The idea of fat-tailed distribution of impact of interventions might be a better alternative to this maybe?
That sounds harder to misinterpret, yeah.
xccf
Karma: 905
That’s a good point, it’s not a connection I’ve heard people make before but it does make sense.
I’m a bit concerned that the message “you can do 80% of the good with only 20% of the donation” could be misinterpreted:
I associate the Pareto principle with saving time and money. EA isn’t really a movement about getting people to decrease the amount of time and money they spend on charity though, if anything probably the opposite.
To put it another way, the top opportunities identified by EA still have room for more funding. So the mental motion I want to instill is not about shaving away your low-impact charitable efforts, it’s more about doubling down on high-impact charitable efforts that are underfunded (or discovering new high-impact charitable efforts).
We wouldn’t want to imply that the remaining 20% of the good is somehow less valuable—it is more costly to access, but in principle if all of the low-hanging altruistic fruit is picked, there’s no reason not to move on to the higher-hanging fruit. The message “concentrate your altruism on the 80% and don’t bother with the 20%” could come across as callous. I would rather make a positive statement that you can do a lot of good surprisingly cheaply than a negative statement that you shouldn’t ever do good inefficiently.
Nevertheless I think the 80⁄20 principle could be a good intuition pump for the idea that results are often disproportionate with effort and I appreciate your brainstorming :)
Was the “at least one EA” someone in a position of influence?
Not really.
most of his current work seems either opposed to or orthogonal to common EA positions.
I think you have to be careful here, because if someone’s work is “opposed” to a common EA position, it’s possible that they disagree on facts related to that position but they are still motivated by doing the most good. It plays into the feedback loop I was talking about in the other comment. If you disagree with someone a lot, and you don’t think you will be able to change their mind, you might not want to invest the time in exploring that disagreement.
I think you should feel free to participate in politics as an individual, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with the EA movement developing an official ideology in an organic and ad-hoc way. It seems easy for a feedback loop to form where an ideology becomes associated with a particular group, and people who disagree with the ideology leave the group, and that strengthens the association. I know an online forum roughly as erudite as the EA forum where this happened in the opposite direction, and the majority of the participants (I believe) are voting for Trump (not because they like him but because they think the left is worse). (Notably, most users on this other forum are pseudonymous—I suspect this is a small thing which can make a big difference in the long run in terms of how a group’s political beliefs evolve.)
I’m going to go ahead and try to explain the mindset of Trump supporters as I see it a little bit, not because I want anyone voting for him (please don’t), but because I think it will be helpful for understanding considerations around getting involved in politics, and also because if you’re going to try and change the votes of his supporters it helps to know what they’re thinking.
Essentially I think the people who support Trump do so because their social media feed mostly shows examples of the media being dishonest, and the people who oppose Trump do so because their social media feed mostly shows examples of Trump being dishonest. I don’t think it is unreasonable to be distrustful of the media. See Gell-Mann Amnesia, this overview of studies which show the dismal accuracy of newspapers, or this book which explains the dismal incentives of modern news publishers and why those incentives cause them to neglect the truth. Insofar as the media is inaccurate, I would expect them to favor Democrats—a 2014 survey found 4x as many journalists identify as Democrat than Republican. I would guess that the balance has worsened since 2014 due to the feedback loop I described above.
It does seem there have been cases where the press has been clearly unfair to Trump. Let’s consider the “original” Trump scandal, the one where he supposedly said Mexicans were rapists.
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.
...
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.Here is the video of Trump saying the second bit. Note how he points to the audience as he says “They’re not sending you”—i.e. suggesting that people in his audience are “Mexico’s best people”. I have never seen any media outlet point this out—it seems like his statement has been consistently presented so as to make Trump seem as xenophobic as possible. (By the way, Trump later referenced this article about coyotes who rape migrants to support his rapist claim.)
As a voter, my time to fact check stories is limited. So once I see two or three stories which seem clearly unfair on a deeper investigation, it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to wonder if most stories are unfair. In other words, the “corrupt establishment which is out to wreck Trump by any means possible” hypothesis becomes a hypothesis that does an OK job of explaining the data I see.
This theory of why people support Trump also explains why particular events have hurt his popularity in my view:
Being a jerk to Joe Biden in the debate
Coronavirus
Trump’s handling of BLM protests
I suspect the key issue is whether the event serves as a credible “out of band” signal of malfeasance on Trump’s part—an event which requires relatively little trust in journalists to verify, and clearly indicates malfeasance even absent journalist editorializing.
