Welcome to the first open thread on the Effective Altruism Forum. This is our place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
Welcome to the first open thread on the Effective Altruism Forum. This is our place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
I'm still fuzzy on the relationship between the EA Facebook group and the EA forum. Are we supposed to move most or all the discussion that was going on in the FB group here? Will the FB be shut down, and if not what will is be used for?
I think the format of the forum will present a higher barrier to low-key discussion than the FB group, e.g. I'd guess people are much less likely to post an EA related new article if they don't have too much to add to it. This is primarily because the forum looks like a blog. Is FB style posting encouraged?
If this has all been described somewhere. Could someone point me toward it?
Also, what's the relationship between the EA forum and the EA hub? http://effectivealtruismhub.com/
What are some examples of things that could have been popular EA causes, but weren't, for reasons that are not completely obvious (and may have to do with historical contingency)?
One example I can think of is anti-aging. This is a cause that has a lot of traction in circles that have overlap with EA circles (rationalist, transhumanist, singularitarian, etc.). However, for whatever reason, it hasn't been identified with EA. If you think anti-aging sounds too outlandish, it's worth noting that with the exception of poverty reduction, the current popular EA cause categories (AI/ex-risk reduction and veganism/animal activism) both seem outlandish.
Another area where EA focus hasn't historically been great, but is gradually increasing, is changing or working around bad policy, in areas such as migration, drug policy, international trade, etc. Lots of economist-types are attracted to EA, so it's interesting that the policy arena has been relatively neglected until recently.
Another example, though not as good, could be effective environmentalism. It's a classic cause among altruists and looks like an x-risk.
I am a committed Christian also committed to the principles of effective altruism. I am very frustrated with the level of apathy in the church, given that we are all called to tithe 10% of our income, like the rest of the population Christians have really lost sight of how rich they are now. I am also frustrated by the focus on differences between religions, and between religion and the non religious, when common values of love and concern for our planet giving how utterly amazing it is we are here should prevail. Altruism is at the heart of Christianity and of course it should be effective. I would be happy to work with other EAs in develop an outreach/link strategy into churches.
My wife is head of fundraising for a charity that is like a mini version of Christian aid - donating to poverty alleviating projects in a Christian context. Making this more effective would be a good place to start.
1 billion Christians should be able to make a real dent in the problems of the world if they focussed less on the coffee rota and more on what our faith actually calls us to do.
Does believing in or identifying as an EA involve a fair amount of hubris and arrogance? To be an EA, and make EA-based decisions, you have to essentially believe that you have some insight into the best way to use resources to make the world a better place. The type of question whose answers EA demands are extremely difficult. When EAs think they have all, or even some, of the answers on how to go about EA, how much arrogance does it reflect? Would something like EA attract overly cocky people?
Legibility is tricky. I want to be able to easily explain my giving, so that when people ask for details on what I mean by "I give half" we don't get into complex arguments about what counts. For example, if my work has a donation matching program, does that count? What if I do work for someone and ask them to donate instead of paying me? What about money my company puts into my 401k? Luckily the US government already has figured out a set of rules for this, so I can use them. When people want details on how I account for things, I can say "income" is "income on form 1040" and "donations" is "gifts to charity on form 1040 Schedule A".
I'd like to see a discussion on thick versus thin EA, similar to the discussions online of thick versus thin libertarianism, such as http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/10/03/libertarianism_through/
Basically, thick EA would involve a wide-ranging set of commitments or organizing one's life around EA ideas, whereas thin EA might mean just accepting the principle that it makes sense to do the most good.
Though there might be competing ways to slice EA into thick and thin.
The EA community seems to have a relatively weak internal support system, relative to other communities of mine (of similar size). I've confirmed this with other EAs. This is in terms of mentorship, providing opportunities for engagement, etc. For example, I think more people participating on this forum strengthens our internal support system! :)
Why is this? And what can we do to improve the situation (if anything)?
[Discount Rates]
I'd like to hear more EA discussion on discount rates. Much of policy analysis involves unilaterally discounting future benefits. For example, an economist might say "Let's value eating one apple today the same as eating four apples ten years from now." The professionals I've spoken with who do this sort of analysis say that discounting is justified because it's a natural part of human decision-making. Psychologically, it's pretty clear that most people make decisions given much greater weight to instant or near-term gratification... (read more)
[Replaceability in Social Change]
When we talk about social change like improving policy or promoting an idea like effective altruism, how do we figure out the counterfactual to measure our impact? Say I'm a civil rights activist in the 1950's and I really want to give a speech titled "I Have a Dream." How would I determine if someone else would do something similar (like MLK actually did in 1963)?
