So that other kinds of minds can comment, I’ll try to be brief for now, and suggest we carry on this one on one threat in a couple days, so that others don’t feel disencouraged to come up with ideas neither of us has thought of yet.
For the same reason I don’t address your technical points. But I praise you for responding promptly and in an uplifting mood.
Signaling wars: History shows that signaling wars between classes are not so bad. The high class—of outcome - (in this case, say, Will MacAskill belongs to it) does not need to signal it belongs to the high class. They are known to belong. The middle class, people who are sort of effective altruists may want to signal they belong to the high class. Finally there are people who are in the feeling-oriented only class, who are lurking and don’t need to signal that much, when they do, it is obvious, and not dangerous, it is like when a 17 year old decides he solved quantum physics, and writes a paper about it. The world keeps turning. So the main worry would be the middle class trying to signal being more altruistic then they are. My hope is that either they will end up influencing people anyway by their signal attempt, or else they will, unbeknownst to themselves fake it till they make it, slowly becoming more altruistic. I mean, it feels good to actually do good, so over time, given a division of labour with asymmetric diffusion of information from the outcome-oriented to the feeling-oriented, I expect the signalling wars not to be a big problem. I do however agree that it is a problem and invite others to think about it.
Large decisions don’t come from the day’s mood: In large, I think they don’t (despite those papers about how absurdly small things can get people to subscribe to completely unrelated causes), so I agree with you. What I want to enforce is that we are composed of many tiny homunculi not only in the time dimension, but across all dimensions. Maybe 70% of someone decided for EA, but the part that didn’t wants to be a photographer of nature, I think saying that person has failed the EA ethos would be throwing the baby with the bathwater. Just like it would not throwing them out of the “Advancing Effective Altruism” closed facebook group.
So that other kinds of minds can comment, I’ll try to be brief for now, and suggest we carry on this one on one threat in a couple days, so that others don’t feel disencouraged to come up with ideas neither of us has thought of yet.
For the same reason I don’t address your technical points. But I praise you for responding promptly and in an uplifting mood.
Signaling wars: History shows that signaling wars between classes are not so bad. The high class—of outcome - (in this case, say, Will MacAskill belongs to it) does not need to signal it belongs to the high class. They are known to belong. The middle class, people who are sort of effective altruists may want to signal they belong to the high class. Finally there are people who are in the feeling-oriented only class, who are lurking and don’t need to signal that much, when they do, it is obvious, and not dangerous, it is like when a 17 year old decides he solved quantum physics, and writes a paper about it. The world keeps turning. So the main worry would be the middle class trying to signal being more altruistic then they are. My hope is that either they will end up influencing people anyway by their signal attempt, or else they will, unbeknownst to themselves fake it till they make it, slowly becoming more altruistic. I mean, it feels good to actually do good, so over time, given a division of labour with asymmetric diffusion of information from the outcome-oriented to the feeling-oriented, I expect the signalling wars not to be a big problem. I do however agree that it is a problem and invite others to think about it.
Large decisions don’t come from the day’s mood: In large, I think they don’t (despite those papers about how absurdly small things can get people to subscribe to completely unrelated causes), so I agree with you. What I want to enforce is that we are composed of many tiny homunculi not only in the time dimension, but across all dimensions. Maybe 70% of someone decided for EA, but the part that didn’t wants to be a photographer of nature, I think saying that person has failed the EA ethos would be throwing the baby with the bathwater. Just like it would not throwing them out of the “Advancing Effective Altruism” closed facebook group.