EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.

Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. People who know perfectly well they're misbehaving will claim that they aren't, using the same arguments. It won't hold water, but now we're swamped, and the entire thing crumbles.

I'd love to believe in effective altruism. I already know that my money is more effective in the hands of a food bank than giving people food myself. I'd love to think that could scale. It would be great to have smarter, better-informed people vetting things. But I don't have any reason to trust them -- in part because I know too many of the type of people who get involved and aren't trustworthy.

I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits.

They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves. They also had a deep contrarian bias, which turned into a belief that drugs weren’t actually as bad as the system wanted us to believe.

Combine these two factors and they convinced themselves that they could harness recreational opioid use to improve their lives, but avoid the negative consequences that “normies” suffered by doing it wrong. I remember being at a party where several of them were explaining that they were on opioids right now and tried to use the fact that nothing terrible was happening as proof that they were performing rational drug use.

Long story short, the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs due to their hubris. I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them.

I will never forget how confident they were that addiction is something that only happens to other people, not rationalists like them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/wef6...

> I can't stop crying. Fuck heroin. Fuck my life. I guess I don't need to say that since heroin pretty much fucked my life for me in under two weeks, I just want to die.

Though heroin use is obviously one of the dumbest things anyone can do.

This is why codeine OTC recommends no more than three consecutive days of use.

Never had the hard stuff and not inclined to try. But the oral ones might as well be cornstarch.

Severe withdrawal comes after dose escaation and youre not going to develop that much tolerance after 2 weeks.

Im not saying it wouldnt be unpleasant, but its not goibg to be the Trainspotting version.

Codeine is available with a pharmacist's approval alone in my state. So while it may not technically OTC by that definition (or is, I don't know how OTC is defined), it can be had without a prescription by visiting a participating pharmacy and simply requesting codeine+guaifenesin. Done it a few times myself.

Lest you think this is no longer the case - “lean”, as it is known by Houstonites (due to your tendency to lean on things while under the influence) was a major plot point of a recent mostly autobiographical Netflix series centered around Houston that was released late last year: https://www.keranews.org/arts-culture/2022-08-25/houston-ooz...

My go-to pain-relief used to be a product called Codis, which was soluble aspirin+codeine. It used to be available OTC, until about 8 years ago, then it disappeared. You can still buy paracetamol+codeine OTC ("Paracodol?). My understanding is that aspirin causes vasodilation, which causes more rapid absorption of codeine. Supposedly that's why Codis worked better than Paracodol.

I don't know why they took it off the shelves. There was no announcement; it just disappeared.

Codis was effective for both migraines and period pains, as reported to me (I'm not a woman, and I don't suffer from migraines).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378

For better or worse, 'american' is the defacto standard on the internet, but please remember that only a small percentage of the global population is USian the in all probability the person you're speaking to isn't from the US.

Disclaimer: Not English. Not American.

UK, Australia, new zealand Canada already add up to a sizeable chunk of the US's population. Then add in 1% of India, or China (I assume some proportion has access outside the great firewall) and you've got a population bigger than the US.

US: 331.9 million

UK: 67.33 million AU: 25.69 million CA: 38.25 million NZ: 5.123 million IN: 1.408 billion * 0.01 = 14m

Point is some very small percentage of the rest of the world is going to dwarf the US. Yes the US will be the single biggest demographic but less than 50% of the total.

I haven't been able to find many solid stats, but eg English language Wikipedia, the US has 22k active editors out of 59k total.

I don't mean that to be a dick. I mean that because I care.

Opiates are dangerous. Very dangerous.

Maybe, but if so, it's a fake narrative they've maintained consistently for over a decade:

https://www.reddit.com/user/SpontaneousH/

I suspect there are different (social) mechanisms at work here, but addiction is generally applied to one specific form of drug reliance.

People who are sceptical of antidepressants, such as Professor Joanna Moncrieff (University of College London), do speak of them as “addictive”, and consider their use to (at least sometimes) be a case of “prescribed drug dependency”, and also speak of “withdrawal” from them

Reading the literature, it appears that this is the experience for 9/10 people prescribed the drug. The problem, of course, is that 10% is a large number at scale.

Obviously, I've had no experience with heroin. But considering my experience with fentanyl, I can quite easily say that most of us are not susceptible.

This strikes me as yet another example of overstating risks. PTSD is the canonical case, of course, where the majority of people experiencing trauma won't get PTSD and even a third of people experiencing major trauma won't get PTSD.

The short version is that the average human is very resilient.

(Incidentally, I don't really care if they are 100% true or near-true or simply entirely plausible.)

I say this as someone who is very drug positive: Stay away from opiates, except for treating extreme, acute, physical pain.

It wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big of a problem as it is if it wasn’t good at that.

A relative of mine-who used to be a heavy marijuana user-told me how he once tried heroin-and he really didn’t like how it made him behave socially-he says it made him smug, arrogant, and an asshole who felt superior to everyone else. I don’t know if that’s some kind of idiosyncratic reaction to it or a common one, but he told me it was enough to convince him to not try it again, and just stick to marijuana and alcohol, which didn’t have the same effect on him

Problem is, it always comes to not wanting normal undrugged life afterwards.

I'm reasonably sure this isn't true. It is also the case in the UK and the US. It is presumably also the case for many other countries, since it is hard to imagine what would make the UK, the US, and the Netherlands somehow unique in the world.

UK: "Higher educational attainment is associated with increased odds of daily alcohol consumption and problem drinking. The relationship is stronger for females than males. Individuals who achieved high test scores in childhood are at a significantly higher risk of abusing alcohol across all dimensions"

https://rmitlibraryvn.rmit.edu.vn/discovery/fulldisplay?vid=...

US: "Greater alcohol consumption is also associated with having a higher educational level and having a higher income [...] In the college sample, educational achievement is positively associated with drinking"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4838609/

O actually there's a ton. These are solidly protestant cultures, with a history of hypocrisy.

Although it's the middle classes that write the rules so make of that what you will.

