yefreitor

Karma: 163

yefreitor May 18, 2023, 12:15 AM
14 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: EA Survey 2022: Demographics
I’m curious what you all think about EA’s extreme left-leaning political skew
It’s an artifact. What’s really being measured here is EA’s skew towards educated urban professionals, for whom identifying as “left” or “center left” is a signal of group membership. The actual dominant ideology is, broadly speaking, technocratic liberalism: the same cluster as “center-right” Rockefeller Republicans, “centrist” New Democrats, or “center-left” LibDems, but qualitatively different from the “center-right” CDU or “center-left” New Dealers.
and whether it represents a problem that needs some attention
Getting Christian conservatives to allocate their donations more effectively would be an extremely good thing but it will never ever happen under the aegis of EA. You would need a totally separate cultural infrastructure, built for (and probably by) communitarians instead of liberal universalists.

yefreitor May 15, 2023, 2:36 AM
2 points
2 ∶ 0
on: yefreitor’s Shortform
Claim: Credible plans for a “pivotal act” may drive AI race dynamics
(Epistemic status: I had mathematica do all the grunt work and did not check the results carefully)
Consider a simple normal-form game with two equally capable agents A and B, each of which is deciding whether to aggressively pursue AI development, and three free parameters:
- the probability $p_{d o o m}$ that accelerating AI development results in an existential catastrophe (with utility −1 for both agents, versus a utility 0 status quo).
- the utility $u_{1}$ of developing the first friendly AI
- the utility $- 1 < u_{2} < u_{1}$ of the other agent developing friendly AI
We’ll first assume the coin only gets flipped once: developing a friendly AI lets you immediately control all other AI development.
Since our choice of parameterization was in retrospect one that requires a lot of typing, we’ll define $u_{+} = \frac{u_{1} + u_{2}}{2}$ , $u_{-} = u_{1} - u_{+} = u_{+} - u_{2}$ and then rescale to get something more readable
$\begin{matrix} Accelerate & Don't Accelerate & u_{+} & u_{+} - u_{-}, u_{+} + u_{-} Don't & u_{+} + u_{-}, u_{+} - u_{-} & \frac{p_{d o o m}}{1 - p_{d o o m}} \end{matrix}$
- (Accelerate, Accelerate) is always a Nash equilibrium, no matter how trivial the differences $u_{-}$ captures are.
- (Don’t, Don’t) is a Nash equilibrium when $(u_{+} + u_{-}) (1 - p_{d o o m}) < p_{d o o m}$ , as you would expect
- (Don’t, Don’t) is never a trembling-hand equilibrium, since (Don’t) does not weakly dominate (Accelerate) for either player.
- When $(u_{+} + u_{-}) (1 - p_{d o o m}) \geq p_{d o o m}$ (Accelerate) weakly dominates (Don’t) and (Accelerate, Accelerate) is a trembling-hand equilibrium.
Now consider the case where (Accelerate, Accelerate) instead flips two coins.
$\begin{matrix} Accelerate & Don't Accelerate & u_{+} (1 - p_{d o o m}) - p_{d o o m} & u_{+} - u_{-}, u_{+} + u_{-} Don't & u_{+} + u_{-}, u_{+} - u_{-} & \frac{p_{d o o m}}{1 - p_{d o o m}} \end{matrix}$
This is potentially a much safer situation:
- (Accelerate, Accelerate) is only a Nash equilibrium when $p_{d o o m} < \frac{u_{-}}{u_{+} + 1}$
- (Don’t, Don’t) is still a Nash equilibrium when $(u_{+} + u_{-}) (1 - p_{d o o m}) < p_{d o o m} ⟺ p_{d o o m} > \frac{u_{+} + u_{-}}{u_{+} + u_{-} + 1}$
- (Don’t, Don’t) is a trembling-hand equilibrium if it’s a Nash equilibrium and (Accelerate, Accelerate) is not.

yefreitor’s Quick takes

yefreitorMay 15, 2023, 2:36 AM

3 points

1 comment1 min readEA link

yefreitor May 14, 2023, 11:21 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: How much do markets value Open AI?
A BOTEC indicates that Open AI might have been valued at >200x their annual recurring revenue, which is by far the highest multiple I can find evidence of for a company of that size. This seems consistent with the view that markets think OAI will be exceptional, but not “equivalent to the Industrial Revolution” exceptional, and a variety of factors make this multiple hard to interpret.
I would be very cautious about trying to extract information from private valuations, especially at this still somewhat early stage. Private markets are far less efficient than public ones, large funding rounds are less efficient still, and large funding rounds led by the organization that controls your infrastructure might as well be poker games.

