It's worth pointing out that the assumption that growing social capital comes at the cost of truth-seeking is not necessarily true.  Sometimes the general public is correct, and your group of core members is wrong. A group that is insular, homogenous, and unwelcoming to new members can risk having incorrect beliefs and assumptions frozen in place, whereas one that is welcoming to newcomers with diverse skills,backgrounds and beliefs is more likely to have poor assumptions and beliefs challenged. 

Thanks for sharing your side here. That seems really frustrating. 

This is definitely a heated topic, and it doesn't seem like much fun at any side of it.

I think in the background, there are different clusters of people who represent different viewpoints regarding philosophical foundations and what good thinking looks like. Early EA was fairly small, and correspondingly, it favored some specific and socially unusual viewpoints. 

Expanding "EA" to more people is really tricky. It's really difficult to expand in ways where newer people are highly aligned with clusters of the "old guard."

I think it's important to see both sides of this. Newer people really hate feeling excluded, but at the same time, if the group grows too much, then we arguably lose many of the key characteristics that make EA valuable in the first place. If we started calling everything and everyone "EA", then there basically wouldn't be EA.

Frustratingly, I think it's difficult to talk about on either end. My guess is that much of the uneasiness is not said at all, in part because people don't want to get attacked. I think saying "epistemics are declining" is a way of trying to be a bit polite. A much more clear version of this might look like flagging specific posts or people as good or bad, but no one wants to publicly shame specific people/posts.

So, right now we seem to be in a situation where both sides of this don't particularly trust each other, and also are often hesitant to say things to each other, in large part because they don't trust the other side. 

For what it's worth, as good as some people might think their/EA epistemics are, the fact that this discussion is so poor I think demonstrates that there's a lot of improvement to do. (I think it's fair to say that being able to discuss heated issues online is a case of good epistemics, and now our community isn't doing terrific here.)

In the spirit of communication style you advocate for... my immediate emotional reaction to this is "Eternal September has arrived".

I dislike my comment being summarized as "brings up the "declining epistemics" argument to defend EA orgs from criticism".  In the blunt style you want, this is something between distortion and manipulation. 

On my side, I wanted to express my view on the Wytham debate. And I wrote a comment expressing  my views on the debate.

I also dislike the way my comment is straw-manned by selective quotation.

In the next bullet point to "The discussion often almost completely misses the direct, object-level, even if just at back-of-the-envelope estimate way."  I do  explicitly acknowledge the possible large effects of higher order factors.
 

In contrast, large fraction attention in the discussion seems spent on topics which are both two steps removed from the actual thing , and very open to opinions. Where by one step removed I mean e.g. "how was this announced" or "how was this decided", and two steps removed is e.g. "what will be the impact of how was this announced on the sentiment of the twitter discussion". While I do agree such considerations can have large effect, driving decisions by this type of reasoning in my view moves people and orgs into the sphere of pure PR, spin and appearance. 

What I object to is a combination of  
1. ignore the object level, or discuss it in a very lazy way
2. focus on the 2nd order ... but not in a systematic way, but mostly based on saliency and emotional pull (e.g., how will this look on twitter)

Yes, it is a simple matter to judge where this leads in the limit. We have a bunch of examples how the discourse looks like when completely taken over by these considerations - e.g., political campaigns. Words have little meaning connected to physical reality, but are mostly tools in the fight for the emotional states and minds of other people.

Also: while those with high quality epistemics usually agree on similar things  is a distortion making the argument personal, about people, in reality yes, good reasoning often converges to similar conclusions. 

Also: It's a given that the path of catering to a smaller group of people with higher quality epistemics will have more impact than spreading the core EA messaging to a larger group of people with lower quality epistemics

No, it's not given. Just, so far, effective altruism was about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and acting based on that. Based on the thinking so far, It was decidedly not trying to be a mass movement, making our core insights more appealing to the public at large . 

In my view, no one figured out yet how the appealing to the masses, don't need to think much  version of effective altruism should look like to be actually good.

(edit: Also, I quite dislike the frame-manipulation move of shifting from "epistemic decline of the community" to "less intelligent or thoughtful people joining". You can imagine a randomized experiment where you take two groups of equally intelligent and thoughtful people, and you make them join community with different styles of epistemic culture (eg physics, and multi-level marketing).  You will get very different results. While you seem to interpret a lot of things as about people (are they smart?  had they studied philosophy?) I think it's often much more about norms.)

I'm just going to register a disagreement that I think is going to be a weird intersection of opinions. I despise posting online but here goes. I think this post is full of applause lights and quite frankly white psychodrama. 

I'm a queer person of colour and quite left-wing. I really disliked Bostrom's letter but still lean hard on epistemics being important. I dislike Bostrom's letter because I think it is an untrue belief and equivocates out of grey tribe laziness. But reading a lot of how white EAs write about being against the letter it sounds like you're more bothered by issues of social capital and optics for yourself not for any real impact reason. 

