Comments
just saying what everyone knows out loud (copied over with some edits from a twitter thread)
Maybe it's worth just saying the thing people probably know but isn't always salient aloud, which is that orgs (and people) who describe themselves as "EA" vary a lot in effectiveness, competence, and values, and using the branding alone will probably lead you astray.
Especially for newer or less connected people, I think it's important to make salient that there are a lot of takes (pos and neg) on the quality of thought and output of different people and orgs, which from afar might blur into "they have the EA stamp of approval"
Probably a lot of thoughtful people think whatever seems shiny in a "everyone supports this" kind of way is bad in a bunch of ways (though possibly net good!), and that granularity is valuable.
I think feel very free to ask around to get these takes and see what you find - it's been a learning experience for me, for sure. Lots of this is "common knowledge" to people who spend a lot of their time around professional EAs and so it doesn't even occur to people to say + it's sensitive to talk about publicly. But I think "some smart people in EA think this is totally wrongheaded" is a good prior for basically anything going on in EA.
Maybe at some point we should move to more explicit and legible conversations about each others' strengths and weaknesses, but I haven't thought through all the costs there, and there are many. Curious for thoughts on whether this would be good! (e.g. Oli Habryka talking about people with integrity here)
I would like a norm of writing some criticisms on wiki entries.
I think the wiki entry is a pretty good place for this. It's "the canonical place" as it were. I would think it's important to do this rather fairly. I wouldn't want someone to edit a short CEA article with a "list of criticisms", that (believe you me) could go on for days. And then maybe, just because nobody has a personal motivation to, nobody ends up doing this for Giving What We Can. Or whatever. Seems like the whole thing could quickly prove to be a mess that I would personally judge to be not worth it (unsure). I'd rather see someone own editing a class of orgs and adding in substantial content, including a criticism section that seeks to focus on the highest impact concerns.
A dynamic I keep seeing is that it feels hard to whistleblow or report concerns or make a bid for more EA attention on things that "everyone knows", because it feels like there's no one to tell who doesn't already know. It’s easy to think that surely this is priced in to everyone's decision making. Some reasons to do it anyway:
In short, if you're acting based on the belief that there’s a thing “everyone knows”, check that that’s true.
Relatedly: Everybody Knows, by Zvi Mowshowitz
[Caveat: There's an important balance to strike here between the value of public conversation about concerns and the energy that gets put into those public community conversations. There are reasons to take action on the above non-publicly, and not every concern will make it above people’s bar for spending the time and effort to get more engagement with it. Just wanted to point to some lenses that might get missed.]
About going to a hub
A response to: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M5GoKkWtBKEGMCFHn/what-s-the-theory-of-change-of-come-to-the-bay-over-the
For people who consider taking or end up taking this advice, some things I'd say if we were having a 1:1 coffee about it:
We all want (I claim) EA to be a high trust, truth-seeking, impact-oriented professional community and social space. Help it be those things. Blurt truth (but be mostly nice), have integrity, try to avoid status and social games, make shit happen.
I hope to flesh this out at some point, but I just want to put somewhere that by default (from personal experience and experience as an instructor and teacher) I think sleepaway experiences (retreats, workshops, camps) are potentially emotionally intense for at least 20% of participants, even entirely setting aside content (CFAR has noted this as well): away from normal environment, new social scene with all kinds of status-stuff to figure out, less sleep, lots of late night conversations that can be very powerful, romantic / sexual stuff in a charged environment, a lot of closeness happening very quickly because of being around each other 24/7, anything going on from outside the environment that's stressful you have less time and space to deal with. This can be valuable in the sense of giving people a chance to fully immerse themselves, but it's a lot, especially for younger people and it is worth organizers explicitly noting this in organizing, talking about it to participants, providing time for chillness / regrounding and being off the clock, and having people around who it's easy to talk to if you're going through a hard time.
