EA thoughts from Israel-Hamas war

By ezrah @ 2023-12-06T08:53 (+271)

Update from author: 
As the situation has evolved, I no longer endorse all of the statements or points made in the original post. I have decided to keep it up, as many of its themes resonated strongly with readers who commented or reached out to me personally. However, my perspective has undergone significant updates, which might warrant a separate post, although I don't plan on writing one anytime soon. The desire for peace and an end to suffering has only grown stronger.

I'm Ezra, CEO of EA Israel, but am writing this in a personal capacity. My goal in writing this is to give the community a sense of what someone from a decent-sized local EA group is going through during a time of national crisis. I'll try to keep the post relatively apolitical, but since this is such a charged topic, I'm not sure I'll succeed. I will say that I’m quite nervous about the responses to the post, since the forum can sometimes lean towards criticism. Ideally, I’d want people who are reading this to do so with a sense of compassion, while keeping in mind that this is a difficult time and difficult topic to post or share experiences about. I also don't want the comments to be a discussion of the war per se, but of the experiences of an EA during the war. Finally, I'm sure that an individual from Gaza will be having a very different experience, which I respect and would be interested in hearing, but in this post I'm not trying to capture all possible experiences, but to share a part of mine and my community’s. 

These are my views and thoughts, and not the official position of the organization or of my team members. I wrote this on my phone around November 18th, since I’ve been without much access to a computer. I haven’t had a chance to update it or spend lots of time editing, so I apologize in advance if it feels lacking in polish. 

Thanks for bearing with me during the preambles.

So what have I been doing since the outbreak of the war?

Since the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, and the ongoing hostage situation and frequent rocket attacks, life in Israel and in the community has changed drastically. Many know someone who was killed or is a hostage, the majority of men (and many women as well) aged 18-40 have been called up to reserve duty, and the entire country has been in a state of trauma and mourning. For the first few weeks, most commercial activity in Israel stopped, schools were closed, and people went to funerals. Adjusted for population size, the Hamas attacks were 13 times more deadly than 9/11.

Personally, I've been called up to the army, along with another EA Israel team member, a board member, and the husbands of two others on our team. I've been home only sporadically for the past 6 weeks. My wife and 2 year old son are alone, and are struggling emotionally. I've been to one funeral, of someone from my local (non EA) community. My cousin, who lives in a city that was attacked on Oct 7th, was locked in the bomb shelter in his apartment for 16 hours with his wife and four children, and heard his neighbours being violently murdered. Thank God, somehow the terrorists passed over them, and they've been living in a hotel since then. 

Many people who I know from the global community have reached out to me and the team to see that us and our families are safe, which felt good. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much the average in EA in Israel (or Gaza) feels cared about by the global EA community. I'd be happy to see some sort of statement of concern for the wellbeing of EA community members in a conflict zone.

Our work at EA Israel has mostly paused. Talking about global priorities seems less relevant during wartime, and most of our staff isn't available to work on projects. The university semester is suspended. We've been involved in a few projects trying to help with prioritising donations, a board member wrote a post about donations, and are trying to launch a donation optimisation project with a major foundation. We’ve done some work on mapping the mental health needs in Israel for foundations, and were invited to present it at the Knesset (parliament), but nothing major has come to fruition. We've been holding weekly virtual community meetings and had our first in person meeting since the start of the war this week, but since there are often rocket sirens it's difficult to arrange in person meetings. Obviously, our planned December community retreat and spring EAGx have been canceled. Grants that we expected to receive didn't materialize because of the regional instability, including for our charity evaluation program, which we were in the middle of fundraising for and now might have to close down. Recently we've begun slowly ramping up our regular activity with the staff members who are available, but it will be a gradual process.

How has my experience changed the way I think about EA concepts?

So far, it appears to me that some of the tools EA has developed to make decisions that optimise general wellbeing don't translate well to a crisis situation, which has made me feel a bit disappointed. As a worldview that guided much of my thinking about how to act, EA is often irrelevant in the current situation. This has played out in a few ways. 

