Physics Student with a wide range of interest.
Co-organizer of EA Tübingen.
Yannick_Muehlhaeuser
Karma: 394
EA Analysis of the German Coalition Agreement 2021–2025
Risks from Bad Space Governance
Investigating the Long Reflection
I share you irriation with this article. This struck me as a normal opinion Vox opinion piece, which never should have been postet on Future Perfect.
I think some of your points of criticism might be explained by the fact that we had to/wanted to keep the article below a certain length. But i also believe that when Dylan writes for Future Perfect about such political topics, he should make sure to argue every point carefully as well as be especially rigorous and careful in his arguments.
I have thought about this topic a lot, so I am always excited what other people think about the question. I basically agree with all the explanations you came up with and I think they explain most of the difference.
There is another points I think might be part of the explanation: Many highly engaged EAs are very ambitious and often highly intelligent. Those are the kinds of people that would be much more likely to attend highly competitive universities like Oxford or Cambridge. So if you just look at the EA-potential of the set of students at one of those Unis, I just think it’s a lot higher than at the average University in Germany where no such selection effect exists and students don’t differ that strongly between cities.
Additionally, due to the absence of tuition in Germany a lot of german students seem to not take their studies very seriously, so the percentage of students registered at the university that would invest significant time in a local group is reduced before even looking at things like value alignment and stuff.
From my experience small EA groups are often stuck in a bad equilibrium. Without many members it becomes challenging to do many events. A lot of the responsibility will rest on the shoulders of the organizer(s), but those are often less motivated if only a few people attend the events. This might even lead to them investing less time in the future. The exact opposite happens if a group is on an upward trajectory in membership.
Overall I fully share your opinion that we need much more ambition and a spirit of optimism and I am excited for the future of the Göttingen local group!
Congratulations to the team that did the media outreach work for the book—looks like you guys did an incredible job!
I am personally also very unsure of how to feel about european federalism. At this present moment it seems to me there is neither a strong political majority for further political integration, nor is there one for a significant roll-back. I expect the next years to be about management of the status-quo.
While I think that a federal EU would be desirable in principle, at the present moment the risk of backlash seems high enough to me that I don’t think EAs should invest resources into pushing for it. Although if such a push were to happen, there seem to be many opportunities in the steering of this process, as I expect it to be in large part elite-driven.
Good and important points. I feel maybe the same care should be taken towards people who have various kinds of anti-capitalist beliefs.
Another thing that came to my mind recently. In Germany many EA meetups are still held in english. Maybe there are some people who would be open to EA ideas, but having to listen and more importantly speak english before people they don’t know comes with extra effort. So at the beginning the hurdle for joining may be a just a bit higher.
I agree in general that depending on Russia for your energy is concerning. However, two points:
(1) Given that it is possible to import LNG from the US (although more expensive), energy dependence on Russia is always in a sense chosen and needs itself to be explained.
(2) This is just one data point, but at least in 2017 german dependence on gas was not higher than neighbouring countries. https://imgur.com/a/UhHaZ3B
Great Interview.
I share the impression that dedication is less encouraged in EA these days than five years ago
Not sure i agree with this. Certainly there is less focus on donating hug sums of money, but that may also be explained by the shift to EA Orgs now often recommending direct work. But i think the EA community as a hole now focusses less on attracting huge ammounts of people and more on keeping the existing members engaged and dedicated and influencing their career choice (if i remember correctly the strategic write-ups from both CEA and EAF seem to reflect this).
For instance, the recent strategy write-up by CEA mentions dedication as an important factor:
We can think of the amount of good someone can be expected to do as being the product of three factors (in a mathematical sense):
Resources: The extent of the resources (money, useful labor, etc.) they have to offer;
Dedication: The proportion of these resources that are devoted to helping;
Realization: How efficiently the resources devoted to helping are used
But i agree that there is a lot of focus on ‘talent’ and dedication seems to take a second role behind it. This may be defensable but i think that we could probably stress dedication a bit more, because talking about ‘dedication’ may turn less people of than talk about ‘talent’. To me talent seems more like something you have while dedication seems like something that ‘merely’ requires willpower. I would generaly be more worried about ‘lacking talent’ than ‘lacking dedication’, but I don’t really know how many people share that intuition.
Wasn’t it announced at launch, that this would be implemented at some point?
If i could only recommend one book to someone should i recommend this or Doing Good Better? Not really sure about that. What do you think?
Thank you very much for this important work. This should be an important consideration for everyone and an important factor in career planning. I’ll make sure to say something about that in our local EA group at some point.
Some points I think need mentioning:
(1) Everything we read here needs to be adjusted for hindsight bias. I have no idea what the baserate for messy breakups among early-stage start-ups are, but I assume it’s significant. So “had a messy start-up breakup” is not a super reliable signal of a future scammer.
(2) We have only heard one sight of the story. We don’t know the reasons given by the people that didn’t quit. We don’t know how SBF explained the story at the time to Will. I think it’s likely that those details will make some of the EA Leader’s behaviour sound a bit more understandable.
That being said, some of the details reported in the article certainly sound concerning and gives us significant reasons to believe in serious wrongdoing. All of this should be seriously be investigated and we need to think carefully about how we can avoid things like that in the future.
I agree with other commenters that a CEA response is long overdue. I understand that they are involved in a trial and have they reasons, but they should try to say as much as they can, since the downsides of remaining silent are significant.