I'd be doing less good with my life if I hadn't heard of effective altruism
Whilst EA has clearly helped me do a lot of good, I was already trying to optimise to do as much good as I could before EA, and was already thinking about XRisk. I think there is a pretty decent chance I'd be working on AI Safety anyway, even without EA
So one way of thinking about this is as follows.
Imagine you're goal is to eat every apple you see. I show you an apple. You acknowledge that it is in fact an apple, and you have seen the apple. I say you should then eat the apple. You refuse to eat the apple.
My view is that you (epistemically) ought to have eaten the apple. There is a normativity about reasons (and logic) that suggest I am justified in saying this. If you reject normativity about epistemic reasons, it seems to me that you don't have to accept that you ought to have eaten the apple.
Maybe there is something different about epistemic normativity than ethical normativity, or maybe there is something unique about epistemic normativity in the logical domain, but I'm not really sure what that special thing is.
Also not Holly, but another response might be the following:
Pausing in the very near future without a rise in political salience is just very very unlikely. The pause movement getting large influence is unlikely without a similar rise in political salience.
If a future rise in political salience occurs, this is likely an approximation of a 'pivotal point' (and if its not, well, policymakers are unlikely to agree to a pause at a pivotal point anyway)
Thus, what advocacy now is actually doing predominantly is creating the groundwork for a movement/idea that can be influential when the time comes.
I think this approach runs real risks, which I'd be happy to discuss, but also strikes me as an important response to the Shulman take.
We should also think about why we want democracy. Intra-communal democracy is not an inherent good, and indeed, the EA community is not here for the sake of the EA community, but rather to have positive impact. However, we might think that 'democratising' or whatever we might want to call it may play important ethical or epistemic roles when we think a) diversifying viewpoints is important and b) justification and accountability are important. However, I think none of these are best served by elections.
For diversifying viewpoints, we may want this because of the epistemic situation we are in might suggest to us that a more 'diverse' (this may only be along certain axes eg expertise, assumptions, political viewpoint/party) decision making body is necessary. I certainly think this is true in a fair few areas EA functions in. However, it isn't clear that elections, which often focus on popularity or consensus actually do that. Maybe we'd be better off doing some sort of deliberately diverse expert elicitation panel, or simply caring more about (relevant forms of) diversity in our hiring. For example, perhaps grantmakers should be making an effort to hire people with experience in conservative policy circles. Or maybe we simply do this by doing CB efforts to have a more pluralsitic 'community'; again. I notbaly think EA (or certain parts of it, for example AI) have got MUCH MUCH better at this the last few years, such that its not actually obvious how much concerted effort is needed.
Accountability may be another reason. EAs tie lots of our identity to this community, and also much of our professional reputation. As such, we might want to be able to hold representatives accountable. However, it isn't obvious that we can't trust well constructed boards to do this, for example. Otherwise, I could imagine a scenario where a certain designated body (say, all people who have attended 2 EAGs or been employed at a certain list of organisations etc) can petition to remove someone from important leadership roles, and if a supermajority votes to remove them then they are removed. But this doesn't really seem like an election.
More generally, it just isn't clear to me what sorts of roles we want elected. The two main levers of power in EA are a) money and b) prestige. A lot of prestige is generated by who speaks at EAGs, appears on the 80000 hours podcast etc, and its really unlikely that having an elected person making these decisions would actually change very much, or encourage the sorts of outcomes wanted. Maybe there are better ways to harness the collective wisdom of the community in these decisions, but I think they are unlikely to look like elections. And for grantmaking, there also just appears minimal reason to do elections. The main issue with regards to grantmaking in this vicinity is how few grantmakers there are (although this is maybe better than it was), which creates centralisation and thus likely a sub-optimal tayloring of the landscape to the preferences of existing grantmakers, and tying of reputations to those grantmakers. This problem is not at all solved by elections, and maybe would get worse rather than better; the problem is solved by bringing more money from different sources into EA.
I think the best argument for elections is it would reduce the 'who you know' component of EA. But a) I think this is just a lot better now than it was - as the community has grown, i think much of this has been adjusted and b) its not obvious to me that elections wouldn't optimise for something similar.
