It was great seeing you at RatFest! I enjoyed your blog and I understand your concern about community building. Still, I disagree with you on some key points, as I explain below.
Firstly, I think you’re being too lenient towards the EA crowd. For a movement about charitable giving, it has developed a remarkably self-referential culture. Polyamory is unusually common among EA-ers, which should raise eyebrows. How does a philosophy about effective altruism consistently attract, or perhaps create, people with the same unconventional relationship style? I’ve also met EA-ers with plainly irrational views, such as the belief that even mentioning Roko’s Basilisk to someone is not just wrong but reprehensible. At one EA conference I attended a couple of years ago, people presented a graph comparing the suffering of cows and crickets, complete with a y-axis labelled “amount of suffering” but no units. It’s the kind of mistake you learn to avoid in first-year science courses. Of course there couldn’t be any units, but then why have the graph at all? Nobody objected, and when I tried to raise the point, I was passed over. It was a simulacrum of science.
Any group of people who attend a conference will, naturally, share certain views and background assumptions. Physicists at a physics conference, or programmers at a tech conference, will agree on a great deal. That kind of cohesion isn’t a sign of irrationality. What matters is the community’s attitude toward disagreement, whether dissent is engaged with or quietly suppressed. In that respect, much of EA has drifted away from the scientific seriousness it claims to embody. It gestures towards rigour but rarely makes real contact with it.
RatFest, by contrast, didn’t feel like that at all. Genuine research scientists were in attendance, discussions were grounded, and obvious errors didn’t pass unchallenged. While many attendees shared similar views on certain topics, I didn’t sense hostility towards dissent or any in-group taboos. So if EA is the standard, RatFest far surpasses it!
Mostly agree with this! My claim is not that EA is epistemically healthy, but rather that it's worrying that they're not given all the effort they've ostensibly put into making themselves open to criticism. In other words, I agree that EA has drifted away from the ideal. But how did that happen, given that (I'm sure) it was not the intention of those involved?
I'm worried that such drift is the norm for such communities, not the exception. My piece was simply pointing out that critrats/ratfest need to be eternally vigilant about this problem. We'll see how they fare over the next few years as the community grows.
I think it's instructive to look a knowledge growth systems that work.
- Science - has a *strict requirement for empirical evidence*. How could you possibly assemble evidence for an event millions of years in the future? Empirical evidence is where ideas meet reality. In the words of Feynman, if your hypothesis doesn't match nature, it's wrong.
Similarly in business - you are free to launch any business idea into the market, and you go bankrupt if your idea doesn't survive its encounter with market reality.
- Democratic decision making requires a *broad church*. Countries fail when political opposition is weak. For example, I think the current problems in the UK were caused by decades of an unelectable Labour Party. Effective opposition is crucial for democracies.
(Btw, It wasn't until the UK parliament of 1807 that the opposition party was required at attend parliament. Prior to that, on losing an election, they would to retire to their country estates!
The two opposing seating stands of Westminster were famously specified to be separated by two sword lengths)
In my personal experience, Effective Altruism people won't debate, but neither will RatFest people (even though I've spent much more time talking with Deutsch than they have). I don't see healthy epistemic norms in either community. The RatFest community doesn't even have a public discussion forum for debates to happen at.
Hi Ben,
It was great seeing you at RatFest! I enjoyed your blog and I understand your concern about community building. Still, I disagree with you on some key points, as I explain below.
Firstly, I think you’re being too lenient towards the EA crowd. For a movement about charitable giving, it has developed a remarkably self-referential culture. Polyamory is unusually common among EA-ers, which should raise eyebrows. How does a philosophy about effective altruism consistently attract, or perhaps create, people with the same unconventional relationship style? I’ve also met EA-ers with plainly irrational views, such as the belief that even mentioning Roko’s Basilisk to someone is not just wrong but reprehensible. At one EA conference I attended a couple of years ago, people presented a graph comparing the suffering of cows and crickets, complete with a y-axis labelled “amount of suffering” but no units. It’s the kind of mistake you learn to avoid in first-year science courses. Of course there couldn’t be any units, but then why have the graph at all? Nobody objected, and when I tried to raise the point, I was passed over. It was a simulacrum of science.
Any group of people who attend a conference will, naturally, share certain views and background assumptions. Physicists at a physics conference, or programmers at a tech conference, will agree on a great deal. That kind of cohesion isn’t a sign of irrationality. What matters is the community’s attitude toward disagreement, whether dissent is engaged with or quietly suppressed. In that respect, much of EA has drifted away from the scientific seriousness it claims to embody. It gestures towards rigour but rarely makes real contact with it.
RatFest, by contrast, didn’t feel like that at all. Genuine research scientists were in attendance, discussions were grounded, and obvious errors didn’t pass unchallenged. While many attendees shared similar views on certain topics, I didn’t sense hostility towards dissent or any in-group taboos. So if EA is the standard, RatFest far surpasses it!
Mostly agree with this! My claim is not that EA is epistemically healthy, but rather that it's worrying that they're not given all the effort they've ostensibly put into making themselves open to criticism. In other words, I agree that EA has drifted away from the ideal. But how did that happen, given that (I'm sure) it was not the intention of those involved?
I'm worried that such drift is the norm for such communities, not the exception. My piece was simply pointing out that critrats/ratfest need to be eternally vigilant about this problem. We'll see how they fare over the next few years as the community grows.
The craziness of EA is a nice 'reductio ad absurdum' for their flavour of Bayesian epistemology imo.
Hard problem indeed Ben.
I think it's instructive to look a knowledge growth systems that work.
- Science - has a *strict requirement for empirical evidence*. How could you possibly assemble evidence for an event millions of years in the future? Empirical evidence is where ideas meet reality. In the words of Feynman, if your hypothesis doesn't match nature, it's wrong.
Similarly in business - you are free to launch any business idea into the market, and you go bankrupt if your idea doesn't survive its encounter with market reality.
- Democratic decision making requires a *broad church*. Countries fail when political opposition is weak. For example, I think the current problems in the UK were caused by decades of an unelectable Labour Party. Effective opposition is crucial for democracies.
(Btw, It wasn't until the UK parliament of 1807 that the opposition party was required at attend parliament. Prior to that, on losing an election, they would to retire to their country estates!
The two opposing seating stands of Westminster were famously specified to be separated by two sword lengths)
You may be interested in my criticisms of EA https://curi.us/2529-effective-altruism-related-articles
In my personal experience, Effective Altruism people won't debate, but neither will RatFest people (even though I've spent much more time talking with Deutsch than they have). I don't see healthy epistemic norms in either community. The RatFest community doesn't even have a public discussion forum for debates to happen at.