yefreitor May 12, 2023, 7:14 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Paul Currion’s comment on: Why Not EA? [paper draft]
Clearly you find me arrogant, but there’s not much I can do about that—I’ve tried to be as polite as I can, but clearly that was insufficient.
You come across as arrogant for a few reasons which are in principle fixable.
1: You seem to believe people who don’t share your values are simply ignorant of them, and not in a deep “looking for a black cat in an unlit room through a mirror darkly” sort of way. If you think your beliefs are prima facie correct, fine, most people do—but you still have to argue for them.
2: You mischaracterize utilitarianism in ways that are frankly incomprehensible, and become evasive when those characterizations are challenged. At the risk of reproducing exactly that pattern, here’s an example:
In humanitarian action effectiveness is an instrumental value not an intrinsic value
...
EA is a form of utilitarianism, and when the word effective is used it has generally been in the sense of “cost effective”. If you are not an effective altruist (which I am not), then cost effectiveness—while important—is an instrumental value rather than an intrinsic value.
...
I’m not a utilitarian, so I reject the premise of this question when presented in the abstract as it is here. Effectiveness for me is an instrumental value
As you have been more politely told many times in this comment section already: claiming that utilitarians assign intrinsic value to cost-effectiveness is absurd. Utilitarians value total well-being (though what exactly that means is a point of contention) and nothing else. I would happily incinerate all the luxury goods humanity has ever produced if it meant no one ever went hungry again. Others would go much further.
What I suspect you’re actually objecting to is aggregation of utility across persons—since that, plus the grossly insufficient resources available to us, is what makes cost-effectiveness a key instrumental concern in almost all situations—but if so the objection is not articulated clearly enough to engage with.
3: Bafflingly, given (1), you also don’t seem to feel the need to explain what your values are! You name them (or at least it seems these are yours) and move on, as if we all understood
humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence
in precisely the same way. But we don’t. For example: utilitarianism is clearly “impartial” and “neutral” as I understand them (i.e. agent-neutral and impartial with respect to different moral patients) whereas folk-morality is clearly not.
I’m guessing, having just googled that quote, that you mean something like this
Humanity means that human suffering must be addressed wherever it is found, with particular attention to the most vulnerable.
Neutrality means that humanitarian aid must not favour any side in an armed conflict or other dispute.
Impartiality means that humanitarian aid must be provided solely on the basis of need, without discrimination.
Independence means the autonomy of humanitarian objectives from political, economic, military or other objectives.
in which case there’s a further complication: you’re almost certainly using “intrinsic value” and “instrumental value” in a very different sense from the people you’re talking to. The above versions of “independence” and “neutrality” are, by my lights, obviously instrumental—these are cultural norms for one particular sort of organization at one particular moment in human history, not universal moral law.

yefreitor May 10, 2023, 7:48 PM
11 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Why Not EA? [paper draft]
Critics like Srinivasan, Crary, etc., pretty explicitly combine a political stance with criticism of EA’s “utilitarian” foundations
Yes, they’re hostile to utilitarianism and to some extent agent-neutrality in general, but the account of “EA principles” you give earlier in the paper is much broader.
Effective altruism is sometimes confused with utilitarianism. It shares with utilitarianism the innocuous claim that, all else equal,it’s better to do more good than less. But EA does not entail utilitarianism’s more controversial claims. It does not entail hegemonic impartial maximizing: the EA project may just be one among many in a well-rounded life …
I’ve elsewhere described the underlying philosophy of effective altruism as“beneficentrism”—or “utilitarianism minus the controversial bits”—that is, “the view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important, and should be amongst one’s central life projects.” Utilitarians take beneficentrism to be exhaustive of fundamental morality, but others may freely combine it with other virtues, prerogatives, or pro tanto duties.
Critics like Crary and Srinivasan (and this particular virtue-ethicsy line of critique should not be conflated with “political” critique in general) are not interested in discussing “EA principles” in this sense. When they say something like “I object to EA principles” they’re objecting to what they judge to be the actual principles animating EA discourse, not the ones the community “officially” endorses.
They might be wrong about what those principles are—personally my impression is that EA is very strongly committed to consequentialism but in practice not all that utilitarian—but it’s an at least partially empirical question, not something that can be resolved in the abstract.

