Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say • Hacker News Board

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#111

Post by goatlover » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #56

zozbot234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Mars though? Why not colonize the Gebi Desert first?

x-risk is existential risk, as in humans get wiped out. Some big ones are meteor impact, nuclear war and disease. The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. They're not reduced with a desert colony.

None of those things would make Earth less hospitable than Mars. A desert colony would still be better off than trying to survive on Mars, particularly once Earth's resources are cutoff. Mars is far more hostile than anything likely to happen to Earth over the next hundred million years.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#112

Post by scarmig » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #97

zozbot234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many of the most effective aid organizations, all of which are absolutely off-the-charts obnoxious about fundraising 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 p…

Fundraising expenses are a huge problem with large charities, but it doesn't follow that fundraising annoyingness is a huge problem. It's not a customer service problem with donors; it's a "using too much of proceeds on fundraising" problem.

If an organization believes spending a marginal dollar of money on their programs is the best way to improve the world, then spending $10 to get $11 in donations allows them to spend an extra dollar on it. It's rational and even morally required. (The only potential negative being the extent that winning a contribution crowds out funding from other causes.)

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

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#113

Post by TigeriusKirk » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #45

gruez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point seem superficially valid, but where do we go from there? >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…

>> 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"? The GP is talking about self-de…

I've never met anyone who didn't deceive themselves in significant ways.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#114

Post by snapetom » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:00 PM UTC

Surprised they didn't mention Dan Price. He should be the poster boy in all this. Some people smelled his $70k/yr bullshit a mile away, most people refused to believe it because it was a great story. Wonder where his supporters are now that there's a felony case against him with multiple accusers.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#115

Post by kibwen » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:01 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #54

JohnFen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

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

I suppose the argument could be that the charities who aren't savvy enough to play ball are the ones who could use the attention. Small, hyperlocal charities might not have the resources for a dedicated marketer in the first place, and even if they're less "effective" from a global optimization perspective, most people probably get greater utility from donating to local causes.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#116

Post by michaelt » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:01 PM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #27

sonjat wrote: post #17

It's unclear if the issue is EA or how to handle misbehavior in organizations without formal structure or hierarchy. It isn't like a workplace, with reasonably well-defined boundaries, but something more akin to religion, where its influence bleeds over heavily into many aspects of ones life. As such, it is probably both more devastating when one is the victim of misconduct and also more difficult to police such misc…

You should be able to punish people even though there's reasonable doubt that they are culpable? Are you arguing for a "balance of probabilities" standard? Or that it's worth punishing some innocents so that the guilty are also punished?

The standard of proof required to ban someone from a once-a-month pub meetup is far lower than the standard required to, say, give someone the death penalty.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#117

Post by boucher » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:03 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #21

JohnFen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

> I get to know the group pretty well first. 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.

It sounds like a nice idea, but I don't think it's a very practical one.

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).

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#118

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:04 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #39

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"? 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…

>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. 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 s…

> 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.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#119

Post by astrange » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #16

jfengel wrote: post #12

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. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

> Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound.

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".)

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#120

Post by ben_w » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #41

JohnFen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

> Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. 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" typ…

> I do not believe utilitarianism is sound, because its logic can be easily used to justify some obviously horrible things.

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.