I think I’ve now pivoted to thinking that the point of ESPR is to get more people thinking altruistically, with effectiveness and rationality as merely nice-to-haves.
If that is the real goal, and if you’re advertising this as a “summer program on rationality” (hmm, if it’s European, shouldn’t it be a programme?), then I worry that you are misleading applicants about what they’re in for.
On the other hand, if that is the real goal, and you advertise it as a “thing that might make you more altruistic”, then you probably won’t get many takers, and the ones you get will probably already be exceptionally altruistic.
Some years ago I was a Christian, and I helped to run some children’s holidays for a Christian organization. These holidays featured fun-and-educational activities (involving e.g. teaching them computer programming) and also some religious content. To many of the people on the team, the point of the holidays was to make as many converts as possible of attendees who weren’t already Christians (yup, some people send their not-Christian children to Christian summer camps run by an organization with “Scripture” in its name; people are strange) and maximize the religious commitment and zeal of attendees who were already Christians. That felt uncomfortable to me at the time, and this feels uncomfortable to me now in the same way.
These kids are taking time, and paying (their parents’) money [EDITED to add: ah, no, I see it’s free, so that particular issue doesn’t apply], for something that promises to help them think more clearly. Give them what they’re there for. If you, or all the staff, or the organization that’s making it happen hope that the kids will end up more altruistic, that’s absolutely fine—but if you start making it what the event is really for then you are getting them there under false pretences so as to manipulate them, and that is Not OK.
(I am not claiming that that’s actually what happened, of course. Only that that’s how it sounds, and that it would in my view be really bad if that were the reality.)
[EDITED to add:] That little quotation above is not at all the only thing that gave me the same creepy quasi-religious-proselytism vibe, I’m sorry to say. Others: “making sure that the future is going to turn out well means making sure the smartest people in 20 years have a good set of ethics” (as a justification for getting very smart people on the camp); “there’s a crucial question of “rope newcomers into the community” versus “marshall existing young community members””; “probability that a student takes well to crazy-sounding ideas [...] is what at least 30% of what ESPR is”. I so hope I’m wrong; but this really looks to me as if you are roping kids in to this programme with the promise of something whose goal is to teach them rationality when the real purpose of the thing is to rope them into the community and make sure they have ethics you like and get them to agree to a bunch of crazy-sounding ideas. No no no no no no. Please. It’s not honest, and (in my judgement, which of course you may disagree with) the likely consequences of following this path are very bad.
Upvoted for raising legitimate concerns that were also raised by other people at camp.
[Once again, my opinions and not CFAR/ESPR’s]
I want to stress that this doc reflects things I personally wanted / hoped, so critiques of values expressed should probably be directed towards me.
Other staff gave pushback to explicitly pushing an agenda at camp (even if that’s what some people like me thought would be good to have happen).
I can’t say the final result was completely devoid of having classes that pushed an agenda. For example, we had two guest speakers come talk about effective altruism and existential risk.
But I claim that a good number of people were worried about problems with forcing ideas really hard, and this manifested in the camp generally doing the thing we advertised it as, in the form of classes / activities that spanned the spectrum of mathematical / psychological topics.
For context: I did want people to be more involved with the rationality community at large. (I also don’t endorse the “20 years-ethics” claim, and upon reflection I’m less sure about the “taking well to crazy ideas” quote.)
But also, despite any goals I might have had, as a result of pushback against forcing an ideology, I didn’t try very hard to sell anything, and I think this was true of other staff with agendas as well.
I just showed up and tried to very hard to be a Very Good Camp Counselor.
(There’s a bunch of other things here too like how I was super occupied with making sure camp was even functioning in the first place when ESPR was running to be thinking about all this, so this type of post-mortem analysis reflects some inaccuracy in how I actually felt/thought at the time.)
(Also as this is currently the only public writeup done by anyone who worked on ESPR, it means my opinions are coloring discourse pretty heavily. Remember that other ESPR staff, who also contributed in a big way to the project, leaned in other directions.)
