"Big tent" effective altruism is very important (particularly right now)

Celebrate all the good actions^[that people are taking (not diminish people when they don't go from 0 to 100 in under 10 seconds flat).

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I'm uncomfortable doing too much celebrating of actions that are much lower impact than other actions

I think the following things can both be true:

• The best actions are much higher impact than others and should be heavily encouraged.
• Most people will come in on easier but lower impact actions and if there isn't an obvious and stepped progression to get to higher impact actions and support to facilitate this then many will fall out unnecessarily. Or may be put off entirely if 'entry level' actions either aren't available or receive a very low reward or status.

I didn't read the OP as saying that we should settle with lower impact actions if there's the potential for higher impact ones. I read it as saying that we should make it easier for people to find their level - either helping them to reach higher impact over time if for whatever reason they're unable or unwilling to get there straight away, or making space for lower impact actions if for whatever reason that's what's available. 

Some of this will involve shouting out and rewarding less impactful actions beyond their absolute value not for its own sake but because this may be the best way of helping this progression. I've definitely noticed the '0-100' thing and if I was younger and less experienced it might have bothered me more. 

Thanks for your response. I tend to actually agree with a lot (but not all) of these points, so I totally own that some of this just needs clarification that wouldn't be the case if I were clearer in my original post.

this means spending more resources on people who are "less elite" and less committed to EA

There’s a difference between actively recruiting from “less elite” sources and being carefully about your shopfronts so that they don’t put-off would-be effective altruists and create enemies of could-be allies. I’m pointing much more to the latter than the former (though I do think there’s value in the former too).

I'm not saying we should shun people for taking a suboptimal action, but we should be transparent about the fact that (a) some altruistic actions aren't very good and don't deserve celebration, and (b) some actions are good but only because they're on the path to an impactful career.

I’m mostly saying we shouldn’t shun people for taking a suboptimal action. But also, be careful about how confident we are about what is suboptimal or not. And use to use positive reinforcement instead of good actions instead of guilting people for not reaching a particular standard. To recognise that we’re all on a journey and the destination isn’t always that clear anyway (Rob Wiblin thought it might not be a good idea for SBF to earn to give and I think that encouraging him to become a grantmaker at Open Philanthropy probably would have been a worse outcome).

Side note: There’s something pretty off-putting about treating the actions of altruistic people as purely a means to getting them into a particular predestined career. I think we lose good people when we treat them this way. We can seem like slimey salespeople.

Communication is hard. There's a tradeoff between fidelity, brevity, scale, and speed

Again this is where you have different focuses in different places. Our shopfronts (e.g. effectivealtruism.org, fellowships, virtual programs, introductory presentations, personal interactions with community members and group leaders etc) start brief and concise with a clear path to dig deeper.

big-tent approach where we also need high scale

I think this is a central confusion with my post and I own I must not have communicated this well: big tent doesn’t mean actively increasing reach. Big tent means encouraging and showcasing the diversity that exists within the community so that people can see that we’re committed to the question of “how can we do the most good” not a specific set of answers.

someone asks whether volunteering in an animal shelter is "EA", we should give well-reasoned arguments that there are probably higher-value things to do under almost every scope-sensitive moral view (perhaps starting from first principles if they're new), not avoid looking dogmatic by telling them something largely false like "Some people might find higher impact at an animal shelter because they have comparative advantage / are much more motivated, and there could also be unknown unknowns that place really high value on the work at animal shelters".

I agree! The former is a great response, the latter is not. I’d also say something along the lines of “you can have multiple goals and that’s fine” and that if the warm fuzzies is important and motivating for you then that’s great. I wouldn’t encourage someone to say it’s “EA” if it isn’t.

We should probably not come off as exclusionary when talking to new people.

Great! That’s one of my main points.

Taken to the extreme, avoiding the appearance of elitism would hamstring EA by taking away some of the most valuable direct and meta interventions.

I agree! I think we should just be judicious about it and bear in mind both (a) how perception of elitism can hurt us; and (b) when we miss out on great people because of unnecessary elitism that results in us achieving a lot less.