You cite the fact that most EA survey respondents seem to oppose Trump. That’s not a convincing argument in my view because of correlated errors. Young people in general oppose Trump and the EA movement skews young. Most EAs aren’t analyzing political issues carefully and trying to come to conclusions from first principles; they’re engaging in their spare time and reading what comes up in their feed. Reading people you disagree with is way less fun as a recreational activity, so people tend not to do it, and also it’s easy to get pushed in a particular direction if friends will ostracize people for disagreement.
I’ll go ahead and respond to a few more of your points individually:
In the context of United States politics, however, the extreme left has not been anywhere near as successful at capturing the Democratic Party as the far right has been at capturing its counterpart
That’s not obvious to me:
The vast majority of current House Republicans have openly condemned QAnon, with all but 17 signing onto a recent House resolution calling it a “conspiracy theory.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/15/qanon-trump-maga-movement-429739
Have the vast majority of House Democrats condemned antifa?
as any actual leftist will be happy to complain to you about.
I understand that disappointment with Trump is a fairly common position on the far right.
You state that the left in the US “isn’t even that extreme by international standards”. However, a big part of what concerns me about the left is their rhetoric and their epistemology. If their objective was to prevent anyone from eating pineapple on pizza, and they considered any yellow or green plant topping to be “pineapple” (regularly referring to the Republicans as the fascist white nationalist party when Senate Republicans unanimously confirmed a Black man as Air Force chief of staff), and they were dropping guillotine memes on Twitter, staying just within the rules to hint about their plans for pineapple on pizza lovers, then I would consider that to be a problem even if I could do without pineapple on pizza. Additionally it’s instructive to observe the trend—the left has gotten a lot more extreme in recent years, and it’s possible that whatever force that caused this will continue to operate.
(Maybe this would be a good time to re-emphasize that I think Biden is the right person to vote for this year—in part because I notice that whatever process which caused the left to get more extreme seemed to operate faster during Trump’s term. However, I acknowledge that my Trump-supporting friend (a brilliant engineer who keeps his views very close to his chest) has a point when he mentions that Trump has ordered a halt to (in his view) Orwellian anti-racism training in the federal government, and there’s a chance Biden will reverse this order. This is a way in which your claim “To the extent there is problematic thinking and behavior on the left, I do not believe it is a problem that will be worsened by having Democrats in power” could be false.)
Anyway, hopefully some of that has given you a sense for why I think the current presidential election is a minefield in a way approval voting and ballot initiatives increasing aid for effective charities are not. In the modern political era, it’s not enough to just mention a bunch of things you read in your feed. You want to do random in-depth fact checks, or provide incentives for normally reticent supporters of unpopular views to explain those views, or something.
What do you predict would happen to someone like that? Would you expect them to be fired if they held a position at an EA org? Barred from attending EA Global? Shunned by people in their local group?
Peter Thiel spoke at the EA Summit in 2014 I think, what happened to him? I heard at least one EA say we should kick him out.
First, I want to say I’m glad you’re voting for Joe and I hope you will tell all your Pennsylvanian friends to do the same. Nevertheless I think there are a few key considerations around EA getting involved in politics on a movement level that your comment misses.
I also want to note that I find it odd that post got downvoted (possibly for being explicitly partisan?) vs posts like this, which don’t explicitly claim to be partisan / engaging in politics but I think are actually extremely political.
That post relates to a case where politics got itself involved in EA. The question we’re discussing here is whether EA should get itself involved in politics. I do think it may be reasonable to treat these cases differently, because if we’re not allowed to say anything when politics gets itself involved in EA, that leaves us vulnerable to being hijacked by external political actors. (As an absurd example, imagine it came out that the CEO if Givewell was a believer in QAnon and was directing Givewell donor funds in their direction. A commitment to being apolitical which prohibited any discussion of this seems rather self-defeating.)
I think one really useful and accurate idea from the social justice community is the idea that you can’t be neutral on many political issues.
Not saying this is how you deployed it, but I often see others deploy this slogan in a way that seems very antithetical to EA.
What if I choose to focus my time and attention on issues I consider higher-impact? (“I’m soliciting donations to cure rare diseases in cute puppies. You can’t be neutral on this issue!”)
