This essay was all introduction and no conclusion. It was "I put up with X, I put up with Y" but there was no "but Z was the last straw". You didn't describe any actual falling out.
I learned about the rationalist community in the mid 2010s and immediately became a postrat. Shortly after that I moved into advanced post-rationalism and have been parked here ever since watching those nerds and clowns LARP their way to a a variety of ethical and intellectual failures to the embarrassment of many and the peril of all.
Rationalism is a new religious movement branded in a way that can only cause cognitive dissonance in its adherents when they discoverer its actual nature. It's an amazing mindfuck and self own and has been coopted by a wide variety of assholes for years. Rationality is where all the cognitive biases were discovered and then, for some inexplicably stupid reason, adopted and enhanced. There's all sorts of trashy economic incentives driving everything and it's mostly childish status games masquerading as something like enlightenment.
Huh. I thought there was going to be more to that story. But then it just ended.
This movement you describe reminds me of two things, which I assume you're familiar with: Thomas Sowell's book Conflict of Visions, and that C.S. Lewis quote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
I'm glad you outgrew the movement before it got violent. I assume most emotionally stable people quickly tire of demonstrating their superiority to the hoi polloi. And the rest eventually graduate to yard signs informing their neighbors how to think, which is a real time-saver for everyone.
I hate it when the nuttier side of EA gets all the attention. There are also people who have stuck with quietly doing as much good as they can.
For example, GiveWell and GiveDirectly are still around and they're still routing money to help poor people in Africa, as well as other places. I think they deserve credit for sticking with it, and also for funding studies to evaluate how well they're doing. If you know of any charities with better proof that what they're doing is working, I'd love to hear about it.
I look at that and I think, well, I worked for Google for a long time too, and I've also donated a fair bit to charity, but not nearly to that extent. I think what they're doing deserves admiration, so why do people so often treat "earn to give" with scorn?
After reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker, there's just no way to ignore what you call the nuttier side. The nuts are the ones with almost all of the money and clout.
I'm sure there are genuinely good people who (still) identify with the EA movement. I also believe there are genuinely good people who are Scientologists.
I don't think that's a fair comparison because, while some EA-adjacent organizations were either cults or nearly so, most EA people were never in them.
I posted about it a long time ago (back in 2022). I think the reason EA has bad rep is because it started with a provocative idea of altruism-as-a-discipline-of-math and then allowed a vocal minority to hijack it and take it to its logical conclusion (longtermism). And that minority had a lot of money and clout, so it's not like you could just brush that off. If you don't denounce SBF and weird AI initiatives, you're it.
Now, I still have some objections to the saner version of EA. First, I just can't get over the appropriation of the term "altruism". Altruism isn't outcome calculus, it's about valiant sacrifice. If they called it "efficient giving", I think it would have invited a lot less scorn. Now, Jeff might be a valiant outlier, but most of EAs are not that.
Second, I think that all that global outcome math is suspect and non-linear. If you move the needle on vaccinations from 80% to 80.001%, you can convince yourself that you *statistically* saved n lives, but it's entirely possible you made no difference whatsoever. In contrast, if you give to a local charity, it might be their make-or-break. So there are multiple impact maximization frameworks, and EA doesn't have the dibs on the "correct" one - but they act like they do.
Third, all that "let's precisely measure large-scale impacts in faraway lands" gives me serious carbon offset vibes. The more money is involved, and the greater the distance, the easier it is for weird bureaucracies to game the system and tell you what you want to hear. Which is another reason why local giving feels more concrete.
Now, to the extent that EA convinced some people to donate what they otherwise wouldn't, more power to them. But I suspect they also convinced a lot of people to just reallocate money in ways that are not as clear-cut as claimed.
I don't like longtermism either, but I disagree that it's the logical conclusion of EA. It should count as EA if you care about effectiveness at all and have some reasonable argument for why what you're doing is effective. That said, there are some arguments I like better than others, and being a "big tent" about this is also what lets people with nutty arguments claim to be EA.
Maybe it's just because I've bought into EA, but quibbling over what counts as "altruism" seems petty. Shouldn't any donation count as charity? And this idea that how much you sacrifice matters is wrongheaded. If two people each give $1000 then they've made equal donations and it doesn't matter how much they suffered to raise the money or what other money they have. If you can manage to avoid suffering, that's good! We should focus on outcomes.