I think the argument that insect suffering is of overwhelming importance doesn't actually require pure utilitarianism. It probably works for any form of aggregationist, and maybe even partially agreggationist ethics. Indeed, itsw not clear the problem isn't worse under certain formations of deontological views, where discounting the life of an insect relative to a human would be unacceptable
Whilst EA has clearly helped me do a lot of good, I was already trying to optimise to do as much good as I could before EA, and was already thinking about XRisk. I think there is a pretty decent chance I'd be working on AI Safety anyway, even without EA
Not sure this should be tagged community, seems an object level cause prioritisation question
My guess is Estonia looks particularly good by this metric (population just over 1 million but 1.9% of survey respondents)
So one way of thinking about this is as follows. Imagine you're goal is to eat every apple you see. I show you an apple. You acknowledge that it is in fact an apple, and you have seen the apple. I say you should then eat the apple. You refuse to eat the apple. My view is that you (epistemically) ought to have eaten the apple. There is a normativity about reasons (and logic) that suggest I am justified in saying this. If you reject normativity about epistemic reasons, it seems to me that you don't have to accept that you ought to have eaten the apple. Maybe there is something different about epistemic normativity than ethical normativity, or maybe there is something unique about epistemic normativity in the logical domain, but I'm not really sure what that special thing is.
Also not Holly, but another response might be the following:
I think this approach runs real risks, which I'd be happy to discuss, but also strikes me as an important response to the Shulman take.
My guess is that pesticides impact on insect welfare probably falls into this category.
We should also think about why we want democracy. Intra-communal democracy is not an inherent good, and indeed, the EA community is not here for the sake of the EA community, but rather to have positive impact. However, we might think that 'democratising' or whatever we might want to call it may play important ethical or epistemic roles when we think a) diversifying viewpoints is important and b) justification and accountability are important. However, I think none of these are best served by elections.
For diversifying viewpoints, we may want this because of the epistemic situation we are in might suggest to us that a more 'diverse' (this may only be along certain axes eg expertise, assumptions, political viewpoint/party) decision making body is necessary. I certainly think this is true in a fair few areas EA functions in. However, it isn't clear that elections, which often focus on popularity or consensus actually do that. Maybe we'd be better off doing some sort of deliberately diverse expert elicitation panel, or simply caring more about (relevant forms of) diversity in our hiring. For example, perhaps grantmakers should be making an effort to hire people with experience in conservative policy circles. Or maybe we simply do this by doing CB efforts to have a more pluralsitic 'community'; again. I notbaly think EA (or certain parts of it, for example AI) have got MUCH MUCH better at this the last few years, such that its not actually obvious how much concerted effort is needed.
Accountability may be another reason. EAs tie lots of our identity to this community, and also much of our professional reputation. As such, we might want to be able to hold representatives accountable. However, it isn't obvious that we can't trust well constructed boards to do this, for example. Otherwise, I could imagine a scenario where a certain designated body (say, all people who have attended 2 EAGs or been employed at a certain list of organisations etc) can petition to remove someone from important leadership roles, and if a supermajority votes to remove them then they are removed. But this doesn't really seem like an election.
More generally, it just isn't clear to me what sorts of roles we want elected. The two main levers of power in EA are a) money and b) prestige. A lot of prestige is generated by who speaks at EAGs, appears on the 80000 hours podcast etc, and its really unlikely that having an elected person making these decisions would actually change very much, or encourage the sorts of outcomes wanted. Maybe there are better ways to harness the collective wisdom of the community in these decisions, but I think they are unlikely to look like elections. And for grantmaking, there also just appears minimal reason to do elections. The main issue with regards to grantmaking in this vicinity is how few grantmakers there are (although this is maybe better than it was), which creates centralisation and thus likely a sub-optimal tayloring of the landscape to the preferences of existing grantmakers, and tying of reputations to those grantmakers. This problem is not at all solved by elections, and maybe would get worse rather than better; the problem is solved by bringing more money from different sources into EA.
I think the best argument for elections is it would reduce the 'who you know' component of EA. But a) I think this is just a lot better now than it was - as the community has grown, i think much of this has been adjusted and b) its not obvious to me that elections wouldn't optimise for something similar.
I think the argument that insect suffering is of overwhelming importance doesn't actually require pure utilitarianism. It probably works for any form of aggregationist, and maybe even partially agreggationist ethics. Indeed, itsw not clear the problem isn't worse under certain formations of deontological views, where discounting the life of an insect relative to a human would be unacceptable
Are the annoying happy lightbulbs when you upvote something here to stay, or they just an April Fool's thing that haven't been removed yet?
I think you should delete the post and resend it out another day (maybe on the 3rd?)