Hm. I think I agree with the point you're making, but not the language it's expressed in? I notice that your suggestion is a change in endorsed moral principles, but you make an instrumental argument, not a moral one. To me, the core of the issue is here:
If EA becomes a very big movement, I predict that individuals on the fringes of the movement will commit theft with the goal to donate more to charity and violence against individuals and organisations who pose x-risks.
This seems to me more of a matter of high-fidelity communication than a matter of which philosophical principles we endorse. The idea of ethical injunctions is extremely important, but not currently treated a central EA pillar idea. I would be very wary of EA self-modifying into a movement that explicitly rejects utilitarianism on the grounds that this will lead to better utilitarian outcomes.
saving money while searching for the maximum seems bad
In the sense of "maximizing" you're using here, I agree entirely with this post. Aiming for the very best option according to a particular model and pushing solely on that as hard as you can will expose you to Goodhart problems, diminishing returns, model violations, etc.
However, I think the sense of "maximizing" used in the post you're responding to, and more broadly in EA when people talk about "maximizing ethics", is quite different. I understand it to mean something more like "doing the most good possible" - not aiming to clear a certain threshold, or trading off with other ethical or non-ethical priorities. It's a philosophical commitment that says "even if you're already saved a hundred lives, it's just as ethically important to save one more. You're not done."
It's possible that a commitment to a maximizing philosophy can lead people to adopt a mindset like the one you describe in this post - to the extent that that's true I don't disagree at all that they're making a mistake. But I think there may be a terminological mismatch here that will lead to illusory disagreements.
Like the idea of having the place in the name, but I think we can keep that while also making the name cool/fun?
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to calling EA spaces "constellations" in general, and just calling this one the "Harvard Constellation" or something. This is mostly because I think Constellation is an extraordinarily good name - it's when a bunch of stars get together to create something bigger that'll shine light into the darkness :)
Alternatively, "Harvard Hub" is both easy and very punchy.
I'm broadly on board with the points made here, but I would prefer to frame this as an addition to the pitch playbook, not a tweak to "the pitch".
Different people do need to hear different things. Some people probably do have the intuition that we should care about future people, and would react negatively to something like MacAskill's bottle example. But personally, I find that lots of people do react to longtermism with something like "why worry about the future when there are so many problems now?", and I think the bottle example might be a helpful intuition pump for those people.
The more I think about EA pitches the more I wonder if anyone has just done focus group testing or something...
I propose we Taboo the phrase "most important", and agree that it's quite vague. The claim I read Karnofsky as making, phrased more precisely, is something like:
In approximately this century, it seems likely that humanity will be exposed to a high level of X-risk, while also developing technology capable of eliminating almost all known X-risks.
This is the Precipice view of things - we're in a brief dangerous bottleneck, after which it seems like things will be much safer. I agree it takes a leap to forecast that no further X-risks will arise in the trillions of years post-Precipice.
Based on your post, I'm guessing that your use of "important" is something more about availability of choice, wildness, value, and maybe a twist where the present is always the most important by definition. I don't think Karnofsky would argue that the current century is the "most important" in any of these senses of the word.
Agree that the impactfulness of working on better government is an important claim, and one you don't provide much evidence for. In the interest of avoiding an asymmetric burden of proof, I want to note that I personally don't have strong evidence against this claim either. I would love to see it further investigated and/or tried out more.
All else equal I definitely like the idea to popularize some sort of longtermist sentiment. I'm still unsure about the usefulness - I have some doubts about the paths to impact proposed. Personally, I think that a world with a mass-appeal version of longtermism would be a lot more pleasant for me to live in, but not necessarily much better off on the metrics that matter.
Climate is a very democratically legitimate issue. It's discussed all the time, lots of people are very passionate about it, and it can probably move some pretty hefty voting blocs. I think investing the amount of energy it would take to get low-key longtermism to the same level of democratic legitimacy as climate, to get the same returns from government that the climate folks are getting, would be pretty abysmal. That said, I don't really know what the counterfactual looks like, so it's hard to compare how worthwhile the mass attention really is.
Widening the talent pool seems most plausible, but the model here is a bit fuzzy to me. Very few people work on one of their top-three-world-issues, but EA is currently very small, so doing this would probably bring in a serious influx of people wanting to do direct work. But if this dominates the value of the proposal, is there a reason it wouldn't be better/cheaper/faster to do more targeted outreach instead of aiming for Mass Appeal? I guess it depends on how easy vs how expensive it is to try and target the folks that really do want to work on one of their top-three-world-issues.
