Ebenezer Dukakis
Posts 3
Comments178
Of course it is socially acceptable to disagree with "traumatized" people in EA.
Well you previously wrote:
I think writing such quoted passages in passive response to a disclosure of sexual assault is cruel and disgusting in my personal opinion
Insofar as others share this opinion of yours, it won't be socially acceptable to express those particular disagreements.
Assuming we are talking about the Any Community That Tolerates Trauma Junkies Is Unsafe For Everyone Else post, it's not something I would've predicted in advance would be considered "cruel and disgusting". So it remains the case that I personally have some uncertainty regarding what opinions will be considered "cruel and disgusting", to the point where it seems a bit safer socially to just avoid expressing much of any disagreement at all.
I think you have a good point that if a person behaves in a traumatized way, that's evidence they are an assault victim. On the other hand, it's also possible to go too far in the opposite direction, where it becomes socially unacceptable to disagree with the traumatized person in any way, and we have policies set by traumatized people who aren't thinking clearly.
I'm not claiming that EA is at this point necessarily. But I do believe this possibility is part of what motivates skepticism towards trauma victims. I expect with some creative thinking it is possible to come up with a compromise which achieves both of the important objectives here.
or you're disagreeing with their 'highly rationalist proof', which they will claim proves their point
I'm confused, if a 'proof' is bad, shouldn't it be possible to explain the flaw? It sounds like you are describing a person who is not arguing in good faith, which does not seem particularly "rational".
It seems to me that EA has still not updated enough from SBF, and is too willing to trust other EAs and assume they are good actors. Maybe EAs need to offer each other less benefit of the doubt, and reduce incestuous hiring practices which deprioritize work experience from outside the EA community. Having some more "outsider" type employees could help address groupthink where everyone updates based on everyone else apparently believing that a particular response is appropriate.
Furthermore I suspect that the "we are all on the same team" mentality can also exacerbate groupthink, e.g. in this particular case it might've been helpful if a particular person was explicitly chosen to be Fran's advocate, to reduce the burden on her and steelman the case that specific actions are necessary. More generally it seems like the community could potentially use a dedicated survivor advocate, who interviews survivors and lobbies for specific changes. Even now it seems like there still hasn't been a compassionate and effective "root cause" post-mortem of this incident.
FWIW I certainly wouldn't tell anyone not to boycott ChatGPT. Decreasing OpenAI's revenue is good for the world.
I suppose if you're using a free account and blocking ads, you are adding costs without adding revenue. The important thing is to boycott acts which put money in OpenAI's pocket, which is not necessarily the same thing as boycotting all of their offerings.
(I think the US example is perhaps a bit more complicated. It's not just very wealthy, it's also highly unequal and offers much weaker safety nets than most other liberal democracies. So the bitter politics may have more to do with material insecurity than with post-scarcity boredom.)
As I linked in my comment, ideologues in the US tend to be rather wealthy:
Progressive Activists have strong ideological views, high levels of engagement with political issues, and the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status. Their own circumstances are secure. They feel safer than any group, which perhaps frees them to devote more attention to larger issues of social justice in their society.
https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/#progressive-activists
The Devoted Conservatives are the counterpart to the Progressive Activists, but at the other end of the spectrum. They are one of the highest-income groups, and they feel happier and more secure than most other Americans.
https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/#devoted-conservatives
I worry that American ideologues have got all the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy satisfied, and they are now pursuing self-actualization through partisanship.
Furthermore there appear to be a number of "urban legends" which float around the internet about the United States which are not true, or at least not as obviously true as you've been lead to believe. One blogger claims:
Common measures of poverty in the U.S. do not factor in taxes and transfers. The very things implemented to address the issue. We already “won” the “war on poverty” in absolute terms to reduce suffering—as measured by consumption. The same stunt is often done for inequality. If you don’t move the goalposts and count existing policy interventions, we’re already largely post-scarcity and highly egalitarian—to the extent the U.S. is more progressive and redistributive than any European country. Which is why poverty became positively correlated with obesity about the same time that bottom line dropped below 5% in the 1990s.
One possibility I worry about is that as scarcity recedes, people will be relatively less motivated to play positive-sum cooperation games. With material goods less of a bottleneck, there's less motivation to cooperate in order to accumulate more of them. Such positive-sum games could be replaced by zero-sum petty status games or political hobbyism, like you see on social media for example. The US is an interesting case study, as a very wealthy country with bitter, Manichean politics -- there may be a connection.
If this theory is true, the influence of fanaticism could increase in the future as global economic growth progresses. Economic growth is probably helpful in the short term, to show people that positive-sum games are possible and worth playing. But the "hedonic treadmill" or diminishing marginal returns could dominate in the longer term. Sort of like how coffee stops working as well if you drink 4 cups every day.
The best approach might be to create and popularize more institutions which harmlessly dissipate human tribal instincts, e.g. sports fandom.
Whose job is it to identify EA questions which could benefit from better forecasts?
Consider two different hypotheses:
Forecasting is only helpful for AI
Forecasting is helpful outside of AI, but AI has captured much more forecasting interest than other cause areas
How much time are non-AI org leaders spending trying to think up decision-relevant forecasts related to their cause areas?
If leaders are not spending any time trying to think up such forecasts, maybe there is low-hanging fruit here. Maybe EA has latent forecasting capability which can be tapped to improve organizational decision-making. Or maybe such forecasting capability will free up in a few years if AI turns out to be a nothingburger.
If leaders have spent a lot of time trying to think up useful forecasts, and failed, maybe forecasting really is fairly useless outside of AI.
If I was leading a non-AI EA organization, and I had a forecast I really wanted to see the result of, who would I even talk to? Which forecasting organizations are actively soliciting ideas for EA-related forecast questions?
It seems to me that a lot of what EA does is implicit forecasting in some sense, e.g. if you give someone a grant, it's an implicit forecast about the probability that they will be able to accomplish something with that grant. EA is often critiqued for neglecting "systemic change". If you want to do systemic change, being able to forecast the effects of various systemic changes is really useful. If you take any action, there's an implicit forecast that it will lead to a good outcome and not backfire somehow. Wouldn't it be better to make this forecast explicit? All else equal, wouldn't it be good to get some perspective from people outside of the organization, who are perhaps forecasting in their free time as a replacement for watching TV or other downtime activities?