Not too surprising; drinking a lot, frequently, is expensive. High education level correlates with high income. It's cheaper to get wasted on almost any illegal drug than it is with alcohol.

1. Most people were full of themselves and full of s** 2. This was just like everything else, a business. Most people were in it for themselves, making a career out of EA, networking for professional growth, using ea in their own workplace to climb ranks and the worst ones were just people virtue signaling for Instagram. 3. Drug, sex and alcohol was heavily involved 4. At the end of the day, there was a lot of talking and less doing, which was the problem that it is supposed to solve in the first place

"They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves."

Horse? Were they shooting horse?

This isn't a convincing story that they were wrong if you don't actually know what happened to them. It just looks like you're showing a bit of that hubris yourself, in assuming they went off a cliff.

OP disassociating at that point is OP exercising good judgement. It does not cancel out his observation that issues started.

The "maybe in next few months they gained something super special" is pure speculation - and it is not even that these people took drugs with that expectation. Instead they took drugs expecting no issues will happen to them.

As is the assumption that it all went to shit, that's why this "story" is useless as some cautionary tale. "Started having problems" could mean anything, from "life spiraled out of control" to "their mom found out and bitched at them".

This is claim of later: the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs

There is no need for them experiencing the worst of heroine addiction or whatever for them to be wrong and or right. At that point, they has drug related issues so they were wrong.

Right, so what realities caught up with them exactly? What "warning signs"? How do you know this wasn't just the OP projecting some bullshit that doesn't actually matter?

Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a success. In part because it's good to help the less fortunate, but also as an ethical stance. Having a business drove home that no business can be successful without the support of the community it starts in, so it's only right to share in the rewards.

So, I give 10% back. I have rules about it:

I always give to a local group who directly helps people and who is typically overlooked for charitable giving. I get to know the group pretty well first.

I never give to any group that won't keep my identity a secret.

I never give to any group that asks me for money.

I don't always give in the form of money. Sometimes, it's in the form of my time and effort, or in material goods, etc.

I don't give to "umbrella" groups whose purpose is fundraising for a collection of other groups. This isn't because I have a problem with them, but because they're not the ones who struggle the most to get donations.

It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. We need to be concerned with the future. That is the only reason to maintain roads and bridges, to prevent pollution, or to conserve resources like water in aquifers and helium. But effective altruists are as likely to talk about colonizing Mars as they are to talk about global warming.

Effective altruism is supposedly about making evidence-based decisions. We have no idea how likely "existential risks" are. We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them. We cannot predict a year into the future, let alone millenia. So-called longtermism is nothing more than guesswork.

Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? AFAIK effective altruists want to colonize mars on x-risk grounds, which would explain why they want to prioritize that over global warming, even though the latter is happening right now. AFAIK they think that global warming is bad, but isn't an existential risk, whereas colonizing mars will mitigate many existential risks.

Cheaper, and more effective.

Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars.

The remaining threats that wouldn't also be pretty likely to take out Mars at the same time, would be something like a whole-crust-liquifying impact, which we'd have a pretty good chance of spotting well in advance, and we could put some of the savings into getting better at that.

I think a bunch of smart people are also just romantics when it comes to space shit, and that's why they won't shut up about Mars, not because it's actually a good idea.

Hell, building orbital habs is probably a better idea than colonizing Mars, for those purposes, if we must do space shit.

thank you

how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here

Earth is easy mode compared to Mars

So... like Earth if several apocalypses happened at once, including a few nigh-impossible ones. Except it starts that way. And it's actually even worse than that. Sure, maybe we could slam some comets into it and do a ton of other sci-fi shit over a few centuries and it'd eventually get better, sorta, a little—but c'mon, seriously?

Because we can afford to make big mistakes in terraforming a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet.

Generally worked pretty well for Antarctica. A few research bases are permitted but colonization is internationally banned and not happening.

BTW, colonizing Antarctica would be a lot easier than colonizing Mars. Far fewer technical challenges to overcome, and much more practical experience overcoming those challenges.

When someone like Elon Musk talks about "colonising" Mars, all he's realistically talking about – at first – is a crewed research station, so not that different from what we have in Antarctica. And many people who want Mars to be a "nature reserve" are opposed to even that. Yes, Musk hopes that such a research station will eventually grow into a buzzing metropolis, but I think if that ever happens it is a long way off. Musk might live to see crewed research stations established, I very much doubt he'll live to see genuine colonisation, much as he enjoys publicly fantasising about that topic.

Even the ban on colonising Antarctica only really works because it is banning something no government wants to do anyway. Crewed exploration of Mars would be attractive in principle to governments because of the benefits for national prestige, getting in the history-books, outshining the competition – the same basic reasons why the US went to the Moon. Of course, that benefit has to be weighed against the immense cost – but costs aren't constant, with further technological and economic developments it is going to become more affordable.

All the groundbreaking exploration opportunities with Antarctica have already been used up, so governments don't have the same motivations there. And I think the first human visit to another planet, is going to be much more noteworthy and prestigious and memorable, than whoever was first to explore some big freezing cold island on Earth. A thousand years from now, most people will still probably remember who Neil Armstrong was; I doubt many other people from the 20th century would still be household names (I suppose Einstein and Hitler would be the other likely candidates)–its only been a century or two, but the average person has no clue whom the first explorers of Antarctica were.

fungel spores probaly are contaimination by what ever probe we sent there. any life evolving their would not be from any terrestrial evolutionary branch such as fungus

Heck, we need to build probes full of selected terran extremophiles and spray them into the Martian atmosphere.

2. If there is any, how could terran life be competitive with it if the existing life has evolved to match the local environment over billions of years?

3. If there is existing life, how could a biologist not be able to easily distinguish it from terran life?

4. If the life there is ancient and now extinct, terran life isn't going to interfere with that

To answer part 3: We're still discovering new kingdoms of life on Earth (though it's unlikely we'll discover new domains). If localized panspermia exists within our solar system (from meteor impacts or the like) it's possible martian life and terrestrial life are related enough for the martian life to fit within the already existing family tree of terrestrial life. https://astronomy.com/news/2021/05/did-life-on-earth-come-fr...