I'm sure this must have been said before, but I couldn't find it on the forum, LW or google
I'd like to talk more about trusting X in domain Y or on Z metric rather than trusting them in general. People/orgs/etc have strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, and I think this granularity is more precise and is a helpful reminder to avoid the halo and horn effects, and calibrates us better on trust.
A commonly used model in the trust literature (Mayer et al., 1995) is that trustworthiness can be broken down into three factors: ability, benevolence, and integrity.
RE: domain specific, the paper incorporates this under 'ability':
The domain of the ability is specific because the trustee may be highly competent in some technical area, affording that person trust on tasks related to that area. However, the trustee may have little aptitude, training, or experience in another area, for instance, in interpersonal communication. Although such an individual may be trusted to do analytic tasks related to his or her technical area, the individual may not be trusted to initiate contact with an important customer. Thus, trust is domain specific.
There are other conceptions but many of them describe something closer to trust that is domain specific rather than generalised.
...All of these are similar to ability in the current conceptualization. Whereas such terms as expertise and competence connote a set of skills applicable to a single, fixed domain (e.g., Gabarro's interpersonal competence), ability highlights the task- and situation-specific nature of the construct in the current model.
Thanks for this! Very interesting.
I do want to say something stronger here, where "competence" sounds like technical ability or something, but I also mean a broader conception of competence that includes "is especially clear thinking here / has fewer biases here / etc"
Strongly agree. I'm surprised I haven't seen this articulated somewhere else previously.
For collecting thoughts on the concept of "epistemic hazards" - contexts in which you should expect your epistemics to be worse. not fleshed out yet. Interested in if this has already been written about, I assume so, maybe in a different framing.
From Habryka: "Confidentiality and obscurity feel like they worsen the relevant dynamics a lot, since they prevent other people from sanity-checking your takes (though this is also much more broadly applicable). For example, being involved in crimes makes it much harder to get outside feedback on your decisions, since telling people what decisions you are facing now exposes you to the risk of them outing you. Or working on dangerous technologies that you can't tell anyone about makes it harder to get feedback on whether you are making the right tradeoffs (since doing so would usually involve leaking some of the details behind the dangerous technology). "
Poke holes in my systematizing outreach apologism
Re: Ick at systematizing outreach and human interactions
There's a paradox I'm confused about, where if someone from a group I'm not in - let's say Christians, came to me on a college campus and smiled at me and asked about my interests and connected all of them to Jesus and then I found out I'd been logged in a spreadsheet as "potential convert" or something and then found the questions they'd asked me in a blog post or "Christian evangelist top questions" I might very well feel extremely weird about that (though I think less than others, I kind of respect the hustle).
BUT, when I think about how one gets there, I think, ok:
This is probably too charitable, there is definitely a thing where you actively want to persuade people because you think your thing is important, and you might lose interest in people who aren't excited about what you're excited about, but those things also seem reasonable to me.
A process that seems bad:
3-5 seem like the worst parts here. 1 seems like a reasonable implication of their beliefs, though I do think we all have to cooperate to not destroy the commons.
2 is complicated - when people have different cruxes than you is it dishonest to talk about what should convince them based on their cruxes?
3 and 4 are bad, also hard to avoid.
5 seems really bad, and something I'd like to strongly avoid via things like transparency and some other percolating advice I might end up endorsing for people new to EA, like not letting your feet go faster than your brain, figuring out how much deference you endorse, seeing avoiding resentment as a crucial consideration in your life choices, staying grounded, etc.
I also think the processes can feel pretty similar from the inside (therefore danger alert!) but also look similar from the outside when they aren't. I certainly have systematically underestimated the moral seriousness and earnestness of many an EA.
What's the difference?
I think people are going to want to say something like "treating people as ends" but I don't know where that obligation stops. I think I want to say something like "are you acting in the interests of the people you're talking to", but that doesn't work either - I'm not! being an EA has a decent chance of being less pleasant than the other thing they were doing, and either way it's not a crux. Ex: I endorse protecting the time and energy of other people by not telling everyone who I would talk to if I had a certain question or needed help in a certain way.
