I'm not sure I understood what you are saying here? Do you add more in the direction they are already tilting, or are just more likely to vote if its a high-vote-volume post? 

I am aware I vote based upon the current karma count.  If someone has a bunch of karma, then I don't mind downvoting. If the post or user has super little karma, I upvote it much more readily. Something has to be truly egregious for me to push it further into negative karma.

In the midrange I am less likely to vote at all, and vote more accurately: if it was personally valuable to me, if I feel its underrepresented, or if I feel like it would be better that more eyes see it then I upvote. My favorite thing is to disagree vote and then give karma for a valuable contribution. Then I feel like I'm (a True Rationalist =P) counteracting the natural "like+agree+karma" impulse. I try to vote like this as often as possible.

I appreciate being counter poked! That was my hope. 

The concepts of metarationality, complexity science, and the like really appeal to me. When I have tried to enter into their domain and learn what they advise, I've been disappointed mainly for the reasons in my above critique. It means a lot to get an inside answer, thank you. 

I'm going to switch gears and now give my own best version of what integral altruism and associated nodes have to offer:

Pre-mortem - Also known as prospective hindsight, you start with the premise that everything went horribly wrong, and then identify what lead to that outcome so we can avoid it. It comes from a psychologist studying field intuition around 2007. Now adopted enthusiastically by EA. (see also backcasting whose lineage traces back to sustainability and environmentalism)

Red teaming - Yes this is super EA. EA took it from military wargames around 2004. But this is exactly the kind of "holding two views" and explicitly searching for alternative frames that integral altruism has pointed towards. Integral altruism would probably call it polarity management techniques which emerged from systems thinking research. Polarity management is mapping  the upsides and downsides to two different goal frameworks, and oscillating between them. You make a 2x2 matrix and then make decisions which keep you in the upper half of the matrix of both goal frameworks. Polarity management dates back to 1992.

Adaptive Management - The jist is: When you're managing a system you don't fully understand, every management action should be treated as an experiment to generate information, not just to achieve outcomes. Passive adaptive management is the standard good practice of enacting seems best, monitoring results, and adjusting. Active adaptive management is deliberately designing multiple competing interventions to discriminate how the system works, even if that means some of the interventions are suboptimal by your current theory. Developed for ecology by C.S. Holling in 1978 from a systems thinking background. I think this is a pretty important tool and I vaguely feel like it should be discussed more. The int/a term would be probe-sense-respond, moving at the speed of wisdom, or double loop learning. The EA version would be explore/exploit tradeoffs or maybe value of information calculations.

Integrative Complexity - A simplistic version of this is making pro/con lists and then having that loaded into active memory when making decisions. Pro/con lists are not as rigorous analysis as most EA endorsed methods, but they are extremely practical, and in some sense enable more thorough judgements than rigorous calculations. Apparently the formal version was developed by Philip Tetlock in the 1980s from psychometrics research. The int/a terms might be decoupling and recoupling. EA might call it scout mindset.

Collective intelligence - Super forecaster research has shown when and how crowd intelligence outperforms experts (and vice versa). Prediction markets are an example of trying to implement this at scale to inform decisionmaking. I think prediction markets are really exciting new technology that will improving decision making across humanity. I suspect this can be traced back to a variety of sources, but in particular it came from systems thinking research. Int/a might say it reflects how full spectrum knowing trumps expertise/formal analysis (in certain conditions).

Focusing - I personally have found this to be incredibly useful across many scales of decisionmaking. I think it makes me wiser and more able to expose and tinker with my underlying reasons. By Gendlin in 1978, adopted by CFAR, generally "EA" accepted now in my experience. Completely in the spirit of integral altruism.

Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher that worked on the idea of a world composed of incomparable values. There is no reason that we would necessarily live in a world composed of values that are comparable. This might be more accurate (though inconvenient) reflection of reality. I'm going to butcher this, but here is my summary: Anderson describes shifting between frameworks and appropriate actions according to the values being optimized for. For example, we don't optimize for "grieving" but it is meaningful to us. Examining the shift between optimization and how we actually practice meaningful activities could help us better pinpoint why we should shift out of EA optimization.

I hope these descriptions are a useful translation bridging these two approaches.