What if I spent some time researching the issue and I think the evidence around it is very mixed/low-quality, or the costs and benefits roughly balance out? Or I think the issue is too much of an epistemic minefield to know what evidence is reliable? (“The CIA did X, and then they did Y and Z to cover their tracks.”)
What if my position is too complex / nuanced / unusual to be easily summarized as for or against? (“Not left, not right, forward.”)
When someone says “you can’t be neutral”, it sounds to me like “please turn off your brain”. Neutrality is the state I’m in when I’m trying to weigh evidence and evaluate arguments related to an issue. Telling me I can’t be neutral is telling me to abrogate the thought process I use to come to a thoughtful and well-informed position.
This “you can’t be neutral” mindset has the potential to destroy a lot of the value of the EA movement, in my opinion.
I think it is pretty likely that attempting to be “neutral” on political issues is close to being as bad as taking the political position that will lead to the worse outcome, or something along those lines.
I just want to quickly address this. What matters in Pennsylvania is the difference between Trump’s total and Biden’s total. Adding 1 to Trump’s total and subtracting 1 from Biden’s total have an equivalent magnitude of effect on the final result. Not voting is exactly halfway between voting for Trump and voting for Biden in terms of the effect it has. If people actually start thinking that “since I’m not voting for Biden, I might as well vote for Trump”, Trump will be very happy.
I think similar logic applies to other political acts. It often seems true that the result is based roughly on summing up the actions of various involved partisans. Generally speaking, I think people who tell you “neutrality is just as bad” are trying to browbeat you into taking their position, and their statement is not descriptively accurate.
(I might as well add that I suspect the “with us or against us” sentiment on the left contributes to Trump’s popularity. For all its faults, Trump’s movement is more ideologically inclusive, in my view.)
This sounds like a very promising initiative. However, you’re asking for advice, so I’ll try and identify potential problems.
The platform would collect money from donors to both campaigns; let’s say for example that Harris donors give us $10 million and Pence donors give us $8 million. We would send matching amounts ($8 million on each side) to charity and donate the remaining amount to the political campaign that raised more ($2 million to Harris).
When I pretend I’m a Republican evaluating this proposal, I think: “If the campaign goes forwards as normal, about 44% of the ads will be for Pence and 56% for Harris. That’s not great, but it is alright—our message for America will shine through. On the other hand, if we implement donation matching, 100% of the ads will be for Harris. That sounds apocalyptic. It might even start cutting into our base because people will start to think that no one agrees with them.”
You could address this by asking Democrats to match $1.25 for every $1 of Republican ad spend, so extreme donation matching means $0 spending on ads, but Democrats might find this to be unfair.
Extreme donation matching is a rather unlikely scenario of course, so it might be better to pitch something more realistic such as “Harris gets $9 million, Pence gets $7 million, $2 million goes to charity”. Actually I think maybe that is in fact what you’re talking about? Still, there might be room to improve the framing.
Another thought: I would guess that political ads fall into two basic categories:
Get out the vote ads
Reaching out to swing voter ads
The first kind of ad probably increases political polarization. However, the second kind could reduce polarization—it seems like so much political discourse these days amounts to playing telephone on what a candidate originally said or did, and I wonder if there is some value in people hearing from candidates directly to know what they really endorse. Additionally, swing voter ads inculcate in party bosses the habit of trying to understand the preferences of people who might not fit squarely within their base, and figure out how they might appeal to those preferences.
My guess is many people who would participate in such a donation matching scheme think polarization sucks. I wonder how they would feel about the matching funds to go towards some kind of anti-polarization organization.
Maybe have staff members who are respected members of both parties?
Or set up individual wealthy donors who are planning to donate roughly the same amount with one another and have them place money in escrow?
Some more considerations:
If you have a bad experience dating EAs, that might cause you to sour on the EA movement. (Personally, after getting rejected by some EAs, part of my brain pointed out “hey you’re putting a lot of effort into this EA thing and it doesn’t seem to be helping where survival or reproduction are concerned.” Since this isn’t something I want my brain to think, I no longer ask EAs out.)
There’s also the possibility of general awkwardness that could interfere with professional relationships.
For heterosexual dating, replaceability comes into play—assuming 2 men for every woman, and monogamy, if a guy gets an EA girlfriend, there’s likely some other guy in the EA movement who isn’t getting an EA girlfriend. So if you’re a guy, you might want to think hard about whether an EA girlfriend is really something you need.