3. Biologists are easily able to determine if they are new kingdoms are not. They're also able to estimate how long ago divergence from a common root happened.

There are many, many examples of parallel evolution in terran biology, but none of them are confused with each other. It's absurdly unlikely that a terran modern amoeba will be confused with a Martian amoeba.

3) Yes, I know. While this isn't my specialty I work at an organization that does have people that specialize in this. The difficulty would be in definitively concluding whether this is a native divergence that we've just never seen before, or the result of Martian evolution.

3. A billion years of evolutionary divergence, with local alien adaptations, is going to be very hard to confuse with anything brought over by a probe.

because its unique challenges and constraints may make us develop technology that we wouldn't otherwise that may in turn out to be useful back on earth. Much of our technological advancements come from military research, where there was no civilian demand. We developed computers so we could break encryption, we developed the internet as a successor to arpanet a military network originally made to maintain command and control in event of nuclear exchange. standardized clothes sizing was invented to make uniforms more cheaply. satellites were invented so we could spy on our military rivals. the entire space program was a spin off of ICBM program. Nuclear power came from atomic bomb research, we have developed many advaced prosthetic due to injured veterans needing them. weather prodiction thanks to radar to detect enemy planes.

But what if we could have something less self destructive than war that would germinate new technologies? Thats what a reasons to colonizes space. space colonization gives us many of the same challenges war does without the need for mass loss of life. Needs for new materials, new means of generating power, new modes of transportation. space exploration will give us new frontiers to strive against rather than find better ways to murder each-other. the ease of earth doesn't provide those challenges. I can dig up my back yard throw seed on the ground and will have vegetables to eat in the fall but i have learned nothing, find a way to grow food from lunar or martian regolith and you just have invented a way to rapidly create new soil and solved earths soil erosion problems ans well as found new ways of removing toxins from contaminated environments.

We already have no till agriculture. The plants terraform the soil for us. The problem with this terraformation is that you need to rotate the plants because every plant terraforms the soil in a different way. Plants don't deplete the soil unless you replant the same plant over and over again and destroy terraforming progress through tillage and harvest it and then never bring the poop back.

Some people will now say that avoiding soil depletion in the short term is a bad idea because it means using a little bit more land (or bring up incorrect numbers).

If we can't successfully terraform Earth how the fuck are we going to terraform Mars?

Which is easier, building a colony on Mars or solving politics? I rest my case. Mars, here we come!

You could make an argument that a shared struggle against extreme conditions would stabilize societies and make cooperation a necessity, but a Mars colony is going to need a lot of help from Earth to get on its feet, in which case we still need to solve terrestrial politics anyway.

A Mars colony would be small by necessity. Everyone will know everyone else. In such communities "politics" is not nearly so abstract. For instance, you can't convince yourself that climate change is not happening when you personally know the experts in that field taking the measurements and crunching the data. There will always be disagreements but nowhere near the type of nonsense we see here on Earth.

One big question is if can make Mars civilization that would survive Earth collapse. It is possible that there are some things, like biological samples or advanced technology that have to come from mother planet. Mars will likely take a long time to become self-sufficient and until then it isn’t a backup. The easier self-sufficiency is, the less Mars is needed as backup.

The final thing is that colonizing Mars could introduce risks. It would involve developing technology that makes disaster more likely, like advanced AI, genetic engineering, or moving asteroids in space. Or could be adding a place for conflict leading to Earth-Mars war that destroys both planets.

Most, but not all right? So then you agree that there is still a case for colonies on other worlds, if only to cover those less plausible scenarios.

Ought implies can. We cannot predict the far future of humanity. We cannot colonize other planets in the foreseeable future. We cannot plan how to handle future technology that we aren't yet sure is even possible.

The things we actually can predict and control, like global warming and natural disasters and pandemics, are handled with regular old public policy. Longtermism, almost by definition, refers to things we can neither predict nor control.

Do YOU not understand their arguments? They are facially stupid. The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard.

Yeah, because that's a strawman you imagined in your head. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that the two were related (other than that they're competing options) based on my previous comment.

I've read enough of that argument being made in earnest on this forum that I'm going to have to go with the parent poster.

There are many intelligent people who seriously believe in that strawman. (Although it's also possible that they don't actually believe in it, and are just making the argument because the purpose of colonizing Mars isn't increasing the resilience of Earth, but getting away from the hoi polloi. Those people will be for a rude surprise when they discover that they are also part of the hoi polloi.)

1. We refuse to believe very bad scenarios until much too late. Doesn't need to be apocalyptic: The Titanic isn't sinking; all of Hiroshima must have gone silent because a telegraph cable was damaged and it can't possibly be the entire city destroyed, and even if it was the Americans can't possibly repeat it; the Cultural Revolution cannot fail; the King can't be executed for treason by his own parliament; the general can't cross the Rubicon; Brutus can't betray me.

I think many of those things would have been dismissed the way you're doing now.

2. Tech is changing. I don't expect extinction from a natural pandemic, but from an artificial one is plausible; not from a natural impact event, but artificial is… not yet, but no harder than creating a Mars colony; propaganda has already started multiple genocide attempts, what happens when two independent campaigns are started at the same time when both groups want to genocide everyone not in their group?

The same risks would still be present on Mars, and the only way I see around the deliberate impact risk is space habitats which have their own different set of problems (given we can't coordinate on greenhouse gases I see no chance of us coordinating on Kesler syndrome either in cis-Luna nor in Dyson swarm scenarios).

I don't have any solutions here, though.

