effective altruism

[sufi]

i only heard about this in the context of FTX - it sounds like a load of old cobblers to me i must say
(and always in lower case for some reason?)

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this article is outstandingly badly written drivel

 

[sufi]

dunno is this one any better?

The power and efficacy of effective altruism

It is important to anchor a culture of giving in economic research and ‘good scientific thinking’

www.ft.com

 

[sufi]

it's like the trickle down effect institutionalised isnt it?

 

[Clinamenic]

it's like the trickle down effect institutionalised isnt it?

From what I understand, EA seems like secular successor to western Christian morality, but with more of a solutions-oriented pragmatism. Like its all an optimization problem, a perspective which I can relate to.

 

[borzoi]

someone i know works in one of the EA organizations and from what I understand they've had a Reformation-like split between the people who want to distribute mosquito nets and water purifiers and the people who want to upload human consciousness into the cloud

 

[shakahislop]

weird bunch of people, or at least, the one time i interacted with them they were. i went to a talk by the effective altruism guysb in oxford more than a decade ago. one of the nice things about oxford as a town is that if you dug into the university webpages you could find a very extensive programme of talks about all kinds of things, and although it was clear that they didn't really plan on attracting people from outside of the university, no-one was going to stop you if you just turned up, so you could quite regularly find yourself in some lecture on a tuesday lunchtime or whatever. obviously oxford is one of those places which is important for elite formation and i feel like its blindingly obvious that all kinds of people recognise that its a place where you can change the minds of powerful people while they're very young, so for someone like the effective altrusist guys its a natural target. after all you basically need to be pretty well off to start thinking about giving 10% of your income to 'good causes'. or alternatively very altruistic i suppose, but most of the people involve are probably the former.

 

[shakahislop]

anyway when i went to that talk, it was a slick marketing pitch, slide decks and a very constructed argument. a bit like a Ted Talk kind of thing where it's all very put together and aimed at convincing rather than getting into the ambiguities. ie, a bit boring.

they had a very strong bias towards quantification as you might expect. which is fine and probably makes sense if the whole idea is something like Giving What We Can, where it's about convincing rich people to give their cash to something that seems to work rather than just what some rich person thinks sounds like a good idea.

but its a very stupid way to think about the world and how to change it. maybe the effective altruists have moved on by now. but at that time i felt there was this massive ignorance about politics and governance, and also about how change in other countries led by outsiders works. it was idealistic in short. but idealistic in a way that felt very much like the nerdy parts of anglo elites trying to get involved in real world things that they know nothing about. approaching something like poverty like they would approach building a bridge or making a computation work.

 

[shakahislop]

in general though, and apologies for sounding like i've spent too long on twitter, but that kind of thing is an expression of how a lot of well meaning and nice people have this developed vs developing country way of looking at the world. which is one of those ways of thinking about things which is fine for most people but quite inaccurate, and which really starts to make people confused if it comes into contact with reality

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

in a way that felt very much like the nerdy parts of anglo elites trying to get involved in real world things that they know nothing about. approaching something like poverty like they would approach building a bridge or making a computation work

It's very closely tied, no surprise, to rationalism, i.e. the people who believe that if you can just get rid of your cognitive biases etc you can make more "correct" decisions. Which is both a crazy premise - how can you ever discover all your cognitive biases from within a subjective consciousness - and an extremely computer engineer way of viewing the world. The optimize everything approach, which doesn't work because many things simply cannot be optimized the way an algorithm can.

On contact with reality it is, unsurprisingly, often disastrous. I have to deal with some people like that for work and it's almost impossible to explain that physical things just don't work like software.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Effective altruism is like the best case scenario for that worldview bc it's at least, if sincere, well-intentioned

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Its main philosophical issue I see, and what causes that Reformation style split between do gooders and prevent existential threat AI types, is how do you decide what the goal of optimization should be? Greater human happiness presumably, but what is that, and who are you or I or anyone to make that decision for anyone besides ourselves? People have been asking what it is to live a good life for thousands of years and we're no closer to an answer

I'd definitely take the mosquito net people over the cloud consciousness types in that regard

 

[DannyL]

It's very closely tied, no surprise, to rationalism, i.e. the people who believe that if you can just get rid of your cognitive biases etc you can make more "correct" decisions. Which is both a crazy premise - how can you ever discover all your cognitive biases from within a subjective consciousness - and an extremely computer engineer way of viewing the world. The optimize everything approach, which doesn't work because many things simply cannot be optimized the way an algorithm can.