I think ESPR as a camp ended up being a generally pretty good experience for the participants, and this is separate from “things Owen wanted to get out of participating in the project”.
Basically:
My goals aren’t necessarily those of ESPR (the organization)’s, and I sort of conflated the two in the above write-up.
Lots of staff shared similar concerns, made them known, and this meant that the camp experience largely turned out pretty good and neutral (I claim), with people being careful to not push agendas.
I realize all this might not do a very good job to assuage worries you have, and I’d be happy to chat further.
It’s reassuring that there was pushback from other staff against the idea that, having brought people in with the promise of a “program in rationality”, the goal should be to bring them into a particular movement and/or push their ethics in a particular direction. And it’s reassuring that this meant you weren’t able to turn the camp into a tool for accomplishing those goals. But it sounds from what you say as if it wouldn’t have been that way if you’d had enough other people “on your side” at the camp—you were reluctantly compelled by others’ attitudes to put up with “the camp generally doing the thing we advertised it as”, so I’m still worried.
Not, for the avoidance of doubt, because I think it would be a bad thing to have more people in the rationalist community, nor because I think it would be a bad thing to have more people thinking in EA-like terms. Both of those are good things! But something can be a good thing and yet not a proper goal to pursue in a particular context.
If the thing is set up so that everyone’s actual incentives are to “just show up and try very hard to be a Very Good Camp Counselor”, then that’s great; everything’s working as it should. But I would very strongly encourage making it an actual goal for the incentives to be so, so that even if in a couple of years half the staff are enthusiastic EAs the camp doesn’t turn into an EA recruitment drive. Again, not because I have any objection to EA! But because something that can turn into an EA recruitment drive masquerading as a rationality-optimizing experience can also turn into a recruitment drive for, say, the Roman Catholic Church masquerading as a rationality-optimizing experience, if it happens to get a different set of staff. And because it shouldn’t be anything masquerading as anything else. Rationality is meant to be about truth-seeking. It should also be about truth-telling.
If “lots of staff shared similar concerns”, think for a moment about what that means. It means that it looked to lots of staff as if the event was EA/rationalist recruitment masquerading as rationality-learning-experience. That’s a really bad sign. Even if their impression was entirely incorrect, giving that impression will lose you good staff. The ones who stay are the ones who are happy with the thing turning into recruitment-masquerading-as-learning, and then you’re on the evaporatively cooling slippery slope to hell. And if their impression wasn’t entirely incorrect, which I’m guessing it wasn’t, that’s even worse.
I’m aware of, and uncomfortable about, the hectoring and moralizing tone I’m taking. And I’m aware of, and uncomfortable about, how unpleasant it is to have your goals attacked in public. But I’m doing it because it sounds to me as if you’re in real trouble here and not realising it. As long as what you really want is for ESPR to be a recruiting/ethics-shaping tool, your goals are radically opposed to the espoused goals of the event and they will lead either to continued frustration for you (if you don’t get what you really want) or disaster for ESPR (if you do). Why disaster? Because if ESPR becomes recruitment/manipulation masquerading as a fun chance for smart people to learn to think better, then people will notice, and then you will get fewer and fewer of the actually-good students, and fewer and fewer team who want anything other than recruitment/manipulation, and the thing will get a reputation for cultishness and dishonesty, and surprisingly quickly you will be in a hole you can’t dig out of. 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. (More precisely: the best it can hope for is to turn into something attended only by people who are already mostly recruited and have roughly the ethics you want, and possibly by people whose parents those things are true of and who are trying to make sure their kids stay in the movement; and everyone will know, really, that while it calls itself a “program in rationality” what it really is is a tool of indoctrination; and, realistically, such a thing is not going to be doing much to make the world a better place.)
Important note: I suspect that you are—very commendably—going out of your way not to make your motives sound “better” than they are, and that to some extent you’re getting jumped on not so much because your goals are bad but because you’re trying hard not to conceal any badness they might have. If you consider that anything I’ve said above is too strong because I’m overestimating the extent to which you’re wanting to treat students as means rather than ends, please consider it appropriately dialled back.