In the awful real-world history of genocide, I don’t think “we want to genocide everyone except for ourselves” has ever actually happened. Genocide is always targeted against certain groups, with others left alone. I remember someone here saying that “Nazis wanted to kill all minorities”-but that’s historically false, we all know how they sought to exterminate some minorities, what is far less well-known is how they actually promoted and even improved the rights of others, which they saw much more favourably-such as Frisians and Bretons. “Let’s genocide everyone except for ourselves” is the kind of policy which cartoon Nazis would adopt but no one in the real-world ever has. I suppose something genuinely new could happen, but it doesn’t seem particularly likely-far less likely than the sad near-inevitability of future genocides (of the targeted kind with which we are familiar)

Right, so you don't understand their arguments then, thanks for clearing that up. Global warming is only an additional reason, not the only or main reason.

I can imagine a situation where that's true. But right now, for almost any situation, a series of super-bunkers is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective. A lot of ridiculously destructive things can happen to Earth and it will still be a better place to live than Mars.

The solar system is much cleaner place now. All the planetismals and most of the asteroids have impacted or been kicked out. Big things are in stable orbits. There are a lot of dangerous asteroids but we track most of the large ones. There is a risk that something big will be kicked out of orbit but it is rare enough we don’t know how unlikely.

Large impacts, 5km or bigger, are every 20 million years.

And one should also bear in mind that Mars is at no less risk of meteor impacts than Earth.

I used the wrong word when I said meteor. They’re too small. A comet or asteroid of 100km diameter would raise the temperature of the surface of the Earth by hundreds of degrees and then there’d be decades of darkness. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632872...

A Mars colony that puts a whole parallel self sufficient society on Mars with their own semiconductor manufacturing and so on is millenia away.

We're not going to have Mars colonized in a decade or two, but it's not going to take a thousand years, either. Probably. I'd say thriving colonies within a century or two.

We absolutely do. We have quantified the risks of supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts and coronal mass ejections. We continue to quantify the ongoing risk of climate change and nuclear war (how many minutes to midnight?). The real open questions are the likelihood of a biological agent (natural or engineered), and AI.

The fact that we don't know the risks should make you more worried about those. Unknown unknowns can bite you in the ass hard with no warning. Maybe we should figure out some warning signs.

> We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them.

That's what research is for. Sounds like we maybe we should fund some research into these issues.

Which is why everyone has a fantastic zombie apocalypse plan but no realistic ideas to to address their local non-zombie violent crime.

I feel the same about Rationalists and rationality. They even had an excellent approach with their motto: "We're only aspiring rationalists", but when you remind them of that motto in the process of them being not actually rational, it has no effect.

There's got to be a way to ~solve something that is so in your face, like right there in an argument, the very essence, but it is a very tricky phenomenon, it always finds a way to slip out of any corner you back it into.

Far be it from me to second-guess anybody's giving (motes and beams and all that) but this rules out many of the most effective aid organizations, all of which are absolutely off-the-charts obnoxious about fundraising --- because it works.

This doesn't seem to jive much with what's reported by charity evaluators like GiveWell, or with what kinds of charitable organizations get grants from more traditional but still high-impact philanthropies like the B&MGF.

It's quite plausible that too much emphasis on fund raising among the general public distorts incentives within these charities and makes them less likely to be highly effective on average. If so, we're better off when the job of publicly raising charitable donations is spun off to separate organizations, such as GiveWell or more generally the EA movement itself.

More generally, people overly emphasize low administrative expenses as a sign of quality. You need overhead to effectively administrate and evaluate programs.

jibe. yes, words change and evolve, but I only mention it because to jive has another meaning, to BS somebody.

I agree with your overall point about "I won't give to groups who tell me they need money" is a pretty high bar to set. However, GP's comment is in keeping with something I've come to think, which is organizations will re-form themselves around your donations (I give large amounts because I can afford them) and they'll befriend you, and it beomes a difficult situation to extricate yourself from. I tend to do one-time gifts and then move on.

Or gibe. The problem is jibe has negative connotations, whereas 'to jive with' seems to me to be a metaphor to works, (I assume it's used in the dancing sense?).

I don't know of the meaning of the phrase has changed somewhat, 'to jibe with' suggests a sarcastic undertone to me, but in modern usage, no sarcasm is intended so maybe jive is the correct term for the current usage of the term 'to jX with'

I have no idea how it acquired the perjorative meaning of making unpleasant remarks.

I'll never make that mistake again.

EDIT: Unless they literally don't care about the base rate donators at all. They only exist so that some of them will get converted into higher rate donators later.

There are many ways to measure impact. I choose to measure it locally.

I always give to a local group who directly helps people and who is typically overlooked for charitable giving. I get to know the group pretty well first.

So maybe they are specifically looking for grass roots organisations that do good work but are less able to find raise.

And who's to say 'most effective'. I used to think Red Cross was one of those, until they got caught driving around randomly during Katrina was it? Doing nothing, but spreading their brand. Or so I recall. If I got that wrong I apologize, but my point is bigger means less transparent. For instance, those big effective organizations are spending a butt-ton on fundraising.

apparently not!

Which you think is what, exactly? I'm under the impression that thing is warmed-over utilitarianism.

> The fundamental idea is sound.

I do not believe utilitarianism is sound, because its logic can be easily used to justify some obviously horrible things. However the framework appeals very strongly to "rationalist" type people.

It's a group of people persuading themselves they're special and entitled, because of course they are, and then trying to sell that line - financially, psychologically, sometimes politically - to themselves and others.

Which is not a new thing in any way at all. The wrapping changes, the psychological games don't.

I have a rule of thumb which is that if you want to understand a movement, organisation, team, social or personal relationship, or any other grouping, the messaging and the stated purpose are largely irrelevant. The real tell is the quality of the relationships - internally, and with outsiders.

If there's a lot of entitlement and rhetorical myth-making + grandiosity happening expect some serious dysfunction, and very likely non-congruence and hypocrisy.

Right, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about consequences at all. There's a pretty big gap between "given that we have scarce resources, we should maximize the impact of our use of it" and "committing this atrocity is fine because the utility calculations work out".