Correct me if I'm wrong in my interpretation here, but it seems like you are modelling impact on a unidimensional scale, as though there is always an objective answer that we know with certainty when asked 'is X or Y more impactful'? 

I got this impression from what I understood your main point to be, something like: 

There is a tail of talented people who will make the most impact, and any diversion of resource towards less talented people will be lower expected value.

I think there are several assumptions in both of these points that I want to unpack (and disagree with).

On the question of whether there is a unidimensional scale of talented people who will make the most impact: I believe that the EA movement could be wrong about the problems it thinks are most important, and/or the approaches to solving them. In the world where we are wrong, if we deter many groups with important skillsets or approaches that we didn't realise were important because we were overconfident in some problems/solutions, then that's quite bad. Conversely, in the world where we are right, yes maybe we have invested in more places than turned out to be necessary, but the downside risks seem smaller overall (depending on constraints, which I'll get to in next para). You could argue that talent correlates across all skillsets and approaches, and maybe there's some truth to that, but I think there's lots of places where the tails come apart, and I worry that not taking worldview diversification seriously can lead to many failure modes for a movement like EA. If you are quite certain that EA top cause areas as listed on 80k are right about the problems that are 'most' important and the 'best' approaches to solving them (this second one I am extremely uncertain about), you may reasonably disagree with me here - is that the case? In my view, these superlatives and collapsing of dimensions requires a lot of certainty about some baseline assumptions.

On the question of whether resource diversion from talented people to less 'talented' people is lower expected value: I think this depends on lots of things (sidestepping the question of talent definition which above para addresses). Firstly, are the resources substitutable? In the example you gave with university groups, I'd say no, if you fund a non-top university group then you are not detracting from top university group funding (assuming no shortage of monetary funding, which I believe we can assume). However, if you meant the resource is the time of a grantmaker specialised in community building, and it is harder for them to evaluate a non-top uni than top because maybe they know fewer people there etc. then I'd say that resource is substitutable. The question of substitutability matters to identify if it is a real cost, but it also opens a question of resource constraints and causality. Imagine a world where that time-constrained grantmaker decides to not take the easy decision but bear short term cost and invest in getting to know the new non-top uni - it is possible that the ROI is higher because of returns to early-stage scaling being higher, and new value of information. We could also imagine a different causality: if grantmaking itself was less centralised (which a bigger tent might lead to), some grantmakers might cater to non-top unis, and others to top unis, and we'd be able to see outcomes from both. So overall I think this point of yours is far from clearly true, and a bigger tent would give more value of information.

There were some points you made that I do agree with you on. In particular: celebration disproportionate to the impact feeling fake, adding false uncertainty to avoid coming across as dogmatic (although I think there is a middle way here), and real trade-offs in axes of desirable communication qualities. Another thing I noticed that I like is a care for epistemic quality and rigour and wanting to protect that cultural aspects. It's not obvious to me why that would need to be sacrificed to have a bigger tent - but maybe we have different ideas of what a bigger tent looks like.

(Also I did a quick reversal test of the actions in the OP in my head as mentioned in the applause lights post you linked to, and the vast majority do not stand up as applause lights in my opinion, in that I'd bet you'd find the opposite point of view being genuinely argued for around this forum or LW somewhere ).

I think the best remedy to looking dogmatic is actually having good, legible epistemics, not avoiding coming across as dogmatic by adding false uncertainty.

This is a great sentence, I will be stealing it :)

However, I think "having good legible epistemics" being sufficient for not coming across as dogmatic is partially wishful thinking. A lot of these first impressions are just going to be pattern-matching, whether we like it or not.

I would be excited to find ways to pattern-match better, without actually sacrificing anything substantive. One thing I've found anecdotally is that a sort of "friendly transparency" works pretty well for this - just be up front about what you believe and why, don't try to hide ideas that might scare people off, be open about the optics on things, ways you're worried they might come across badly, and why those bad impressions are misleading, etc.

Thanks! I really like your framing of both these 😀 

+1 to this.

In fact, I think that it's harder to get a very big (or very fast-growing) set of people to do the "reason and evidence" thing well.  I think that reasoning carefully is very hard, and building a community that reasons well together is very hard.