I do think it's more about whether you're doing things in such a way that if they knew why you were doing them, they'd mostly not be bothered (ie passing the red face test). But that doesn't really solve the problem that digital sentience is a weird reason to do a lot of things, and there are lots of things I endorse it being inappropriate to be too explicit about.
[This is separate from the instrumental reasons to act differently because it weirds people out etc.]
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Later musings:
Presumably the strongest argument is that these feelings are tracking a bunch of the bad stuff that's hard to point at:
I do think it's more about whether you're doing things in such a way that if they knew why you were doing them, they'd mostly not be bothered (ie passing the red face test). But that doesn't really solve the problem that digital sentience is a weird reason to do a lot of things, and there are lots of things I endorse it being inappropriate to be too explicit about.
Of course this is a spectrum, and we shouldn't put up a public website listing all our beliefs including the most controversial ones or something like that (no one in EA is very close to this extreme). But the implicit jump from "some things shouldn't be explicit" to "digital sentience might weird some people out so there's a decent chance we shouldn't be that explicit about it" seems very non-obvious to me, given how central it is to a lot of longtermist's worldviews and honestly I think it wouldn't turn off many of the most promising people (in the long run; in the short run, it might get an initial "huh??" reaction).
Oh, sorry, those were two different thoughts. "digital sentience is a weird reason to do a lot of things" is one thing, where it's not most people's crux and so maybe not the first thing you say, but agree, should definitely come up, and separately, "there are lots of things I endorse it being inappropriate to be too explicit about", like the granularity of assessment you might be making of a person at any given time (though possibly more transparency about the fact that you're being assessed in a bunch of contexts would be very good!)
I think steps 1 and 2 in your chain are also questionable, not just 3-5.
- Want to maximize number of EAs
Why do we want to maximize number of EAs, this seems very non-obvious to me? Some people would add much more to the community than others via epistemics, culture, direct talent, etc. If we added enough of certain types of people to the community, especially too quickly, it could easily be net negative.
2. Use framings, arguments and examples that you don't think hold water but work at getting people to join your group [I don't think EAs do this, I'm gesturing at the extreme other end]
[...]
2 is complicated - when people have different cruxes than you is it dishonest to talk about what should convince them based on their cruxes?
I think sometimes/often talking about people's cruxes rather than your own is good and fine. The issue is Goodharting via an optimal message to convert as many people to EA as quickly as possible, rather than messages that will lead to a healthy community over the long run.
I think there are two separate processes going on when you think about systematizing and outreach and one of them is acceptable to systematize and the other is not.
The first process is deciding where to put your energy. This could be deciding whether to set up a booth at a college's involvement fair, buying ads, door-to-door canvassing, etc. It could also be deciding who to follow up with after these interactions, from the email list collected, to who's door to go to a second time, to which places to spend money on in your second round of ad buys. These things all lend themselves to systematization. They can be data driven and you can make forecasts on how likely each person was to respond positively and join an event, revisit those forecasts and update them over time.
The second process is the actual interaction/conversation with people. I think this should not be systematized and should be as authentic as possible. Some of this is a focus on treating people as individuals. Even if there are certain techniques/arguments/framings that you find work better than others, I'd expect there to be significant variation among people where some work better than others. A skilled recruiter would be able to figure out what the person they are talking to cares about and focus on that more, but I think this is just good social skills. They shouldn't be focusing on optimizing for recruitment. They should try to be a likeable person that others will want to be around and that goes a long way to recruitment in and of itself.
I see what you're pointing at, I think, but I don't know that this resolves all my edge cases. For instance, where does "I know this person is especially interested in animal welfare, so talk about that" fall?
I separately don't want to optimize for recruitment in the metric of number of people because of my model of what good additions to the community looks like (e.g. I want especially thoughtful people who have a good sense of the relevant ideas and arguments and what they buy and what their uncertainties are") - maybe your approach comes from that? Or are you saying even if one were trying to maximize numbers, they shouldn't systematize?