You can apply EA-like concepts with any sort of consequentialist ethics. E.g. the Rawlsan veil of ignorance can work -- would hypothetical-me rather reduce his chance of dying of malaria by X%, or reduce his chance of malnutrition by Y%? It's just harder to explain why you rank one course of action over another, and therefore you're probably not going to be able to centralize the decision making.

This isn't because it's somehow unsound[0]. It's because it's harder (though not impossible) to explain with math, and the subjective value judgements are right in your face rather than hidden in concepts like utility functions.

[0]- It might be; you might not accept the premise of the veil of ignorance. That's not the reason it seems trickier than the utilitarian version, which has the same problem.

Of course, EA has a bunch of other weird stuff like AI safety, which isn't an idea that's been around for millennia.

I think most moral philosophers agree with you on that.

IMO, the way people talk about Utilitarianism feels to me exactly the same as my own feelings when at school, having only been taught 2D vectors and basic trig functions, I spent 6 months trying to figure out what it even meant to render in 3D — in particular the sense of pride when I arrived at two useful frameworks (which I later learned were unshaded 3D projection and ray-marching).

By analogy: while that's a good start, there's a long way from that to even Doom/Marathon let alone modern rendering; similarly while Utilitarianism is a good start, it's only saying "good and bad can be quantified and added" and falls over very quickly when you involve even moderately sized groups of spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum people with finite capacity for experiencing utils. It also very definitely can't tell you what you should value, because of the is/ought divide.

Once your model for people is complex enough to admit that some of them are into BDSM, I don't think the original model of simple pluses and minuses can even ascribe a particular util level any more.

In other words, we would have to treat most situations as unique and then try to find patterns and then the whole rationalism thing goes out of the window.

Unfortunately, and this goes back to my previous point, lots of people (I'm not immune!) mistake taking the first baby step for climbing the whole mountain.

I'm reminded of the joke about a an engineer, a physicist, and a theoretical mathematician who each wake up to a fire in their bedrooms: https://old.reddit.com/r/MathJokes/comments/j8bax6/an_engine...

If it sounds horrible, then it's probably is?

The logical chain of hurting a human leading to helping two human doesn't sound like something that is moral or dependable.

Giving to charities that focus on the most severe and urgent problem of humanity is a very straightforward idea.

However, not all charities are focused on the most urgent problems. For example, a local charity I frequent does improv and comedy theater, hardly 'urgent' needs. People don't like to hear is that they could donate money to a third world NGO providing vaccines, or fighting corruption in third world countries instead of their local church or community theater.

Don't get me wrong, community theaters/churches/etc are good things. They just aren't saving lives.

This was the point I was making, yes. The idea itself isn't logically faulty, but it is easy to subvert.

Start a donor-advised fund (DAF) with your financial institution. Most have one, and some large charities (e.g. Silicon Valley Charitable Foundation) have their own.

You fund it with cash or appreciated stock. For the latter, you can take a tax deduction that year for the entire market value.

You can't get the money back (that's why it was deductible). You can "advise" that they make a grant to some 501(c)(3) charity, and from my experience they always do, after due diligence.

Here's why they're not annoying: you can give anonymously if you want. They can't bother you because they don't know who you are.

The one I have allows you to name a "successor trustee" who takes over as advisor if I'm gone.

I get how this would keep you personally from being annoyed, but it seems to incentivize in worse outcomes. "Let's collect all the money we can, we never know if we'll get more. Let's grow that reserve" vs. "In a bad month we can get our usual donors/JohnFen to give us his annual donation a little early".

I think this is a very, very, very important step. What's more, it's a step that I don't think can be outsourced to someone else, which is why I'm skeptical about claims by, among others, the Effective Altruism movement, to be able to do this kind of thing on your behalf.

Why can't this be done? Society in general outsources due diligence to third parties all the time. Banks outsource credit worthiness assessments to credit bureaus. Passive investors outsource price discovery to other market participants. Online shoppers outsource quality control to reviewers. I agree that there's no substitute for doing it yourself, but it's simply not realistic in many cases to do the due diligence yourself. Even if you do it yourself, there's no guarantee that you'll do a better job than the professionals.

It drives away anyone who wants to give but is unable or unwilling to devote the kind of time necessary to do this kind of in-depth research (the amount of which only goes up the more money you want to give away).

Anything around 3% or more endless annual growth must invent faster than light travel within less than a millenium and then exclusively use it to colonize multiple galaxies.

What this tells you is that we are going to drown in capital within the next two thousand years and probably launch a few space missions toward neighboring solar systems but all of those things are closer to 0% annual growth than 3%.

It's largely a reinvention of a philosophical program called logical positivism, which the philosophers gave up on because it didn't work, so it's not sound. They just brought it back because it's the most STEMy kind of philosophy and they think anything with enough math must be right.

(Example of them not reading the literature is their invented term "steelman", which academia already had and called "reconstructing arguments".)

Perhaps you mean rationalism (in the internet-rationalist sense; there are others) which is closely associated with EA but not at all the same thing, and is somewhat like logical positivism.

Those things are less controversial and exciting to talk about than (say) whether there's a real danger of AI wrecking the world, so if you focus on what's talked about in the EA Forum or something then you will get a misleading impression.

I had never been a core figure in the local group, so it was easy enough for me to melt away unnoticed but one of my friends was an organizer and regular lecturer. When she finally decided to leave over exhaustion from increasingly abrasive and hostile tone of the group to any dissent, she was harassed for months. The group was seemingly offended that she rejected their brilliance and become an apostate.

I think they eventually got subsumed by the Atheism+ movement, which then imploded.

A few years ago, he told me, he went to a skeptics’ conference in La Coruña, Spain. He was walking down some stairs one afternoon, not long after investigating the statue of a local saint, which was said to protect those who embrace it, when his left leg suddenly crumpled beneath him. “It wasn’t like I fell and broke my leg,” he said. “It was more like I broke my leg and fell.” The other skeptics gathered around as he writhed in agony. When he told them, between gasps, that he thought he had broken his leg, they were dubious. “You know, that might just be a sprain,” one of them suggested. Another told him to try wiggling his toes. It wasn’t until Nickell lifted his leg, revealing that it was bent at a grotesque angle to his foot, that they believed him.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/23/waiting-for-gh...

