EA - What I learned from the criticism contest by Gavin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What I learned from the criticism contest, published by Gavin on October 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I was a judge on the Criticism and Red-teaming Contest, and read 170 entries. It was overall great: hundreds of submissions and dozens of new points. Recurring patterns in the critiques But most people make the same points. Some of them have been made from the beginning, like 2011. You could take that as an indictment of EA's responsiveness to critics, proof that there's a problem, or merely as proof that critics don't read and that there's a small number of wide basins in criticism space. (We're launching the EA Bug Tracker to try and distinguish these scenarios, and to keep valid criticisms in sight.) Trends in submissions I saw: (I took out the examples because it was mean. Can back em up in DMs.) Academics are stuck in 2015. It's great that academics are writing full-blown papers about EA, and on average I expect this to help us fight groupthink and to bring new ideas in. But almost all of the papers submitted here are addressing a seriously outdated version of EA, before the longtermist shift, before the shift away from public calculation, before the systemic stuff. Some of them even just criticise Singer 2009 and assume this is equivalent to criticising EA. (I want to single out Sundaram et al as an exception. It is steeped in current EA while maintaining some very different worldviews.) Normalisation. For various reasons, many suggestions would make EA less distinctive. Whether that's intentional PR skulduggery, retconning a more mainstream cause into the tent, adding epicycles to show that mainstream problem x is really the biggest factor in AI risk, or just what happens when you average intuitions (the mode of a group will reflect current commonsense consensus about causes and interventions, and so not be very EA). This probably has some merit. But if we implemented all of these, we'd be destroyed. Schism. People were weirdly enthusiastic about schisming into two neartermist and longtermist movements. (They usually phrase this as a way of letting neartermist things get their due, but I see this as a sure way to doom it to normalisation instead.) Stop decoupling everything. The opposite mistake is to give up on decoupling, to allow the truism that 'all causes are connected' swamp focussed efforts. Names. People devote a huge amount of time to the connotations of different names. But obsessing over this stuff is an established EA foible. Vast amounts of ressentiment. Some critiques are just disagreements about cause prioritisation, phrased hotly as if this gave them more weight. EAs underestimate uncertainty in cause prioritisation. One perennial criticism which has always been true is that most of cause prioritisation, the heart of EA, is incredibly nonobvious and dependent on fiddly philosophical questions. And yet we don't much act like we knew this, aside from a few GPI economist-philosophers. This is probably the fairest criticism I hear from non-EAs. Fundamental criticism takes time Karnofsky, describing his former view: "Most EA criticism is - and should be - about the community as it exists today, rather than about the “core ideas.” The core ideas are just solid. Do the most good possible - should we really be arguing about that?" He changed his mind! Really fundamental challenges to your views don't move you at the time you read them. Instead they set dominoes falling; they alter some weights a little, so that the next time the problem comes up in your real life, you notice it and hold it in your attention for a fraction more of a second. And then over about 3 years, you become a different person, - and no trace of the original post remains, and no gratitude will accrue. If the winners of the contest don't strike you as fundamental critiqu...