The reason I believe this is because of two reasons:

1. This post bundles together the Bostrom letter and Wyntham. I personally think Wyntham quite possibly could be negative EV (mostly because I think Oxford real estate is inflated and the castle is aesthetically ugly and not conducive to good work being done). But the wrongness in the Bostrom isn't that it looks bad. I am bothered by Bostrom holding a wrong belief not a belief that is optically bad. 

2. You bundled in AI safety in later discussions about this. But there are lots of neartermist causes that are really weird e.g. shrimp welfare.  Your job as a community builder isn't to feel good and be popular it's to truth-seek and present morally salient fact. The fact AI safety is the hard one for you speaks to a cohort difference not anything particular about these issues. For instance,  in many silicon valley circles AI safety makes EA more popular!

Lastly, I don't think the social capital people actually complete the argument for full implication of what it means for EA to become optics aware. Do we now go full Shorism and make sure we have white men in leadership positions so we're socially popular? The discussion devolved to the meta-level of epistemics because the discussion is often low quality and so for it to even continue to do object-level utilitarian calculus to exist because we're doing group decision-making. It all just seems like a way to descend into respectability politics and ineffectiveness. I want to be part of a movement that does what's right and true not what's popular.

On a personal emotional note, I can't help but wonder how the social capital people would act in previous years with great queer minds. It was just a generation ago that queer people were socially undesirable and hidden away. If your ethics are so sensitive to the feelings of the public I frankly do not trust it. I can't help but feel a lot of the expressions of fears by mostly white EAs in these social capital posts are status anxieties about their inability to sit around the dinner table and brag about their GiveWell donations. 

I'll defend the declining epistemics point of view, even though I don't think it's quite so bad as some others think.

I recommend first reading about the Eternal September. The basic effect is that when new people join a movement, it takes time for them to get up to speed and if people join at too fast a rate this breaks down. This isn't necessarily a lack of intelligence, more a result of needing a certain number of more experienced people to help newer members understand why things work the way that they do.

When a movement grows too fast, it's very easy for this cultural knowledge to dissipate and for the values of a movement to change not because people deeply understood the old values and consciously decided that it would be better because they were different, but more because people are importing their assumptions from the broader society.

Now some people think it would be arrogant for a group of people to think that they have better access to the truth than society on average. On the other, almost no-one denies that there are groups with worse access to the truth and that they have some idea of what groups these are. And the hypothesis that we can identify some groups with worse access to the truth, but we can't identify groups with better access would be an extremely strange and weird hypothesis to entertain, the kind of hypothesis that is generally only produced by social processes.

Once we've accepted that it is possible to identify at least some groups with better epistemics than average, then it becomes reasonable to suggest that EA could be one of those groups. Indeed, if someone didn't think EA was one of those groups, I'd wonder why they decided to join EA rather than something else? 

So once you accept that it is likely  that your group has above-average epistemics, it follows quite quickly that you don't want it regressing to the societal mean. And this is a major challenge because social forces naturally push your movement to regress to the mean and the so maintaining the current quality requires constantly pushing back against these entropic forces.

I'd challenge you to reverse your analysis and consider what are the "smuggled assumptions" in the "epistemic decline isn't an issue" hypothesis. As an example, one assumption might be, "We mostly can't tell who has high-quality epistemics or not". And I would push back against this by pointing out, as I did above, that people are pretty good at agreeing that certain groups have low-quality epistemics (flat-earthers, creationists, lizard-person conspiracy theorists) and so it would be strange if we had no idea of high-quality epistemics, particularly since you can get pretty far towards high-quality epistemics by not doing things that clearly degrade your epistemics. 

I really wanted to like this post, because I agree with the fact that "declining epistemics" is rarely a complaint that is made in good faith, and is often harmful when compared to actually asking about the issues. However,the problem that the [high-decoupler epistemic purists|LessWrong crowd] seem to have is a different one than you imply - that they do ignore impactful and important emotional and social factors which matter, and instead focus on only easily assessed object level issues. (A version of the McNamara fallacy.)

You correctly point out that "in a real utilitarian calculus, things outside the object level can matter much more than the object level itself," which I strongly agree with - but then explicitly decide not to do any of that calculus, and appeal to emotion - not to say that you think it matters more than the object level factors in certain cases, but to say that you feel like it should.

To those who haven't studied philosophy, epistemics broadly refers to the idea of knowledge itself, or the study of how we gain knowledge, sort out good from bad, etc. 

I just want to point out that I have a degree in philosophy and have never heard the word "epistemics" used in the context of academic philosophy. The word used has always been either epistemology or epistemic as adjective in front of a noun (never on its own, always used as an adjective, not a noun, and certainly never pluralized). 

From what I can tell, "epistemics" seems to be weird EA Forum/LessWrong jargon. Not sure how or why this came about, since this is not obscure philosophy knowledge, nor is it hard to look up.