I think the benefit of "making longtermist causes easier to explain" is mostly subsumed by the other two arguments? I can't think of any path-to-impact for this that doesn't run through marginal pushes towards either government action or direct work.
Also, quick flag that the slogan "creating a better future for our grandchildren" reads a bit nationalist to me - maybe because of some unpleasant similarity to the 14 words.
Thanks for this post - dealing with this phenomenon seems pretty important for the future of epistemics vs dogma in EA. I want to do some serious thinking about ways to reduce infatuation, accelerate doubt, and/or get feedback from distancing. Hopefully that'll become a post sometime in the near-ish future.
Hm. I think I agree with the point you're making, but not the language it's expressed in? I notice that your suggestion is a change in endorsed moral principles, but you make an instrumental argument, not a moral one. To me, the core of the issue is here:
This seems to me more of a matter of high-fidelity communication than a matter of which philosophical principles we endorse. The idea of ethical injunctions is extremely important, but not currently treated a central EA pillar idea. I would be very wary of EA self-modifying into a movement that explicitly rejects utilitarianism on the grounds that this will lead to better utilitarian outcomes.
Pulling this sentence out for emphasis because it seems like the crux to me.
In the sense of "maximizing" you're using here, I agree entirely with this post. Aiming for the very best option according to a particular model and pushing solely on that as hard as you can will expose you to Goodhart problems, diminishing returns, model violations, etc.
However, I think the sense of "maximizing" used in the post you're responding to, and more broadly in EA when people talk about "maximizing ethics", is quite different. I understand it to mean something more like "doing the most good possible" - not aiming to clear a certain threshold, or trading off with other ethical or non-ethical priorities. It's a philosophical commitment that says "even if you're already saved a hundred lives, it's just as ethically important to save one more. You're not done."
It's possible that a commitment to a maximizing philosophy can lead people to adopt a mindset like the one you describe in this post - to the extent that that's true I don't disagree at all that they're making a mistake. But I think there may be a terminological mismatch here that will lead to illusory disagreements.
Like the idea of having the place in the name, but I think we can keep that while also making the name cool/fun?
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to calling EA spaces "constellations" in general, and just calling this one the "Harvard Constellation" or something. This is mostly because I think Constellation is an extraordinarily good name - it's when a bunch of stars get together to create something bigger that'll shine light into the darkness :)
Alternatively, "Harvard Hub" is both easy and very punchy.
I'm broadly on board with the points made here, but I would prefer to frame this as an addition to the pitch playbook, not a tweak to "the pitch".
Different people do need to hear different things. Some people probably do have the intuition that we should care about future people, and would react negatively to something like MacAskill's bottle example. But personally, I find that lots of people do react to longtermism with something like "why worry about the future when there are so many problems now?", and I think the bottle example might be a helpful intuition pump for those people.
The more I think about EA pitches the more I wonder if anyone has just done focus group testing or something...
I propose we Taboo the phrase "most important", and agree that it's quite vague. The claim I read Karnofsky as making, phrased more precisely, is something like:
This is the Precipice view of things - we're in a brief dangerous bottleneck, after which it seems like things will be much safer. I agree it takes a leap to forecast that no further X-risks will arise in the trillions of years post-Precipice.
Based on your post, I'm guessing that your use of "important" is something more about availability of choice, wildness, value, and maybe a twist where the present is always the most important by definition. I don't think Karnofsky would argue that the current century is the "most important" in any of these senses of the word.
Is there still disagreement after this Taboo?
Agree that the impactfulness of working on better government is an important claim, and one you don't provide much evidence for. In the interest of avoiding an asymmetric burden of proof, I want to note that I personally don't have strong evidence against this claim either. I would love to see it further investigated and/or tried out more.
All else equal I definitely like the idea to popularize some sort of longtermist sentiment. I'm still unsure about the usefulness - I have some doubts about the paths to impact proposed. Personally, I think that a world with a mass-appeal version of longtermism would be a lot more pleasant for me to live in, but not necessarily much better off on the metrics that matter.
Also, quick flag that the slogan "creating a better future for our grandchildren" reads a bit nationalist to me - maybe because of some unpleasant similarity to the 14 words.
Thanks for this post - dealing with this phenomenon seems pretty important for the future of epistemics vs dogma in EA. I want to do some serious thinking about ways to reduce infatuation, accelerate doubt, and/or get feedback from distancing. Hopefully that'll become a post sometime in the near-ish future.
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