EA movement course corrections and where you might disagree

By michel @ 2022-10-29T03:32 (+79)

This is the final post in a series of two posts on EA movement strategy. The first post categorized ways in which EA could fail.

Summary

• Following an influx of funding, media attention, and influence, the EA movement has been speeding along an exciting, yet perilous, trajectory recently.
• A lot of the EA community’s future impact rests on this uncertain growth going well (and thereby avoiding movement collapse scenarios). 
• Yet, discussions or critiques of EA’s trajectory are often not action-guiding. Even when critiques propose course corrections that are tempting to agree with (e.g., EA should be bigger!) proposed course corrections to make EA more like X often don’t rigorously engage with the downsides of being more like X, or the opportunity cost of not being like Y. Proposals to make EA more like X also often leave me with only a vague understanding of what X looks like and how we get from here to X.
• I hope this post and the previous write-up on ways in which EA could fail  can make discussions of the EA community’s trajectory more productive (and to clarify my own thinking on the matter).
• This post analyzes the different domains within which EA could change its trajectory, as well as key considerations that inform those trajectory changes where reasonable people might disagree. 
• I also share next steps to build on this post. 

Preface

I was going to write another critique of EA. How original. I was going to write about how there’s an increasingly visible EA “archetype” (rationalist, longtermist, interested in AI, etc.) that embodies an aesthetic few people feel warmly towards on first impression, and that this leads some newcomers who I think would be a great fit for EA to bounce off the community.

But as I outlined my critique, I had a scary realization: If EA adopted my critique, I’m not confident the community would be more impactful. Maybe, to counter my proposed critique, AI alignment is just the problem of our century and we need to orient ourselves toward that unwelcome reality. Seems plausible. Or maybe EA is rife with echo chambers, EA exceptionalism^[1], and an implicit bias to see ourselves as the protagonist of a story others are blind to. Also seems plausible. 

And then I thought about other EA strategy takes. Doesn't a proposal like “make EA enormous” also rest on lots of often implicit assumptions? Like how well current EA infrastructure and coordination systems can adapt to a large influx of people, the extent to which “Effective Altruism” as a brand can scale relative to more cause-area-specific brands, and the plausible costs of diluting EA’s uniquely truth-seeking norms. I’m not saying we shouldn’t make EA enormous, I’m saying it seems hard to know whether to make EA enormous^[2]– or for that matter to have any strong strategy opinion. 

Nevertheless, I’m glad people are thinking about course corrections to the EA movement trajectory. Why? Because I doubt the existing “business as usual” trajectory is the optimal trajectory.^[3]

• I don’t think anyone is deliberately steering the EA movement. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) does at some level with EAG(x)’s, online discussion spaces, and goals for growth levels, but ask them and they will tell you CEA is not in charge of all of EA. 
• EA thought leaders also don’t claim to own course-correcting all of EA. While they may nudge the movement in certain directions through grants and new projects, their full-time work typically has a narrower scope. 
• I get the sense that the EA movement as we see it today is a conglomeration of past deliberate decisions (e.g., name, rough growth rate, how to brand discussion and gathering spaces) and just natural social dynamics (e.g., grouping by interests and vibes, certain people feeling more comfortable in some spaces than others, etc.). 
• This unintentional “business as usual” trajectory being the best for the EA movement seems suspicious.  

I’m not saying that any particular person or institution should be steering the EA movement; there are strong reasons why centralization could be very counterproductive. But, if we agree that “business as usual” isn’t best, I think we should be aiming to have more productive, action-guiding conversations about EA movement strategy to get us on the right track. And that involves concretely stating what aspects of the community you think should change and why  you think they should change. Hopefully, the frameworks outlined help these discussions.

Domains in which EA could course-correct  

The best possible EA trajectory is the one that helps the most sentient beings live lives free of suffering and full of flourishing, over the long term.^[4] Or something like that. Reasonable people disagree on most parts of that sentence, like how much to morally care about consequences vs. rules, how much to morally weigh different types of sentience, how much to morally weigh suffering vs. flourishing, and how much to discount the value of future lives. But I’ll use this optimum as a first approximation for the ideal movement and leave solving ethics for another write-up.

So, is EA currently on this best possible trajectory? As argued above, I doubt it. I think a fair bit of how EA has grown and identified itself is pretty unplanned (i.e., evolved from social dynamics and people kind of just doing things that way rather than deliberate, debated decisions), and I don’t expect this would land the EA movement in the ideal trajectory. ^[5]

If we grant that EA is likely not on the ideal trajectory, in what ways could we nudge EA toward the ideal trajectory? That’s the purpose of this section. Below I identify different “domains” in which EA could course correct.