If you Google "epistemics" philosophy, you get 1) sources like Wikipedia that talk about epistemology, not "epistemics", 2) a post from the EA Forum and a page from the Forethought Foundation, which is an effective altruist organization, 3) some unrelated, miscellaneous stuff (i.e. neither EA-related or academic philosophy-related), and 4) a few genuine but fairly obscure uses of the word "epistemics" in an academic philosophy context. This confirms that the term is rarely used in academic philosophy.

I also don't know what people in EA mean when they say "epistemics". I think they probably mean something like epistemic practices, but I actually don't know for sure.

I would discourage the use of the term "epistemics", particularly as its meaning is unclear, and would advocate for a replacement such as epistemology or epistemic practices (or whatever you like, but not "epistemics").

I don't have any great solutions to this debate, but I'd like to see less talk of epistemic decline in the EA forum, or at least have people state it more blatantly rather than dressing up their ideas in fancy language. If you think that less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement, I'd argue you should say so directly to help foster discussion of the actual topic.

Tyler Cowen said:

...effective altruism seems to attract more talented young people than anything else I know of right now by a considerable margin. And I've observed this by running my own project, Emergent Ventures for Talented Young People. And I just see time and again, the smartest and most successful people who apply get grants. They turn out to have connections to the EA movement. And that's very much to the credit of effective altruism.

I agree with Cowen: I think EA has done a great job attracting talented people.

I don't like the idea of driving those people away.

Like you, I am fairly suspicious of the "declining epistemic quality" idea.

But it seems possible that this idea is correct, and also that "less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement" is an incorrect diagnosis of what's going wrong.

I don't think people should jump to the most inflammatory diagnosis.

Hey Wil,

as someone who is likely in the "declining epistemics would be bad" camp, I will try to write this reply while mindfully attempting to be better at epistemics than I usually am.

Let's start with some points where you hit on something true:

However I think the way this topic is being discussed and leveraged in arguments is toxic to fostering trust in our community

I agree that talk about bad epistemics can come across as being unwelcoming to newcomers and considering them stupid. Coupled with the elitist vibe many people get from EA, this is not great.

I also agree that many people will read the position you describe as implying "I am smarter than you", and people making that argument should be mindful of this, and think about how to avoid giving this impression.

You cite as one of the implied assumptions:

Those with high quality epistemics usually agree on similar things

I think it is indeed a danger that "quality epistemics" is sometimes used as a shortcut to defend things mindlessly. In an EA context, I often disagreed with arguments that defer strongly to experts in EA orgs. These arguments vaguely seem to neglect that these experts might have systematic biases qua working in those orgs. Personally, I probably sometimes use "bad epistemics" as a cached thought internally when encountering a position for which I have mostly seen arguments that I found unconvincing in the past.

Now for the parts I disagree with:

I scrolled through some of the disagreeing comments on Making Effective Altruism Enormous, and tried to examine if any have the implicit assumptions you state:

It is a simple matter to judge who has high quality epistemics This comment argues that broadening the movement too much will reduce nuance by default. While it implies that EA discussions have more nuance than the average discussion, I do not think the poster or anyone else in the thread says it is easy to identify people with good epistemics. Furthermore, many argue that growth should be not too fast to be able to get people used to EA discussion norms, which implies that people do not necessarily think that bad epistemics are fundamental.

Those with high quality epistemics usually agree on similar things

I don't think the strong version of this statement ("usually") holds true for most people in the epistemics camp, some people, including me, would probably agree that e.g. disagreeing with "it is morally better to prioritize expected impact over warm feelings" is usually not good epistemics. I.e. there are some few core tenants for which "those with high quality epistemics" usually agree on.

It’s a given that the path of catering to a smaller group of people with higher quality epistemics will have more impact than spreading the core EA messaging to a larger group of people with lower quality epistemics

While many people probably think it is likely , I do not think the majority consider it "a given". I could not find a comment that argues or assumes it is obvious in the above discussion.

What I personally believe:

My vague position is that one of the core advantages of the EA community is caring about true arguments, and consequently earnest and open-minded reasoning. In so far that I would complain about bad epistemics, it is definitely not that people are dumb. Rather, I think that it is a danger that people engage a bit more in what seems like motivated reasoning in some discussions than the EA average, and seem less interested in understanding other people's position and changing their mind. These are gradual differences, I do not mean to imply that there is a camp who reasons perfectly and impartially, and another one that does not.
Without fleshing out my opinion too much (the goal of this comment is not to defend my position), I usually point to the thought experiment: "What would have happened if Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote ai safety posts on the machine learning subreddit?" to illustrate how important having an open-minded and curious community can be.

For example, in your post you posit three implicit assumptions, and later link to a single comment as justification. And tbf, that comment reads a little bit dismissive, but I don't think it actually carries the three assumptions you outline, and should not be used to represent a whole "camp", especially since this debate was very heated on both sides. It is not really visible that you try to charitably interpret the position you disagree with. And while it's good that you clearly state that something is an emotional reaction, I think it would also be good if that reaction is accompanied with a better attempt to understand the other side.