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Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

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

#121

Post by twblalock »

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…

This observation is correct, and it applies to any kind of consequentialis/utilitarian reasoning in general.

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

#122

Post by roenxi »

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…

Let us take a moment and separate the idea from the community - most (I might potentially say all) communities fail to embody their own ideas. A fun one is giving any religious community 100 years and then checking in to see how they are going at avoiding scandals.

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.

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

#123

Post by twblalock »

astrange wrote: post #119
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. 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. (E…

It's really just utilitarianism, all over again.

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

scarmig wrote: post #109
teraflop wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of a fascinating series of Reddit threads, starting back in 2009, from somebody who convinced himself he "could handle anything once" and decided to try heroin, only to rapidly spiral out of control: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/wef6...

The issue with Reddit is that the story is as likely as not to be fake. Particularly, here, I don't think people are at risk of serious withdrawal after only two weeks of heroin use. Though heroin use is obviously one of the dumbest things anyone can do.

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by derbOac »

supersour wrote: post #48

> EA is diffuse and deliberately amorphous; anybody who wants to can call themselves an EA... But with no official leadership structure, no roster of who is and isn’t in the movement, and no formal process for dealing with complaints, Wise argues, it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society. This passage reminded me of this article: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm…

This is an aside, but although I agree that groups without formal power structures can hide real ones, I'm not sure explicit hierarchies are necessarily better. In my experience, they can be used to legitimize shadow hierarchies or corruption, which sometimes makes the problems worse. Those vague power structures exist with or without formal ones; when they coincide it's good, but when they don't, it can perpetuate or reinforce problems more than they might otherwise.

I'm not trying to defend anything about EA, though. It's always seemed somewhat suspicious to me, and there's probably a lot of ways in which it could be used as an example of phenomena that occur more broadly in society.

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

#127

Post by amalcon »

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…

The reason EA seems like it's a form of utilitarianism is of course the association with the so-called rationalist community. As you note, it's very appealing to that type of person. This is partly because the math used to rigorously compare consequences seems easy, and partly because utilitarianism has a lot of good places to hide your subjective value judgements.

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.

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

#128

Post by neilv »

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…

> The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything.

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

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

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

#129

Post by gruez »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #118
gruez wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

But where do you draw the line at "overthinking"? I agree that "don't help the homeless guy down the street in favor of funding AI alignment research" is a bit unintuitive, but keep in mind that "don't help homeless guy in favor of helping 100 random guys in africa" is also unintuitive (at least to the extent that we needed a whole movement to popularize it). I'm not saying that AI alignment research is actually the most worthwhile cause to fund, but "convincing people to donate to unintuitive, but theoretically greater utility projects" is basically the reason why effective altruism even exists. If people already naturally donated to the highest impact charities rather than donating to their alumni or the local opera house, we wouldn't need EA because that would be the default.

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

#130

Post by hgsgm »

snapetom wrote: post #114

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.

That was a fraud to steal the business value from his brother/co-owner.
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