Effective Samaritans can’t be a perfect utility inverse of Effective Altruists while keeping the labels of ‘human’, ‘rational’, or ‘sane’. Socialism isn’t the logical inverse of Libertarianism; both are different viewpoints on how to achieve the common goal of societal prosperity.
Effective Samaritans won’t sabotage an EA social experiment any more than Effective Altruists will sabotage an Effective Samaritan social experiment. If I received a letter from Givewell thanking me for my donation that was spent on sabotaging a socialist commune, I would be very confused—that’s what the CIA is for. I frankly don’t expect either the next charter city or the next socialist commune to produce a flourishing society, but I do expect both to give valuable information that would allow both movements and society in general to improve their world models.
Also, our priors are not entirely trapped. It can seem that way because true political conversion rarely happens in public, and often not even consciously, but people join or leave movements regularly when their internal threshold is passed. Effective Altruist/Samaritan forums will always defend Effective Altruism/samaritanism as long as there is one EA/ES on earth, but if evidence (or social condemnation) builds up against it people whose thresholds are reached will just leave. Of course the movement as a whole can also update, but not in the same way as individual members.
People do tend to be resistant to evidence that goes against their (political) beliefs, but that resistance gets easier to surmount the fewer people there are that are less fanatical about the movement than you. Also, active rationalist practices like doubt can also help get your priors unstuck.
So in a world with EAs and ESs living side by side, there would constantly be people switching from one movement to the other or vice versa. And as either ES or EA projects get eaten by a grue, one of these rates will be greater than the other until one or both have too few supporters to do much of anything. This may have already happened (at least for the precise “Effective Samaritan” ideology of rationalism/bayesianism + socialism + individual effective giving).
So I don’t think we need to resort to frequentism. Sure we can use frequentism to share the same scientific journal, but in terms of cooperation we can just all run our own experiments, share the data, and regularly doubt ourselves.
I kind of… hard disagree?
Effective Samaritans can’t be a perfect utility inverse of Effective Altruists while keeping the labels of ‘human’, ‘rational’, or ‘sane’. Socialism isn’t the logical inverse of Libertarianism; both are different viewpoints on how to achieve the common goal of societal prosperity.
Effective Samaritans won’t sabotage an EA social experiment any more than Effective Altruists will sabotage an Effective Samaritan social experiment. If I received a letter from Givewell thanking me for my donation that was spent on sabotaging a socialist commune, I would be very confused—that’s what the CIA is for. I frankly don’t expect either the next charter city or the next socialist commune to produce a flourishing society, but I do expect both to give valuable information that would allow both movements and society in general to improve their world models.
Also, our priors are not entirely trapped. It can seem that way because true political conversion rarely happens in public, and often not even consciously, but people join or leave movements regularly when their internal threshold is passed. Effective Altruist/Samaritan forums will always defend Effective Altruism/samaritanism as long as there is one EA/ES on earth, but if evidence (or social condemnation) builds up against it people whose thresholds are reached will just leave. Of course the movement as a whole can also update, but not in the same way as individual members.
People do tend to be resistant to evidence that goes against their (political) beliefs, but that resistance gets easier to surmount the fewer people there are that are less fanatical about the movement than you. Also, active rationalist practices like doubt can also help get your priors unstuck.
So in a world with EAs and ESs living side by side, there would constantly be people switching from one movement to the other or vice versa. And as either ES or EA projects get eaten by a grue, one of these rates will be greater than the other until one or both have too few supporters to do much of anything. This may have already happened (at least for the precise “Effective Samaritan” ideology of rationalism/bayesianism + socialism + individual effective giving).
So I don’t think we need to resort to frequentism. Sure we can use frequentism to share the same scientific journal, but in terms of cooperation we can just all run our own experiments, share the data, and regularly doubt ourselves.