I am very keen for EA to be about the "reason and evidence" thing, rather than about specific answers.  But in order to do this, I think that we need to grow cautiously (maybe around 30%/year) and in a pretty thoughtful way.

my sense is that historically there have been many large and rapidly growing groups of people that fit the second description, and not very many of the first.  I think this was true for mechanistic reasons related to how humans work rather than being accidents of history, and think that recent technological advances may even have exaggerated the effects.

I think that works for many groups, and many subfields/related causes, but not for "effective altruism". 

To unpack this a bit, I think that "AI safety" or "animal welfare" movements could quite possibly get much bigger much more quickly than an "effective altruism" movement that is "commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can".

However, when we are selling that we're "commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can" and instead present people with a very narrow set of conclusions I think we do neither of these things well. Instead we put people off and we undermine our value. 

I believe that the value of the EA movement comes from this commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can.

People are hearing about EA. These people could become allies or members of the community and/or our causes. However, if we present ourselves too narrowly we might not just lose them, but they might become adversaries.

I've seen this already. People soured on EA because if it seeming too narrow and too overconfident becoming increasingly adversarial and that hurting our overall goals of improving the world.

A core part of the differing intuitions might be because we're thinking about two different timescales.

 It seems intuitively right to me that the "dedicated to a particular set of conclusions about the world" version of effective altruism will grow faster in the short term. I think this might be because conclusions require less nuanced communication, and being more concrete  there are more concrete actions to take that can get people on board faster.

I also have the intuition that a "commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can" (I'd maybe add, "with some proportion of our resources") has the potential to have a larger backing in the long-term. 

I have done a terrible "paint" job (literally used paint) in purple on one of the diagrams in this post to illustrate what I mean:

There are movement building strategies that end us up on the grey line, which gives us faster growth in the short term (so a bigger tent for a while), but doesn't change our saturation point (we're still at saturation point 1). 

I think that a "broad spectrum of ideas" might mean our end saturation point is higher even if this might require slower growth in the near term. I've illustrated this as the purple line which ends up being bigger in the end, at saturation point 2, even if in the short term, growth is slower. In this sense, we will be smaller tent for a while, but we have the potential to end up as a bigger tent in some terminal equilibrium. 

I think "large groups that reason together on how to achieve some shared values" is something that's so common, that we ignore it. Examples can be democratic countries, cities, communities.

Not that this means reasoning about being effective can attract as large a group. But one can hope.

Thanks Nathan. I definitely see the tensions here. Hopefully these clarifications will help :)

I reckon it's better if we focus on being a smaller highly engaged community rather than a really big one.

My central claim isn't about the size of the community, it's about the diversity of EA that we present to the world (and represent within EA) and staying true to the core question not a particular set of conclusions. 

It depends on what you mean by "focus" too. The community will always be some degree of concentric circles of engagement. The total size and relative distribution of engagement will vary depending on what we focus on. My central claim is that the total impact of the community will be higher if the community remains a "big tent" that sticks to the core question of EA. The mechanism is that we create more engagement within each level of engagement, with more allies and fewer adversaries.

Do low engagement people become high engagement.

I've never seen someone become high engagement instantly. I've only seen engagement as something that increases incrementally (sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes hit's a point and tapers off, and sadly sometimes high engagement turns to high anti-engagement).

I don't think that EA is for everyone. Again this clashes with what i said above, but I think that it can be harder for people who leave a community after some time than those who are rejected at the door. If my above point is correct, then there should be some way to signal to people that EA is for people who want to really engage and that it may not be for everyone

Depends on what you mean by EA. In my conception (and the conception I advocate for) everyone is an effective altruist to some extent sometimes and nobody is entirely an effective altruist ever. Effective altruism is a way of thinking not an identity. Some people are part of the "EA community" while some people eschew the label and community yet have much higher impact than most people within the "EA community" because they've interrogated big world problems and taken significant positive actions.

I reckon it's better if we focus on being a smaller highly engaged community rather than a really big one.

Why not both? Have a big tent with less-engaged people, and a core of more-engaged people.

Also, a lot of people donating small amounts can add up to big amounts.

What is WWOTF?