In order words, what social change is inevitable and what is more malleable? In posting this comment, did I just make the idea of "Replaceability i... (read more)
Most EA giving advice is directed at people in the developed world, where purchasing power parity differences make their money go farther overseas than it would at home. For a person who's equally wealthy in PPP terms but lives in a country where prices are lower (such as India), so that the person doesn't have that much money when viewed at the international exchange rate, how does the calculus of giving change?
As part of the pros/cons between "give now" and "invest now, give later", has there been any investigation into how much good is accomplished by investing itself? It seems like that is a (small) part of economic growth and innovation, so I'm curious if there's much reason to think that has a big enough impact to include in the invest-then-give decision.
I'd like to see more work done on "warm fuzzies," e.g.: How can our charitable organizations be competitive with non-EA charities in producing positive feelings in donors? How can our message be framed such that they don't lead to feelings of guilt or a sense of being overwhelmed by the scope of the problems we're trying to tackle?
That Effective Altruists, implicitly if not explicitly, nearly always assume a single moral epistemology: some version of utilitarianism. It is only one of very many plausible registers of human value, whose prominence in the Anglophone academy has long waned post-Rawls (nevermind on the continent). I find the fact that this is a silent unanimity, tacit but never raised to the level of explicit discussion, doubly problematic.
I say this as someone who completely rejects utilitarianism, but recognises the obvious and ecumenical value in gauging high-utility ... (read more)
Please reply with a description of Effective Altruism that you think optimizes for, in priority, conciseness, likelihood of compelling the reader to learn more, and comprehensiveness.
After we get a sufficient number, I'll repost them all at the same time as a poll.
This Forum May Offer Better, Newer Formats For Interviews
An initial interview with one effective altruist lets the rest of us know what that one person is up to. However, for individuals working on particularly deep and interesting projects, I want to know more than just what they're doing. I want to know why, and how. For example: I might want to know more about what Brian Tomasik is doing with the Foundational Research Institute, or what Owen Cotton-Barrat is doing with the Global Priorities Project. That might require a second interview, or one that int... (read more)
Over at LessWrong, user "mushroom" recently proposed a debiasing heuristic for dealing with unpopular ideas. In sum, his claim is that we should be extra charitable to such ideas because they are disproportionately more likely to be promoted by its most extreme, disagreeable or crazy adherents. In a comment, I wrote:
... (read more)Your analysis has implications not only for individuals exposed to unpopular ideas, but also for movements promoting such ideas. These movements (e.g., effective altruism) should be particularly worried about their ideas being repre
What are the implications of Robin Hanson's idea of being a charity angel for effective altruism(more details on charity angels here)? For the purposes of answering this question, don't limit yourself to thinking about being a charity angel to only intellectuals, as Robin Hanson primed for discussion in his original post. Please think broadly about what being a charity angel could be for whatever effective altruistic endeavor you might have in mind, and whether it would be worthwhile.
I believe the most relevant previous thought is one concern raised by Hol... (read more)
In this thread, you try to argue as well as you can against the cause you currently consider the highest expected value cause to be working on. Then you calibrate your emotions given the new evidence you just generated. This is not just a fun exercise. It has been shown that if you want to get the moral intuitions of a person to change, the best way to do so is to cause the person to scrutinize in detail the policy they are in favor of, not show evidence for why other policies are a good idea or why the person is wrong. To get your mind to change, the best way is to give it a zooming lens into itself. So what is your cause?
Spreading EA to non-First World nations to take advantage of people's preference for helping their own country. Lots of both rich and poor in BRICS these days.
Spreading EA to institutions and governments. I know CEA advised the UK government but I haven't heard much about other governments or corporate giving (although I realize that only about 5% of donations come from business, with most of the rest being from individuals). Although I realize a critical mass of individuals probably needs to be reach before institutions start to change.
Spreading altr
What are the best books related to altruism that you have seen? Which books mostly influenced your thinking as an EA?
