returning to advertise Camille's response to the Bentham's bulldog post you linked & what you're saying here, which I think captures well my attitude towards reading things where clarity is not being optimised for

I also think it's ok for community builders to explain the answers that EA has generally settled on. This seems very analogous to the scientific community: it's perfectly normal and even good for a science teacher to tell you how the cell works, to explain how greenhouse gasses cause climate change, while still encouraging you to use the scientific method and question things.

Should we be as confident in the 'answers that EA has settled on' as a science teacher is in how a cell works?

I suspect part of what is happening is that systems change advocates are not judging their interventions purely on an individualist consequentialist calculus. If they were purely motivated by a belief that, say, starting a proto-B or intentional community is going to Solve The Metacrisis, I would agree that this is extremely unlikely making the intervention weak AF.

But seeing it as part of a correlated ecosystem of interventions might make more sense. I'm modelling systems change folks as taking a bet that the general direction they're going in is correct enough that many others will independently (or somewhat dependently through engaging with metacrisis literature) reach similar conclusions and do similar things, resulting in emergent larger-scale changes. (there's a good chance I am modelling metacrisis folk wrong)

FWIW this doesn't feel extremely different to longtermist cause areas like AI safety to me. AI safety is also an ecosystem of interventions (technical work + advocacy + governance + education + philosophy + ...), if it works it'll likely be due to some complicated combination of these that the individual theories of change didn't fully capture. If an individual or group tell me that they are going to single-handedly save the world from unaligned AI, that is a red flag for me, because the system of AI development is more complex than an individual/group can reckon with IMO.

Thanks Tandena, I appreciate this poke! The following is my counter-poke.

They mostly obfuscate them by disallowing comparison and avoid failure by never choosing between options.

We are not interested in disallowing comparison and never choosing between options. Our move is to be aware of more options to choose from. To integrate x and y is not to never chose between them, but to have both at your disposal so you can apply either x or y depending on which works better in a given context.

One way we are distinct from EA is that we are explicitly striving to be metarational, which means recognizing that the best frame, idea, tool, or action is context-dependent. Dependent on the context of the individual altruist, the problem they are working on, and a plethora of other factors.

I claim that the current explicit tools & implicit approaches of EA are not the best suited for all contexts that changemakers today can find themselves in.

For example, take the 'Decoupling & Recoupling' principle. Taking the most zoomed-out frames (e.g. metacrisis) benefits understanding but hurts tractability, and zoomed-in frames has the opposite tradeoff. We want to consciously choose this tradeoff depending on a judgement of which is better given what we're doing, rather than only being aware of the zoomed in frame.

int/a as a superstructure is not committing to x or y, because there is no universal truth of whether x or y is correct, it depends on the person and the problem. But this does not prevent individuals or projects within int/a from committing to x or y, we want to empower individuals & projects with x and y so they can discern for themselves whether x or y is right for their context.

And it is not preventing the possibility of a synthesis of x and y leading to novel concrete directions for solving the world's most complex & pressing problems.

So yea, I appreciate that "staying in the ideation phase" is a possible failure mode, but I don't consider it intrinsic to the project.

(edit: looking at this again, this is not the only way to interpret 'integrate', and probably it would be cool to get more clear about what we mean by the word. For example, another angle on integrating x and y could be to find a specific action z that is robust to both x and y being true)

I wouldn't consider the metacrisis movement to have any wins yet (according to the EA standard of wins at least), and its hard to point at very concrete proposed solutions yet. It's mostly in 'diagnosis mode'.

The main directions of solutions I'm aware of are things like Perspectiva's antidebates, which are meant to improve collective epistemics (a layer of the metacrisis) (which was also adapted recently by Liv Bouree in her recent AI safety antidebate), or Life Itself's Developmental Spaces, which is trying to catalyze culture change (another layer of the metacrisis)(Life Itself's more broad proposed strategy is here). You could consider Schmachtenberger's third attractor the beginnings of a proposed solution.