But paying attention to outcomes does have some unsavory consequences. It means that a billionaire could do much more good than you or me. Similarly for large foundations. If we only care about outcomes, more money is often better, and therefore it's desirable to be in a position to affect more "money moved." The logical conclusion of *that* might mean joining the staff of some philanthropy where you can influence how a billionaire donates, or just attempting to associate with more rich people, and that can have downsides depending on who you associate with.
Maybe the end justifies the means, but being greedy for a good cause can result in ethical issues similar to just being greedy, and you could just be fooling yourself.
(Maybe this motive is tangentially related to working for Google. If you want to have more impact, wouldn't it make sense to go to work for a company with billions of users? Those big numbers during TGIF sure were impressive, weren't they? It made me feel like it was a privilege just to be there. But they would also show slides with long lists of people who worked on some project, and it was as long as movie credits, and my name wasn't there.)
I think you're right that saving statistical lives is not quite the same thing as knowing you helped someone in particular. Vaccinations are a good example of this. Nobody will ever know if getting a shot helped them at all, because they don't know what would have happened to them if they didn't get the shot. Epidemiologists can see infections going down for a whole population, and for people who work for a hospital during an epidemic, the outcomes will feel real. But for most of us, it's a line on a graph. And if you're just a small donor, you can't even see your donation on the graph. So, you donate and trust that it helped, based on a rough calculation.
So, that's unsatisfying, but that's just how public health works. It's about populations, not individuals. It doesn't mean public health shouldn't be funded.
GiveDirectly is a bit different since at least the people who got the money will know that they got the money. But, admittedly they are strangers on a different continent.
I think I've gone on long enough. As you can see, there's endless room to argue about effectiveness.
People can be rational however, that is far down the list. People are often emotional drama queens who invent rationale to persuade others to agree. We are delusional enough to be impressed with ourselves! If we have exceptional intelligence and various abilities, we should humbly thank our generous God.
Idk if Damore is a good example of the typical rationalist beliefs, the Google memo seemed to stem more from traditional conservative ideas than rationalist ones.
Otoh stuff like Bayesian rationality is obviously wrong, and I'm surprised the people in that group keep believing it, and even use it to underpin concepts like AGI being possible. So that's where I think the movement lost itself.
> Idk if Damore is a good example of the typical rationalist beliefs, the Google memo seemed to stem more from traditional conservative ideas than rationalist ones.
That's the point I'm making: rationalists, like anyone else, start with some random thing they care about, dress it in a seriously-sounding argument, and then claim the intellectual high road. The fact it kicked off on skeptics@, with scientific citations, sort of makes it "ours".
If you're against debating random topics just because someone wants to then I agree that the rationalist community is a bad place to be, but I for one like doing that, and consider it a feature that they engage in open debate, even on well hashed out topics. But I also believe that if a topic is sufficiently hashed out it should be easy enough to write out or link to sufficient counterarguments and not have the debate go on for too long. My issue is that they don't change their minds when proven wrong, despite claiming to do that.
This is funny because I was also at Google during the Damore drama. From what I remember, he was explicitly asked for feedback after some kind of DEI retreat, but I didn't verify or pay close attention. Being autistic, the fool actually gave them a piece of his mind. It was a milquetoast opinion that virtually everybody held just a couple of decades ago. I don't necessarily agree with it, but he is nowhere near an OMEGACHUD that he was smeared as. His career was destroyed because he dared to challenge the blank slate foundation of modern progressive thought pushed at the company.
If anything, the entire episode gives the weird rationalist nerds plenty of valid ammunition.
I really don't want to get into politics here because I think they're orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make. It was just a skeptics@ playbook for forcing an argument on a topic we wanted to argue about (for reasons that usually had little to do with science).
I learned to ask myself “What’s the point? Who cares?”. Most internet “debaters” seem to far prefer sending to receiving, so you’re not going to change any minds. Engaging with them is pointless because they aren’t interested in having their views subjected to any kind of scrutiny.
Occasionally it’s good sport if you have an opponent who also views it so, but all too often “debate” quickly spirals into an exchange of insults, which can also be kind of fun, but its utter frivolousness makes it something of a luxury use of time.
1) I have to present my stance as a coherent argument. It's easy to think you know or believe something until you try to explain what and why, so it's a good exercise to try to do so, similar to how teaching people forces you to look at the subject differently.