yefreitor May 10, 2023, 8:29 AM
5 points
3 ∶ 1
on: Why Not EA? [paper draft]
In this paper, I’ve argued that there are no good intellectual critiques of effective altruist principles. We should all agree that the latter are straightforwardly correct. But it’s always possible that true claims might be used to ill effect in the world. Many objections to effective altruism, such as the charge that it provides “moral cover” to the wealthy, may best be understood in these political terms.

I don’t think philosophers have any special expertise in adjudicating such empirical disagreements, so will not attempt to do so here. I’ll just note two general reasons for being wary of such politicized objections to moral claims.

First, I think we should have a strong default presumption in favour of truth and transparency. While it’s always conceivable that esotericism or “noble lies” could be justified, we should generally be very skeptical that lying about morality would actually be for the best. In this particular case, it seems especially implausible that discouraging people from trying to do good effectively is a good idea. I can’t rule it out—it’s a logical possibility—but it sure would be surprising. So there’s a high bar for allowing political judgments to override intellectual ones.
This is pretty uncharitable. Someone somewhere has probably sincerely argued for claiming helping people is bad on the grounds that doing so helps people, but “political” critics of EA are critics of EA, the particular subculture/professional network/cluster of organizations that exists right now, not “EA principles”. This is somewhat obscured by the fact that the loudest and best-networked ones come from “low decoupling” intellectual cultures, and often don’t take talk of principles qua principles seriously enough to bother indicating that they’re talking about something else—but it’s not obscure to them, and they’re not going to give you any partial credit here.

yefreitor May 10, 2023, 4:24 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Towards Internationalist Conservativism
However, internationalist strains of thought are currently far less influential within conservatism...
Crudely, about half the time, conservatives are in power. To help promote internationalist policy, which is vital to tackle global catastrophic risk and extreme poverty, we need to promote and strengthen existing internationalist schools of thought within conservatism, or even create new internationalist schools of thought within conservatism.
I think this gets the causation backwards.
Conservatism, like any other ideological cluster, does not exist independently of the real political movements that constitute it. There is no law of nature that says “conservatives”, in some abstract ideal sense, are going to be in power half of the time. Whatever level of success contemporary conservative parties have is a fact about actually existing conservatives, not “conservatism” as such. They’re not inherently traditionalists and only accidentally nationalists; they just have whatever traits they have, any combination of which might explain their success.

yefreitor May 8, 2023, 4:11 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Graphical Representations of Paul Christiano’s Doom Model
Do you disagree with any?
Treating “good future” and “irreversibly messed up future” as exhaustive seems clearly incorrect to me.
Consider for instance the risk of an AI-stabilized personalist dictatorship, in which literally all political power is concentrated in a single immortal human being.^[1]Clearly things are not going great at this point. But whether they’re irreversibly bad hinges on a lot of questions about human psychology—about the psychology of one particular human, in fact—that we don’t have answers to.
- There’s some evidence Big-5 Agreeableness increases slowly over time. Would the trend hold out to thousands of years?
- How long-term are long-term memories (augmented to whatever degree human mental architecture permits)?
- Are value differences between humans really insurmountable or merely very very very hard to resolve? Maybe spending ten thousand years with the classics really would cultivate virtue.
- Are normal human minds even stable in the very long run? Maybe we all wirehead ourselves eventually, given the chance.
So it seems to me that if we’re not ruling out permanent dystopia we shouldn’t rule out “merely” very long lived dystopia either.
This is clearly not a “good future”, in the sense that the right response to “100% chance of a good future” is to rush towards it as fast as possible, and the right response to “10% chance of utopia ’till the stars go cold, 90% chance of spending a thousand years beneath Cyber-Caligula’s sandals followed by rolling the dice again”^[2] is to slow down and see if you can improve the odds a bit. But it doesn’t belong in the “irreversibly messed up” bin either: even after Cyber-Caligula takes over, the long-run future is still almost certainly utopian.
1. ^
  Personally I think this is far less likely than AI-stabilized oligarchy (which, if not exactly a good future, is at least much less likely to go off into rotating-golden-statue-land) but my impression is that it’s the prototypical “irreversible dystopia” for most people.
2. ^
  Obviously our situation is much worse than this