We are ultimately story telling apes. To believe we are going to stop telling each other and ourselves fictional stories is the height of delusion. There is this highly negative aspect too when you start believing the fictional story is actually non-fiction. That opens up all kinds of additional problems that is actually solved at the society level by believing in fiction like religion.

I am a total atheist but it seems really stupid to me to not see the role fiction plays in coordinating society. That level of skepticism was overly focused on the individual with near disregard for collections of individuals at the level of society.

What do you think of that? Is the atheism+ still around? What happened to its people?

Yup.

Which is super-ironic given the association with big-R Rationality, Less Wrong, Overcoming Bias, all of which quote Feynman saying "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

Now I have the mental image of the scene in The Life of Brian where the crowd mindlessly parrots Brian's call for them to think for themselves.

>The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments.

>EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.

Should we not talk ourselves into believing into stuff? Should smart people specifically avoid changing their beliefs out of fear of "justify all kinds of terrible things"?

>I'd love to believe in effective altruism. I already know that my money is more effective in the hands of a food bank than giving people food myself. I'd love to think that could scale. It would be great to have smarter, better-informed people vetting things. But I don't have any reason to trust them -- in part because I know too many of the type of people who get involved and aren't trustworthy.

So you don't trust donating money to food banks or malaria nets because "don't have any reason to trust them", then what? Don't donate any money at all? Give up trying to maximize impact and donate to whatever you feel like donating to?

It's simple really: just be skeptical of your own reasoning because you're aware of your own biases and fallibility. Be a good scientist and be open to being wrong.

> So you don't trust donating money to food banks or malaria nets because "don't have any reason to trust them", then what?

No, they don't trust that you can scale the concept of "food banks are more effective than I am" to any kind of maximization. You can still donate to worthy causes and effective organizations.

> Don't donate any money at all? Give up trying to maximize impact and donate to whatever you feel like donating to?

Yeah, basically. Giving is more helpful than not giving, so even a non-maximalist approach is better than nothing. Perfect is the enemy of good, aim for good.

This just seems like a generic advice to me which is theoretically applicable to everyone. Is there any evidence of effective altruists not doing that, or this being specifically a problem with "really-smart-person"s?

>No, they don't trust that you can scale the concept of "food banks are more effective than I am" to any kind of maximization. You can still donate to worthy causes and effective organizations.

I'm not quite understanding what you're arguing for here. Are you saying that you disagree with effective altruists' assessment that you should be funding malaria nets in africa or whatever (ie. what they want you to do), rather than donating to local food banks (ie. what you want to do)?

>Yeah, basically. Giving is more helpful than not giving, so even a non-maximalist approach is better than nothing. Perfect is the enemy of good, aim for good.

To be clear, you're arguing for donating for whatever your gut tells you, rather than trying to maximize benefit?

Yes. Don't overthink it and end up trying to colonize Mars instead of buying the homeless guy down the street a sandwich.

'My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?'

> Should we not talk ourselves into believing into stuff? Should smart people specifically avoid changing their beliefs out of fear of "justify all kinds of terrible things"?

The GP is talking about self-deception. And yes, we should not deceive ourselves.

To broaden the applicability, consider that a clever person goes through life with their bullshit checker set to medium. Normies try to persuade him of stuff, and he quickly spots the flaws in their arguments. But a clever person doesn't lock the setting at medium. They adjust it to suit their adversary. If it is a negotiation for a large business deal, the skepticism gets turned up to a high level.

One can imagine a situation in which an executive, Mr E, for company A discovers that company B has hired away one of company A's due diligence team. Whoops! Mr E thinks "They know what we look for, and will have made very sure that it looks good." One adjusts the setting of ones bullshit detector not just on the raw ability of ones adversary, but also to whether they have access to your thought processes, that they can use to outwit you.

Assume for the sake of argument that the previous paragraph is for real. Adjusting your bullshit detectors to allow for an adversary reading your secrets is an option. Then it leads to actionable advice.

How do you set your bullshit detector when you are trying to avoid deceiving yourself? You use the settings that you use when you fear that an adversary has got inside your head and knows how to craft an argument to exploit your weak spots.

This general approach works quite well (with practice) in many other domains, maybe it would also work for arguments/beliefs.

If it did, 1 week ban. Do it again: 2 week ban. All according to the well explained and agreed upon on a point by point basis in the terms of service that the user agreed to...except in this case, the TOS are actually serious, and not the colloquial meaning of "serious" that people have grown accustomed to.

This would create substantial gnashing of teeth, but I anticipate before too long a few people would be able to figure it out (perhaps by RTFM), demonstrate how to speak and think properly, and a new norm would be established.

Besides: if 95% of people simply cannot cut it, I don't see this as a major problem. Cream is valuable, milk is more trouble than it's worth.

Two things that should never be underestimated:

- the stupidity of humans

- the ability of humans to learn

> On internet arguments it's already implied that you're bringing forth logical points and not just spouting off what you feel in the heat of the moment.

It's even worse: it is perceived as such! This is the problem though: people have never been taught how to reliably distinguish between opinions, "facts", facts, and the unknown (the latter is typically what catches genuinely smart people). So: offer an educational component, maybe integrated into the onboarding process.

Too big of a hassle? Best of luck to you elsewhere (provide links to Reddit, Facebook, Hacker News, etc).

> Invoking the safe word is basically a thinly veiled attempt at calling the other party irrational and emotional.

Take a wild guess what response a comment of this epistemic quality (in the form that it is currently presented) would elicit under the standards I describe above.

Besides: I doubt any unemotional, rational people exist on the planet. It is not a question of "if" someone has these shortcomings, it is a question of "to what degree" they suffer from them. And should we expect any different from people? We don't try to create any of these people, and it's not like they have anyone to emulate.

