if you see people making large life decisions that look like they’re pretending to try (e.g. satisficing on donations or career choice), this should be a red flag.
This seems to expose a bit of a tension between two possible goals for the EA movement. One of them is “We need more rigor and people to be trying harder!” and the other one is “We need to bring in lots of people who aren’t trying quite as hard; we can have a bigger total impact by getting lots of people to do just a little bit.” The second one is closer to what e.g. Peter Singer is trying to do, by setting a low baseline threshold of doing good and trying to make it the norm for as many people as possible to do good at that threshold.
Is it actually that bad to have people in the movement who are just doing good because of social pressure? If we make sure that the things we’re socially pressuring people to do are actually very good things, then that could be good anyway. Even if they’re just satisficing, this could be a net good, as long as we’re raising the threshold of what “satisficing” is by a lot.
I guess the potential problem there is that maybe if satisficing is the norm, we’ll encourage complacency, and thereby get fewer people who are actually trying really hard instead of just satisficing. Maybe it’s just a balancing act.
Having feeling-oriented people signalling outcome-orientation is stopping the outcome-oriented people from pushing forward the EA state of the art, because it adds epistemic inertia (feeling-oriented people have less belief pressure from truth-seeking and more from social satisficing).
I’m not sure I understand you here. Are you saying that because feeling-oriented people will pretty much believe what they are socially pressured to believe, the outcome-oriented people will also stop truth-seeking?
On your last point: there are two equally interesting claims that fit Ben’s comment:
1) above a certain proportion, or threshold, feeling oriented altruists may reinforce/feed only themselves, thus setting the bar on EA competence really, really low (yes lurker, you are as good as Toby, who donates most of his income and is counterfactually responsible for 80k and GWWC), I addressed this below. 2) Outcome-oriented people may fail to create signal among the noise (if they don’t create the AEA facebook group) or succumb more frequently to drifting back into their feeeling-oriented self, getting hedons for small amounts of utilons.
2) is what I’m more concerned about. I don’t really mind if there are a bunch of people being feeling-oriented if they don’t damage the outcome-orientation of the outcome-oriented group at all. (But I think that counterfactual is so implausible as to be difficult to imagine in detail.) To the extend that they do, as Maia said, it’s a trade-off.
Would you be as kind as to create the Advancing Effective Altruism Facebook group Ben? (or adding me to it in case the secret society of Effective Altruists is in the ninth generation, and I’m just making a fool of my self here to the arcane sages) I can help you invite people and create a description. I can’t administer it, or choose who belongs or not, since I’m too worried about more primeval things, like going to Berkeley, surviving finantially, making sure www.ierfh.org remains active when I leave Brazil despite our not having any funding; and I don’t know everyone within EA as, say, Carl does.
I don’t think Facebook is a good forum for productive discussion even among more outcome-oriented people. See my post and Brian Tomasik’s remarks for why.
Solving the problem of having a good discussion forum is hard and requires more bandwidth than I have right now, though Ozzie Gooen might know about projects heading in that direction. I think continuing to use LW discussion would be preferable to Facebook.
I don’t hold the belief that Lesswrong discussion contains only people who are at the cutting edge of EA theory. I don’t think you do either. That solution does not apply to a problem that you and I, more than anyone, agree is happening. We do not have an ultimate forum that buzzes top notch outcome-oriented altruists to think about specific things that others in the same class have thought of.
A moderator in such community should save all discussions, so they are formal in character and eternalized in a website. But certainly the buzzin effect which facebook and emails have (and only facebook and emails have) is a necessary component, as long as the group is restricted only to top theorists. Since no one cares about this more than you and I, I am asking you to do it, I wouldn’t even know who to invite besides those I cited in the post.
If you really think that one of the main problems with EA at the moment is absence of a space for outcome-oriented individuals to rock our world, and communicate without the chaotic blog proliferation that has been going on, I can hardly think your bandwidth would be better invested elsewhere (the same goes for you, dear Effective Altruist reading this post).
I don’t hold the belief that Lesswrong discussion contains only people who are at the cutting edge of EA theory. I don’t think you do either.
Non sequitur. I don’t hold this belief but I nevertheless think that Less Wrong would be better than Facebook for pushing forward the state of EA. Reasons include upvotes, searchability and preservation with less headache for the moderator, threading, etc.
I can hardly think your bandwidth would be better invested elsewhere
You just gave me some great reasons why your own bandwidth is better invested elsewhere. I’m surprised that you can’t think of analogous ones that might apply to me right now.