I think integral altruism and friends are important because I want to make better, more wholistic, more informed choices. I  want to take everything into account. I want the ability to be context dependent and switch to the exact best approach according to the changing circumstances. It might be harder to do and harder to describe, but it is what we should strive for. I think we all want this. 

I'm really pleased to see so many people coalescing around this post. I'm enormously blessed to be amongst people thinking about the big problems with such openness, passion, and energy.

Int/a correctly identifies that EA has imperfections. But the proposals, replacing specificity with multidimensionality, putting process over goals, substituting metrics with sensing, don't fix those imperfections. They mostly obfuscate them by disallowing comparison and avoid failure by never choosing between options. I think the main problem int/a has with EA is not an EA problem but an imperfect-world problem.

EA's singleminded focus on specificity, measurability, and goal-orientedness is the painful, imperfect method that turns values and caring and messy big problems into singular choices and actions. Yes, the metrics are always flawed. Yes, you cut off possibilities when you commit to a direction. That's the cost of actually acting in the world, and I don't think int/a has provided a better path forward.

I may be being ungenerous, but my aim is to cut through to my biggest concern and look for correction. What int/a offers is staying in the ideation phase. More intuition, more holism, more systems thinking, more openness, more frames. Every single recommendation is widening, sourcing, and uncontroversial. These are a vital part of the opening process. But as far as I can tell, int/a does not move past enriching understanding, and does not seem concerned with what that is giving up. At some point the unpleasant part has to come: splitting apart, letting go of options, committing to something that might be wrong. EA isn't limiting itself to specificity and comparison out of compulsion. It sees these as necessary stages. Pleading for more modalities does not get you to a tradeoff-free world! At some point you have to demonstrate a better outcome.

The complexity science and metacrisis communities have said "see the whole system, keep entanglements, don't reduce" and then hit the entirely predictable problem of being unable to make much headway. They have produced real analytical tools, but the endpoint actions remain sparse. Is EA's predisposition towards action more harmful than int/a's moving at the speed of wisdom? I genuinely think EA's greater bias toward action has produced more good than harm. But I can see arguing for change.

What int/a does do well, and EA should listen to, is their unearthing root problems, catching incomplete definitions, calls for opening up, and providing more frames. Int/a can teach us greater things to get narrowed toward. I don't think its best seen as a competing method. It needs to be handed off to EA-style problem-solving, and should be resurfaced periodically too.

I don't know anything about music and am not a math virtuoso, but I love this. Wonderful content, wonderful writing.

Exciting resource, and well presented! I'm digging into the insecticide section now. Some of the research into numbers of individuals, prevalence of insecticides, biggest actors, and off target effects is also useful for grounding biodiversity impact estimations. Thanks to all the researchers for their hard work on this project.

Hi, I'm trying to understand your call to action.

I'm confused why donors "should not give to Founder’s Pledge or Giving Green’s climate fund until charities that engage in nuclear advocacy are no longer part of their recommended charities lists." It sounds like you are mainly saying that nuclear is ineffective. You also believe funding nuclear efforts might worsen outcomes by displacing renewables. Are you saying it a significant enough backfire so as to to negate the effectiveness of the rest of the fund? Or is this just a way to say that "it would be more effective to customize your donations to avoid nuclear advocacy."  

If 5% of Giving Green's climate fund is being mis-allocated, why should one still not donate to their overall portfolio?

While EA is not fully at the table yet, EcoResilience Initiative is an EA group trying to answer exactly those questions: 

"What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?"

So far we're 1) maintaining a big list of biodiversity interventions (not just protecting land!), 2) investigating which of these  are the most effective types of interventions, 3) identifying ways people can donate to projects working on those highly effective interventions, 4) developing conservation philosophy (ex: prioritizing coverage of the entire evolutionary tree and the long-term value of biodiversity (coming in a couple weeks)). 

EcoResilience Initiative keeps getting requests from EA members that the EA movement provide some guidance on how to improve environmental strategies! So its more getting organized and working towards the goal than a total lack of desire from EA.

We (ERI) are a very small team, but we are looking to grow. We hope our work will provide the first steps towards influencing program managers, NGOs and the funding you talk about in this post. 

