Hi Holden, thanks for writing this up, but would it be possible for you to say something with a little bit more substance? At present it seems rather perfunctory and potentially a little insulting.
I've attempted to translate the comment above into a series of plain-English bottom-lines.
I apologise if the tone is a little forthright: a trade-off with clarity and intellectual honesty.
On anonymity
"Yeah I can see why there might seem to be a problem, and I promise that I am truly very sorry that you're facing its consequences. In any case, I promise that everything is actually completely fine and you don't need to worry! I acknowledge that (as you have already said) my promises don't count for much here, but... trust me anyway! No, I will not take any notice of the specific issues you describe, nor the specific solutions that you propose."
On conflicts of interest
"Here I will briefly describe some of the original causes of the problem. I personally think that it's no big deal, and will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide. I promise we're taking it really seriously, though."
On focusing on a couple of existential risks (which is a gross simplification of the section I presume you're responding to?)
"I personally think everything is fine, no I will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide."
On being in line with the interests of billionaires
"I understand your concerns, but most of our tech billionaire donors changed their minds to fit the techno-political culture of Silicon Valley rather than starting off that way, and thus all incentive structures and cultural factors are completely irrelevant."
On centralization of funding
"I perfunctorily agree that there is a problem, but I'm having trouble operationalizing the operational proposals you made. I will provide no specifics. I think membership-demarcation may be a problem, and will ignore your proposals for solving it."
"By the way, would you mind doing even more unpaid work to flesh out specific mechanistic proposals, even though I, the person with the power to implement such proposals, just completely ignored them all in the sections I responded to?"
Despite my pre-existing intellectual respect for you, Holden, I really can't escape reading this as a somewhat-more-socially-competent version of Buck's response:
"We bosses know what we're doing, you're welcome to disagree if you want, but if you want to be listened to you need to do a bunch of unpaid work that we will probably completely ignore, and we most likely won't listen to you at all anyway."
This is what power does to your brain: you are only able to countenance posting empty EA-ified PR-speak like this because you are accountable only to a few personal friends that basically agree with you, and can thus get away with more or less ignoring external inputs.
For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible. “You have to love them,” the message always seemed to run, “but who can really understand how these creatures think?” One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men. In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.
This kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of such patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise. Generations of women novelists—Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind (To the Lighthouse)—have documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving the continual work of imaginative identification, or interpretive labor. This work carries over on every level. Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women.
Overwhelmingly one-sided social arrangements breed stupidity: by being in a position where you're powerful enough to ignore people with other points of view, you become extremely bad at understanding them.
Thus, the oblivious bosses (egged on by mixed teams of true sycophants and power/money-seeking yes-men) continue doing whatever they want to do, and an invisible army of exhausted, exasperated, and powerless subordinates scramble to semi-successfully translate the whims of the bosses into bureaucratic justifications for doing the things that actually need to be done.
The bosses can always cook up some justification for why them being in charge is always the best way forward, and either never hear critiques because critics fear for their careers or, as seen here, lazily dismiss them without consequence.
Speaking as someone with a little experience in similar organisations and movements to this one that slowly lost their principles as they calcified into self-serving bureaucracies:
Interestingly, a huge proportion of EA’s intellectual infrastructure can be traced back to the academic climate of the USA during the Cold War, where left-wing thinkers were eradicated from (analytic) philosophy by McCarthyist purges, Robert McNamara pushed for “rationalisation” and quantification throughout the US establishment, and the RAND Corporation developed concepts like Rational Choice Theory, Operations Research, and Game Theory. Indeed, the current President and CEO of RAND, Jason Matheny, is a CSET founder and former FHI researcher. Aside from the Silicon Valley influences (from which we get the blogposts, CalifornianIdeology, and most of the technofetishism), EA’s intellectual heritage is largely one of philosophy and economics intentionally stripped of their ability to challenge the status quo. [emphasis mine]
Yes!
The Effective Altruism movement is, in origin and at present, on a mission to benefit the powerless using the tools of the powerful; an injection of genuine compassion into the machinery of Capitalist Modernity.
It thus has precisely the advantages and limitations that you would expect. It is a truly impressive engine for the operationalisation of altruism, distributing malaria nets and deworming drugs with astonishing efficiency and effectiveness. Yet, it cannot conceive of solving problems rather than treating their symptoms, acts with the self-assured entitlement of a colonial administrator, and can never quite escape the stony gaze of the techno-modernist Leviathan.
That's good to know, but I wonder how much change you personally can make. It'll be significant, for sure, but I think a lot of this is cultural: a sort of EA-accelerated chunk of the class-coded aspects of the Hidden Curriculum.
John, with all possible respect, that is not a theoretical framework.