Most/all of the metacrisis discourse hasn't taken short AI timelines into account, so the paths to impact of the proposed solutions tend to assume we have a bunch of time.

All the metacrisis stuff could do with more direction, urgency and clarity IMO, and part of my motivation for building this bridge between them and EA is that hopefully injecting some EA energy might make concrete progress more likely to happen.

It's worth restating what I said in the post here:

We intend the presentation here to be descriptive rather than convincing - arguing for the merits of these principles is beyond the scope of this post.

And

The principles are also currently somewhat abstract, in the future we hope to translate these to be more concrete & action-guiding.

Getting into more detailed arguments of what EA is missing and precisely what they should do differently is quite a big project due to the inferential difference between EA and liminal land, and one that I hope int/a can attempt in the future.

Thanks Richard!

On the 'hippies have too much agreeableness' point - yes, you are totally right!!

On the 'pinning down core int/a claims' point. I agree that in general getting more precise about claims is good. But I have some caution around pushing to generate precise object-level claims that "define int/a", in that you have to believe these claims to be part of it. One thing I feel towards EA is that it used to be about "the question" (how to do the most good), and created room for people to generate new answers to that question, but more recently it has become about "the answer" (this short list of career paths is how to do the most good). But I don't think the cultural/structural locking in of those answers is good because we might be missing crucial considerations that will only become clear in the future.

Thanks for the thoughtful response Elliot!

On point 2 - yes, it is a fair criticism of both int/a and the sensemaking folks that what we're saying feel indirect. The challenge as I see it is that the things the sensemaking world are pointing at are just a lot harder to put in very explicit terms. That doesn't necessarily mean stuff like the metacrisis doesn't exist, it could just mean that its harder to point at/analyze/get traction on.

I've heard metacrisis people describe EA as 'searching for the keys under the lamppost', in that EA focuses on the things that can be explicitly stated and modeled, which is not necessarily the same as the set of problems that exist. They would argue that instead of continuing to search under the lamppost, maybe we should build new lampposts, or buy a torch, or whatever. I don't fully condone this but it's a good intuition pump for where they're coming from.

Part of int/a's ambition in building this bridge is to try to caste sensemaking ideas in more direct EA-brained terms (like this rough first attempt), but it's tough and a work in progress!

On point 3 - sure, a lot of what we talk about here is already in the EA discourse to varying degrees. I think the distinction is the degree in which the value is emphasized and practiced. For example, the element of 'personal fit' is a meme that exists within EA, but in the 80k guide feels like a footnote. In contrast, in int/a we have an intention for personal fit to be quite central and have it inform the structure and emergent behavior of the movement.

On point 4 - yea great point. Ultimately it would be cool to examine whether int/a makes sense on both EA territory and other territories.

Thanks Tobias, some good threads to pull here!

Yes, the question of whether int/a is a subset of EA, overlapping, or something totally different has been a big point of discussion, and we haven't found a clean answer.

You are right that EA in some sense already contains a lot of the things int/a is excited about (especially in terms of the official written principles being quite broad), but perhaps the real difference is what is emphasized in practice.

For example:

Effective altruism doesn't take a position on whether we are in conflict with the natural unfolding of the universe.

Yea, EA doesn't explicitly say anything about that, but what we're pointing at is perhaps a cultural or semi-conscious current that pervades a lot of EA work (possibly this is more relevant to rationalism than EA). This line was inspired by in part by Joe Carlsmith's An Even Deeper Atheism, which points out a current underlying a lot of EA/rat/AI safety that is born out of a deep mistrust of everything (might not be doing the essay justice but that's the general direction).

I'm not necessarily saying this current is bad, rather that we should have an awareness of it and be able to step outside of that frame of mind when it is not helping us, and integrate different frames. The hope is that int/a can more explicitly/consciously find the right balance between the yang-y mistrusting the universe vibe and the yin-y trusting the universe vibe.