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.)
This rang alarm bells for me:
If that is the real goal, and if you’re advertising this as a “summer program on rationality” (hmm, if it’s European, shouldn’t it be a programme?), then I worry that you are misleading applicants about what they’re in for.
On the other hand, if that is the real goal, and you advertise it as a “thing that might make you more altruistic”, then you probably won’t get many takers, and the ones you get will probably already be exceptionally altruistic.
Some years ago I was a Christian, and I helped to run some children’s holidays for a Christian organization. These holidays featured fun-and-educational activities (involving e.g. teaching them computer programming) and also some religious content. To many of the people on the team, the point of the holidays was to make as many converts as possible of attendees who weren’t already Christians (yup, some people send their not-Christian children to Christian summer camps run by an organization with “Scripture” in its name; people are strange) and maximize the religious commitment and zeal of attendees who were already Christians. That felt uncomfortable to me at the time, and this feels uncomfortable to me now in the same way.
These kids are taking time, and paying (their parents’) money [EDITED to add: ah, no, I see it’s free, so that particular issue doesn’t apply], for something that promises to help them think more clearly. Give them what they’re there for. If you, or all the staff, or the organization that’s making it happen hope that the kids will end up more altruistic, that’s absolutely fine—but if you start making it what the event is really for then you are getting them there under false pretences so as to manipulate them, and that is Not OK.
(I am not claiming that that’s actually what happened, of course. Only that that’s how it sounds, and that it would in my view be really bad if that were the reality.)
[EDITED to add:] That little quotation above is not at all the only thing that gave me the same creepy quasi-religious-proselytism vibe, I’m sorry to say. Others: “making sure that the future is going to turn out well means making sure the smartest people in 20 years have a good set of ethics” (as a justification for getting very smart people on the camp); “there’s a crucial question of “rope newcomers into the community” versus “marshall existing young community members””; “probability that a student takes well to crazy-sounding ideas [...] is what at least 30% of what ESPR is”. I so hope I’m wrong; but this really looks to me as if you are roping kids in to this programme with the promise of something whose goal is to teach them rationality when the real purpose of the thing is to rope them into the community and make sure they have ethics you like and get them to agree to a bunch of crazy-sounding ideas. No no no no no no. Please. It’s not honest, and (in my judgement, which of course you may disagree with) the likely consequences of following this path are very bad.
Upvoted for raising legitimate concerns that were also raised by other people at camp.
[Once again, my opinions and not CFAR/ESPR’s]
I want to stress that this doc reflects things I personally wanted / hoped, so critiques of values expressed should probably be directed towards me.
Other staff gave pushback to explicitly pushing an agenda at camp (even if that’s what some people like me thought would be good to have happen).
I can’t say the final result was completely devoid of having classes that pushed an agenda. For example, we had two guest speakers come talk about effective altruism and existential risk.
But I claim that a good number of people were worried about problems with forcing ideas really hard, and this manifested in the camp generally doing the thing we advertised it as, in the form of classes / activities that spanned the spectrum of mathematical / psychological topics.
For context: I did want people to be more involved with the rationality community at large. (I also don’t endorse the “20 years-ethics” claim, and upon reflection I’m less sure about the “taking well to crazy ideas” quote.)
But also, despite any goals I might have had, as a result of pushback against forcing an ideology, I didn’t try very hard to sell anything, and I think this was true of other staff with agendas as well.
I just showed up and tried to very hard to be a Very Good Camp Counselor.
(There’s a bunch of other things here too like how I was super occupied with making sure camp was even functioning in the first place when ESPR was running to be thinking about all this, so this type of post-mortem analysis reflects some inaccuracy in how I actually felt/thought at the time.)
(Also as this is currently the only public writeup done by anyone who worked on ESPR, it means my opinions are coloring discourse pretty heavily. Remember that other ESPR staff, who also contributed in a big way to the project, leaned in other directions.)
I think ESPR as a camp ended up being a generally pretty good experience for the participants, and this is separate from “things Owen wanted to get out of participating in the project”.