This used to be Godwin's law. Except by the time that's triggered, your System 2 thinking dialed you to 11 almost always tells everyone it's time to leave that discussion.

Hmmm, let's see:

"Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies,[1] is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.[2]"

"a term that is mutually agreed upon in advance, and when uttered by a participant it kicks off a well documented (and agreed upon) protocol where all participants downgrade System 1 thinking to zero and upgrade System 2 thinking to 11"

I see very little similarity between these two things.

> Except by the time that's triggered, your System 2 thinking dialed you to 11 almost always tells everyone it's time to leave that discussion.

From my other comment: "if 95% of people simply cannot cut it, I don't see this as a major problem. Cream is valuable, milk is more trouble than it's worth."

Lots of people will leave, but there will be some who remain. It's a similar principle to quality standards when joining various organizations, or any other process that involves targeted selection.

I'm not sure what isn't clear: the trigger condition you're looking for is the first comparison to Nazis is made. Except as I said, by the time that point is reached I'm not sure productive discussion is possible.

I'm baffled, what are you referring to here? Why am I looking for a trigger of a comparison to Nazis?

> a term that is mutually agreed upon in advance, and when uttered by a participant it kicks off a well documented (and agreed upon) protocol ...

That term is a trigger condition for initiating a protocol. I suggested that the first comparison to Nazis is the trigger condition. What's unclear here?

>> how about we develop something similar for internet arguments, a term that is mutually agreed upon in advance, and when uttered by a participant it kicks off a well documented (and agreed upon) protocol where all participants downgrade System 1 thinking to zero and upgrade System 2 thinking to 11

> This used to be Godwin's law.

In this case, playing of the Godwin's Lawcard would invoke my recommended process, as opposed to playing of the Godwin's Lawcard being an instance of my recommended process.

> Except by the time that's triggered, your System 2 thinking dialed you to 11 almost always tells everyone it's time to leave that discussion.

Again, this claim would invoke my process, and would be accompanied by a reminder that it isn't actually possible to read minds or the future, it only seems like it is possible when running on System 1 heuristics.

But then, both my logic and intuition suggests to me that what's going on here is that you and I are talking past each other, and if we were to eliminate all of the numerous flaws in communication (for example: your usage of "the" trigger condition instead of "a" trigger condition[1]), we'd discover we don't actually disagree very much. But ain't no one got time for that, under current protocols.

[1] A common response to this style of complaint ("pedantry") is that one should simply assume [the correct intended] meaning - but again, this has a dependency on mind reading, which is a false premise (that seems true during realtime cognition).

I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you. The opposite would be you accusing your opponent as luddites or whatever because they're too bought into "conventional wisdom". Neither are actually helpful epistemically because the line for "good reason" is entirely arbitrary, and is easily colored by your beliefs.

>an hour on Google Scholar doesn't mean you've learned everything".

>If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan to get a peptide lab to manufacture cheap Semaglutide is dangerous, even if you can't explain exactly why it's dangerous (in this case it's probably pretty obvious).

I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china or that the typical EA analysis on x-risk is based on "an hour on Google Scholar".

>If, on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is "eat 6 - 11 servings of grain and 3 - 5 servings of vegetables a day", but many nutritionists are recommending less grain and there's new research out saying that much higher vegetable intake is good, maybe a plan to eat more vegetables and less bread is good.

Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"? Does some well researched books like "The Precipice" or "What We Owe the Future" suffice here? I'm sure that among all the effective altruists out there, you can find among them "many" to support their claim?

EA people would probably phrase it as something about how updating strong priors in response to weak evidence needs to happen slowly, but I feel the Bayesian formulation is a bit toothless when it comes to practical applications.

The broader point is that when your opponent is more radical than you on a factual issue[0], but they don't present any evidence for why, they're probably wrong. This isn't good enough in a debate but it's a fine heuristic for deciding whether to use opioids as performance enhancers.

> I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china

This is a fair criticism, but I didn't mean to apply it to the movement as a whole, only to the particular failure mode where some effective altruists (or more generally, rationalists) talk themselves into doing bizarre and harmful things that equivalently smart non-EAs would not. It's easy to talk about Chesterton's Fence but it's not so easy to remember it when you read about something cool on Wikipedia or HN.

> Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"?

I'm just looking for a heuristic that stops you doing weird rationalist stuff, not a population-wide set of dietary recommendations. It's okay if some low-risk experimentation slips through, even if it's not statistically rigorous and even if it's very slightly harmful.

The point is that there are two requirements being met: first, no strong expert consensus ("many nutritionists" was too weak a phrasing and I apologise), and second, if you ask a few random strangers (representing conventional wisdom) whether eating more vegetables and less bread is good for you they'll tell you to go for it if you want to, while if you ask about using non-prescription opioids they'll be against it.

[0] Values-driven stuff is different.

>EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything.

I think that just as big of an issue is that a lot of these EA people are not really smart. They are generally financially successful, which many people confuse with being really smart. This is especially true if that financial success came as a result of being really good at something (like programming), that doesn't necessarily translate into being really good at other things, or being really smart in general. This effect is compounded when other people are constantly stoking their egos due to the aforementioned professional and financial success. This is not to say that wealthy people who go into EA are stupid (they are very likely intelligent) but they just may not be as smart as they believe they are, or as smart as other people tell them they may be.

I'm just learning that they made it into a cult. Who thought that was a good idea? Just be an effective altruist FFS.

EA has a lot of overlap with religion by its very nature. Any moralizing philosophy with dedicated followers will tend to become cultish.

I saw it more like "If you are going to attempt to make your actions line up with your morals or ethics as a matter of principle, you should do it in a way that actually produces the result your ethics demand."

I mean I'm not really arguing, I know people are gonna do what people do...

Somebody from on high isn't going to have the right perspective to do a good job. I think the effective altruists are solving a problem for themselves "how do I feel better about having all this money" and not "how do I solve this person's lack of ability to fill prescriptions problem"

What about if you're less smart? Wouldn't you be more easily fooled?

