Over the past couple of weeks I've been surprised and distressed by the extent of these reports, a point which your concrete observations have underscored for me.
Having more details about the abusers you've identified and the abuses they committed would help me (and probably others) understand the nature of the problem, and what actions would make sense in response. On the other hand, there are good reasons not to make the list public, not least of which is that the survivors may not have consented to this.
I'm wondering if there is some way we can make more information public without compromising the desires of victims, or exposing victims or others to potential social or legal harm. For example, I could imagine you giving a list of 5 EA organisations and saying how many abusers were working there, or saying how many abusers you know of are attending the upcoming EAG conference in SF (assuming there's a public list of attendees), or how many have taken the Giving What We Can pledge. I also think it'd be important to know how many of these abusers are specifically known to CEA (by known, I mean both their identity and the nature of their actions).
I appreciate there might be reasons to be careful about revealing even this information, but any context like this that you can give would be helpful.
I'm not sure I understand why you think this requires a response. I don't think the texts here were shady or wrong at all. Musk was clearly looking for people to buy Twitter with him, and Will happened to be a mutual contact. Trying to put them in touch seems pretty reasonable to me.
This may not be what you're intending (and is pretty understandable), but I want to be pretty careful about generalising from what's going on now, to assuming that anything involved with SBF or FTX is shady until proven otherwise.
Finding good data seems like an interesting problem here- this method seems like a good first pass that will underestimate/completely miss some companies (mine included). It's hard to think of another good data source that wouldn't have this problem though. Next time an EA survey rolls around, asking people for their companies there might add something?
This post takes a well-known story about impact (smallpox eradication), and makes it feel more visceral. The style is maybe a little heavy-handed, but it brought me along emotionally in a way that can be useful in thinking about past successes. I'd like to see somewhat more work like this, possibly on lesser-known successes in a more informative (but still evocative) style.
Thanks for the post - I can see what you're getting at, but this doesn't feel like two clearly distinct categories to me. The first person I thought to try and apply this to had strong traits from both columns, for example. As a similar but more available example, where would you fit Bryan Caplan here? He's disagreeable without being angry, and is trying hard not to be wrong while happily telling others why they are.
I'm not sure whether my intuition here is that these can both be strong/weak in the same person, that there's more of a spectrum, or that they're a set of characteristics that may or may not cluster the way you've described. I'm not really sure what shape you meant for this to take, or how well it applies in these intermediate cases.
I should clarify 3.3. For me, longtermism is partly the acknowledgement of much vaster moral stakes - so long as there are things we can do to help, they're no less important to do as short-termist interventions. (The usual arguments about it not being helpful to demand too much of people still apply though).
Hi - my intuitions fall in the other direction here, so I'm keen to explain why. Implicit IMOs in front of everything here.
1: 1.1: I have a younger brother. My parents could have stopped at one, and my family would broadly still be happy, but my brother is generally happy and leads a good life. Similarly, if they'd had a third child they probably would have been happy and great too, and I would have loved them. All else being equal I wish that youngest sibling could have existed. IMO these two sentiments aren't meaningfully distinct.
1.2: We don't only care about humans. Sure, the argument for making more humans would apply to insects or something as well. However, most of the things that would kill all the humans would also kill everything else, so for me not letting that happen is still much more of a priority.
1.3: True on the specifics, false more generally. I don't know exactly what the world should look like, but I'm pretty sure people being happy is good, more people being happy is better, and everything being unrecoverably dead is neutral at most.
2:
2.1: If we weren't potentially about to all die I'd be more willing to think about this, but we have to survive the next century or two first. Whether capitalism makes things better or worse for now depends much more on whether it makes us more or less likely to all die, than on anything else (again, for now).
2.2: I'm pretty sure non-privileged people also want to be alive and happy.
2.3: Possibly, and I'm ok with that. I'd rather live a worse life if it means my grandkids are more likely to survive and have happy ones. Although it's definitely better for everyone to be happier now, I feel like it doesn't amount to much if we all die in the next century.
2.4: If I can choose between a surviving but stable society, and a growing one, I would choose the growing one. But both are better than an empty rock, so the priority now is not dying either way.
3:
3.1: I'm pretty sure we'll continue to want to be alive and happy, so false. People can't decide what their preferences are, and work to fulfil them, if they don't exist.
3.2: Our moral intuitions were built for very different-looking societies to where we are today. We like sugar and sex because we were supposed to go for fruit and reproduction; our moral intuitions aren't hugely different. IMO this is in a similar category to people caring more about saving one child than eight of them.