Donation recommendations

Israel has seen an outpouring of support via philanthropy (the government hasn't functioned especially well). There are plenty of causes to support within Israel - mental health, hundreds of thousands of displaced people, supporting a struggling economy, etc. This should be an opportunity where EA-based principles would have enormous value! People are giving at incredibly high scales, and we could help them give more effectively! But, with a situation changing so rapidly, and little information about the effectiveness or neglectedness of different donations, we at EA Israel found that we don’t have much to say. We’ve done charity evaluation in Israel, but in order to reach the standard of evidence we feel necessary to provide concrete value to donors, the evaluation requires time, and an understanding of the philanthropic ecosystem, both of which aren't relevant when things are moving so rapidly. Even donations to Gazans or other Palestinians in need are of uncertain effectiveness due to the political considerations preventing aid from reaching its destination.

Important aspects of suffering aren't captured by usual metrics

Although I try not to think about the horrors of the attack, it's clear to me that to be brutally murdered in ways like this is worse than dying of a naturally occurring disease. ^[1] I don't know what metric to use to prove this, but to me it seems self-evident. The sense of tragedy and trauma in Israel is so much stronger now than it was during Covid, even though less people have died. And I don't think it's because people can't multiply, I think it's because violence feels much more horrible than disease. Not to mention being held hostage or tortured or raped by a terrorist organization.

There's even more moral uncertainty

The main goal of my day job is to improve lives as much as possible. Yes, there are decisions to be made about cause prioritisation, animal vs human suffering, how much to discount the long-term, etc etc. These are questions that I've thought through, more or less, and read a lot about, and I’m mostly at peace with my conclusions, updating occasionally.  

During wartime, my value system is much more confused. Hoping that suffering and death are kept to a minimum is still dominant. But now I also think much more about good and evil, and if stopping evil can justify many lives lost (if yes, how many? How do you even start to answer that?). I want justice for the terrorists who committed atrocities on women and children. I also feel national lines and tribalism much more strongly. I both relate to and understand it, having had family in life threatening danger, and also find it to be wrong and misleading and easy to slip into a mindset where I care more about “my people” than I want to. In general, for me, there's much less clarity on what “the right thing” is. This is during a time where there's a war of narratives raging, and many people reduce the complexity by just picking a side. My moral compass hasn't found North, and unfortunately I don't think it will anytime soon.

Caring about people far away can go wrong if the topic is trending

From what I've seen of the global coverage of the war, it seems that everyone has a strong opinion on who's at fault. Most of those people have no idea what's going on, and may be acting against the best interest of the people they claim to care about. They've expanded their moral circle, but are lacking the knowledge and context to express their care in a way that actually improves the situation or matches the facts of the ground. If we were to compare to GHWB, hearing Peter Singer and being convinced to expand the moral circle isn't enough, you also need GiveWell to help you guide your actions in order to have a positive impact. It’s easy to be emotional, loud and ignorant when addressing the suffering of someone far away, or when seeing pictures of children suffering. This is an area where I really appreciate EA thinking - there's a deep understanding that helping others is hard, and we should do it carefully and quietly and honestly, with a lot of self reflection. Especially in a global world, caring needs to come with a lot of humility, and maybe a dose of rationality.

Models of complex situations can be overly simplistic and harmful

There's an ongoing debate within AI safety about whether public protests and support for a pause are good or bad for safety in practice, which is a healthy debate on a complex topic. The same debate should be had for interpower conflicts. I've seen a claim that by using the ITN framework, publicly protesting for a cease-fire is a clear cut way to make the situation better. Low effort, medium tractability, not insignificant scale. 

I'm more skeptical. Popular support often needs a clear goal to have traction, and in this case, the clear goal of the public protests is a long term ceasefire. Which sounds good initially - a long term ceasefire means less fighting and less death, which is a good thing. 

