Sorry Sophia but I still don’t completely understand how what we’re talking about maps on to actual decisions community builders are making. I’m still suspicious that many of us are sensing a vibe problem but misdiagnosing it as a messaging/cause prioritization problem.
I would find it really helpful if you could an example of how you percieve the big tent / small tent abstraction could map on to a concrete action which a community organiser takes.
Let’s say someone was starting up a new a EA group at an Australian university—what’s an example of a mistake you worry this person might make if they’re too directly focused on chasing the “tails”?
Xavier_ORourke
I encourage readers to consider whether they are the correct audience for this advice. As I understand it, this advice is directed at those for whom all of the following apply:
- Making a large impact on the world is overwhelmingly more important to you than other things people often want in their lives (such as spending lot of time with friends/family, raising children, etc.)
- You have already experienced a normal workload of ~38h per week for at least a couple of years, and found this pretty easy/comfortable to maintain
- You generally consider yourself to be happy, highly composed and emotionally stable. You have no history of depression or other mood-related dissorders.
If any of these things do not apply, this post is not for you! And it would probably be a huge mistake to seek out an adderall prescription.
That’s true, but before the brand “Effective Altruism” existed, there was no reason why starting an organisation using that name should have made the founders beholden to the will of every single participant in this community—you’d need to conjecture a pretty unreasonable amount of foresight and scheming to think that even back then the founders were trying to structure these orgs in a manner designed to maintain central control over the movement.
If you or me or anyone else wanted to start our own organisation under a new brand with similar goals to CEA or GWWC I don’t think anyone would try to stop us!
For what it’s worth, I’m on the 1 year “try giving” pledge atm. Even though I currently donate to “EA approved” orgs, I would never make the life-long commitment if I thought it meant giving up the right to use my own discretion when deciding which causes/organisations to give to.
Pollyamory is not necessarily a bad thing in all contexts and all implementations, and I’m not claiming that everyone who practices is an abuser—but on its face it seems intuitive that the prevalance of polly in a community would interact with frequency of sexual harrasment/assult (especially when layered on top of other things like high prevalance of aspergers+mood dissorders+professional relationships between members of the community).
I’m not advocating this entirely, but just to illustrate the point—imagine if most people in EA had cultural attitudes such that:
- It’s taboo to have sex or cuddle with somebody who you’re not in a serious committed relationship with
- Propositioning someone who already has a partner was considered a vile thing to do, and could lead to serious humiliation for the proposer
- Being in a long term, stable, exclusive partnership was seen as a very high-status signal, and having many sexual partners was considered low-status
If the culture in EA was more like this, (for better or worse), the frequency of unwanted physical advances would certianly be lower, right?
Another important difference with monogomy is that it’s taboo to make a proposition to somebody who’s already married or already in a serious relationship, so people don’t make them as often.
Great point! As well as “focus on the norms that are causing the most harm” I’d want to also add “focus on the norms that promise the least benefit”.
Doing weird things like giving away 10% of your income, or talking about shrimp welfare, or raising the alarm about the dangers of AGI are all very weird, but there are credible worldviews in which it’s really important to do them anyway.
Whereas weird things like having sex with multiple people within your professional network on a regular basis promise mild benefits at best, even according to worldviews which endorse them.
I think it’s worth keeping in mind that every functioning culture includes a vast list of taboos which people enforce on others. In both regular Western culture, and EA culture, all of the following are considered inappropriate:
- Making sexist jokes
- Not being sympathetic when someone else experiences a personal tragedy
- Nuidity in the workplace
- Answering somebody else’s phone
- Smoking weed in the office
- Bragging about money
- Chewing with your mouth open
- Refusing to shake somebody’s hand when you’re introduced
- Making prolonged, intense eye contact with people
- Not saying “pardon me” after farting or burping loudly
- Over-sharing personal information with someone you don’t know very well
- Asking an employee to carry out a duty that is far outside their normal role (e.g. “For the second half of your shift, can you please go to my parent’s house and change the bedsheets”)
- Giving people unsolicited gifts which are too expensive
- Swearing—
Having sex with somebody much younger than you even if they’re above legal age of consent
- Offering to buy somebody’s pet from them
Some of these taboos are hard to justify on the spot, but very few people seriously want to eliminate them all.
Perhaps we want EA culture to lean slightly more towards personal autonomy than normal Western culture does, but there’s never going to be a cohesive collection of humans who can productively interact together without seriously regulating each other’s behaviour.
I agree that if all the concerns about relationship norms in EA culture were comming from small minority, then this would not justify changing them (but the minority are still entitled to try and advocate/persuade).
But when it comes to culture/status, I think the dynamics mean majority rule is pretty much baked in by default anyway! So we might not have to worry much about that.
Interestingly, we might have different impressions about what the median attitude is in the community when it comes to questions like—
“Is it a bad idea to have sex with your manager?”
- “Is it a red flag when a local university group organiser is regularly hooking up with newcommers?”
- “Do long term, stable, committed relationships generally lead to better community health overall?”