Basically:
My goals aren’t necessarily those of ESPR (the organization)’s, and I sort of conflated the two in the above write-up.
Lots of staff shared similar concerns, made them known, and this meant that the camp experience largely turned out pretty good and neutral (I claim), with people being careful to not push agendas.
I realize all this might not do a very good job to assuage worries you have, and I’d be happy to chat further.
It’s reassuring that there was pushback from other staff against the idea that, having brought people in with the promise of a “program in rationality”, the goal should be to bring them into a particular movement and/or push their ethics in a particular direction. And it’s reassuring that this meant you weren’t able to turn the camp into a tool for accomplishing those goals. But it sounds from what you say as if it wouldn’t have been that way if you’d had enough other people “on your side” at the camp—you were reluctantly compelled by others’ attitudes to put up with “the camp generally doing the thing we advertised it as”, so I’m still worried.
Not, for the avoidance of doubt, because I think it would be a bad thing to have more people in the rationalist community, nor because I think it would be a bad thing to have more people thinking in EA-like terms. Both of those are good things! But something can be a good thing and yet not a proper goal to pursue in a particular context.
If the thing is set up so that everyone’s actual incentives are to “just show up and try very hard to be a Very Good Camp Counselor”, then that’s great; everything’s working as it should. But I would very strongly encourage making it an actual goal for the incentives to be so, so that even if in a couple of years half the staff are enthusiastic EAs the camp doesn’t turn into an EA recruitment drive. Again, not because I have any objection to EA! But because something that can turn into an EA recruitment drive masquerading as a rationality-optimizing experience can also turn into a recruitment drive for, say, the Roman Catholic Church masquerading as a rationality-optimizing experience, if it happens to get a different set of staff. And because it shouldn’t be anything masquerading as anything else. Rationality is meant to be about truth-seeking. It should also be about truth-telling.
If “lots of staff shared similar concerns”, think for a moment about what that means. It means that it looked to lots of staff as if the event was EA/rationalist recruitment masquerading as rationality-learning-experience. That’s a really bad sign. Even if their impression was entirely incorrect, giving that impression will lose you good staff. The ones who stay are the ones who are happy with the thing turning into recruitment-masquerading-as-learning, and then you’re on the evaporatively cooling slippery slope to hell. And if their impression wasn’t entirely incorrect, which I’m guessing it wasn’t, that’s even worse.
I’m aware of, and uncomfortable about, the hectoring and moralizing tone I’m taking. And I’m aware of, and uncomfortable about, how unpleasant it is to have your goals attacked in public. But I’m doing it because it sounds to me as if you’re in real trouble here and not realising it. As long as what you really want is for ESPR to be a recruiting/ethics-shaping tool, your goals are radically opposed to the espoused goals of the event and they will lead either to continued frustration for you (if you don’t get what you really want) or disaster for ESPR (if you do). Why disaster? Because if ESPR becomes recruitment/manipulation masquerading as a fun chance for smart people to learn to think better, then people will notice, and then you will get fewer and fewer of the actually-good students, and fewer and fewer team who want anything other than recruitment/manipulation, and the thing will get a reputation for cultishness and dishonesty, and surprisingly quickly you will be in a hole you can’t dig out of. 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. (More precisely: the best it can hope for is to turn into something attended only by people who are already mostly recruited and have roughly the ethics you want, and possibly by people whose parents those things are true of and who are trying to make sure their kids stay in the movement; and everyone will know, really, that while it calls itself a “program in rationality” what it really is is a tool of indoctrination; and, realistically, such a thing is not going to be doing much to make the world a better place.)
Important note: I suspect that you are—very commendably—going out of your way not to make your motives sound “better” than they are, and that to some extent you’re getting jumped on not so much because your goals are bad but because you’re trying hard not to conceal any badness they might have. If you consider that anything I’ve said above is too strong because I’m overestimating the extent to which you’re wanting to treat students as means rather than ends, please consider it appropriately dialled back.
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.)