But. It seems to me that such a model misses much of the context of the war. Why did it start? What does each side want? What are the consequences of pressuring a side to accept a long term ceasefire before they are ready? I don't have a great answer to any of these questions, but there are enough negative scenarios that make me skeptical that public support for a long term ceasefire will be net positive in practice, and isn't just fuzzies for people hearing about a horrible situation and looking for some way, any way, to act. The theory of change here sounds plausible, but doesn't take into account second order effects.

There's at least one potential scenario that comes to mind in which protests end up being net negative in the long run. If global protests cause an early long term ceasefire, in the short term, fighting will stop, and lives will be saved. However, terror groups all over the world will learn that if they embed themselves within a civilian population, take hostages and use human shields, Western public opinion will protect them from a military response for even the most barbaric of attacks. In the long run, the chance of more frequent and more vicous attacks, and the use of human shields, will go up significantly, leading to even higher death tolls. In game theory there are often differences between single round games and multiround games, and unfortunately, this looks like a multiround game.

I don't have any idea what the right balance is between not empowering terror and civilian lives, and I'm very thankful that I don't have to be the one to make decisions on life and death policy questions. What is clear to me that pushing for simple solutions to complex policy decisions can easily backfire, and that models that don't take into account second order effects or understand the responses of the actors are probably deeply flawed. The OpenAI saga (from what I've been able to glean from the headlines) looks like an all too recent example of this.

Optimisation is irrelevant

During the past few weeks in the army, I've been struck by how much I need to adjust my tendency to try and optimize. The army doesn't think in terms of cost-effectiveness at all, while I instinctually start doing expected value BOTECs wherever I am. At first I tried calculating the cost-effectiveness of being called up to the army. Reserve soldiers cost X, logistics cost Y, lost earnings cost Z, vs the value of my unit's role (hint: not especially important). But after a while, I realised that the army in real-time has no concept of cost. They've been given a mission, and that's the only thing they care about. Since the cost of losing the war is huge, you either can't do cost-effectiveness calculations or the conclusion of the calculation is to simply let the money flow. So basically the army is pascal-mugging everyone, which is strangely comforting.

Personally, the place where my usual way of thinking clashes most painfully with army thinking is how I view the value of my time. In regular life, I think a lot about how to optimise my time. In the army, most of the time I wait. This is while my wife is struggling with a two year old who refuses to nap because he's waiting for Dad to come home. It feels that my time is more valuable at home, where I have an immediate impact on the wellbeing of the people I care about most. But if my being in the army somehow helps return the hostages taken by Hamas, even in a very roundabout way, I feel obligated to stay, even though most of my days I feel I could be contributing much more at home.

Ambition to improve the world 

Two weeks before the war started I chatted with someone in the park on a Saturday, each of us holding a baby stroller. Two weeks later, I see his picture in the news with details about his funeral. Life seems more fragile. Something that shouldn't be taken for granted. Just waking up, knowing my family is healthy and that I'm loved by them, having basic food and shelter, is enough for me to feel satisfied and grateful. How very much of a contrast this state of mind is to the amount of energy and stress I expended on work projects, and to the slumps of mild depression during periods I didn't feel I was succeeding at having an impact. 

I don't know how this will play out long term, once the war ends. Maybe I'll go back to how things were, or maybe I'll be even more motivated to fix one of the many places where the world is incredibly messed up. I'm grateful that I can even contemplate returning to work on improving the world, which wouldn't be the case if I was a tax lawyer (no offense). But for now, my ambition sums up to living quietly in a shack with my wife and watching my son grow up.

The importance of peace  

I've been brought up Jewish, and peace comes up often during Jewish prayer. Only now do I understand how key peace is to all other values. May there be peace soon.


 

1. ^{^}

   A therapist friend commented that the emotional trauma from interpersonal violence is generally much greater than the emotional trauma from disasters that are “acts of God”, so apparently there is some literature to support this.