Thanks so much for writing this! I think it could be a top-level post, I'm sure many others would find it very helpful.
My 2 cents:
2 is complicated - when people have different cruxes than you is it dishonest to talk about what should convince them based on their cruxes?
I think it's definitely bad to "Use framings, arguments and examples that you don't think hold water but work at getting people to join your group". If I understand correctly it can cause point 5. Also "getting people to join your group" is rarely an instrumental goal, and "getting people to join your group for the wrong reasons" is probably not that useful in the long term.
Something that I think is very important that seems missing from this is that there's a significant probability that we're wrong about important things (i.e. EA as a question).
We could be wrong about the impact of bednets, wrong about AI being the most important thing, wrong about population ethics, etc. I think it's a huge difference from the "cult" mindset.
I think I want to say something like "are you acting in the interests of the people you're talking to", but that doesn't work either - I'm not! being an EA has a decent chance of being less pleasant than the other thing they were doing, and either way it's not a crux.
The way I think about this, on first approximation, is that I want people to work on maximising their values (and not their wellbeing). If they think altruism is not important and are solipsistic egoists and only value their own wellbeing, I don't think EA can help them. If they value the wellbeing of others then EA can help them achieve their values better.
From my personal perspective this is strongly related to the point on uncertainty: I don't want to push other people to work on my values because from an outside view I don't think my values are more important than their values, or more likely to be "correct".
I don't know if it makes any sense, really curious to hear your thoughts, you have certainly thought about this more than I.
Thanks, Lorenzo!
I think it's definitely bad to "Use framings, arguments and examples that you don't think hold water but work at getting people to join your group". If I understand correctly it can cause point 5. Also "getting people to join your group" is rarely an instrumental goal, and "getting people to join your group for the wrong reasons" is probably not that useful in the long term.
Agree about the "not holding water", I was trying to say that "addresses cruxes you don't have" might look similar to this bad thing, but I'm not totally sure that's true.
I disagree about getting people to join your group - that definitely seems like an instrumental goal, though definitely "get the relevant people to join your group" is more the thing - but different people might have different views on how relevant they need to be, or what their goal with the group is.
Something that I think is very important that seems missing from this is that there's a significant probability that we're wrong about important things (i.e. EA as a question).
I kind of agree here; I think there are things in EA I'm not particularly uncertain of, and while I'm open to being shown I'm wrong, I don't want to pretend more uncertainty than I have.
The way I think about this, on first approximation, is that I want people to work on maximising their values (and not their wellbeing). If they think altruism is not important and are solipsistic egoists and only value their own wellbeing, I don't think EA can help them. If value the wellbeing of others then EA can help them achieve their values better.
I've definitely heard that frame, but it honestly doesn't resonate for me. I think some people are wrong about what values are right and arguing with me sometimes convinces them of that. I've definitely had my values changed by argumentation! Or at least values on some level of abstraction - not on the level of solipsism vs altruism, but there are many layers between that and "just an empirical question".
I don't want to push other people to work on my values because from an outside view I don't think my values are more important than their values, or more likely to be "correct"
I incorporate an inside view on my values - if I didn't think they were right, I'd do something else with my time!
Transparency for undermining the weird feelings around systematizing community building
There's a lot of potential ick as things in EA formalize and professionalize, especially in community building. People might reasonably feel uncomfortable realizing that the intro talk they heard is entirely scripted, or that interactions with them have been logged in a spreadsheet or that the events they've been to are taking them through the ideas on a path from least to most weird (all things I've heard of happening, with a range of how confident I am in them actually happening as described here). I think there's a lot to say here about how to productively engage with this feeling (and things community builders should do to mitigate it), but I also think there's a quick trick that will markedly improve things (though do not fix all problems): transparency.
