Hello EA Global! Woo! I love doing that. It's
fun. I'm really excited for this conference,
it was really great getting to chat with some
of you last night, hear about how literally
everyone, it seems, is applying for Open Phil.
Funny how that's going. Should I apply myself?
Like, seems to be what the cool kids are doing.
No, so it's absolutely great to be able to
see you all for this conference.
I'm excited for the theme as well,
which is “stay curious”. So to warm up
a little bit, how about you say hi to the
person next to you, especially if you don't
know them as much, say something you're curious
or kind of uncertain about or would like to
learn a little bit more. I'll give you just
one minute for that.
From the sound of things, there’s quite
a lot of curiosity
in the room. So, I'm pretty happy about that.
What I'm going to talk about is just a little
bit on the kinds of the challenges and opportunities,
and how to think about building a really open
minded community. To do that, I'm going to
create a little contrast, going back two and
a half thousand years, to two sorts of communities
that did exist. And how any community can
be like one of these in different ways.
The first is ancient Sparta. Sparta is an
amazing city-state, entirely built around
trying to build the perfect army. And so,
communities in general can be more or less
like trying to be an army. The idea is, you've
got this single goal. You've really got something
you're trying to achieve. If you want to achieve
this goal, you want to enforce conformity
of beliefs, and conformity of values. Conformity
with respect to what the end goals are. You
also want a kind of hierarchy as well, so
that it's unquestioned who you listen to and
whose views are less important. That’s one
model I think you can have for the sort of
ideal community you can aspire towards.
Second, in contrast, is ancient Athens, and
it's very different what the Athenians prized.
It was not so much having a goal: instead
they were in the marketplace of ideas. It
was really cherishing open ended discussion,
and following the argument wherever it leads.
It was also the case that, there was far less
conformity of ideas. It was much more about
celebrating diversity, celebrating disagreement,
and not the same sort of hierarchy as in Sparta.
Socrates could accost someone in the square,
and the idea – at least with the ideals
they had – was that the best argument would
win. And so when I present these two (Athens
and Sparta), the question is, well, what sort
of community do we want to be? I bet you're
all thinking Sparta because they look badass.
No, I'm imagining most of you are thinking
in this setup: “Obviously we want to be
more like the Athenians and less like the
Spartans.” It's true that there were many,
many benefits for the kind of Athenian sort
of community over the Spartan. One is just,
well, what if you're wrong about your goal?
What if you're aiming at the wrong thing or
at least some of your beliefs are incorrect?
It seems like social or intellectual movements
in general can suffer from this problem where
certain beliefs become indicators of tribal
membership.
So if you look at the environmentalist movement,
for example, it really cares about environmental
destruction, about climate change above anything,
but then also one of its core beliefs, at
least very commonly, is also being against
nuclear power, which from my perspective seems
just completely insane. It seems like this
is an amazing partial solution to the problem
of climate change, but it's been debarred
because certain attitudes to nuclear power
are just part of what it means to be part
of the environmentalist movement. That seems
pretty bad.
There are other benefits in favor of the more
Athenian approach as well. One is you've got
a broader appeal – you’re no longer having
to select on a very narrow set of beliefs
and preferences or values, and that means
you can have a much wider appeal.
Athenian communities are possibly less fragile
as well. You avoid the narcissism of small
differences, people are more comfortable with
disagreement, and so there's perhaps less
of a risk from the infighting which so often
plagues other social and intellectual movements.
But I think the main thing I want to convey
is that actually, there is a genuine tension
between being Athenian or Spartan. It's a
genuinely deep problem. And the main reason
is, have you ever tried to get a group of
philosophers to do anything? It's extremely
difficult! I was at a philosophy conference
just a couple of weeks ago and we were trying
to get everyone to go to the bar after the
conference. It takes about an hour to rally
everyone together. Finally, you get people
moving in the right direction and they all
follow each other, so they don't actually
know where they're going. And then we get
to the bar and everyone stops outside and
just has their conversation. And if you ask
them, why have we stopped, they're like, “Oh,
I don't know. I guess the, um, you can't get
in or something.” No one thought about the
very final stage which is opening the door
and going in. And this is a problem because
we as a community, we really want to achieve
things. We think we’ve really got big problems
in the world, and we want to solve them.
If there's something that's good about building
an army, it’s that they’re very good about
doing things. And so, there are real benefits
of conformity of beliefs and conformity of
values. You get to solve principal agent problems.
You know if someone has the same beliefs and
values as you, and you tell them to do something,
that they're going to pursue that goal. And
they’ll pursue it basically the same way
you would: you don't have to spend effort
and resources checking up on them. Also it
means you can have extremely high levels of
trust as well. In general, it's actually kind
of like the shared aims community that we
talked about a lot last year. It's very powerful,
the level of cooperation and coordination
you can have if everyone has the same beliefs
and same values. I also think there are structural
reasons for some pressure that pushes communities
towards being more like Sparta and less like
Athens.
One is just because if there are organizations
that are wanting to do something, they're
going to want to hire people who have similar
worldviews, and have similar beliefs because
they're going to be able to work better together.
Or if they're providing training or help to
someone, it’ll seem like a better deal for
them if they can do that to someone who's
going to act more like they would think is
the right way to act. So again, you're gonna
get preferential assistance provided to people
who have beliefs and values that are more
like the mainstream. Then also, as a community
grows, you more and more are going to have
to start relying on social epistemology. You're
going to have to start deferring to certain
people because there’s not enough time for
everyone to scrutinize everything all at once.
