This is in response to Sarah Constantin's recent post about intellectual dishonesty within the EA community.
I roughly agree with Sarah's main object level points, but I think this essay doesn't sufficiently embody the spirit of cooperative discourse it's trying to promote. I have a lot of thoughts here, but they are building off a few existing essays. (There's been a recent revival over on Less Wrong attempting to make it a better locus for high quality discussion. I don't know if it's especially succeeded, but I think the concepts behind that intended revival and very important)
- Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- A Return to Discussion (Sarah Constantin)
- The Importance of [Less Wrong, OR another Single Conversational Locus] (Emphasis mine) (Anna Salamon)
- The Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
I think it's important to have all three concepts in context before delving into: - EA has a lying problem (Sarah Constantin)
I recommend reading all of those. But here's a rough summary of what I consider the important bits. (If you want to actually argue with these bits, please read the actual essays before doing so, so you're engaging with the full substance of the idea)
- Intellectuals and contrarians love to argue and nitpick. This is valuable - it produces novel insights, and keeps us honest. BUT it makes it harder to actually work together to achieve things. We need to understand how working-together works on a deep enough level that we can do so without turning into another random institution that's lost it's purpose. (See Why Our Kind... for more)
- Lately, people have tended to talk on social media (Facebook, Tumblr, etc) rather than in formal blogs or forums that encourage longform discussion. This has a few effects. (See A Return to Discussion for more)
- FB discussion is fragmented - it's hard to find everything that's been said on a topic. (And tumblr is even worse)
- It's hard to know whether OTHER people have read a given thing on a topic.
- A related point (not necessarily in "A Return to Discussion" is that social media incentives some of the worst kinda of discussion. People share things quickly, without reflection. People read and respond to things in 5-10 minute bursts, without having time to fully digest them.
- Having a single, long form discussion area that you can expect everyone in an intellectual community to have read, makes it much easier to building knowledge. (And most of human progress is due, not to humans being smart, but being able to stand on the shoulders of giants). Anna Salamon's "Importance of a Single Conversational Locus" is framed around x-risk, but I think it applies to all aspects of EA: the problems the world faces are so huge that they need a higher caliber of thinking and knowledge-building than we currently have in order to solve.
- In order to make true intellectual progress, you need people to be able to make critiques. You also need those critics to expect their criticism to in turn be criticized, so that the criticism is high quality. If a critique turns out to be poorly thought out, we need shared, common knowledge of that so that people don't end up rehashing the same debates.
- And finally, (one of) Sarah's points in "EA has a lying problem" is that, in order to be different from other movements and succeed where they failed, EA needs to hold itself to a higher standard than usual. There's been much criticism of, say, Intentional Insights for doing sketchy, truth-bendy things to gain prestige and power. But that plenty of "high status" people within the EA community do things that are similar, even if to a different degree. We need to be aware of that.
I would not argue as strongly as Sarah does that we shouldn't do it at all, but it's worth periodically calling each other out on it.
Cooperative Epistemology
So my biggest point here, is that we need to be more proactive and mindful about how discussion and knowledge is built upon within the EA community.
To succeed at our goals:
- EA needs to hold itself to a very high intellectual standard (higher than we currently have, probably. In some sense anyway)
- Factions within EA needs to be able to cooperate, share knowledge. Both object level knowledge (i.e. how cost effective is AMF?) and meta/epistemic knowledge like:
- How do we evaluate messy studies
- How do we discuss things online so that people actually put effort into reading and contributing the discussion.
- What kinds of conversational/debate norms lead people to be more transparent.
- We need to be able to apply all the knowledge to go out and accomplish things, which will probably involve messy political stuff.
I have specific concerns about Sarah's post, which I'll post in a comment when I have a bit more time.
I feel like this is true for me too. I'd guess I've got more spare time on my hands than you guys. I also don't currently work for any EA charities. It's really hard to make your beliefs pay rent when you're in near mode and you're constantly worried about how if you screw up a criticism you'll lose connections and get ostracized, or you'll hurt the trajectory of a cause or charity you like by association because as much as we like to say we're debiased a lot of time affective rationalizations sneak into our motivations. Well, we all come from different walks of life, and a lot of us haven't been in communities trying to be as intellectually honest and epistemically virtuous as EA tries to be. It's hard to overcome that aversion to keeping our guard up because everywhere else we go in life our new ideas are treated utterly uncharitably, like, worse than anything in EA on a regular day. It's hard to unlearn those patterns. We as a community need to find ways to trust each other more. But that takes a lot of work, and will take a while.
In the meantime, I don't have a lot to lose by criticizing EA, or at least I can take a hit pretty well. I mean, maybe there are social opportunity costs, what I won't be able to do in the future if I became low-status, but I'm confident I'm the sort of person who can create new opportunities for himself. So I'm not worried about me, and I don't think anyone else should either. I've never had a cause selection. Honestly, it felt weird to talk about, but this whole model uncertainty thing people are going for between causes now is something I've implicitly grasped the whole time. Like, I never understood why everyone was so confident in their views on causes when a bunch of this stuff requires figuring out things about consciousness, or the value of future lives, which seem like some philosophically and historically mind-boggling puzzles to me.
If you go to my EAHub profile, you'll notice the biggest donation I made was in 2014 for $1000 to Givewell for unrestricted funds. That was because I knew those funds would increase the pool of money for starting the Open Philanthropy Project. And it was matched. You'll also notice I select pretty much every cause as something to consider, as I'm paranoid about myself or EA in general missing out on important information. All I can say about my politics is I'm a civil libertarian and otherwise I don't get offended by reading things when they're written by people who want to improve EA in earnest. I hope you'll take my word that I didn't just edit my EA Hub profile now. That's what I got for a badge to show I really try to stay neutral.
If anyone wants to privately and/or anonymously send me their thoughts on an EA organization, and what they're doing wrong, no matter what it is, I'll give my honest feedback and we can have a back and forth and hopefully hammer something out to be published. I also don't particularly favour any EA org right now as I feel like a lot of these organizations are people who've only been in academia, or the software industry, or are sometimes starting non-profits right out of college, who might just not have the type or diversity of experience to alone make good plans/models, or get skills for dealing with different types of people and getting things done. I've thought for a while all these organizations at different points have made little or big mistakes, which are really hard to talk about in public, and it feels a bit absurd to me they're never talked about.
Feel free to send me stuff. Please don't send me stuff about interpersonal drama. Treat what you send me like filing a bug report.