(This is an outside take from someone who doesn't do community building on college campuses or elsewhere, I think that work is hard and filled with paradoxes, and it's also possible that this is already done by default, but in the spirit of stating the obvious)
I've been updating over and over again over the last few years that earnestness is just very powerful, and I think there are ways (though maybe they require some social / communication skills that aren't universal) to say things like (conditional on them being true):
NB: I don't think these are the best versions of these scripts, this was a first pass to point at the thing I mean
Not everything needs to be explicit, but this at least tracks whether you're passing the red face test.
I think that being transparent in this way requires:
Ambitious Altruism
When I was doing a bunch of explaining of EA and my potential jobs during my most recent job search to friends, family and anyone else, one framing I landed on I found helpful was "ambitious altruism." It let me explain why just helping one person didn't feel like enough without coming off as a jerk (i.e. "I want to be more ambitious than that" rather than "that's not effective").
It doesn't have the maximizing quality, but it doesn't not have it either, since if there's something more you can do with the same resources, there's room to be more ambitious.
Some experimental thoughts on how to moderate / facilitate sensitive conversations
Drawn from talking to a few people who I think do this well. Written in a personal capacity.
In my experience, the most important parts of a sensitive discussion is to display kindness, empathy, and common ground.
It's disheartening to write something on a sensitive topic based on upsetting personal experiences, only to be met with seemingly stonehearted critique or dismissal. Small displays of empathy and gratitude can go a long way towards this, to make people feel like their honesty and vulnerability has been rewarded rather than punished.
I think your points are good, but if deployed wrongly could make things worse. For example, if a non-rationalist friend of yours tells you about their experiences with harassment, immediately jumping into a bayesian analysis of the situation is ill-advised and may lose you a friend.
(Written in a personal capacity) Yeah, agree, and your comment made me realize that some of these are actually my experimental thoughts on something like "facilitating / moderating" sensitive conversations. I don't know if what you're pointing at is common knowledge, but I'd hope it is, and in my head it's firmly in "nonexperimental", standard and important wisdom (as contained, I believe, in some other written advice on this for EA group leaders and others who might be in this position).
From my perspective, a hard thing is how much work is done by tone and presence - I know people who can do the "talk about a bayesian analysis of harassment" with non-rationalists with sensitivity, warmth, care, and people who do "displaying kindness, empathy and common ground" in a way that leaves people more tense than before. But that doesn't mean the latter isn't generally better advice, I think it probably is for most people - and I hope it's in people's standard toolkits.
Things I'd like to try more to make conversations better
Template for EA Calls
Over the last six months, I've been having more and more calls with people interested in EA and EA careers. Sometimes I'm one of their first calls because they know me from social things, and sometimes I'm an introduction someone else (eg at 80k) has made. I've often found that an hour, my standard length for a call, feels very short. Sometimes I just chat, sometimes I try to have more of a plan. Of course a lot depends on context, but I'm interested in having a bit of a template so that I can be maximally helpful to them in limited time (I can't be a career coach for everyone I'm introduced to) and with the specifics that I can give (not trying to replicate / replace eg 80k advising).
Posting so that people can give advice / help me with it and/or use it if it seems helpful.
Template
It's possible I should ask more about the cause areas they care about - that feels like it's such a big conversation that it doesn't fit in an hour, but maybe it's really crucial. Don't know! Still figuring it out.
Been flagging more often lately that decision-relevant conversations work poorly if only A is sayable (including "yes we should have this meeting") and not-A isn't.
At the same time I've been noticing the skill of saying not-A with grace and consideration, breezily and not with "I know this is going to be unpopular, but..." energy and it's an extremely useful skill.
Engaging seriously with the (nontechnical arguments) for AI Risk: One person's core recommended reading list
(I saw this list in a private message from a more well-read EA than me and wanted to write it up, it's not my list since I haven't read most of these, but I thought it was better to have it be public than not):
If still unconvinced, might recommend (as examples of arguments most uncorrelated with the above)
For going deeper:
Might as well put a list of skilling up possibilities (probably this has been done before)
Correct me if there are mistakes here
Scattered Takes and Unsolicited Advice (new ones added to the top)
Everyone who works with young people should have two pieces of paper in their pockets:
In one: "they look up to you and remember things you say years later"
In the other: "have you ever tried to convince a teenager of anything?"