Over the past couple of weeks I've been surprised and distressed by the extent of these reports, a point which your concrete observations have underscored for me.
Having more details about the abusers you've identified and the abuses they committed would help me (and probably others) understand the nature of the problem, and what actions would make sense in response. On the other hand, there are good reasons not to make the list public, not least of which is that the survivors may not have consented to this.
I'm wondering if there is some way we can make more information public without compromising the desires of victims, or exposing victims or others to potential social or legal harm. For example, I could imagine you giving a list of 5 EA organisations and saying how many abusers were working there, or saying how many abusers you know of are attending the upcoming EAG conference in SF (assuming there's a public list of attendees), or how many have taken the Giving What We Can pledge. I also think it'd be important to know how many of these abusers are specifically known to CEA (by known, I mean both their identity and the nature of their actions).
I appreciate there might be reasons to be careful about revealing even this information, but any context like this that you can give would be helpful.
Fwiw I would still be interested in a response from Will, but I dont think he should feel obliged to give one.
I'm not sure I understand why you think this requires a response. I don't think the texts here were shady or wrong at all. Musk was clearly looking for people to buy Twitter with him, and Will happened to be a mutual contact. Trying to put them in touch seems pretty reasonable to me.
This may not be what you're intending (and is pretty understandable), but I want to be pretty careful about generalising from what's going on now, to assuming that anything involved with SBF or FTX is shady until proven otherwise.
Finding good data seems like an interesting problem here- this method seems like a good first pass that will underestimate/completely miss some companies (mine included). It's hard to think of another good data source that wouldn't have this problem though. Next time an EA survey rolls around, asking people for their companies there might add something?
This post takes a well-known story about impact (smallpox eradication), and makes it feel more visceral. The style is maybe a little heavy-handed, but it brought me along emotionally in a way that can be useful in thinking about past successes. I'd like to see somewhat more work like this, possibly on lesser-known successes in a more informative (but still evocative) style.
Thanks for the post - I can see what you're getting at, but this doesn't feel like two clearly distinct categories to me. The first person I thought to try and apply this to had strong traits from both columns, for example. As a similar but more available example, where would you fit Bryan Caplan here? He's disagreeable without being angry, and is trying hard not to be wrong while happily telling others why they are.
I'm not sure whether my intuition here is that these can both be strong/weak in the same person, that there's more of a spectrum, or that they're a set of characteristics that may or may not cluster the way you've described. I'm not really sure what shape you meant for this to take, or how well it applies in these intermediate cases.
I should clarify 3.3. For me, longtermism is partly the acknowledgement of much vaster moral stakes - so long as there are things we can do to help, they're no less important to do as short-termist interventions. (The usual arguments about it not being helpful to demand too much of people still apply though).
Hi - my intuitions fall in the other direction here, so I'm keen to explain why. Implicit IMOs in front of everything here.
1:
1.1: I have a younger brother. My parents could have stopped at one, and my family would broadly still be happy, but my brother is generally happy and leads a good life. Similarly, if they'd had a third child they probably would have been happy and great too, and I would have loved them. All else being equal I wish that youngest sibling could have existed. IMO these two sentiments aren't meaningfully distinct.
1.2: We don't only care about humans. Sure, the argument for making more humans would apply to insects or something as well. However, most of the things that would kill all the humans would also kill everything else, so for me not letting that happen is still much more of a priority.
1.3: True on the specifics, false more generally. I don't know exactly what the world should look like, but I'm pretty sure people being happy is good, more people being happy is better, and everything being unrecoverably dead is neutral at most.
2:
2.1: If we weren't potentially about to all die I'd be more willing to think about this, but we have to survive the next century or two first. Whether capitalism makes things better or worse for now depends much more on whether it makes us more or less likely to all die, than on anything else (again, for now).
2.2: I'm pretty sure non-privileged people also want to be alive and happy.
2.3: Possibly, and I'm ok with that. I'd rather live a worse life if it means my grandkids are more likely to survive and have happy ones. Although it's definitely better for everyone to be happier now, I feel like it doesn't amount to much if we all die in the next century.
2.4: If I can choose between a surviving but stable society, and a growing one, I would choose the growing one. But both are better than an empty rock, so the priority now is not dying either way.
3:
3.1: I'm pretty sure we'll continue to want to be alive and happy, so false. People can't decide what their preferences are, and work to fulfil them, if they don't exist.
3.2: Our moral intuitions were built for very different-looking societies to where we are today. We like sugar and sex because we were supposed to go for fruit and reproduction; our moral intuitions aren't hugely different. IMO this is in a similar category to people caring more about saving one child than eight of them.
3.3: No.