One problem with making a list like this: People already get mad at EA for saying that their favorite trendy cause is ineffective. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this: Even if I don’t think [super trendy cause] is the most important cause, I’m usually glad people are working on it, and I don’t want to discourage them (if the likely result of me discouraging them is that they switch to playing video games or something). It’s also bad from a public relations point of view for EA to be seen as existing in opposition to trendy causes.
Therefore, if anyone makes a list like this, I suggest you stick to obscure causes.
EDIT: I want to highlight this take by someone who’s much more knowledgable than I am; you should probably read it before reading my comment.
First, the immediate stakes are far lower—in the Cultural Revolution, “counter-revolutionary revisionists” were sent cross-country to re-education camps, tortured, killed, even eaten. As far as I am aware, none of these things have happened recently in America to public figures (or made-public-by-Twitter figures) as a result of the sort of backlash you discuss.
This hasn’t happened yet, and probably won’t happen any time soon, but it’s conceivable to me that it might happen eventually if things get much worse. What if we saw a resurgence in targeted killings in a world where police have been abolished/shamed into inaction and discussing the killings in the media is seen as blowing a dog whistle? (However, even in this world, one could move to a part of the US where the rate of private gun ownership is high… from what I’ve seen, rioting hasn’t really been taking place in those areas.)
Third, at the moment, this cultural movement (whatever you want to call it) is not orchestrated top-down or directly backed by the formal structures of power (legislative, executive, and judicial branches of American government, and the military), in stark contrast to the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was not backed by the formal structures of power. The Red Guard organizations precipitating the revolution were frequently in opposition to established party structures (and each other). Here are some quotes from Mao: A Very Short Introduction:
All groups justified their policies and actions with reference to Mao’s works. When Mao gave a clear order they tried to obey it. Much of the time, however, Mao was careful to hide his hand. His comments were Delphic in their ambiguity leaving Red Guard organizations considerable room to act on their own initiative. Communist leaders vying for power or survival whether at local or national level tried to manipulate Red Guard groups, sometimes through their own children. Like gang members anywhere, Red Guard organizations developed their own rivalries and antagonisms, albeit with ideological rationalizations. In some cases, they imprisoned, tortured, and even murdered each other with disturbing brutality.”
...
When [Party leaders] were dragged before struggle meetings, Mao left the masses to do as they saw fit. He did not order their ill treatment but neither did he intervene to prevent it.
...
...At this point, however, Mao drew back from the abyss, condemning the commune and the free elections it had announced...
...Finally in the summer of 1968, faced with near civil war in various provinces, Mao decided to call a halt. Work teams were sent onto the campuses to restore order but were sometimes viciously attacked. Mao called a meeting of Red Guard leaders in the capital. Confronting their complaint that a ‘Black Hand’ was attempting to suppress the campus revolution, he announced that he himself was that Black Hand.
Lack of top-down authority could be a bad thing. With the current situation, since there is no cult of personality, there is no one with the authority to be a ‘Black Hand’ if things get truly crazy. Memetic evolution seems to be the primary master.
On the other hand, there is the point that police, military, and privately-owned guns in the US all appear to not be very inclined to revolution, at least for the time being.
Secondly, effective altruists are disproportionately employed at companies like Google and Facebook. The policies of social media giants can influence discourse norms on the Web and therefore society as a whole. While EAs working at tech giants may not have enough power within the organizational hierarchy to make a meaningful difference, it’s something worth considering. Another way in this vein that EAs could make a difference is by creating or popularizing discussion platforms that promote rational argumentation and mutual understanding instead of divisiveness (related post).
I want to highlight reddit as a social network which could be especially valuable to get a job at. It seems to have a combination of
a very large userbase (bigger than Twitter according to this article)
a relatively small employee headcount (so larger per-capita employee influence)
a subreddit structure which could allow for experimentation with depolarization interventions—allow moderators to customize their subreddits in a programmable way, let many experiments bloom, see which experiments are associated with depolarization/improved discussion quality (I have experiment ideas if people are interested)
increasing the presence of public service broadcasting
I don’t know how well that would work in the US—it seems that existing public service broadcasters (PBS and NPR) are perceived as biased by American conservatives.