Maybe this depends on how big/small you draw the boundary for who counts as part of the EA community, but most people I know who engage with EA would answer “yes” to those questions. (I’m in Australia, perhaps Bay Area is very different)
This is consistent with the point I’m trying to make—all human interactions in all contexts are happening within a super complex web of norms and taboos, and any proposal as simple as “just let people do whatever they want” is a non-starter
If there was no difference at all between the beliefs/values/behaviours of a the average member of this community, versus the average member of the human species—then there would be no reson for the concept “Effective Altruism” to exist at all.
It would be a terrible thing for our community to directly discriminate against traits which are totally irrelevant to what someone has offer to the EA project (such as race/gender/sexual preference) - and I’ve never heard anyone around here disagree with that.
But when it comes to a traits such as being highly intelligent, not being a political extremist, or having intellectual curiosity about any part of the universe other than our comparitively tiny planet (aka “thinks space is cool”) - having these traits be over-represented in the community is an obviously good thing!
Dear authors, if you think the community at large has the wrong idea about moral philosophy, I think the best response is to present compelling arguments which criticize utilitarianism directly!
If you think the community at large has the wrong economic/political beliefs, please argue against these directly!
Or if you think there is a a particular organisation in the movement is making a particular mistake which they wouldn’t have made had they consulted more domain experts, please lay out a compelling case for this as well!
Dear authors—could you please provide at least one concrete example of a high-quality “deep critique” of Effective Altruism which you think was given inadequate consideration?
Thanks! Now that SBF has been disavowed do you think EA still has a big problem with under-emphasising conflicts of interest?
I still think the best critiques benefit from being extremely concrete and that article could have had more impact if it spent less time on the high-level concept of “conflicts of interest” and more time explicitely saying “crypto is bad and it’s a problem that so many in the community don’t see this”
In my oppinion—a very attractive compromise which many other cultures adopt is to keep everythign you love about the deep relationships except for the sex. People having sex with each other is uniquely prone to causing harm+drama+conflict.
I don’t think we’ll ever see a TIME article exposing the problem that someone in EA had too many people offer to help them move house, or that community events were filled with too much warmth and laughter, or that people offered too much emotional support to someone when they lost a parent.
More friendship and loyalty and support and love and fun and shared moments of vulnerability is fine! Just leave out the sex part!
We should be careful to avoid dismissing a simple easy solution to a real problem because it might fail to solve an imaginary one. Do you really think the community currently has a problem with bosses pressuring their direct reports to help them move house?
How do you know we don’t live in a world where >90% of the problem is specifically due to people having sex / trying to have sex with each other? What would convince you that sex is the culprit, rather than interpersonal relationships in general?
If Bostrom did step down as FHI director, who is likely to replace him? How confident are you that a new director will succeed in resolving conflicts with the broader philosophy department?
I have very little direct experience with FHI (just a very brief internship) but from the outside it looks like FHI has produced some really amazing research while Bostrom has directed it.
Perhaps a good way to appraise whether FHI has been performing above/below par during Bostrom’s directorship is to compare its output to a similar organisation such as Global Priorities Institute. How would you compare the value of work done by FHI versus GPI? I don’t know enough to be confident in this, but to me it seems like FHI has generated far more value (not that Bostrom is the only person to thank for this, but it seems like an important piece of evidence).
In any case—the views and oppinions of random users of this forum like me who aren’t directly involved with FHI don’t mean much, and I don’t really see the benefits of raising this question in public on the EA forum.
From where I sit -It’s really hard to guess at all the details and relevant context of what’s going on (which is why I feel a bit stupid commenting on it… but I guess I can’t resist lol).
Is FHI the only org being subject to a hiring freeze? Or is the university/philosophy department cutting costs in many places? Are conflicts with the philosophy department basically FHI’s fault? Or is the bureaucracy dysfunctional/unfriendly to FHI in ways which made it impossible to keep them happy without making other costly tradeoffs? If Nick steps down as director, is there somebody else waiting in the wings who is likely to do a better job and successfully resolve the issue?
The only thing I know for sure looking in from the outside is that FHI has been doing really really great work 🤷
If Bostrom is not entitled to protection from random people on the forum making judgments about him, why should it be any different for OP?
Why would it be a problem for long-term community builders?
Anecdote: I used to help run a local university group in Australia. While helping run that group, I didn’t try to date or sleep with attendees. Also while running that group, I met wonderful woman in a separate context who wasn’t involved in the EA community, we entered into a relationship, and are now happily married and expecting a child.
I’ve also got lots of EA friends who’ve done community building in the past and are in really happy romantic relationships with spouses they met in a non-EA context as well.
Thanks Holden and Luke for answering so many questions <3
Thinking in terms of broad generalisations/approximations—if you had to draw a graph depicting the value provided to OP by a new research analyst over time, what kind of shape would this graph have?
Or to ask the question in a different way: Are your efforts to hire for new OP roles motivated more by a desire to make better grants in the next couple of years, or by an intention to have a strong team in place several years from now which does high quality work in the future?