Maybe it's not about smartness, but about arrogance?

My favorite aspect of EA is the transparency. Givewell and open phil publish white papers that go into excruciating detail about how they reached their conclusions. You don't have to trust them. Read what they publish and make your own conclusions about how to do good most effectively.

I've also enjoyed the writing of Julia Galef, especially The Scout Mindset, which many in the EA community have embraced as solutions to not only the "too smart for your own good" problem but general divisiveness/tribalism in society.

It’s always seemed to me there is likely to be more oversight in larger organizations. I’ve been meaning to ask about this but never had time.

Also if you read their recommendations, a lot of times their source is “personal conversations with the leader of the charity”

with all the related problems & benefits.

Disestablishmentarianism by modern democracies means that without a centralized religion to arbitrate Truth, pseudo-religions will expand their power bases to fill in the blanks.

Psychiatry, Social Security, shelters, soup kitchens, hospital and university systems. All were adequately handled by Christendom, until society decided that Christendom was superfluous and hindering their goals.

What I think is the most promising feature of EA is openness to criticism and trying to improve the movement itself. I think SBF was a wake up call and many people in the movement should take note that this isn't how we get to a better future or do the most good (although I think his tactics also were not really EA canon, if there is one, and I don't know if people knew there could be outright fraud -- disclaimer, I don't know the details of SBF's case). That case highlighted the importance of following common sense ethics, honesty and so on.

I also think it's a very common issue for smart people to 'get over their heads' (is that a valid expression?), which I wrote about here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yww9g6/be_s...

It's certainly dangerous to use reasoning to justify whatever you would like to be true. I believe this is addressed in Julia's book 'The Scout Mindset' (haven't read it, only a few reviews!), and it's actually one of the main points of the book (with several examples of that) -- a.k.a. motivated reasoning, arrogance, etc.. We can't be perfect, but we can learn from our mistakes and be aware of those dangers.

I hope the EA community will have a sincere look at those issues and address whatever needs to be addressed. I myself will continue to be an EA possibly forever, because the root ideas are very sound. I want to help people, and I want to learn how to best help others. You can't make me not want to help others effectively ;)

Conventional wisdom would say that wielding wealth and power like effective altruism demands requires humility, compassion, and maturity. It requires wisdom. Effective altruism can seem to remove the need for that. Doing good is about calculation, not compassion! Interpersonal failings don't matter if someone is really good with C++. One needn't care about the feelings of others if there are more efficient ways to use the time.

Effective altruism calls on the rich and capable to recognize their own power to help those who are poor and helpless. However, it is easy for pity to turn to contempt and for clarity of purpose to turn to arrogance. The poor, hungry, and sick of the world need the effective altruist for a savior. The effective altruist is better than the rest because they are making the world a better place.

An effective altruist may confuse immaturity with wisdom and greed with generosity.

This is not meant to be a diatribe. I find much of effective altruism obviously true and find my exposure to it has made me a better person. If pressed, I would probably call myself an effective altruist. Still, it is greatly concerning that people like Elon Musk or Sam Bankman-Fried can be associated with effective altruism without any real hypocrisy.

Voltaire put it most succinctly:

"Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities"

And, as Feynman pointed out:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

So, yes, this works just as well recursively, i.e., if you are making yourself believe absurdities...

Effective altruism the ideal is very easy to defend - it is blindingly obvious that economic advancement has outperformed all attempts at charity by orders of magnitude. Asian countries keep using work-hard-and-save with jaw dropping outcomes. The success rate of capitalist entrepreneurs at driving social improvements dwarfs the attempts of charities too.

The Effective Altruist community however is probably going to devolve into something rather unimpressive. There isn't much difference between a high performing effective altruist and a successful capitalist, so the community is on shaky ground. They don't have obvious rituals or demographic pressures to keep the community congealed.

Although this headline confuses me. Don't all communities with men in them have a sexual harassment problem? I'm not recalling a community that I'm eligible to join that hasn't been labelled as having sexual harassment problems.

In some sense, I think this idea is even valid. "You're trying to be better so why are you not better at this particular thing?" seems like a reasonable question. It's just sad when this is used as a general argument against trying to improve things.

How smart you are has nothing to do with it. If you're motivated enough to believe something that you shouldn't believe, you'll talk yourself into it. Smart people might be able to come up with an objectively better (or at least more convoluted) rationalization, but only because they'll require of themselves a better rationalization. Less-smart people won't be as capable of rationalizing, but they also won't be as discerning about the quality of the rationalization. Kind of like how people develop about the right amount of muscle to carry their own weight around, whether that be 90 or 180 lbs.

> EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything.

This sounds negative until you realize this also applies to programming and litigation, chess and go, everything in academia, communism and anarcho-capitalism, etc. The fact that something appeals to know-it-alls says next to nothing about the quality of the thing. Chess isn't a worse game because it attracts insufferable braniacs and other pretentious people, it's just the community around it that suffers. But the communities around everything interesting suffer from those same sorts of people.

> And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.

> Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. People who know perfectly well they're misbehaving will claim that they aren't, using the same arguments. It won't hold water, but now we're swamped, and the entire thing crumbles.

Once again, yes, people who want to justify terrible things can do so. It's not unique to tech bros. Fundamentalist christians, the homeless, and young activists of any alignment can do it too.

> ...in part because I know too many of the type of people who get involved and aren't trustworthy.

This is the meat; the only question that actually matters: Is it true that EA is disproportionately populated by the "untrustworthy"? If so, then there's a reason to stay away from it. This article's pair of anecdotes are worse than useless for arriving at the answer. All I know after reading it is that the TIMES is interested in taking EA down a peg. The evidence presented is utterly insufficient to support the claim that "EA has a sexual harassment problem [to an unusual--and therefor newsworthy--extent]".

>I already know that my money is more effective in the hands of a food bank than giving people food myself

In certain situations. Unless you're generally in favour of communism. Most people just skip out the barter entirely and give money, generally in exchange for things. It isn't clear to me why charity in general should be different.