As was posted in some other comments: there is also the new biodiversity recommendation from Giving Green coming in February, Effective Environmentalism's community building work, and Conservation X Labs as an example of tactical conservation impact. Outside of EA there is Conservation Evidence, which is making research on effectiveness digestible.  EDGE which is prioritizing global conservation with better a methodology. The Earth Biogenome Project is coordinating the genetic sequencing of all life on earth. And many others working on improving conservation with their specific approach, on in their specific corner of the world.

Hi, I really appreciate your independent thinking. I strongly suspect that the main reason people are not choosing to have more kids is because of the raising kids portion, not the pregnancy portion. At least that's my reason for not having more kids.  If this (the difficulty of raising kids, rather than birthing them) is the main bottleneck for most families, then I suspect the best ways to boost fertility would be mostly policy things along the lines of:

• Less strict zoning laws --> more abundant, cheaper housing so young couples can more easily afford to live in larger houses, sooner.
• Reducing the large amount of redistribution we currently do towards seniors (they are some of the richest demographics in world history!) and directing more towards young people -- better yet targeted towards encouraging children (childcare subsidies, more and better schools, direct "baby bonus" payments, weird income incentives like they do in Hungary, etc)
• Especially for places like Korea, trying reduce spending more and more on individual children (eg by hiring private tutors, making kids study 24/7 as part of a stressful, intense competition to get into the best schools)
• Random little ways of making life more amenable for families with children, eg less-strict car seat laws, passing free-range-child laws to reduce false-positive CPS investigations and other sources of hostility towards child-rearing, etc.
• For more on these kinds of things, Zvi Moshowitz's has a good series of posts on fertility-related policy issues

I think it's also possible that the very best lever for increasing fertility would be to boost marriages rather than the birth rate among married couples, since there is some good evidence toward this conclusion.

On artificial wombs as a technology: I do not have any information unfortunately (other than anecdotes). I would also suggest checking outside academia if you have not done so yet. And if anyone is doing this "for pets" as a way to make progress faster before transitioning to people. 

Out of personal interest, though, I am highly interested in knowing what the main bottlenecks and timelines are for artificial wombs. This is because it would contribute towards reversing species extinction, and I would inform my estimates to how far away that technology is. Please share what you learn, I would appreciate it!

In general if you are seeing an obvious lack of rigor everywhere you look, then you can greatly improve the information environment by doing your own shallow research and sharing what you find. I think this itself would be a great service. (even without doing a full delphi forecast)

Hi, thank you for voicing this concern. I read your recent post, “Rewilding Is Extremely Bad.”

Personally, I doubt that most wild animals have negative lives. (informed by analogy to most of our own history of subsistence-level survival, and my doubt that they would consider their lives to have not been worth living). I also don’t believe that total hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame for thinking about this. I think it is important to factor in people's and animals' preferences for continued existence. Mostly I think we just don't know much about this question overall. I do think we should care about this fundamental question and certainly do what is in our power to improve the lives of other beings.

I think you may have gotten the wrong impression from my use of "biodiversity." It would be understandable to assume that I want to maximize Earth's total biomass / total natural land area / number of wild animals, or something like that. I'm actually mostly interested in preserving the diversity of life that has evolved on Earth, such as by avoiding species extinctions. I think there are several good reasons to do this, such as to provide the far future with valuable information that would otherwise be lost, potentially fulfill uplift-style moral obligations we may have towards nonhuman animals, and generally keep our options open.

Preserving natural land tends to be a tractable, robust, large scale way to prevent species extinctions. But there are other biodiversity interventions that work with very small numbers of individuals, like seed banks or analogous "insect zoo", or even zero individuals, like biobanking tissue samples with the aim of de-extinction in a utopian future world. 

Perhaps we could both celebrate something like a well-designed insect zoo - where we care for many small populations of insects, work toward better understanding their many different desires, elevate the value of their lives for more to see, and preserve a wide variety of life forms into the future. There are probably also a variety of biodiversity-enhancing measures that would simultaneously boost animal welfare. Unfortunately which interventions are good depend a lot on figuring out the proper value of complex vs simple animals and how far into positive or net-negative territory different animals are. I hope to write up a list of these types of mutually beneficial interventions.

${}^{Giving}$ and I refuse to elaborate further