2) its possible that the person I'm arguing against has never heard a good explanation of my side of the argument. Oftentimes if they're politically engaged they only hear strawman arguments of whatever the other side thinks. So if I can provide that at least they can't say they never heard the other sides actual explanation. If they reject it after that it's on them
3) because it's online there's other people reading and they may benefit from seeing the argument play out and reconsider their own stances on the topic, or hopefully get entertainment if it goes bad lol.
Yes, in the happy circumstance that you can find someone who can actually think clearly and engage in a civilized manner, then I think it’s certainly worth the time for the reasons you say. Nothing rounds a rough edge off your argument like an insightful question.
In my experience, not responding works a lot better than I had assumed. Most of arguments are drive-bys and the only thing that keeps them going are reply notifications. I don't need to correct every person on the internet. If it's something consequential, I might do a blog post about my POV instead.
I guess it also helps that nowadays, you can't even be sure if you're debating a human in the first place.
Not responding works really well - especially if you’re a pedant like me. I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with a weird feeling when I believe that another person is wrong. I get an urge to butt in with an “akshually I think you’ll find…”.
Only realised much, much later in life that biting your tongue works - and I’m getting better with realising that I have a finite amount of energy. Good faith arguments with friends and loved ones are my only outlets for pedantry, and I consciously make an effort to be kind and respectful.
If you’re wired to optimise for making things right (according to the values that you hold), choosing where you expend energy to do it makes life much easier.
I think public forums (like this one) are a terrible place to have good faith discussions because of the implicit and ever present pressure to perform for your tribe and express allegiance. It is less a conversation and more a panel discussion or debate on a stage with a large audience in attendance. I think this is why one nearly never finds anyone changing their mind about anything on internet forums.
When I do participate, I go in with the full expectation that no concession will ever occur in public and the point is to only hope that your arguments will enable some private reflection. And I try, imperfectly, to remain open to having my mind changed in a public fashion, though, often, I discover that I am not entirely immune to the lure of wanting to perform for my tribe. Unfortunately.
This essay was all introduction and no conclusion. It was "I put up with X, I put up with Y" but there was no "but Z was the last straw". You didn't describe any actual falling out.
I learned about the rationalist community in the mid 2010s and immediately became a postrat. Shortly after that I moved into advanced post-rationalism and have been parked here ever since watching those nerds and clowns LARP their way to a a variety of ethical and intellectual failures to the embarrassment of many and the peril of all.
Rationalism is a new religious movement branded in a way that can only cause cognitive dissonance in its adherents when they discoverer its actual nature. It's an amazing mindfuck and self own and has been coopted by a wide variety of assholes for years. Rationality is where all the cognitive biases were discovered and then, for some inexplicably stupid reason, adopted and enhanced. There's all sorts of trashy economic incentives driving everything and it's mostly childish status games masquerading as something like enlightenment.
Huh. I thought there was going to be more to that story. But then it just ended.
This movement you describe reminds me of two things, which I assume you're familiar with: Thomas Sowell's book Conflict of Visions, and that C.S. Lewis quote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
I'm glad you outgrew the movement before it got violent. I assume most emotionally stable people quickly tire of demonstrating their superiority to the hoi polloi. And the rest eventually graduate to yard signs informing their neighbors how to think, which is a real time-saver for everyone.
I hate it when the nuttier side of EA gets all the attention. There are also people who have stuck with quietly doing as much good as they can.
For example, GiveWell and GiveDirectly are still around and they're still routing money to help poor people in Africa, as well as other places. I think they deserve credit for sticking with it, and also for funding studies to evaluate how well they're doing. If you know of any charities with better proof that what they're doing is working, I'd love to hear about it.
For an extreme case of "earn to give," see: https://www.jefftk.com/p/donating-80-while-it-still-counts
I look at that and I think, well, I worked for Google for a long time too, and I've also donated a fair bit to charity, but not nearly to that extent. I think what they're doing deserves admiration, so why do people so often treat "earn to give" with scorn?
After reading "More Everything Forever" by Adam Becker, there's just no way to ignore what you call the nuttier side. The nuts are the ones with almost all of the money and clout.
I'm sure there are genuinely good people who (still) identify with the EA movement. I also believe there are genuinely good people who are Scientologists.
I don't think that's a fair comparison because, while some EA-adjacent organizations were either cults or nearly so, most EA people were never in them.
Point taken. But I was making more of an analogy than a comparison.