A related idea I’ve seen is media companies which sell cancellation insurance (archive). The idea being that this is a business model which incentivizes obtaining the trust and respect of as many people as possible, as opposed to inspiring a smaller number of true believers to share/subscribe. One advantage of this idea is it doesn’t require any laws to get passed. (As polarization gets worse, I expect passing depolarization laws gets harder and harder.)
Here’s another idea for the list: https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1266701479404060678
Maybe you could choose to only vote in a party’s primary if you also precommit to voting for your chosen candidate in the general election if they win the primary.
I think if you’re in a blue state like California, it generally makes sense to register as Republican to vote in the Republican primary, because there will be fewer California Republicans voting in that primary, but California still contributes the same number of electoral college votes?
I think a good way to explore potential downsides of this proposal, and also potentially reduce the taboo around genetic enhancement, would be to steelman the concerns of people who are reflexively opposed to it.
For example, how likely is it that talking about genes more (e.g. the genetic basis of intelligence) will cause people to associate moral value with genes or feel contempt for those are genetically unlucky? You could do psychology experiments where you tell participants that X% of variation in some trait is genetic and see how that affects their attitude towards people without that trait. Does the framing matter? Do some framings cause dehumanization and others cause compassion?
You could also look at historical case studies and try to tease apart causality: Did the progressive eugenics movement amplify the racism of that time period or just reflect it? Did Hitler become interested in genes because he was racist, or did he become racist because he was interested in genes?
You’re both looking for potential downsides to this kind of advocacy, and also looking for framings which will minimize potential downsides while framing genetic enhancement in a way that broadens support among those who might consider it taboo. For example, subsidize it as a way to decrease inequality. Genetic inequality is arguably more unfair than any other kind!
Finally, regarding the We risk creating a race of enhanced humans who won’t care about (or will subjugate) the rest of us. point, one idea for mitigating this is to introduce genetic enhancement soon, before we are very good at it, so there is a gradual increase in the level of e.g. intelligence instead of a sudden one. That could decrease tribalism, since instead of there being an “ultra-enhanced” tribe and a non-enhanced tribe with nothing in between, there are many people with many different levels of enhancement in the middle to keep the peace and foster compassion and understanding.
I also hope your faith in Bennett is well-placed, that whatever mix of vices led him to write vile antisemitic ridicule on an email list called ‘morning hate’ in 2016 bear little relevance to the man he was when with Leverage in ~~2018, or the man he is now.
Perhaps it’d be helpful for Bennett to publish a critique of alt-right ideas in Palladium Magazine?
In Bennett’s statement on Medium, he says now that he’s Catholic, he condemns the views he espoused. If that’s true, he should be glad to publish a piece which reduces their level of support.
Since he used to espouse those views, he has intimate understanding of the psychology of those who hold them. So a piece he edits could help deconvert/deradicalize people more effectively than a piece edited by an outsider. And whatever persuaded him to abandon those views might also work on others.
Bennet might complain that publishing such a piece would put him in an impossible bind, because any attempt to find common ground with alt-righters, and explain what originally drew him to the movement to do effective deconversion, could be spun as “Jonah Bennett doubles down on alt-right ideology” for clicks. Bennet might also complain that publishing such a piece would make him a target for alt-right harassment. However, if Bennett is sincerely sorry for what he said, it seems to me that he should be willing to accept these risks. At least he could offer to publish a critique of the alt-right that’s written by someone else.
If he does publish such a piece, I personally would be inclined to tentatively accept him back into civil society—but if he’s unwilling to publish such a piece, I think it’s reasonable to wonder if he’s “hiding his true power level” and be suspicious/condemnatory.
I do feel we should have some sort of path to forgiveness for those who sincerely wish to leave extremist movements.
communal violence seems to be common in post-colonial contexts, where many borders have been drawn in disregard to geographic grouping of social groups.
Hmmm, would this reasoning also imply that immigration restrictions could reduce communal violence in some cases? If putting people of different social groups in the same country tends to cause conflict.
Ozy also wrote a response to this article which agrees with some of your points:
I think the Center for Election Science, an EA organization that advocates approval voting, could be an effective anti-polarization organization. There seems to be widespread dissatisfaction with the 2-party system, and I believe it’s contributing significantly to polarization.
There’s something rather delightful about money being matched from Republican and Democrat donors in order to fund an organization which aims to get rid of the 2-party system :)