yefreitor May 7, 2023, 5:04 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Clarifying and predicting AGI
Some projects take humans much longer (e.g. proving Fermat’s last theorem) but they can almost always be decomposed into subtasks that don’t require full global context (even tho that’s often helpful for humans).
At least for math, I don’t think this is the right way to frame things: finding the right decomposition is often the hard part! “Average math undergrad”-level mathematical reasoning at vastly superhuman speed probably gets you a 1-year artificial mathematician, but I doubt it gets you a 50-year one.

yefreitor May 6, 2023, 3:44 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: finm’s comment on: What is effective altruism? How could it be improved?
Competitive markets can involve some behaviour which is not directly productive, but does help companies get a leg-up on one another (such that many or all companies involved would prefer if that behaviour weren’t an option for anyone). One example is advertising (advertising is useful for other reasons, I mostly have in mind “Pepsi vs Coke” style advertising).
It’s worth noting that this is a case of (and cause of) imperfect competition: perfect competition and the attendant efficiency results require the existence of perfect substitutes for any one producer’s goods.

yefreitor May 6, 2023, 3:35 AM
9 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: What is effective altruism? How could it be improved?
but it’s not clear to me that the assumptions of these theorems are actually satisfied by EA
Definitely not. A small sample of the obstacles to applying the welfare theorems here:
- Certain “trades” have very large negative externalities due to the risk of reputational harm
- The largest few funders have huge amounts of market power.
- We’re extremely far from perfect information. “Consumers” don’t even have good knowledge of their own utility functions in most cases.
- EA is not a complete system of markets—the vast majority of possible charitable interventions are not on offer at any given time.
- Perhaps most importantly: “sellers” aren’t profit-maximizers
But even if EA did approximate a perfectly competitive market, that would imply very little about its effectiveness. The first welfare theorem says that perfect competition gets you a Pareto-efficient outcome, but Pareto-efficient outcomes can be almost arbitrarily bad. “The king owns literally everything” is Pareto-efficient. The second welfare theorem is where all the oomph comes from: given perfect competition, you can reach any point on the Pareto-frontier—by redistributing resources and then letting the market reequilibrate. But EA is not a state and cannot carry out redistribution, so this gets us nothing.

yefreitor May 5, 2023, 6:15 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews.
If you think that American communists don’t have an unusually strong intrinsic value of equality then I think you’re mistaken
My claim is that it’s not an intrinsic value—it’s the result of “instrumental convergence” between adherents of many different value systems, grounded in their shared conception of our present circumstances. If our circumstances were different, the conclusions would be too.
If, for instance, the United States had a robust social-democratic welfare state, most communists would be much less concerned with equality than they are now.
If it were instead some sort of agrarian yeoman-republic (certainly impossible now, but conceivable if early American history had gone very differently), then plausibly communists could instead take a mildly anti-egalitarian tack—inefficient small farmers frustrating the development of the productive forces and so on.
What you would never get, regardless of prevailing conditions, are communists who are also market fundamentalists.
If you think worldviews aren’t to a substantial extent about beliefs that I suspect we just mean different things by “worldviews”.
Really what I think is that beliefs can’t, in general, be cleanly separated from attitudes and concepts and mere habits of thought and so on—at the end of the day human cognition is what it is. But to the extent that there are distinguished object- and meta-levels, I think meta-level variation is the strongest driver of object-level variation between at least moderately educated people.
For instance, I would not call a bunch of the examples you gave “worldviews.”
Those were intended as characteristic beliefs that would pick out clearly recognizable clusters, not entire worldviews themselves. “Love Thy Neighbor” as a substitute for “Christianity”—except that I don’t have good names for the worldviews in question.
I’ve likely overestimated how salient the concrete-instrumentalist-(problem solver) vs. abstract-(scientific realist)-(theory builder) divide is for most people, but I think the two are clearly at least as different and understand each other at least as poorly as mainstream liberals and conservatives in the US.

