If what you most want is for lots of smart young people to be rationalists and to think altruistically, then you still should not want ESPR to be a recruiting/ethics-shaping tool, because on a timescale longer than a couple of years it is unlikely to work for that purpose.
I think I largely agree with this. I think it’s Good to be clear about the thing you’re trying to push, and also being forceful with ideology isn’t a viable long-term strategy. The worry about things like evaporative cooling and problems with seemingly deceptive practice are valid.
I do in fact think it’d be a great thing if more students get into EA/rationality, and I also think that claiming one thing and having camp be about another thing is Bad.
I sort of wish I could have given more context for the original post-mortem analysis. While I used a very utilitarian framing looking back, I’m pretty confident that’s not how it felt at the time; I just wanted to make the camp great for the students, and that was it. No grand scheming of how to secretly instill people with the ‘right’ ethics, values, etc.
(For context, I was the staff member rated most highly by participants under “ease of interaction”.)
I don’t think that I get a lot of credibility for saying it now, alas, and I realize that this makes it seem like my ethics got worse over time. And that might actually be the case here (though I subjectively would want to say otherwise).
When I was writing the post-mortem, I was like, “Huh. What seem to be the effects of camp?” and what’s been on my mind lately have been evaluations from an EA perspective. So to the extent that you might be inclined to trust the current me less because of these professed claims seems reasonable.
But I think that the person I was before / during ESPR was far more committed to the students’ general well-being than the original post-mortem might have you conclude.
Wrapping up, I want to say that your critiques have largely been things I agree with, and, for what my current beliefs are worth, you can consider me more strongly convinced of the fact that the impact-based views expressed in the original post-mortem are flawed / bad to fully execute on in the ESPR context.
(I do think certain explicit things like 80,000 Hours workshops for college students can also be impactful / good. But I don’t think we disagree on this.)
(Also I want to claim that the original impact assessments were from just one framing, and I also just actually care about the students, but of course saying this now is also suspect / hindsight.)
Thanks for continuing the conversation.
I think I largely agree with this. I think it’s Good to be clear about the thing you’re trying to push, and also being forceful with ideology isn’t a viable long-term strategy. The worry about things like evaporative cooling and problems with seemingly deceptive practice are valid.
I do in fact think it’d be a great thing if more students get into EA/rationality, and I also think that claiming one thing and having camp be about another thing is Bad.
I sort of wish I could have given more context for the original post-mortem analysis. While I used a very utilitarian framing looking back, I’m pretty confident that’s not how it felt at the time; I just wanted to make the camp great for the students, and that was it. No grand scheming of how to secretly instill people with the ‘right’ ethics, values, etc.
(For context, I was the staff member rated most highly by participants under “ease of interaction”.)
I don’t think that I get a lot of credibility for saying it now, alas, and I realize that this makes it seem like my ethics got worse over time. And that might actually be the case here (though I subjectively would want to say otherwise).
When I was writing the post-mortem, I was like, “Huh. What seem to be the effects of camp?” and what’s been on my mind lately have been evaluations from an EA perspective. So to the extent that you might be inclined to trust the current me less because of these professed claims seems reasonable.
But I think that the person I was before / during ESPR was far more committed to the students’ general well-being than the original post-mortem might have you conclude.
Wrapping up, I want to say that your critiques have largely been things I agree with, and, for what my current beliefs are worth, you can consider me more strongly convinced of the fact that the impact-based views expressed in the original post-mortem are flawed / bad to fully execute on in the ESPR context.
(I do think certain explicit things like 80,000 Hours workshops for college students can also be impactful / good. But I don’t think we disagree on this.)
(Also I want to claim that the original impact assessments were from just one framing, and I also just actually care about the students, but of course saying this now is also suspect / hindsight.)