EA leaders forum (with Aurora, the "E = S × W" framework)

2016-08-11 · ~2,120 words

Thanks! So, lots of interesting things I could dive into here. I'm not sure I'll be able to cover everything, but I'll do my best.

The first principle I use might be called "Conservation of Weirdness". Roughly speaking, it says that groups obey this equation:

E = S * W

where E is the amount of effort it takes to maintain the group, S is the size of the group, and W is the level of "weirdness" - how different the group's ideas are from the mainstream. To do a really large amount of good, S has to be moderately large (the group can't be too tiny), and W has to be at least moderately large too; if the world's problems could be solved by doing everything the standard, boring, socially-approved way, they'd have been solved already. Therefore, the leaders of the movement have to maintain good levels of both S and W.

Unfortunately, if we hold E constant, then we get this equation:

W = E/S

that is, S and W are reciprocally related; increasing one tends to decrease the other. As you increase weirdness, size will "want" to decrease; likewise, if you increase size, weirdness will "want" to decrease, in the same way that water "wants" to flow downhill and fluorine gas "wants" to set things on fire. You can overcome this with enough effort, but since you're fighting against the natural tendencies of groups, you have to make sure there are no "leaks", no places where S or W will try to sneak out from under you. If you try to push water uphill, it will flow out under the cracks in your fingers; if you pump it up with a hose, it will try to spray out the side; only when there are no holes anywhere will it flow to the top.

As an example, suppose you think all buildings ought to be painted yellow. Relative to current consensus, this has a pretty high level of W. You form a group of Yellowists, and start advocating for your position, lobbying housing developers, and so on. Soon, a billionaire comes along, and they offer to pay for a big PR campaign - you'll blanket the whole country with messages about Yellowism. The PR campaign works so well that a year later, Congress passes the Yellowist Act of 2019, which allocates $500 million in federal funding for the painting of school buses, and in extra subsidies to the lemonade industry, which has nothing to do with buildings. What happened was that your hose was leaky - you didn't pay close enough attention, and all the W leaked out when "Yellowist" got redefined, right under your nose.

There are several different strategies to combat this, all of which have their own tradeoffs (sadly, no free lunches here). First, try to keep S smaller when you can. Only grow when there's a strong reason to grow; don't grow just for the sake of it. Second, try to attract people with high levels of Openness, in the Big Five personality model. You'll be able to maintain a higher level of W, without having to put in so much effort. Third, try to encourage honesty, and clear language with specific, narrowly defined terms. This doesn't mean enforcing ideological conformity; for example, if someone thinks Nick Bostrom is a crackpot, I might work with them on other issues, even though I strongly disagree. But they can't think Nick Bostrom is a crackpot, and then talk about how they want to fight existential risks, where by "existential risks" they mean right-wing politicians being elected and people eating GMO foods. That's not what "existential risks" means; people can't be allowed to hijack words for their own pet projects. Say no to word piracy. :)

On the flip side, with sufficient effort, it's possible to get a very large S. But that mandates a very low W, which greatly narrows the range of goals it's practical to pursue as a group. For example, consider the environmentalist movement, which has achieved an extremely large S. One goal, which almost all serious environmental thinkers agree on, is "car-dependent sprawl bad, density and transit good". The W of this goal is quite small, certainly compared to almost anything at EAG. But because S is so large, the W is still too high for car-oriented Americans. Hence, the Sierra Club of San Francisco continually lobbies against building more densely (in defiance of the national Sierra Club), and the main use today of the California Environmental Quality Act is to force companies and local governments to fill all of their land with lots and lots of freeways and parking.