One of the concepts that is currently gaining more traction among EA's is that of Crucial Considerations.
Which considerations do you think will be more crucial for us to get right in the next ten years in order to produce a massively better world?
When will the results of the EA survey be released? They survey was underweigh in early may, and it's now late September. I realize there were many problems with the survey (Gregory Lewis pointed out some pretty convincing ones), but a lot of EAs spent a lot of time filling it out, so we should at least get the raw data (of those who agreed to let their data be public) and summary stats.
I would like to see a visual and possibly interactive map of all organizations and projects related to Effective Altruism, and their relationships including hierarchy, funding, room for funding, members, potential scale/scope of impact with some general metric, etc (suggest other useful attributes, and links to similar maps).
Would this project be worth the investment?
EDIT: By map I mean something like a mind map, not geographical.
Can anyone think of a way effective altruists, as a group, or as individuals, can playtest (their own) different approaches to spreading effective altruism, whether among the people they know personally, or to the public at large? Also, how could any of us go about about assessing and comparing the impact of such a thing? Is there an experimental design in this we could set up?
I'd like to propose a web application targeted specifically to donors that captures recurring payments for an EA meta-charity and helps them manage the donation:
Let the donor easily view sum total donations over time, view some simple budgeting, tweak their commitment, manage their payment method, and do tax accounting/reporting.
I think this movement should have a
That sentence you quoted doesn't exhaust my normativity, but marks the extent of it which motivates my interest in EA. The word 'maximally' is very unclear here; I mean maximally internal to my giving, not throughout every minutia of my consciousness and actions.
The issue I wanted to raise was several-fold: that very many effective altruists take as obvious and unproblematic that utilitarianism does exhaust human value, which is reinforced by the fact that almost no one speaks to this point; that it seriously effects the evaluation of outcomes (i.e. the xrisk community, including if not especially Nick Bostrom, speak with a straight-face about totalitarianism as a condition of controlling nanotechnology and artificial intelligence); and the tactics for satisfying those outcomes.
In regard to the last point, in response to a user suggesting that we should reshape our identity, presentation and justification when speaking to conservatives, in order to effectively bring them to altruism, I posted:
"I find the this kind of rationalization - subordinating ones ethics to what can effectively motivate people to altruism - both profoundly conservative and, to some extent, undignified and inhuman, i.e. the utility slave coming full circle to enslave their own dictate of utility maximisation."
That kind of thinking, however, is extremely common.
In response to your second paragraph:
"It just seems obvious to me that, all other things equal, helping two people is better than helping one."
This simply begs the question: "helping" and "people" are heavily indeterminate concepts, the imputation of content to which is heavily consequential for the action-guidance that follows.
"If various moral theories favoured by academics don't reach that conclusion, then so much worse for them; if they do reach that conclusion, then all the better. And in the latter case, the precise formulations of the theories matter very little to me."
I find this perhaps culpable of wishful thinking; insofar as it would be nice if the natural structure of the world inhered an objective morality dovetailing with my historically specific intuitions and attitudes, that doesn't itself vindicate it as so. More often that not, the imposition of the latter on the former occurs. Something seeming obvious to oneself isn't premise for its truth.
If you follow the history of utilitarianism, it is a history of increasing dilution, from the moral naturalism of Bentham's conception of a unified human good psychologically motivating all human action, to Mill's pluralising of that good, to Sidgwick's wholesale rejection of naturalism and value commensurability, and argument that the only register of independent human valuation is mere intuition, to Moore's final reductio of the tradition in Principia Ethica ('morality consists in a non-natural good, whatever I feel it to be, but by the way, aesthetics and interpersonal enjoyment are far and away superior'). Suffice it to say that nearly all utilitarians are intuitionists today, which I honestly can't take seriously as an independent reason for action, and is a standard by which utilitarianism sowed its own death - any and all forms of utilitarianism entail serious counter-intuition. Hence the climb of Rawls and liberal egalitarianism to predominance in the academy; it simply better satisfies the historical values and ideology of the here and now.
My philosophical background is that of the physics stereotype that utterly loathes most academic philosophy, so I'm not sure if this discussion will be all that fruitful. Still I'll give this a go.
At some pretty deep level, I just don't care. I treat statements like "It is better if people get vaccinated" or "It is better if people ... (read more)