a right-wing piece to make the comparison is missing the point.
(This comment also quotes an old version of my post, which has since been changed on the basis of feedback. I’m a bit confused about that, since some of the changes were made more than a day ago – I tried logging out and the updated version is still the one I see. Can you update your quote?)
I also don’t want conservative-leaning EAs to be driven from the movement, but that isn’t the central thing I’m worried about here. ↩︎
One aspect of how “information hazard” tends to be conceptualised that is fairly new[1], apart from the term itself, is the idea that one might wish to be secretive out of impartial concern for humankind, rather than for selfish or tribal reasons[2].
This especially applies in academia, where the culture and mythology are strongly pro-openness. Academics are frequently secretive, but typically in a selfish way that is seen as going against their shared ideals[3]. The idea that a researcher might be altruistically secretive about some aspect of the truth of nature is pretty foreign, and to me is a big part of what makes the “infohazard” concept distinctive.
Not 100% unprecedentedly new, or anything, but rare in modern Western discourse pre-Bostrom. ↩︎
I think a lot of people would view those selfish/tribal reasons as reasonable/defensible, but still different from e.g. worrying that such-and-such scientific discovery might damage humanity-at-large’s future. ↩︎
Brian Nosek talks about this a lot – academics mostly want to be more open but view being so as against their own best interests. ↩︎
Exploring the Streisand Effect
“Culminating” might be the wrong word, I agree the triggering event was fairly independent.
But I do think people’s reactions to the SSC kerfuffle were coloured by their beliefs about the previous controversy (and Scott’s political beliefs), and that it contributed to the general feeling I’m trying to describe here.
I agree that post was very bad (I left a long comment explaining part of why I strong-downvoted it). But I think there’s a version of that post, that is phrased more moderately and tries harder to be charitable to its opponents, that I think would get a lot more sympathy from the left of EA. (I expect I would still disagree with it quite strongly.)
I think there’s a reasonable policy one could advocate, something like “don’t link to heavily-downvoted posts you disagree with, because doing so undermines the filtering function of the karma system”. I’m not sure I agree with that in all cases; in this case, it would have been hard for me to write this post without referencing that one, I think the things I say here need saying, and I ran this post by several people I respect before publishing it.
I could probably be persuaded to change that part given some more voices/arguments in opposition, here or in private.
(It’s also worth noting that I expect there are a number of people here who think comparisons of the current situation to the Cultural Revolution are quite bad, see e.g. here.)
Nice, thanks Peter.
Seems like a good reason. :-)