Prefacing the domains in which EA could course correct:

• There are different approaches to identifying EA course corrections. I choose to identify the domains in which strategy updates could play out, in hopes that giving an overview of the options on the table will allow people to make critiques and proposals more specific. But I’m not sure if this is the best approach. One could also 1) list out many different overarching strategies, like collating EA should be “big tent”, EA as a schelling point, and more; or  2) list the properties of the ideal EA, and work backward from there to identify which aspects of EA need to changed to look more like that ideal EA. 
• Some of these different domains share a great deal of overlap. For example, I can imagine “extent to which EA is a whole identity” and “demanded hardcoreness” being closely related. I found making the domains hard and changed my mind a lot. I doubt this is the ideal taxonomy. 
• Just because I list a type of course correction or example here doesn’t mean I am advocating for it. There are quite few example updates I would personally argue against. My goal here is to lay out a framework within which people can have such debates. 
• “My quick take of where EA is at in this domain” could be wrong. I wrote these pretty off the cuff due to time constraints. 

I’m worried that some of those domains are too abstract. Social movements are complicated  and something like “Extent to which people identify with EA brand vs. more philosophical or cause-specific brands” is a pretty fuzzy concept. 
 

So here’s a map of some more concrete things that could lead to, or follow from, a trajectory change:

• Types, size, and target audience of events (e.g., cause-specific EAGs, bigger EAGs)
• What's on effectivealtruism.org 
• Funding distribution across cause areas or worldviews
• Target audience and main message of EA communications projects
• Online discussion spaces (e.g., cause-specific forums)
• Outreach to university, local, or professional audiences (and the relative emphasis across these)
• Branding of organizations, co-working spaces, social gatherings, and professional networks
• Location of EA Hubs (e.g., Boston, Berkeley, Oxford, NYC, Berlin) and how they distinguish themselves
• Use of jargon/ in-group language  
• “Onboarding” content (e.g., EA Intro Program, handbook, curated classics)

When you make an EA strategy proposal or critique, please tell the reader which domains you think need changing (including domains I missed here or that you would refactor), and consider pointing to concrete things in reality.

Where one might disagree about ideal course corrections

EA movement strategy is a complicated business. Stated otherwise, there are lots of reasons people could disagree about the ideal trajectory change and a lot of room for debatable assumptions to creep in.

The purpose of this section is to identify some of those reasons different people disagree – or could disagree – on the ideal course corrections. I doubt this is an exhaustive list, but I hope it illustrates the type of questions I think strategists should be asking themselves. 

Meta considerations 

Alongside the above object-level considerations, I think other more meta-considerations should influence how we weigh different trajectory updates:

• Quality of status quo: If you think that the business-as-usual trajectory looks bad for business (e.g., Bad Omens in Current Community Building), I expect you’d be more bullish on making at least some trajectory changes. 
• Switching cost: Even if we’re confident a new trajectory looks better than business as usual, it may not be worth it to make costly trajectory updates if the gains from the updates are only marginal and business as usual already has a lot of inertia.^[18] Example switching costs include the cost of planning new events, the cost of hiring new program manager, the cost of changing comms strategy, etc. I think switching costs are real, but I think we should be wary of local incentives to not make updates that could pay compounding returns. You know, long-term thinking. 
• Option value: The best course corrections leave room to course correct away from the course correction. For example, we wouldn't want to course-correct to a strategy that permanently splits EA in some way, only to have the strategic landscape change and realize five years later that it's best for the movement to merge.
• Info value: Ideally, we learn a lot when we try some trajectory update. I’m in favor of taking an experimental approach in trying to answer “what’s the ideal trajectory update?”
• Tractability: [basically a different framing of switching cost] Some trajectory changes may be much less feasible than others (e.g., I’d expect changing vibes in certain communities to be harder than experimenting with cause-specific EAGs).  
• Predictability: The consequences of some trajectory updates may be quite easy to predict, while others may be much more uncertain.

Next steps

• Think through EA success cases. My previous post identified ways in which EA could fail – but what are the ways in which we could win? 
• Analyze the tractability of changes in different domains. For example, I’d expect changing associations with different sub-cultures to be much less tractable than changing where EA does outreach.
• Improve collective understanding of where EA stands in different domains. I think my current quick thoughts are pretty weak and could benefit from more data. 
• Argue for or against concrete course corrections or some stance on a key consideration. Like a lot of what bubbled up in the criticism and red-teaming contest, but perhaps making it more concrete and transparent by identifying which domains should change and where you stand on key considerations. 
• Identify what organization/ people are best positioned to make certain changes. Who could “own” things? How much of this is on CEA? Who else needs to make moves?
• Surveys or user interviews with different cross-sections of EA – or people who bounced off EA – to understand their opinions on these different considerations. 
• Run more small-scale experiments to test hypotheses on considerations. Do you think it's possible that EA would benefit from different “on-ramps” that don’t just flow through the EA brand? Test this by running an animal advocacy student org, a longtermist student org, and an EA org at the same university.^[19] 
• Do (Retrospective) data collection on key considerations. What can we learn about these key considerations from the EA movements past? When EA movement building has been at similar crossroads before, what road did they take and how does that decision look in hindsight? Example: doing user interviews with people leading cause-specific uni groups and learning more about pros and cons of such groups. 
• Analyze historical case studies for analogous movements. How did they fail, succeed, or land anywhere in between and why? See a previous forum question on reading suggestions. 
• Forecast EA community health. I previously looked for some measurable proxies.

