Quadratic Reciprocity's Quick takes

I mostly haven't been thinking about what the ideal effective altruism community would look like, because it seems like most of the value of effective altruism might just get approximated to what impact it has on steering the world towards better AGI futures. But I think even in worlds where AI risk wasn't a problem, the effective altruism movement seems lackluster in some ways.

I am thinking especially of the effect that it often has on university students and younger people. My sense is that EA sometimes influences those people to be closed-minded or at least doesn't contribute to making them as ambitious or interested in exploring things outside "conventional EA" as I think would be ideal. Students who come across EA often become too attached to specific EA organisations or paths to impact suggested by existing EA institutions. 

In an EA community that was more ambitiously impactful, there would be a higher proportion of folks at least strongly considering doing things like starting startups that could be really big, traveling to various parts of the world to form a view about how poverty affects welfare, having long google docs with their current best guesses for how to get rid of factory farming, looking at non-"EA" sources to figure out what more effective interventions GiveWell might be missing perhaps because they're somewhat controversial, doing more effective science/medical research, writing something on the topic of better thinking and decision-making that could be as influential as Eliezer's sequences, expressing curiosity about the question of whether charity is even the best way to improve human welfare, trying to fix science. 

And a lower proportion of these folks would be applying to jobs on the 80,000 Hours job board or choosing to spend more time within the EA community rather than interacting with the most ambitious, intelligent, and interesting people amongst their general peers. 

Just some ranty thoughts about EA university groups without any suggestions. Don't take too seriously.

Lots of university EA group organisers I have met seem to not be very knowledgeable about EA.  A common type is someone who had gotten involved for social reasons and uses EA terms in conversations but doesn't really get it. I can imagine this being offputting to the types of people these groups would like to join. Probably this is less of a problem at top universities though.

It also feels awkward to mention this to people because I know these group organisers have good intentions but they may be turning off cool people from engaging with the EA groups. It is even more awkward when community building is their part-time job. It's not that they're bad, it's just that I wouldn't be excited about a promising student first coming across EA by interacting with them. 

Less confidently, it seems like in some groups there is too much of an emphasis on being very agenty right away and making big projects happen (especially community-building projects) compared to having a culture of intellectual curiosity and prioritising making interesting conversations happen that are not about community building. It also feels like for young people in EA, there are strong incentives to network hard, go to Berkeley, go to a bunch of retreats so you have cool important EA friends and all of this cuts down the time you can just sit down and learn important things, skill up and introspect. 

There have been posts on the EA forum pointing at similar things so it feels like the situation might become better over the next year but this is just me recording what my experience has been like at times. 

A few months ago I felt like some people I knew within community building were doing a thing where they believed (or believed they believed) that AI existential risk was a really big problem but instead of just saying that to people (eg: new group members), they said it was too weird to just say that outright and so you had to make people go through less "weird" things like content about global health and development and animal welfare before telling them you were really concerned about this AI thing. 

And even when you got to the AI topic, had to make people trust you enough by talking about misuse risks first in order to be more convincing. This would have been an okay thing to do if those were their actual beliefs. But in a couple of cases, this was an intentional thing to warm people up to the "crazy" idea that AI existential risk is a big problem. 

This bothered me.

To the extent that those people now feel more comfortable directly stating their actual beliefs, this feels like a good thing to me. But I'm also worried that people still won't just directly state their beliefs and instead still continue to play persuasion games with new people but about different things.

Eg: one way this could go wrong is group organisers try to make it seem to new people like they're more confident about what interventions within AI safety are helpful than they actually are. Things like: "Oh hey you're concerned about this problem, here are impactful things you can do right away such as applying to this org or going through this curriculum" when they are much more uncertain (or should be?) about how useful the work done by the org is or how correct/relevant the content in the AI safety curriculum is.

I hope more people, especially EA community builders, take some time to reevaluate the value of growing the EA movement and EA community building. Seems like a lot of community builders are acting as if "making more EAs" is good for its own sake. I'm much less sure about the value of growing the EA community building and more uncertain about whether it is positive at all. Seems like a lot of people are having to put in energy to do PR, make EA look good, fight fires in the community when their time could be better spent directly focusing on how to solve the big problems.

But I also think directly focusing on how to solve the big problems is difficult and "get more people into EA and maybe some of them will know how to make progress" feels like an easy way out. 

Some things I got wrong in the past:

1. In the past, I think I cared excessively about EA and me myself seeming respectable, and I think I was wrong about the tradeoffs there. As one concrete example of this, when talking to people about AI safety I avoided linking a bunch to blog posts even when I thought they were more useful to read and instead sent people links to more legitimate-seeming academic papers and people because I thought that made the field seem more credible. I think this and other similar things I did were bad. 
2. I didn't care about people's character, and how much integrity they had enough in the past. I was very forgiving when I found out someone had intentionally broken a small promise to a colleague or acted in a manipulative way towards someone because in those cases, it seemed to me like the actual magnitude of the harm caused ended up being small relative to the impact of the person's work. I now think those small harms add up and could be quite costly by adding mistrust and friction to interactions with others in the community.
3. I dismissed AI x-risk concerns in 2019 without making an honest attempt to learn about the arguments because it sounded weird. I think that was a reasonable thing to do given the social environment I was in. I think the really big mistake I made there though was not stating why I was unconvinced to my friends who had thought about it because I was afraid of seeming dumb due to not having read all the arguments already and because I was afraid of feeling pressured if I did try to argue about it.
4. I think I thought university EA group organising was the most useful thing for me to do. This seemed sensible to believe for a while but I think I stuck with it for too long because I had signed up to do it. If I had been honestly looking for evidence of the usefulness of the group organising activities I was doing, I would have realised a lot quicker that it was more useful for me to stop and do other things instead. I think this cost me ~100 hours. 