I posted about it a long time ago (back in 2022). I think the reason EA has bad rep is because it started with a provocative idea of altruism-as-a-discipline-of-math and then allowed a vocal minority to hijack it and take it to its logical conclusion (longtermism). And that minority had a lot of money and clout, so it's not like you could just brush that off. If you don't denounce SBF and weird AI initiatives, you're it.
Now, I still have some objections to the saner version of EA. First, I just can't get over the appropriation of the term "altruism". Altruism isn't outcome calculus, it's about valiant sacrifice. If they called it "efficient giving", I think it would have invited a lot less scorn. Now, Jeff might be a valiant outlier, but most of EAs are not that.
Second, I think that all that global outcome math is suspect and non-linear. If you move the needle on vaccinations from 80% to 80.001%, you can convince yourself that you *statistically* saved n lives, but it's entirely possible you made no difference whatsoever. In contrast, if you give to a local charity, it might be their make-or-break. So there are multiple impact maximization frameworks, and EA doesn't have the dibs on the "correct" one - but they act like they do.
Third, all that "let's precisely measure large-scale impacts in faraway lands" gives me serious carbon offset vibes. The more money is involved, and the greater the distance, the easier it is for weird bureaucracies to game the system and tell you what you want to hear. Which is another reason why local giving feels more concrete.
Now, to the extent that EA convinced some people to donate what they otherwise wouldn't, more power to them. But I suspect they also convinced a lot of people to just reallocate money in ways that are not as clear-cut as claimed.
I don't like longtermism either, but I disagree that it's the logical conclusion of EA. It should count as EA if you care about effectiveness at all and have some reasonable argument for why what you're doing is effective. That said, there are some arguments I like better than others, and being a "big tent" about this is also what lets people with nutty arguments claim to be EA.
Maybe it's just because I've bought into EA, but quibbling over what counts as "altruism" seems petty. Shouldn't any donation count as charity? And this idea that how much you sacrifice matters is wrongheaded. If two people each give $1000 then they've made equal donations and it doesn't matter how much they suffered to raise the money or what other money they have. If you can manage to avoid suffering, that's good! We should focus on outcomes.
But paying attention to outcomes does have some unsavory consequences. It means that a billionaire could do much more good than you or me. Similarly for large foundations. If we only care about outcomes, more money is often better, and therefore it's desirable to be in a position to affect more "money moved." The logical conclusion of *that* might mean joining the staff of some philanthropy where you can influence how a billionaire donates, or just attempting to associate with more rich people, and that can have downsides depending on who you associate with.
Maybe the end justifies the means, but being greedy for a good cause can result in ethical issues similar to just being greedy, and you could just be fooling yourself.
(Maybe this motive is tangentially related to working for Google. If you want to have more impact, wouldn't it make sense to go to work for a company with billions of users? Those big numbers during TGIF sure were impressive, weren't they? It made me feel like it was a privilege just to be there. But they would also show slides with long lists of people who worked on some project, and it was as long as movie credits, and my name wasn't there.)
I think you're right that saving statistical lives is not quite the same thing as knowing you helped someone in particular. Vaccinations are a good example of this. Nobody will ever know if getting a shot helped them at all, because they don't know what would have happened to them if they didn't get the shot. Epidemiologists can see infections going down for a whole population, and for people who work for a hospital during an epidemic, the outcomes will feel real. But for most of us, it's a line on a graph. And if you're just a small donor, you can't even see your donation on the graph. So, you donate and trust that it helped, based on a rough calculation.
So, that's unsatisfying, but that's just how public health works. It's about populations, not individuals. It doesn't mean public health shouldn't be funded.
GiveDirectly is a bit different since at least the people who got the money will know that they got the money. But, admittedly they are strangers on a different continent.
I think I've gone on long enough. As you can see, there's endless room to argue about effectiveness.
People can be rational however, that is far down the list. People are often emotional drama queens who invent rationale to persuade others to agree. We are delusional enough to be impressed with ourselves! If we have exceptional intelligence and various abilities, we should humbly thank our generous God.
skeptics@google must have been one hell of a mailing list
Seems like this is part one of a series. Hope so!
Idk if Damore is a good example of the typical rationalist beliefs, the Google memo seemed to stem more from traditional conservative ideas than rationalist ones.