Anyway, I think this is an important problem but not the important problem (as you seem to think I think), and also one that I have quite a large comparative disadvantage in solving correctly compared to other people, and other important problems that I could solve. If no one else decides it’s worthy of their time I’ll (a) update against it being worthwhile and (b) get around to it when I have free bandwidth.
This seems to expose a bit of a tension between two possible goals for the EA movement. One of them is “We need more rigor and people to be trying harder!” and the other one is “We need to bring in lots of people who aren’t trying quite as hard; we can have a bigger total impact by getting lots of people to do just a little bit.” The second one is closer to what e.g. Peter Singer is trying to do, by setting a low baseline threshold of doing good and trying to make it the norm for as many people as possible to do good at that threshold.
Is it actually that bad to have people in the movement who are just doing good because of social pressure? If we make sure that the things we’re socially pressuring people to do are actually very good things, then that could be good anyway. Even if they’re just satisficing, this could be a net good, as long as we’re raising the threshold of what “satisficing” is by a lot.
I guess the potential problem there is that maybe if satisficing is the norm, we’ll encourage complacency, and thereby get fewer people who are actually trying really hard instead of just satisficing. Maybe it’s just a balancing act.
I’m not sure I understand you here. Are you saying that because feeling-oriented people will pretty much believe what they are socially pressured to believe, the outcome-oriented people will also stop truth-seeking?
On your last point: there are two equally interesting claims that fit Ben’s comment: 1) above a certain proportion, or threshold, feeling oriented altruists may reinforce/feed only themselves, thus setting the bar on EA competence really, really low (yes lurker, you are as good as Toby, who donates most of his income and is counterfactually responsible for 80k and GWWC), I addressed this below.
2) Outcome-oriented people may fail to create signal among the noise (if they don’t create the AEA facebook group) or succumb more frequently to drifting back into their feeeling-oriented self, getting hedons for small amounts of utilons.
2) is what I’m more concerned about. I don’t really mind if there are a bunch of people being feeling-oriented if they don’t damage the outcome-orientation of the outcome-oriented group at all. (But I think that counterfactual is so implausible as to be difficult to imagine in detail.) To the extend that they do, as Maia said, it’s a trade-off.
Would you be as kind as to create the Advancing Effective Altruism Facebook group Ben? (or adding me to it in case the secret society of Effective Altruists is in the ninth generation, and I’m just making a fool of my self here to the arcane sages) I can help you invite people and create a description. I can’t administer it, or choose who belongs or not, since I’m too worried about more primeval things, like going to Berkeley, surviving finantially, making sure www.ierfh.org remains active when I leave Brazil despite our not having any funding; and I don’t know everyone within EA as, say, Carl does.
I don’t think Facebook is a good forum for productive discussion even among more outcome-oriented people. See my post and Brian Tomasik’s remarks for why.
Solving the problem of having a good discussion forum is hard and requires more bandwidth than I have right now, though Ozzie Gooen might know about projects heading in that direction. I think continuing to use LW discussion would be preferable to Facebook.
I don’t hold the belief that Lesswrong discussion contains only people who are at the cutting edge of EA theory. I don’t think you do either. That solution does not apply to a problem that you and I, more than anyone, agree is happening. We do not have an ultimate forum that buzzes top notch outcome-oriented altruists to think about specific things that others in the same class have thought of.
A moderator in such community should save all discussions, so they are formal in character and eternalized in a website. But certainly the buzzin effect which facebook and emails have (and only facebook and emails have) is a necessary component, as long as the group is restricted only to top theorists. Since no one cares about this more than you and I, I am asking you to do it, I wouldn’t even know who to invite besides those I cited in the post.
If you really think that one of the main problems with EA at the moment is absence of a space for outcome-oriented individuals to rock our world, and communicate without the chaotic blog proliferation that has been going on, I can hardly think your bandwidth would be better invested elsewhere (the same goes for you, dear Effective Altruist reading this post).
Non sequitur. I don’t hold this belief but I nevertheless think that Less Wrong would be better than Facebook for pushing forward the state of EA. Reasons include upvotes, searchability and preservation with less headache for the moderator, threading, etc.
You just gave me some great reasons why your own bandwidth is better invested elsewhere. I’m surprised that you can’t think of analogous ones that might apply to me right now.
Anyway, I think this is an important problem but not the important problem (as you seem to think I think), and also one that I have quite a large comparative disadvantage in solving correctly compared to other people, and other important problems that I could solve. If no one else decides it’s worthy of their time I’ll (a) update against it being worthwhile and (b) get around to it when I have free bandwidth.