~5 months I formally quit EA (formally here means “I made an announcement on Facebook”). My friend Timothy was very curious as to why; I felt my reasons applied to him as well. This disagreement eventually led to a podcast episode, where he and I try convince each other to change sides on Effective Altruism- he tries to convince me to rejoin, and I try to convince him to quit.
Some highlights:
My story of falling in love, trying to change, and then falling out of love with Effective Altruism. That middle part draws heavily on past posts of mine, including EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem and Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow
Why Timothy still believes in EA
Spoilers: Timothy agrees leaving EA was right for me, but he wants to invest more in fixing it.
Thanks to my Patreon patrons for supporting my part of this work.
Some notes from the transcript:
Enjoyed this point—I would guess that the feedback loop from EA college recruiting is super long and is weakly aligned. Those in charge of setting recruiting strategy (eg CEA Groups team, and then university organizers) don’t see the downstream impacts of their choices, unlike in a startup where you work directly with your hires, and quickly see whether your choices were good or bad.
Might be worth examining how other recruiting-driven companies (like Google) or movements (...early Christianity?) maintain their values, or degrade over time.
Definitely think that on the margin, more “directly verifying base reality with your own eyes” would be good in EA circles. Eg at one point, I was very critical of those mission trips to Africa where high schoolers spend a week digging a well; “obviously you should just send cash!” But now I’m much more sympathetic.
This also stings a bit for Manifund; like 80% of what we fund is AI safety but I don’t really have much ability to personally verify that the stuff we funded is any good.
I think not enforcing an “in or out” boundary is big contributor to this degradation—like, majorly successful religions required all kinds of sacrifice and
It feels like AI safety is the best current candidate for this, though that is also much less cohesive and not a direct successor for a bunch of ways. I too have been lately wondering what “Post EA” looks like.
Really liked this analogy!
I like this as a useful question to keep in mind, though I don’t think it’s totally explanatory. I think I’m reasonably Catholic, even though I don’t know anything about the living Catholic leaders.
I’ve been thinking that EA should try to elect a president, someone who is empowered but also accountable to the general people in the movement, a schelling person to be the face of EA. (plus of course, we’d get to debate stuff like optimal voting systems and enfranchisement—my kind of catnip)
This could be part of it… but I think a hypothesis that does have to be kept in mind is that some people don’t care. They aren’t trying to follow action-policies that lead to good outcomes, they’re doing something else. Primarily, acting on an addiction to Steam. If a recruitment strategy works, that’s a justification in and of itself, full stop. EA is good because it has power, more people in EA means more power to EA, therefore more people in EA is good. Given a choice between recruiting 2 agents and turning them both into zombies, vs recruiting 1 agent and keeping them an agent, you of course choose the first one--2 is more than 1.
I feel ambivalent about this. On one hand, yes, you need to have standards, and I think EA’s move towards big-tentism degraded it significantly. On the other hand I think having sharp inclusion functions are bad for people in a movement[1], cut the movement off from useful work done outside itself, selects for people searching for validation and belonging, and selects against thoughtful people with other options.
I think being a Catholic with no connection to living leaders makes more sense than being an EA who doesn’t have a leader they trust and respect, because Catholicism has a longer tradition, and you can work within that. On the other hand… I wouldn’t say this to most people, but my model is you’d prefer I be this blunt… my understanding is Catholicism is about submission to the hierarchy, and if you’re not doing that or don’t actively believe they are worthy of that, you’re LARPing. I don’t think this is true of (most?) protestant denominations: working from books and a direct line to God is their jam. But Catholicism cares much more about authority and authorization.
I’d love for this to be true because I think AIS is EA’s most important topic. OTOH, I think AIS might have been what poisoned EA? The global development people seem much more grounded (to this day), and AFAIK the ponzi scheme recruiting is all aimed at AIS and meta (which is more AIS). ETG was a much more viable role for GD than for AIS.
If you’re only as good as your last 3 months, no one can take time to rest and reflect, much less recover from burnout.