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Related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HB2zD5mu7ynXnD63u/healthy-competition [EA · GW]

You could also try reforming a legislative house to focus on future generations. The House of Lords (UK)/Senate (Canada) is already meant to take a more long-term 'sober second thought' on legislation, and there's widespread discontent about the current function of both. They could be ripe for reform.

Ok, I understand your point better now, and find that it makes sense. To summarize, I believe that the art of good planning to a distant goal is to find a series of intermediate targets that we can focus on, one after the other. I was worried that your argument could be used against any such strategy. But in fact your point is that as it stands, health interventions have not been selected by a "planner" who was actually thinking about the long-term goals, so it is unlikely that the selected interventions are the best we can find. That sounds reasonable to me. I would really like to see more research into what optimizing for long-term growth could look like (and what kind of "intermediate targets" this would select). (There is some of this in Christiano's post, but there is clearly room for more in-depth analysis in my opinion.)

Even though I agree that presenting EA as Utilitarianism is alienating and misleading, I think that it is a useful mode of thinking about EA in some contexts. Many practices in EA are rooted in Utilitarianism, and many (about half from the respondents to the survey, if I recall correctly) of the people in EA consider themselves utilitarian. So, while Effective Utilitarianism is not the same as EA, I think that the confusion of the outsiders is sometimes justified.

Thanks for sharing this.

1. One argument I come across is that apart from being symbolic, individual action does not help #1,2 and 3. Elaboration / links to articles that try to quantify the "real" individual effect could probably make the case more persuasive.

2. If the "real" impact is small then one could argue that the slight inconvenience in following a vegan benifit is comparable to the small benifit that individual action results in.

Are there any specific tools or methods you used to start an EA group in the Phillipines? I'm also interested in spreading the EA movement in emerging markets and would value any insight you have on this.

One I was very glad not to see in this list was "EA as Utilitarianism". Although utilitarian ethics are popular among EAs, I think we leave out many people who would "do good better" but from a different meta-ethical perspective. One of the greatest challenges I've seen in my own conversations about EA is with those who reject the ideas because they associate them with Singer-style moral arguments and living a life of subsistence until not one person is in poverty. This sadly seems to turn them off of ways they might think about better allocating resources, for example, because they think their only options are either to do what they feel good about or to be a Singer-esque maximizer. Obviously this is not the case, there's a lot of room for gradation and different perspectives, but it does create a situation where people see themselves in an adversarial relationship to EA and so reject all its ideas rather than just the subset of EA-related ideas they actually disagree with because they got the idea that one part of EA was the whole thing.

This is a really interesting post, thanks for writing it up.

I think I have two main models for thinking about these sorts of issues:

• The accelerating view, where we have historically seen several big speed-ups in rate of change as a result of the introduction of more powerful methods of optimisation, and the introduction of human-level AGI is likely to be another. In this case the future is both potentially very valuable (because AGI will allow very rapid growth and world-optimisation) and endangered (because the default is that new optimisation forces do not respect the values or 'values' of previous modes.)
• Physics/Chemistry/Plate Tectonics
• Life/Evolution
• Humanity/Intelligence/Culture/Agriculture
• Enlightenment/Capitalism/Industrial Revolution
• Recursively self-improving AGI?
• The God of Straight Lines approach, where we'll continue to see roughly 2% RGDP growth, because that is what always happens. AI will make us more productive, but not dramatically so, and at the same time previous sources of productivity growth will be exhausted, so overall trends will remain roughly intact. As such, the future is worth a lot less (perhaps we will colonise the stars, but only slowly, and growth rates won't hit 50%/year) but also less endangered (because all progress will be incremental and slow, and humanity will remain in control). I think of this as being the epistemically modest approach.

As a result, my version of Clara thinks of AI Safety work as reducing risk in the worlds that happen to matter the most. It's also possible that these are the worlds where we can have the most influence, if you thought that strong negative feedback mechanisms strongly limited action in the Straight Line world

Note that I was originally going to describe these as the inside and outside views, but I actually think that both have decent outside-view justifications.

thanks, fixed :)

As a concrete example, I worry that living in the SF bay area is making me care less about extreme wealth disparities. I witness them so regularly that it's hard for me to feel the same flare of frustration that I once did. This change has felt like a gradual hedonic adaptation, rather than a thoughtful shifting of my beliefs; the phrase "value drift" fits that experience well.

This seems to me adequately and better captured as saying the conditions of the world are different in ways that make you respond differently that you wouldn't have endorsed prior to those conditions changing. That doesn't mean your values changed, but the conditions to which you are responded changed such that your values are differently expressed; I suspect your values themselves didn't change because you say you are worried about this change in behavior you've observed in yourself, and if your values had really changed you wouldn't be worried.