I reckon it's better if we focus on being a smaller highly engaged community rather than a really big one

Agreed, though it makes sense for Giving What We Can to become a mass movement. I think it'd be good for some people involved in GWWC to join EA, but there's no need to push it too hard. More like let people know about EA and if it resonates with people they'll come over.

but signal that EAGs are mainly for those who are engaged

Maybe, I think there's scope for people to become more engaged over time.

I think there are two ways to frame an expansion of the group of people who are engaged with EA through more than donations.

The first, which sits well with your disagreements: we're doing extremely important things which we got into by careful reasoning about our values and impact. More people may cause value drift or dilute the more impactful efforts to make way on the most important problems.

But I think a second one is much more plausible: we're almost surely wrong about some important things. We have biases that stem from who the typical EAs are, where they live, or just the very noisy path that EA has taken so far. While our current work is important, it's also crucial that our ideas are exposed to, and processed by, more people. What's "value drift" in one person's eyes might really be an important correction in another's. What's "dilution" may actually prove to mean a host of new useful perspectives and ideas (among other less useful ones).

I also interpreted this comment as quite dismissive but I think most of that comes from the fact Max explicitly said he downvoted the post, rather than from the rest of the comment (which seems fine and reasonable).

 I think I naturally interpret a downvote as meaning "I think this post/comment isn't helpful and I generally want to discourage posts/comments like it." That seems pretty harsh in this case, and at odds with the fact Max seems to think the post actually points at some important things worth taking seriously. I also naturally feel a bit concerned about the CEO of CEA seeming to discourage posts which suggest EA should be doing things differently,  especially where they are reasonable and constructive like this one.

This is a minor point in some ways but I think explicitly stating "I downvoted this post" can say quite a lot (especially when coming from someone with a senior position in the community). I haven't spent a lot of time on this forum recently so I'm wondering if other people think the norms around up/downvoting are different to my interpretation, and in particular whether Max you meant to use it differently?

[EDIT: I checked the norms on up/downvoting, which say to downvote if either "There’s an error", or "The comment or post didn’t add to the conversation, and maybe actually distracted." I personally think this post added something useful to the conversation about the scope and focus of EA, and it seems harsh to downvote it because it conflated a few different dimensions - and that's why Max's comment seemed a bit harsh/dismissive to me]

Thanks Max. I agree that there is a lot of ground covered here that isn't broken up into different dimensions and that it could have been better if broken up as such. I disagree that entirely undermines the core proposition that: (a) whether we like it or not we are getting more attention; (b) it's particularly important to think carefully about our "shop fronts" with that increased attention; and therefore (c) staying true to "EA as a question" instead of a particular set of conclusions is going to ultimately serve our goals better (this might be our biggest disagreement?).

I'd be very interested to hear you unpack that you think the opposite of "easier to get big with the 'evidence and reasoning' framing".  This seems to be a pretty important crux.

Hello Max,

In turn, I strongly downvoted your post.

Luke raised, you say, some "important issues". However, you didn't engage with the substance of those issues. Instead, you complained that he hadn't adequately separated them even though, for my money, they are substantially related. I wouldn't have minded that if you'd then go on to offer your thoughts on how EA should operate on each of the dimensions you listed, but you did not.

Given this, your comment struck me as unacceptably dismissive, particularly given you are the CEO of CEA. The message it conveys is something like "I will only listen to your concerns if you present them exactly in the format I want" which, again for my money, is not a good message to send.

"I think we could be more accepting of the idea that some of these things (eg donating blood) make us feel warm fuzzy feelings, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to feel those feelings and taking actions to achieve them, even if they might not be obviously maximally impactful. Impact is a marathon, not a sprint, and it's important that people who are looking to have a large impact make sustainable choices, including keeping their morale high."

Strongly agreed.

I think you may be underestimating the value of giving blood. It seems like according to the analysis here:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jqCCM3NvrtCYK3uaB/blood-donation-generally-not-that-effective-on-the-margin

A blood donation is still worth about 1/200 of a QALY. That’s still altruistic; it isn’t just warm fuzzies. If someone does not believe the EA community’s analyses of the top charities, we should still encourage them to do things like give blood.

They currently work for me.