There are  different ways to approach telling people about effective altruism (or caring about the future of humanity or AI safety etc):

• "We want to work on solving these important problems. If you care about similar things, let's work together!"
• "We have figured out what the correct things to do are and now we are going to tell you what to do with your life"

It seems like a lot of EA university group organisers are doing the second thing, and to me, this feels weird and bad. A lot of our disagreement about specific things, like how I feel it is icky to use prepared speeches written by someone else to introduce people to EA and bad to think of people who engage with your group in terms of where they are in some sort of pipeline, is about them thinking about things in that second frame.

I think the first framing is a lot healthier, both for communities and for individuals who are doing activities under the category of "community building". If you care deeply about something (eg: using spreadsheets to decide where to donate, forming accurate beliefs, reducing the risk we all die due to AI, solving moral philosophy, etc) and you tell people why you care and they're not interested, you can just move along and try to find people who are interested in working together with you in solving those problems. You don't have to make them go through some sort of pipeline where you start with the most appealing concepts to build them up to the thing you actually want them to care about. 

It is also healthier for your own thinking because putting yourself in the mindset of trying to persuade others, in my experience, is pretty harmful. When I have been in that mode in the past, it crushed my ability to notice when I was confused. 

I also have other intuitions for why doing the second thing just doesn't work if you want to get highly capable individuals who will actually solve the biggest problems but in this comment, I just wanted to point out the distinction between the two ways of doing things. I think they are distinct mindsets that lead to very different actions. 

My defense of posting pseudonymously:

It does feel like I'm defecting a little bit by using a pseudonymous account. I do feel like I'm somewhat intentionally trying to inject my views while getting away with not paying the reputational cost of having them.  

My comments use fewer caveats than they would if I were posting under my real name, and I'm more likely to blurt things I currently think without spending lots of time thinking about how correct I am. I also feel under little obligation to signal thoughtfulness and niceness when not writing using my name. Plausibly this contributes to lowering the quality of the EA forum but I have found it helpful as a (possibly temporary?) measure to practise posting anything at all. I think that I have experiences/opinions that I want others on the EA forum to know about but don't want to do the complicated calculation to figure out if it is worth posting them under my real name (where a significant part of the complicated calculation is non-EA people coming across them while searching for me on the internet). 

I also prefer the situation where people in the EA community can anonymously share their controversial views over the situation where they don't say anything at all because it makes it easier to get a more accurate pulse of the movement. I mostly have spent lots of time in social groups where saying things I think are true would have been bad for me and I do notice that it did cause my thinking to be a bit stunted as I avoid thinking thoughts that would be bad to share. Writing pseudonymously feels helpful for noticing that problem and practising thinking more freely. 

Also idk pseudonyms are really fun to use, I like the semi-secret identity aspect of using them. 

Maybe folks funding community building at universities should make the option of: "doing paid community building stuff at the start of term for a couple of months and then focusing on personally skilling up and learning more things for the rest of the year" more obvious. For a lot of group organisers, this might be a better idea than consistently spending 10 hours/week group organising throughout the year. 

 Since EAG: SF is coming up and not all of us will get to talk to everyone it would be valuable for us to talk to, it would be cool for people to document takeaways from specific conversations they had with people (with those people's consent) rather than just takeaways of the entire conference, which people have posted on the forum in the past. 

From https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9Y6Y6qoAigRC7A8eX/my-take-on-what-we-owe-the-future#Thoughts_on_the_balance_of_positive_and_negative_value_in_current_lives:

I feel like I basically have no idea, but if I had to guess I’d say ~40% of current human lives are net-negative, and the world as a whole is worse than nothing for humans alive today because extreme suffering is pretty bad compared to currently achievable positive states. This does not mean that I think this trend will continue into the future; I think the future has positive EV due to AI + future tech.

I share these intuitions and it is a huge part of the reason reducing x-risk feels so emotionally compelling to me. It would be so sad for humanity to die out so young and unhappy never having experienced the awesome possibilities that otherwise lie in our future. 

Like, the difference between what life is like and the sorts of experiences we can have right now and just how good life could be and the sorts of pleasures we could potentially experience in the future, is so incredibly massive. 

Also feeling like the only way to make up for all the suffering people experienced in the past and are experiencing now and the suffering we inflict on animals is to fill the universe with good stuff. Create so much value and beautiful experiences and whatever else is good and positive and right, so that things like disease, slavery, the torture of animals seem like a distant and tiny blot in human history.