Otoh stuff like Bayesian rationality is obviously wrong, and I'm surprised the people in that group keep believing it, and even use it to underpin concepts like AGI being possible. So that's where I think the movement lost itself.
> Idk if Damore is a good example of the typical rationalist beliefs, the Google memo seemed to stem more from traditional conservative ideas than rationalist ones.
That's the point I'm making: rationalists, like anyone else, start with some random thing they care about, dress it in a seriously-sounding argument, and then claim the intellectual high road. The fact it kicked off on skeptics@, with scientific citations, sort of makes it "ours".
If you're against debating random topics just because someone wants to then I agree that the rationalist community is a bad place to be, but I for one like doing that, and consider it a feature that they engage in open debate, even on well hashed out topics. But I also believe that if a topic is sufficiently hashed out it should be easy enough to write out or link to sufficient counterarguments and not have the debate go on for too long. My issue is that they don't change their minds when proven wrong, despite claiming to do that.
This is funny because I was also at Google during the Damore drama. From what I remember, he was explicitly asked for feedback after some kind of DEI retreat, but I didn't verify or pay close attention. Being autistic, the fool actually gave them a piece of his mind. It was a milquetoast opinion that virtually everybody held just a couple of decades ago. I don't necessarily agree with it, but he is nowhere near an OMEGACHUD that he was smeared as. His career was destroyed because he dared to challenge the blank slate foundation of modern progressive thought pushed at the company.
If anything, the entire episode gives the weird rationalist nerds plenty of valid ammunition.
I really don't want to get into politics here because I think they're orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make. It was just a skeptics@ playbook for forcing an argument on a topic we wanted to argue about (for reasons that usually had little to do with science).
As someone who also gets sucked into invalid arguments sometimes, what is the way out? Ignoring them only gets you so far.
I learned to ask myself “What’s the point? Who cares?”. Most internet “debaters” seem to far prefer sending to receiving, so you’re not going to change any minds. Engaging with them is pointless because they aren’t interested in having their views subjected to any kind of scrutiny.
Occasionally it’s good sport if you have an opponent who also views it so, but all too often “debate” quickly spirals into an exchange of insults, which can also be kind of fun, but its utter frivolousness makes it something of a luxury use of time.
I often debate online for 3 reasons:
1) I have to present my stance as a coherent argument. It's easy to think you know or believe something until you try to explain what and why, so it's a good exercise to try to do so, similar to how teaching people forces you to look at the subject differently.
2) its possible that the person I'm arguing against has never heard a good explanation of my side of the argument. Oftentimes if they're politically engaged they only hear strawman arguments of whatever the other side thinks. So if I can provide that at least they can't say they never heard the other sides actual explanation. If they reject it after that it's on them
3) because it's online there's other people reading and they may benefit from seeing the argument play out and reconsider their own stances on the topic, or hopefully get entertainment if it goes bad lol.
Yes, in the happy circumstance that you can find someone who can actually think clearly and engage in a civilized manner, then I think it’s certainly worth the time for the reasons you say. Nothing rounds a rough edge off your argument like an insightful question.
In my experience, not responding works a lot better than I had assumed. Most of arguments are drive-bys and the only thing that keeps them going are reply notifications. I don't need to correct every person on the internet. If it's something consequential, I might do a blog post about my POV instead.
I guess it also helps that nowadays, you can't even be sure if you're debating a human in the first place.
Not responding works really well - especially if you’re a pedant like me. I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with a weird feeling when I believe that another person is wrong. I get an urge to butt in with an “akshually I think you’ll find…”.
Only realised much, much later in life that biting your tongue works - and I’m getting better with realising that I have a finite amount of energy. Good faith arguments with friends and loved ones are my only outlets for pedantry, and I consciously make an effort to be kind and respectful.
If you’re wired to optimise for making things right (according to the values that you hold), choosing where you expend energy to do it makes life much easier.
I think public forums (like this one) are a terrible place to have good faith discussions because of the implicit and ever present pressure to perform for your tribe and express allegiance. It is less a conversation and more a panel discussion or debate on a stage with a large audience in attendance. I think this is why one nearly never finds anyone changing their mind about anything on internet forums.
When I do participate, I go in with the full expectation that no concession will ever occur in public and the point is to only hope that your arguments will enable some private reflection. And I try, imperfectly, to remain open to having my mind changed in a public fashion, though, often, I discover that I am not entirely immune to the lure of wanting to perform for my tribe. Unfortunately.