32 Comments

I think this is a good piece overall but:

"...weird nerds are increasingly marginalized as things optimize for legibility to large central funding sources. At this point, the movement has died....This really took off by 2018 or 2019. Since thing, EA has been a zombie movement that exists to launder the decision making of a certain kind of billionaire as the process of a distributed cognition."

just strikes me as sort of perfectly anti-correct. In many ways, EA is laundering weird ideas /into/ respectability. This is a totally conscious strategy, there are probably dozens of EA forum posts implicitly saying this.

This is Good. Laundering weird ideas into respectability is the basis of large-scale values change. If only weird nerds hold ideas, they have an intrinsically limited influence.

Mass persuasion (eg, success for EAs) basically looks like this.

And your suggestions: "Prohibitions on allowing people with histories as lobbyists, journalists, and similar to sit on EA decision committees." are basically saying [don't engage with powerful mainstream people], which is fine if you have some magical source of power that doesn't rely on already extant elites, but dumb if you. Some tech elites (Balaji, Elon, etc.) can effectively do this, but they don't work in policy, and this is a sustainable strategy for a whole movement.

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Nov 17, 2022·edited Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

The short course, in my mind, is my rule "Never give money to big charities", but this assumes the reason to give to charities is to accomplish the aims you intended rather than as a tax writeoff.

Home run after home run, Robot.

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>David Chapman’s classic model of subcultural evolution is Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths...

I was first exposed to this via a comic spread on 4chan where anons wanted to play dnd, and one among them invite a Chad, who plays reasonably well, but then Chad invites Stacy who doesn't, and then the "game" becomes "flirt and hang out", until the nerds leave and try to make a new game/subculture.

I haven't seen the comic in years and would like assistance in finding it, if anyone has the time.

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Nov 17, 2022·edited Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

The main point of this post seems to be that the problem with institutional capture comes from investors having too much power over internal management, rather than too little: chasing whales led well-intentioned insiders astray. I think the standard argument for why this occurs in the private sector is the opposite: HR-style managerialism comes from too little investor power (whether because labor specialization empowers technocrats to act as monopolists of their skillsets, as in Burnham, or, less persuasively, because labor specialization reduces line-workers to reliance on monopsonist employers, as in Wyndham Lewis). And so my prior is that the faddish status-hungry flaws you point out actually come from a lack of memetic sovereignty among insiders, instead of self-sovereign power-seeking.

The personal advice remains the same: cultivate habits rather than memes, because memes transmit horizontally through us, like diseases, and so get selected for optimizing their own spread, whereas habits transmit vertically through us, like genes, and so get selected for optimizing our spread. But the mechanism seems entirely different: a lack of well-defined meaningful ownership over an institution means that nobody is looking out for its long-term health, and everyone is exploiting its resources in poorly aligned ways. And so my political takeaway is that funders should have more power over charities rather than less.

Ironically, I think the root of this view is that markets mostly work by clarifying ownership, not allocating scarce desirables: sure, stock trading constrained by near-perfect competition can as if magically figure out which contractor caused the Challenger explosion within 20 minutes, but the reason a city works is that we all agree on who does own each building so that we don't have to argue about who should own it (and so we mostly don't even think about where the rent goes or which entity our office leases from). In other words, clear ownership allows feedback to select for what owners actually value, while spreadsheet magic selects for signaling: first-gen EAs did well because they were the small-time funders of e.g. malaria prevention, and have gone wrong because they've become the managers of big-time funding spigots. And so I'd suggest that the movement should remain like small-time owners instead of like small-time bureaucrats for big-time owners.

I think this relates to certain blind-spots in standard economics, which focuses on already well-defined agents, who can simply be defined in terms of their expectations and preferences; I think the relevance of memetic sovereignty in this communications age means that we should also focus on the borders which dynamically define said agents. My shameless plug is that I tried writing about that here, in the paragraphs which follow "One way to partition these two types of intelligence is between borders and information": https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-power-of-babble

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Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

and who would be the sociopathic dramatis personae of the online sphere you belong to? awkward...

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Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

The hilariously ironic thing about EA is that it specifically focuses on causes with not much awareness and not much support, so it's very vulnerable to a sociopathic megadonor entering EA and gaining a really efficient dollars -> prestige ratio!

And extra prestige bonus points for having a new-age sci-fi mystique. It's hard to imagine anyone getting this many puff pieces for donating to Oxfam.

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Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

If all donations become anonymous, wouldn't that create a whole host if potentially worse problems: people donating to really socially damaging causes, doing nepotism/backroom deals without any oversight etc?

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Nov 20, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

This seems correct to me, and I enjoyed reading it.

Your comment distinguishing financial/social threats was likewise enlightening, although I kinda already knew that part; I had a pretty good model of the social threat, so the epistemic value to me from this was mostly delineating the financial threat.

It was also of non-negligible aesthetic value to me; clear thought has a beauty all its own.

Wanted to say thanks 🙏 for writing, and I'm sorry I don't have anything more concrete to contribute.

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Nov 18, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

>No, I don’t mean you have to believe in God if you don’t want to.

From the lens of a hard consequentialist that is the modal EA enthusiast, isn't acting in the manner of the most pious saint not really any different from becoming that saint, given that the outcomes of a saint with faulty or absent theology are indistinguishable from one with truly held Christian beliefs? In fact, if you would act more admirably and with better consequences by fully emulating Christian beliefs and practices, a committed and selfless consequentialist would be *compelled* to commit to practice.

That is, it seems like their beliefs indicate they ought to effectively meme themselves into a full second birth into the light of Christ. Go to church, pray and read scripture daily, raise their children to love and fear the Lord, give to the poor, sick, and needy generously and anonymously, etc. Then they would be untethered from their temporal standing and free to do the Most Effective Good. 🙂

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(Banned)Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

Better to donate to Democrats than Yale. I’ll take that any day.

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Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

So I take it from this that in your discourse on Blue Rose that Shor is the sociopath taking advantage of everyone but inasmuch as political influence actors go, do you think Shor is actually, well, *effective*?

I agree with very few of his politics but I have always thought his political analysis was objective and on point.

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Nov 17, 2022Liked by eigenrobot

One quibble: the NYT frontrunning seems like it could significantly mitigate the damage this does to EA in the eyes of the public. Most damaging, I guess, would be if it gets polarized. I could see it being fully subsumed within the Aggregate Left, while, like, Fox and whoever destroy its reputation solely within the Aggregate Right.

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🥱

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