Take out as needed.
Reference: https://www.gesher-jds.org/2016/04/15/a-coat-with-two-pockets/
Habits of thought I'm working on
Habits of thought I might work on someday
More I like: https://twitter.com/ChanaMessinger/status/1287737689849176065
Conversational moves in EA / Rationality that I like for epistemics
I've been thinking about and promulgating EA as nerdsniping (https://chanamessinger.com/blog/ea-as-nerdsniping) as a good intro to bring in curious people interested intellectually in the questions who can come up with their own ideas, often in contrast to EA as an amazing moral approach, but EAG x Oxford pushed me to update towards the fact that EA / rationality give seeking people a worldview that makes a lot of sense and is more consistent and honest than many others they encounter is a huge part of the appeal, which is both good to know from an outreach perspective and has implications about how much people might get really into EA / rationality if they're looking for that in particular, which might point to being wary if you don't want to be in some sense "too convincing".
A point I haven't seen is that the "Different Worlds" hypothesis implies that if you consistently have an experience, especially interpersonally, you should on the margin expect it to happen more often relative to what conventional wisdom says.
Example: If your reports or partners consistently get angry when you do X, then decent chance that even if that isn't all that common, you're inadvertently selecting for people for whom it is, so don't update as far down on the likelihood of it happening again as you otherwise might
My Recommended Reading About Epistemics
For content, but also the vibe it immerses me in I think makes me better
About going to a hub to do networking:
A response to: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M5GoKkWtBKEGMCFHn/what-s-the-theory-of-change-of-come-to-the-bay-over-the
I think there's a lot of truth to the points made in this post.
I also think it's worth flagging that several of them: networking with a certain subset of EAs, asking for 1:1 meetings with them, being in certain office spaces - are at least somewhat zero sum, such that the more people take this advice, the less available these things will actually be to each person, and possibly on net if it starts to overwhelm. (I can also imagine increasingly unhealthy or competitive dynamics forming, but I'm hoping that doesn't happen!)
Second flag is that I don't know how many people reading this can expect to have an experience similar to yours. They may, but they may not end up being connected in all the same ways, and I want people to go knowing that they take that as a risk and to decide whether it's worth it for them.
On the other side, people taking this advice can do a lot of great networking and creating a common culture of ambition and taking ideas seriously with each other, without the same set of expectations around what connections they'll end up making.
Third flag is I have an un-fleshed out worry that this advice funges against doing things outside Berkeley/SF that are more valuable career capital in the future for ever doing EA things outside of EA or bringing valuable skills and knowledge to EA (like, will we wish in 5 years that EAs had more outside professional experience to bring domain knowledge and legitimacy to EA projects rather than a resume full of EA things?). This concern will need to be fleshed out empirically and will vary a lot in applicability by person.
(I work on CEA's community health team but am not making this post on behalf of that team)
Features that contribute to heated discussion on the forum
From my observations. I recognize many of these in myself. Definitely not a complete list, and possibly some of these things are not very relevant, please feel free to comment to add your own.
Interpersonal and Emotional
Low trust environment
Something to protect / Politics
Organizational politics
This is so perceptive, relevant and respectfully written, thank you.
I've noticed this too and I think another common dynamic is where "both sides" feel like the other side obviously "started it" and so feel justified in responding in kind.
I've also noticed in myself recently this additional layer of upset that sounds something like, "We're supposed to be allies!" I think I need to keep reminding myself that this is just what people do, namely fight with people very much like them but a little bit different*. I think EA's been remarkably good at avoiding much of this over the years and obviously I wish we weren't falling prey to it quite so much right now, but I don't think it's a reason to feel extra upset.
*Here's my favourite dramatisation of this phenomenon.
Thanks for sharing, I think this is a very useful overview of important factors, and I encourage you to share it as a normal post (I mostly miss shortforms like this).