For defining a movement, I unfortunately think terms like doing good, evidence, reason, action, and so on are so general as to essentially be meaningless. Presumably, for effective altruism to be a meaningful concept, effective altruists have to think that some group of people should change their actions in some way (otherwise, why bother having a movement?). If the desired change is (say) that everyone should donate 10% of their income, then having a principle of "everyone donates 10%" clearly communicates what EAs want - "people donate 3%, they ought to donate 10%, and that's why we're here". But having principles of "doing good", "evidence", or "reason" doesn't really communicate anything, because these words are so general that everyone already has their own version of them. For example, suppose that someone told Bashar al-Assad, the brutal Syrian dictator, that he should do more good in Syria. He'd very likely reply that he was already doing lots of good, by fighting the evil terrorists and foreign powers inside Syria, who are trying to overthrow the democratic Syrian government and replace it with a genocidal terrorist state. (I've seen him get interviewed, he's really very good at persuading you of things like this.) Likewise, people who believe in psychic powers say they're definitely using evidence - after all, there are hundreds of scientific studies that demonstrate psychic powers. It's the mainstream scientific community who are refusing to use evidence, since they take the decades of data from dozens of labs in favor of ESP, and declare that it all somehow doesn't count. As for reason, Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant man by any standard, spent 3,500 pages arguing so brilliantly for the doctrines of medieval Catholicism that his work was still read centuries later. (If one happened to already be Catholic, I'm sure there are equivalent Muslim theologians one could point to, although I know less about them.)

Of course, I think almost all EAs would disagree with Assad, Broderick, and Aquinas. What we're really saying when we disagree with them is that their definitions of "good", "evidence", and "reason" were faulty, and that they should have used other definitions instead. But saying "do good" or "use evidence" doesn't tell anyone which new definition to switch to; it's like saying someone is at the wrong house, and giving them the directions "go to the house with a roof, windows, and a front door". The statement doesn't really convey any information, since all the houses have roofs, windows and doors. Now, there is an advantage to using such general terms - you can define "doing good" or "using evidence" internally as something with high W, and then if anyone asks questions, say that you're just "doing good" or "using evidence", which are very hard to object to. In this way, you can increase the maximum level of W inside the community, without anyone complaining too much. However, the obfuscation works both ways, since now you can't talk really about what you're doing in a way that others will understand. It's like turning on one of those cloaking devices from Star Trek - the other ship can't see you or attack you, but they can't talk to you either.

Regarding conversation framing, it's certainly true that lots of things aren't communicated well. Amen to that. However, I think a lot of people in EA tend to see skills like PR, communication, outreach, and marketing in a naive way. It's as if someone was running a delivery company, and they thought, well, the purpose of a delivery company is to deliver things, so we should try to deliver lots and lots of things, and so we'll just snatch tons of random objects off the street and deliver them to whatever house happens to be nearby, that'll make us super great deliverers. (Hence, silly things like FLI appointing Morgan Freeman to their advisory board.) An effective approach would look more like:

Eg., for a software company, this process might look like:

Something like politics works a little differently, but it's the same basic principle, eg.:

This is just speculative guessing, but I think many naive PR/marketing/communication strategies come from an evolutionary assumption that there are maybe fifty or eighty or a hundred people around, like how it was in hunter-gatherer times. In that environment, it makes sense to "convince people of X" or "gather support for X" or "spread the word about X" in the abstract, since there are few enough people that you can just talk to everyone personally. You won't accidentally recruit thousands of people you don't want, or spend a bunch of effort on people who don't have the skills you need, while never reaching any of the people who do. However, the world today is so large, and it has so many different groups, and there are so many different reasons you might want someone to join, that "recruiting" or "marketing" as a fully general abstraction just isn't really a thing. Indeed, as I think you pointed out, people who try to "recruit" or "market" in the abstract will in all likelihood de facto be targeting some narrower segment anyway. But instead of being deliberately planned, the segment they're targeting will get chosen by luck (the college they happened to go to, the age bracket they happened to fall in, the political views that happened to be popular in their town growing up, etc.), and they might not even be aware of what their segment is like, which puts them at a huge disadvantage compared to doing real planning.

Well, I could probably continue, but it's 3 AM now, so I'm going to head to sleep. Goodnight :)

Awww, thanks. It's fun talking with you :)

Hmmmm... Here's a thought experiment. Suppose an eccentric billionaire gave you, Aurora, $5 million to implement a successful marketing, outreach, and communication strategy for EA. You can buy whatever you want, but the billionaire says you can't just outsource the project to a professional; you have to decide what to do and what to spend the money on yourself. Before diving too deep into the implementation, what would you set as the goals of your campaign? Compare a world where the campaign succeeded, and a world where it failed; how are the two worlds different? What would make people in one world happier than people in the other?