Open Thread: May 2021

I would love to see how you'd solve that equation now, compared to when you first wrote it. Glad your teacher knew where to point you!

first, not condoning bill's behavior. My intuition is that it is good to be trustworthy, not sexually harass anyone, etc. That being said, I didn't find any of the arguments linked particularly convincing. 

"In general, I try to behave as I would like others to behave: I try to perform very well on “standard” generosity and ethics, and overlay my more personal, debatable, potentially-biased agenda on top of that rather than in replacement of it." 

Sure generally you shouldn't be a jerk, but generally being kind isn't mutually exclusive to achieving goals. Beyond that what does 'overlay' mean? The statement is quite vague, and I'm actually sure there is some bar of family event that he would skip. I'm sure 99%+  of his work w/ givewell is not time sensitive in the way a family event is, so this statement somewhat amounts to a perversion of opportunity cost. In fact, Holden even says in the blog that nothing is absolute. It's potentially presentist also because I would love for people to treat me with respect and kindness, but I would probably prefer if past people just built infrastructure. 

And again with julia's statement, she's just saying "Because we believe that trust, cooperation, and accurate information are essential to doing good". Ok, that could be true but isn't that the core of the questions we are asking- When we talk about these types of situations we are to some extent asking: is it possible x person or group did more good by not being trustworthy, cooperative, etc. Maybe this feels less relevant for EA research, but what about EAs running businesses? Microsoft got to the top with extremely scummy tactics, and now we think bill gates may be on of the greatest EAs ever, which isn't supposed to be a steel counterargument but I'm just pointing out its not that hard to spin a sentence that contradicts that point. And to swing back to the original topic, it seems extremely unlikely that sexually harassing people is ever essential or even helpful to having more impact, so it seems fair to say don't sexually harass people, but not under the grounds that "you should always default to standard generosity, only overlaying your biased agenda on top of the first level generosity." However, what about having an affair? What if he was miserable and looking for love. If the affair made him .5% more productive, there is at least some sort of surface level utilitarian argument in favor. The same for his money manager, If he thought Larson was gonna make .5% higher returns then the next best person, most of which is going to high impact charity stuff, you can once again spin a (potentially nuance-lacking) argument in favor. And what is the nuance here? Well the nuance is about how not being standardly good affects your reputation, affects culture, affects institutions, hurts peoples feelings, etc.  

*I also want to point out that julia is making a utilitarian backed claim, that trust, etc. are instrumentally important while Holden is backing some sort of moral pluarlism (though maybe also endorsing the kindness/standard goodness as instrumental hypothesis).

So while I agree with Holden and Julia generally on an intuitional level, I think that it would be nice if someone actually presented some sort of steelmanned argument (maybe someone has) for what types of unethical behavior could be condoned, or where the edges of these decisions lied.  The EA brand may not want to be associated with that essay though. 

It feels a bit to me like EAs are often naturally not 'standardly kind' or at least are not utility maximizing because they are so awkward/bad at socializing (in part due to the standard complaints about dark-web, rational types) which has bad affects on our connections and careers as well as EAs general reputation, and so Central EA is saying, lets push people in the direction so that we have a reputation of being nice rather than thinking critically about the edge cases because it will put our group  more at the correct value of not being weirdos and not getting cancelled(+ there are potentially more important topics to explore when you consider that being kind is a fairly safe bet).