yefreitor May 4, 2023, 6:12 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews.
I think this article is quite badly mistaken, both in its account of what particular groups believe and its understanding of worldviews as such. It’s also an excellent illustration of what happens when you fail to notice the walls of your own “snowglobe”—in this case, contemporary Anglophone politics (such as it is) as seen from the inside.
This is a domain where the most visible fault lines between worldviews really are about The Right and The Good—to a certain degree because politics has always been about The Right and The Good, but also because we happen to live in a culture—a worldview—that excludes most other substantive disagreements (from “are any normative claims even truth-apt, let alone true?” to “to what extent is political persuasion possible?” to “are real economies close to equilibrium?”) from the political sphere.
On the rare occasions when other issues make their way into public discourse (or when you wait for things to get heated elsewhere), you see just as much baffled incomprehension.
- “Why do mathematicians complicate things by talking about real numbers, in real life you can only ever observe rationals” (missing insight: “the” real numbers are more complicated as a set but simpler as e.g. a topological space (or other relevant structure))
- “Qualia don’t offer any explanatory power, this is just rehashed vitalism” (missing insight: they’re explananda, not explanations)
- “Dark matter is just some placeholder physicists came up with to explain there being too much gravity, they should change the theory instead, why should I believe in something I can’t even see?” (missing insight: all objects are placeholders to explain our measurements)
Worldviews are not principally about moral beliefs because they’re not principally about beliefs. They’re principally about concepts—the ones you use habitually, the ones you recognize, the ones you actively reject, the ones you don’t even know you’re missing—and the relations between them. The object-level disagreements are, for the most part, further downstream.
An example from the linked post: the “American Communists” table (which I’m going to round off to “Marxists”) is more wrong than right. Relevant excerpt:
- Intrinsic values: Equality
- Where does good come from? Labor, and workers owning the means of production
- Where does bad come from? Capitalism and class systems
- Who deserves good things? Workers
- What should you do to be good? Try to abolish capitalism and support labor rights
The missing insight here, I think, is that unlike most of the other entries (but like the “Silicon Valley Techno-Optimists”, with whom they share far more than most members of either group would care to admit), Marxists see themselves as carrying out a historical process, not advocating for a set of values.
The view of history, accordingly, should come first. Tanner Greer’s account here is a good one
Orthodox Marxism describes the last few thousand years of history as a dialectical advance, each step in humankind’s social evolution an emancipation from natural forces paired with deepening servitude to artificial ones. The problem is not greedy capitalists, but capitalism, a structure of incentives that gives capitalists no option but to live rapacious. It was not the capitalists’ fault, really: for those inside the vortex there is no escape from the ceaseless whirl. We all live in thrall to the depersonalized incentives of the capitalist machine; we all are slaves to the blind force of the marketplace. The game cannot be changed by those stuck playing it: one must play or perish. The only solution possible is for an outside force to intervene and reshape the terms of the game. Socialist revolution will be that force. With no stake in the current order, the propertyless masses will wipe the slate clean. Human life in the world to come will be twice blessed: technology and industry has freed mankind from the shackles of nature. Revolution will now break the artificial shackles that technology and industry themselves had forged. From that point forward great decisions will not be filtered through the partial interests of the individual, but decided rationally, with the entire whole in mind. Then mankind would be free! Free from the manipulations of the market! Free from egoism, from indecency, from all the terrible things the system forces us to do to each other! Moloch vanquished, human life would finally flourish as our inborn natures intended.
Intrinsic values? Human ones, no further comment. Where does bad come from? Moloch. Where does good come from? Also Moloch. What should you do to [kill Moloch]? Feed it until it chokes on its own waste.
This is not a worldview that fits in a value-system shaped hole.

yefreitor May 2, 2023, 11:23 PM
5 points
1 ∶ 1
on: AGI rising: why we are in a new era of acute risk and increasing public awareness, and what to do now
Common objections to this narrative are that there won’t be enough compute, or data, for this to happen. These don’t hold water after a cursory examination of our situation. We are nowhere near close to the physical limits to computation (the theoretical limit set by physics is, to a first approximation, as many orders of magnitude above current infrastructure as current infrastructure is above the babbage engine).
And we are nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere near being able to even begin approaching them. We’re closer to nanotech. We’re closer to dyson spheres. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s like an iron-age armorsmith worrying about the physical limits of tensile strength.
Hardware overhang is a legitimate concern but you hurt your argument quite badly by mixing it with this stuff. In the whole history of the universe no one will ever be hit in the head with an entire ringworld. It’s steel you have to worry about.