On contact with reality it is, unsurprisingly, often disastrous. I have to deal with some people like that for work and it's almost impossible to explain that physical things just don't work like software.

It really reminds me of Brexit, in some ways. The idealisation which fails miserably when it touches the real. I just put some links in the Crypto thread that are related because of the SBF link.

 

[version]

One of my cousins was talking to me about this stuff last time I saw him. He described his job as essentially advising rich people re: philanthropy. Apparently he's gotten a load of Bill Clinton's money to do something with.

 

[Slothrop]

It's very closely tied, no surprise, to rationalism, i.e. the people who believe that if you can just get rid of your cognitive biases etc you can make more "correct" decisions. Which is both a crazy premise - how can you ever discover all your cognitive biases from within a subjective consciousness - and an extremely computer engineer way of viewing the world. The optimize everything approach, which doesn't work because many things simply cannot be optimized the way an algorithm can.

On contact with reality it is, unsurprisingly, often disastrous. I have to deal with some people like that for work and it's almost impossible to explain that physical things just don't work like software.

This reminds me, I recently saw this on another forum:

The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn | Washington Spectator

For decades, the conventional wisdom about Silicon Valley was that it leaned progressive. And by many measures (like donations by Big Tech employees to political candidates), the industry has been…

washingtonspectator.org

and wondered what our man on the ground in the Silicon Valley elite would make of it?

Gut reaction is that the TESCREAL concept feels a bit like a left-wing version of that thing that Jordan Peterson types do on the right, where you take every individual thing that anyone you dislike believes in and assume that they make up a single more-or-less coherent ideological thing (post-modernist relativist marxist CRT cultural-maoist identity politics) that everyone you dislike believes in. Also, the suggestion that the lurch to the right of a culture dominated by wealthy white cishet men can only be explained by a wacky brand of transhumanist accelerationism seems like a solid bit of missing the wood for the trees. But I dunno, maybe there's more to it than that...

 

[catalog]

Here's another one about nick land and trump



Although I like this guy alot

 

[version]

This reminds me, I recently saw this on another forum:

The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn | Washington Spectator

For decades, the conventional wisdom about Silicon Valley was that it leaned progressive. And by many measures (like donations by Big Tech employees to political candidates), the industry has been…

washingtonspectator.org

and wondered what our man on the ground in the Silicon Valley elite would make of it?

Gut reaction is that the TESCREAL concept feels a bit like a left-wing version of that thing that Jordan Peterson types do on the right, where you take every individual thing that anyone you dislike believes in and assume that they make up a single more-or-less coherent ideological thing (post-modernist relativist marxist CRT cultural-maoist identity politics) that everyone you dislike believes in. Also, the suggestion that the lurch to the right of a culture dominated by wealthy white cishet men can only be explained by a wacky brand of transhumanist accelerationism seems like a solid bit of missing the wood for the trees. But I dunno, maybe there's more to it than that...

@Clinamenic @sus @ghost

 

[sus]

Bizarre anagram to choose when TREACLES, CLEAREST, and CARTELS are on the table

 

[version]

Seems ridiculous to try to cram so many things into one acronym.

 

[sus]

I think that longtermism and accelerationism offer genuine challenges to progressive worldview: the first by accepting progressive moral logic and then taking it to its logical breaking point; the second by proposing an alternate theological basis.

Effective altruism and Rationalism are both pretty predictable extensions of liberal ideology though. I don't think they're challenges in any meaningful way to, say, a 2000s (ie pre-woke) Democratic party platform.

 

[sus]

One of the clearest ways to think about the vibe shift IMO is a reassertion of Master Morality after a long period of Slave Morality

You always want both, cf noblesse oblige, but the balance is key and that's what's always shifting