I think one of your major errors in this piece (as betrayed by your methodology-as-categorisation comment above), is that you have an implicit ontology of factors as essentially separate phenomena that can perhaps have a few, likely simple relationships, which is simply not how the Earth-system or social systems work.
Thus, you think that if you've written a few paragraphs on each thing you deem relevant (chosen informally, liberally sprinkled with assertions, assumptions, and self-citations), you've covered everything.
Doubtful if you look at Gideon's first comment and remember it was downvoted through the floor almost immediately.
Questioning orthodoxy is ok within some bounds (often technical/narrow disagreements), or when expressed in suitable terms, e.g.
(Significant) underconfidence, regardless of expertise and/or lack of expertise among those criticised
Unreasonable assumptions of good faith, even in the face of hostility or malpractice (double standards, perhaps a lesser form of the expectation of a 'perfect victim')
Extensive use of EA buzzwords
Huge amounts of extra work/detail that would not be deemed necessary for non-critical writing
Essentially making oneself as small as possible so as not to set off the Bad Tone hair-trigger
This is difficult because knowing what you are talking about and being lazily dismissed by people you know for a fact know far less than you about a given subject matter makes one somewhat frustrated
As several EAs have noted, e.g. weeatquince, this is time-consuming and (emotionally) exhausting, and often results in dismissal anyway.
This is even harder to pull off when questioning sensitive issues like politics, funding ethics, foundational intellectual issues (e.g. the ways in which the TUA uses utterly unsuitable tools for its subject matter due to a lack of outside reading), competence of prominent figures, etc.
I actually think this forms a sort of positive feedback loop, where EAs become increasingly orthodox (and confident in that orthodoxy) due to perceived lack of substantive critiques, which makes making those critiques so frustrating, time-consuming, and low-impact that people just don't bother. I've certainly done it.
To me it seems more like EA's STEMlord-ism and roots in management consultancy, and its consequent maximiser-culture, rejection of democracy, and heavy preference for the latter aspect of the explore-exploit tradeoff.
"Number go bigger" etc. with a far lower value placed on critical reason, i.e. what the number actually is.
Orthodoxy is very efficient, you just end up pointed in the wrong direction.
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I've always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we're making are so important, shouldn't we have really robust ways of making sure they're right?
I think we also need renewed discussion of how the karma system contributes to groupthink and hierarchy, things that, to put it gently, EA sometimes struggles with somewhat.
As far as I can tell, the system gives far more voting power to highly-rated users, allowing a few highly active (and thus most likely highly orthodox) forum users to unilaterally boost or tank any given post.
This is especially bad when you consider that low-karma comments are hidden, allowing prominent figures (often with high karma scores) to soft-censor their own critics.
This is especially worrying given the groupthink that emerges on internet fora, where a comment having a score of -5 makes it much more likely for people to downvote it further on reflex, and vice versa.
Hi Holden, thanks for writing this up, but would it be possible for you to say something with a little bit more substance? At present it seems rather perfunctory and potentially a little insulting.
I've attempted to translate the comment above into a series of plain-English bottom-lines.
I apologise if the tone is a little forthright: a trade-off with clarity and intellectual honesty.
On anonymity
"Yeah I can see why there might seem to be a problem, and I promise that I am truly very sorry that you're facing its consequences. In any case, I promise that everything is actually completely fine and you don't need to worry! I acknowledge that (as you have already said) my promises don't count for much here, but... trust me anyway! No, I will not take any notice of the specific issues you describe, nor the specific solutions that you propose."
On conflicts of interest
"Here I will briefly describe some of the original causes of the problem. I personally think that it's no big deal, and will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide. I promise we're taking it really seriously, though."
On focusing on a couple of existential risks (which is a gross simplification of the section I presume you're responding to?)
"I personally think everything is fine, no I will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide."
On being in line with the interests of billionaires
"I understand your concerns, but most of our tech billionaire donors changed their minds to fit the techno-political culture of Silicon Valley rather than starting off that way, and thus all incentive structures and cultural factors are completely irrelevant."
On centralization of funding
"I perfunctorily agree that there is a problem, but I'm having trouble operationalizing the operational proposals you made. I will provide no specifics. I think membership-demarcation may be a problem, and will ignore your proposals for solving it."
"By the way, would you mind doing even more unpaid work to flesh out specific mechanistic proposals, even though I, the person with the power to implement such proposals, just completely ignored them all in the sections I responded to?"
Despite my pre-existing intellectual respect for you, Holden, I really can't escape reading this as a somewhat-more-socially-competent version of Buck's response:
"We bosses know what we're doing, you're welcome to disagree if you want, but if you want to be listened to you need to do a bunch of unpaid work that we will probably completely ignore, and we most likely won't listen to you at all anyway."