yefreitor May 2, 2023, 3:26 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: The costs of caution
Insofar as AI x-risk looks like LLMs while awesome stuff like medicine (and robotics and autonomous vehicles and more) doesn’t look like LLMs, caution on LLMs doesn’t delay other awesome stuff.* So when you talk about slowing AI progress, make it clear that you only mean AI on the path to dangerous capabilities.
AI biologists seem extremely dangerous to me—something “merely” as good at viral genomes as GPT-4 is at language would already be an existential threat to human civilization, if not necessarily homo sapiens.

yefreitor May 2, 2023, 3:13 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
But perhaps “many people (and many EAs) likely place <50% credence on” is not a good operationalization of “controversial.” In that case maybe it’d be helpful to operationalize what we mean by that word.
I think the relevant consideration here isn’t whether a post is (implicitly or not) assuming controversial premises, it’s the degree to which it’s (implicitly or not) recommending controversial courses of action.
There’s a big difference between a longtermist analysis of the importance of nuclear nonproliferation and a longtermist analysis of airstrikes on foreign data centers, for instance.

yefreitor May 2, 2023, 2:34 PM
3 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kerkko Pelttari’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
I don’t really know what the solutions for this are. On a personal level I think perhaps I need to read more old books or participate in reading circles where non-EA books are read.
I would suggest, as a perhaps easier on-ramp, reading writing by analytic philosophers defending the views of people from other traditions or eras. A few examples:
- A Spirit of Trust, Robert Brandom (Hegel)
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (not really a defense of premodern physics, which is of course empirically wrong, but a defense of its coherence)
- Pragmatism as a Way of Life, Hilary and Ruth Putnam (American Pragmatism)
- Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, G.A. Cohen (historical materialism)

yefreitor May 1, 2023, 10:42 PM
14 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
I’m seeing an argument against dogmatically enforcing particular sub-branches of feminism
I don’t think these are sub-branches of any single coherent thing, any more than contemporary left-of-center politics is just hashing things out between factions of the Jacobin club. Feminism is at most a loose intellectual tradition, not an ideology.
The actual cluster-structure here is something like
- the self-identified left
  - radical feminism (not “feminism which is radical”) is largely its own thing
  - the liberal left
    mainstream liberalism
    academic liberal feminism
    traditional feminist political organizations: NOW, Planned Parenthood, etc.
    the new left and its descendants
    queer theory, “third wave” feminism
    “woke” politics
    anarchism, libertarian socialism, etc.
    the environmental movement, other “hippie” groups (the actual hippies somewhat less so)
  - the radical left
    Marxism
    Radical social democracy (some overlap with liberalism)
    “materialist” feminism (largely extinct)
What stance do you actually want EA to take when it comes to this issue? Do you want to shun feminist scholars, or declare their opinions to be unworthy of serious thought?
Engagement with radical feminism would be both actively harmful and, given their well-deserved reputation for rabid transphobia, a serious reputational risk. They should be completely ignored.
EA is already quite engaged with mainstream liberalism. This is basically fine, but the fact that it’s often not acknowledged as an ideological stance is very bad: many EAs have a missing gear called “other worldviews make perfect sense on their own terms and are not deformed versions of your own”. No change in attitude vis a vis liberal feminism is needed, just go take some old books seriously for a while or something.
The New Left has a bit to offer on the “big ideas” front, but it has terrible epistemics, worse praxis, and is also weird and alienating to a significant fraction of the population. I think it would be a serious mistake for EA organizations to promote their frameworks. Engagement with people who already buy it seems unlikely to matter much either way—it’s an almost completely incommensurable worldview.
Any good-faith engagement whatsoever with left-of-liberal politics would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

yefreitor May 1, 2023, 2:48 PM
15 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
There’s feminism and then there’s feminism (and also feminism, feminism, and feminism). Even within the academy you have radfems (e.g. Julie Bindel) and queer theorists (e.g. Julia Serano) and liberals (e.g. Martha Nussbaum) at each other’s throats—and I very much doubt that the average self-identified feminist has any of them in mind (as opposed to, say, maternal leave and abortion access) when they claim that label.

yefreitor

yefre­itor’s Quick takes

yefreitor’s Quick takes