I’m probably one of the people you’re trying to reach. I want to help people and I am aware that the approaches favoured by society may well not work. But doing the right thing is really hard.
However many arguments you present to me it’s still really hard. For me, it’s not a lack of argument that stands in the way of doing the right thing.
What I want is a community of rationalists who are interested in helping others as much as possible. Does such a thing already exist, ready-made? Either as a subset of LW or independent of it?
I can’t help feeling that such a thing would help your cause immensely. However good your arguments are, people will want to know “what do I do next?” And they will be much happier with the answer “come meet my friends and throw some ideas around” than “give all your money to SIAI”.
However many arguments you present to me it’s still really hard. For me, it’s not a lack of argument that stands in the way of doing the right thing.
I don’t think you are quite the sort of person I’m trying to reach with this effort—you seem to already be in the mental state I wish more people were in.
I have been spending a great deal of time recently thinking about exactly what I should be doing. I agree completely that the problem is extremely hard. I understand that the plan I come up with is going to be far, far from the best possible plan. Here are some thoughts, which are not yet very well formed and need to be articulated much more precisely in the future.
Creating and growing communities of rationalists thinking about and working on the problem seems like an extremely good first step. I believe such communities are much more likely to succeed when they are started with concrete projects to direct their energies towards (I think Eliezer discusses this at some point within the sequences). Telling someone to become more rational “because” seems pretty futile—telling them to become more rational because they are going to need it to pull their weight is something else entirely.
What projects should they work on? I think understanding and engaging in effective, large-scale rationality outreach is tractable and more important than almost anything else we can work on. I have described some of my thoughts recently on LW.
To motivate this sort of outreach (eventually to the targets of outreach, but more immediately to the people who you would like to convince to engage in it), at some point you need to have in mind goals which aren’t just recruiting more rationalists. I think there are currently very important problems controlling the speed, quality, and responsibility of research in the immediate future, which rationalists should be working on aggressively. For example:
Efforts to improve markets’ and organizations’ abilities to collect information and make rational decisions / allocate energy effectively (see all of the work of Robin Hanson for example, although there is room for much more to be done in this direction than what I perceive as only a handful of rational economists are capable of).
Efforts to improve the education of the most promising students, by running programs and developing resources targeted to them, and by studying the factors which control the effectiveness of such efforts.
Efforts to incrementally reform research institutions, funding agencies, and regulatory bodies, by reaching out to individuals who may eventually be in a position to implement such reform.
These efforts in turn must be justified by arguments regarding the importance of responsible and rapid research advances, which would inevitably expand to even greater length than the preceding paragraph. To someone who already takes the SIAI seriously, this part of the argument is probably comparatively easy: if you care about the future, rational research looks very different from modern research and is very important.
The upshot is: I am now thinking hard about how to create communities of people working as well as they can for the good of humanity. Justifying such an undertaking (as a significant change in someone’s day to day life) is going to be quite involved, and so getting people to take the idea seriously requires at a minimum getting them to the point where they are willing to spend a very long time thinking about what exactly they should be doing. That is what this post addresses, though it is a tiny part of a large problem.
This probably is a bit late, but in a general sense Effective Altruism sounds like what you’re looking for, although the main emphasis there is the “helping others as much as possible” rather than the “rationalists” part, but there’s still a significant overlap in the communities.
If both LW and EA are too general for you and you want something with both rationality and utilitarian altruism right in it’s mission statement… I’m sure there’s some blog somewhere in the ratioinalist blogosphere which is devoted to that specifically, although it might be just a single person’s blog rather than a community forum.
Incidentally, if you did find- or found- a specific community along those lines I’d be interested in joining it myself.
What I want is a community of rationalists who are interested in helping others as much as possible. Does such a thing already exist, ready-made? Either as a subset of LW or independent of it?
It depends where you live. If you’re in NY, you’re in luck. I hear a lot about London and Cambridge too, but I know less about them.
paulfchristiano,
I’m probably one of the people you’re trying to reach. I want to help people and I am aware that the approaches favoured by society may well not work. But doing the right thing is really hard.
However many arguments you present to me it’s still really hard. For me, it’s not a lack of argument that stands in the way of doing the right thing.
What I want is a community of rationalists who are interested in helping others as much as possible. Does such a thing already exist, ready-made? Either as a subset of LW or independent of it?
I can’t help feeling that such a thing would help your cause immensely. However good your arguments are, people will want to know “what do I do next?” And they will be much happier with the answer “come meet my friends and throw some ideas around” than “give all your money to SIAI”.
I don’t think you are quite the sort of person I’m trying to reach with this effort—you seem to already be in the mental state I wish more people were in.
I have been spending a great deal of time recently thinking about exactly what I should be doing. I agree completely that the problem is extremely hard. I understand that the plan I come up with is going to be far, far from the best possible plan. Here are some thoughts, which are not yet very well formed and need to be articulated much more precisely in the future.
Creating and growing communities of rationalists thinking about and working on the problem seems like an extremely good first step. I believe such communities are much more likely to succeed when they are started with concrete projects to direct their energies towards (I think Eliezer discusses this at some point within the sequences). Telling someone to become more rational “because” seems pretty futile—telling them to become more rational because they are going to need it to pull their weight is something else entirely.
What projects should they work on? I think understanding and engaging in effective, large-scale rationality outreach is tractable and more important than almost anything else we can work on. I have described some of my thoughts recently on LW.
To motivate this sort of outreach (eventually to the targets of outreach, but more immediately to the people who you would like to convince to engage in it), at some point you need to have in mind goals which aren’t just recruiting more rationalists. I think there are currently very important problems controlling the speed, quality, and responsibility of research in the immediate future, which rationalists should be working on aggressively. For example:
Efforts to improve markets’ and organizations’ abilities to collect information and make rational decisions / allocate energy effectively (see all of the work of Robin Hanson for example, although there is room for much more to be done in this direction than what I perceive as only a handful of rational economists are capable of).
Efforts to improve the education of the most promising students, by running programs and developing resources targeted to them, and by studying the factors which control the effectiveness of such efforts.
Efforts to incrementally reform research institutions, funding agencies, and regulatory bodies, by reaching out to individuals who may eventually be in a position to implement such reform.
These efforts in turn must be justified by arguments regarding the importance of responsible and rapid research advances, which would inevitably expand to even greater length than the preceding paragraph. To someone who already takes the SIAI seriously, this part of the argument is probably comparatively easy: if you care about the future, rational research looks very different from modern research and is very important.
The upshot is: I am now thinking hard about how to create communities of people working as well as they can for the good of humanity. Justifying such an undertaking (as a significant change in someone’s day to day life) is going to be quite involved, and so getting people to take the idea seriously requires at a minimum getting them to the point where they are willing to spend a very long time thinking about what exactly they should be doing. That is what this post addresses, though it is a tiny part of a large problem.
This probably is a bit late, but in a general sense Effective Altruism sounds like what you’re looking for, although the main emphasis there is the “helping others as much as possible” rather than the “rationalists” part, but there’s still a significant overlap in the communities. If both LW and EA are too general for you and you want something with both rationality and utilitarian altruism right in it’s mission statement… I’m sure there’s some blog somewhere in the ratioinalist blogosphere which is devoted to that specifically, although it might be just a single person’s blog rather than a community forum.
Incidentally, if you did find- or found- a specific community along those lines I’d be interested in joining it myself.
It depends where you live. If you’re in NY, you’re in luck. I hear a lot about London and Cambridge too, but I know less about them.