This is what power does to your brain: you are only able to countenance posting empty EA-ified PR-speak like this because you are accountable only to a few personal friends that basically agree with you, and can thus get away with more or less ignoring external inputs.
Writing like this really reminds me of the bit about Interpretive Labour in Dead Zones of the Imagination:
Overwhelmingly one-sided social arrangements breed stupidity: by being in a position where you're powerful enough to ignore people with other points of view, you become extremely bad at understanding them.
Thus, the oblivious bosses (egged on by mixed teams of true sycophants and power/money-seeking yes-men) continue doing whatever they want to do, and an invisible army of exhausted, exasperated, and powerless subordinates scramble to semi-successfully translate the whims of the bosses into bureaucratic justifications for doing the things that actually need to be done.
The bosses can always cook up some justification for why them being in charge is always the best way forward, and either never hear critiques because critics fear for their careers or, as seen here, lazily dismiss them without consequence.
Speaking as someone with a little experience in similar organisations and movements to this one that slowly lost their principles as they calcified into self-serving bureaucracies:
This is what it looks like.
The r/SneerClub response is interesting
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/10ent65/saw_this_and_thought_of_you_guys/
Yes!
The Effective Altruism movement is, in origin and at present, on a mission to benefit the powerless using the tools of the powerful; an injection of genuine compassion into the machinery of Capitalist Modernity.
It thus has precisely the advantages and limitations that you would expect. It is a truly impressive engine for the operationalisation of altruism, distributing malaria nets and deworming drugs with astonishing efficiency and effectiveness. Yet, it cannot conceive of solving problems rather than treating their symptoms, acts with the self-assured entitlement of a colonial administrator, and can never quite escape the stony gaze of the techno-modernist Leviathan.
At least it matches our Basilisk.
How would you prefer people to react when someone acts in bad faith?
What aspects of this comment fall outside those bounds?
That's good to know, but I wonder how much change you personally can make. It'll be significant, for sure, but I think a lot of this is cultural: a sort of EA-accelerated chunk of the class-coded aspects of the Hidden Curriculum.
John, with all possible respect, that is not a theoretical framework.
I think one of your major errors in this piece (as betrayed by your methodology-as-categorisation comment above), is that you have an implicit ontology of factors as essentially separate phenomena that can perhaps have a few, likely simple relationships, which is simply not how the Earth-system or social systems work.
Thus, you think that if you've written a few paragraphs on each thing you deem relevant (chosen informally, liberally sprinkled with assertions, assumptions, and self-citations), you've covered everything.
It's all very Cartesian.
Doubtful if you look at Gideon's first comment and remember it was downvoted through the floor almost immediately.
Questioning orthodoxy is ok within some bounds (often technical/narrow disagreements), or when expressed in suitable terms, e.g.
As several EAs have noted, e.g. weeatquince, this is time-consuming and (emotionally) exhausting, and often results in dismissal anyway.
This is even harder to pull off when questioning sensitive issues like politics, funding ethics, foundational intellectual issues (e.g. the ways in which the TUA uses utterly unsuitable tools for its subject matter due to a lack of outside reading), competence of prominent figures, etc.
I actually think this forms a sort of positive feedback loop, where EAs become increasingly orthodox (and confident in that orthodoxy) due to perceived lack of substantive critiques, which makes making those critiques so frustrating, time-consuming, and low-impact that people just don't bother. I've certainly done it.
To me it seems more like EA's STEMlord-ism and roots in management consultancy, and its consequent maximiser-culture, rejection of democracy, and heavy preference for the latter aspect of the explore-exploit tradeoff.
"Number go bigger" etc. with a far lower value placed on critical reason, i.e. what the number actually is.
Orthodoxy is very efficient, you just end up pointed in the wrong direction.
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I've always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we're making are so important, shouldn't we have really robust ways of making sure they're right?
I think we also need renewed discussion of how the karma system contributes to groupthink and hierarchy, things that, to put it gently, EA sometimes struggles with somewhat.
As far as I can tell, the system gives far more voting power to highly-rated users, allowing a few highly active (and thus most likely highly orthodox) forum users to unilaterally boost or tank any given post.
This is especially bad when you consider that low-karma comments are hidden, allowing prominent figures (often with high karma scores) to soft-censor their own critics.
This is especially worrying given the groupthink that emerges on internet fora, where a comment having a score of -5 makes it much more likely for people to downvote it further on reflex, and vice versa.
I am not going to go into details here beyond saying that this is the plot of the MeowMeowBeenz episode of Community.
MeowMeowBeenz does not contribute to good epistemics.