Closing remarks

I write this post – and I expect others write their good-faith EA critiques – out of a genuine love for the principles of effective altruism. These ideas are so special, and so worth protecting. Yes, we’re likely messing up important things. Yes, vibes are weird sometimes. But we’re trying something big here. We’re trying to help and safeguard sentient life in a  way no community has before – of course, we’ll make mistakes. Regardless of how we disagree with one another, let's acknowledge our shared goal to do. good. better. Now go fiercely debate ideas in the name of this goal :)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Ben Hayum, Nina Stevens, Fin Moorehouse, Lara Thurnherr, Rob Bensinger, Eli Rose, Oscar Howie, and others for comments or discussions that helped me think about EA movement failures, course corrections, and key considerations. To the hopefully limited extent that I express views in this post, they’re my own. 

1. ^{^}

   EA exceptionalism: that oft-seen sentiment that “EA can do it better"; that we have nothing to learn from the outside world. I think I first heard this from Eli Rose. 

2. ^{^}

   Note that I chose “make EA enormous” rather randomly as a recent strategy proposal. I’m using it to illustrate a larger pattern I see in strategy proposals.

3. ^{^}

   Reasonable people might disagree here. I discuss this more under “meta considerations” in section III. 

4. ^{^}

    Note what I’m saying the best possible EA trajectory is not: It’s not the one that makes EAs feel most validated; it’s not the one that upsets the fewest people; it’s not necessarily the one that feels inviting to you or me. 

5. ^{^}

    And even if all the decisions were deliberate, what are the odds that decision-makers over the EA movement’s lifetime have made all the correct decisions? But people could still disagree with me on how likely random social pressures and local decisions – within guardrails placed by EA decision-makers – are to lead to the best possible trajectory. 

6. ^{^}

    See EA Culture and Causes: Less is More for example arguments for EA splitting at some level. 

7. ^{^}

    See also: Benjamin Todd’s discussion of longtermist identity and Jonas Vollmer discussion of identifying as ‘effective altruist.’

8. ^{^}

    In this list of domains, I make the distinction between different EA brands in outreach and a more overarching community split. I do this because you could imagine an outreach approach that has many different “on-ramps” that effectively funnel into the same community or, vice versa, a small set of “on-ramps” that then branch off into many different communities.

9. ^{^}

   Other possible “on-ramps” include: 80,000 Hours promotion, Giving What We Can chapters, AI safety groups, Biosecurity groups, animal welfare groups, One For the World chapters. 

10. ^{^}

    See Benjamin Todd’s comment:

    If we think that some causes have ~100x the impact of others, there seem like big costs to not making that very obvious (to instead focus on how you can do more good within your existing cause).

    
    I'm particularly bullish on any impact estimate being confidence-adjusted because of reasoning similar to Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)

11. ^{^}

     For people who don’t place a lot of weight on the diversity of opinions, beware of the broccoli effect! This might manifest as something like: 
    “But I don’t want EA to become less purely consequentialist, because if I find out that non-consequentialist lines of reasoning that I haven’t really looked into make sense I’ll end up being less consequentialist, and I don’t want to be less consequentialist.”

12. ^{^}

    Note that I don’t want to sharpen a somewhat false dichotomy between “longtermist work” and “neartermist work.” See Will MacAskill twitter thread.

13. ^{^}

    Bad Omens in Current Community Building makes a good point that the value of hardcoreness likely varies across cause areas:

     I think the model of prioritizing HEAs does broadly make sense for something like AI safety: one person actually working on AI safety is worth more than a hundred ML researchers who think AI safety sounds pretty important but not important enough to merit a career change. But elsewhere it’s less clear. Is one EA in government policy worth more than a hundred civil servants who, though not card-carrying EAs, have seriously considered the ideas and are in touch with engaged EAs who can call them up if need be? What about great managers and entrepreneurs?

14. ^{^}

     Unclear to me if this is the case so don’t want to project that it is. 

15. ^{^}

    See EA can sound less weird, if we want it to 

16. ^{^}

    See Thomas Kwa and Luke Freeman debate on this.
    Note that this likely varies a great deal by which specific ideas are spread. Some ideas, like considering the moral value of our grandkids’ grandkids and scope sensitivity, seem far less controversial than others, like AI alignment arguments designed for mass appeal. 

17. ^{^}

    See also: Some quick notes on effective altruism; “effective altruist” shouldn’t be an identity; defense of EA-as-identity; Keep Your Identity Small

18. ^{^}

    Switching costs are a particularly important consideration if you think the “business as usual” trajectory isn’t that bad. 

19. ^{^}

     Yup, this is me shamelessly hyping up my successor exec team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. s/o Max, Eeshaan, Declan, Cian, and Meera :)