And again, that's very good! In fact, it's
vital. We wouldn't be able to have a sophisticated
number of beliefs if we didn't do that, but
it becomes much more fragile because a lot
of weight is being put on the views of a smaller
number of people. So I think it's no surprise
that when you look around at different social
movements, they often have this Spartan army
mentality. I think it’s kind of the way
humans are programmed. And that means that
we can’t just blindly say: “Oh yeah, of
course – Athens – we’re free thinkers.
We want to be questioning everything, that's
what we're like.” Instead, it's going to
require quite a bit more work. And the solution
is that we want to try and get the best of
both worlds.
In a slogan, I think we want to try and build
an army of philosophers. I think I'm the first
person to ever have suggested this idea, but
I'm going to stand by it. I think there's
a few ways in which we can actually make this
happen. So one is having a community that
– and this is a core part of the effective
altruist project – is having a community
that's based on a higher order level of meta
than many other communities. It's not about
any particular belief, but it's about three
things which are all quite abstractly stated.
1. A decision theoretic idea of trying to
maximize rather than just satisfice (or, do
“enough”) good.
2. An epistemological view which is being
very aligned with science, being kind of broadly
Bayesian in the way we think about things.
3. Set values where firstly, we just think
everyone counts equally, and then we also
think that promoting wellbeing is among the
most important things we could be doing right
now.
I think, importantly, that does actually rule
out a lot of different possible views in the
world. I think it'd be really bad to start
defining effective altruism so broadly that
everything counts. I have a friend who I asked,
what do you think effective altruism is? He
said, “I think effective altruism is acting
with integrity.” And obviously, that's way
too broad. Then this community is just everyone,
because everyone wants to aspire to that.
But at the same time, there's still a huge
possibility to have differing beliefs about
how you do the most good and differing values
as well because within this kind of broad
idea of impartiality and welfare, there's
still tons of opportunity to have differences.
One potential solution is noting that what
unifies us is a meta-level agreement and that
can still unify us even if we have very different
views at the object level. Another is then
just having really strong coordination norms.
Part of the push towards being more like Sparta
is because it's so helpful with coordination.
It means you can have trust in others. You
don't have to check up on people to see how
they're doing. But if we have very strong
norms where people coordinate, where even
if we have very different views, we still
trust each other and work together, then the
additional benefits of having conformity of
beliefs and values are lessened to quite an
extent.
I actually think we do really well in this
as a community. We emphasized that a lot last
year. And then another solution is a cultural
one, where people feel trusted and safe in
the ability to express more unusual views.
You're able to disagree with others without
being disagreeable, without getting angry,
without feeling like you’re going to be
kind of alienated or pushed out or criticized
in some way, just for having a different set
of views. I think that's extremely important
as well. And that's something we want to put
the spotlight on for this conference. And
so with that in mind, I'm going to propose
an experiment that we can all try for this
weekend: no idea how it will go, but we'll
find out.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once had this blog post
which is about holding a New Day where you
don't visit a website you've visited before,
you don't read any books you've read before,
you just do everything completely new, including
when you become aware of yourself using any
thought you’ve thunk before, then muse on
something else. I was inspired by this. I
think we can have the idea of taking one belief,
one view that you have that is particularly
dear to you, that really is an important assumption
to your whole view of the world and try your
best, at least for some of the conference,
to believe the opposite.
When I first saw this, I was like, this could
really be carnage. You've got people not believing
in gravity and like walking off the building
and so on. Maybe don't go that far. Here are
examples of some views that are like particularly
commonly held within effective altruism and
at least for some of the time you might want
to try thinking... perhaps you're at a talk
and you think “Well, I'm at this talk that
I agree with. How would this look if I had
the opposite of this assumption that I'm questioning?”
Or, in fact, go to talks that would only make
sense for you to go to if you had the opposite
of this belief, or deliberately find the people
who you disagree with, and don't try and get
into an argument about who’s right. Instead,
really try and see what the world looks like
from that other perspective.
Part of the reason I'm interested in experimenting
with this is I think very often, at least
when we hold a particular view, it's not so
much that we have reasons on one side and
the other and assess that, but it's more that
the particular view is part of an overall
worldview, and it makes sense given that worldview.
And then if you can try and switch that you
can maybe start to see, wow, how does everything
look, how does everything fit together if
you have a very different worldview? So I
think the approach is actually similar to
simulated annealing in machine learning where
the ideas, rather than simply optimizing on
whatever belief change looks best on the margin,
sometimes – regularly – you just do something
completely random. And the reason this happens
with machine learning is to avoid a local
optimum, where you think, well, any particular
change I make just now looks worse, looks
less plausible, but then that means you're
stuck, while there's actually perhaps some
better worldview that fits as a package together.
Going back to the list of new ideas we could
have, avoid what Scott Alexander calls a “50
more Stalins” approach where – for example
– perhaps you're someone who thinks that
AI timelines are very short or something.
Avoid then saying: “Well, imagine if I thought
they were even shorter!” That's not in the
spirit of what I'm thinking. Instead try something
that is actually quite core to you.
So in my own case, why I'm going to try is,
I have a certain view on philosophical methodology,
that places a lot of weight on simple theories,
elegance and explanatory power, even if that
means overturning a lot of our common sense
intuitions, and so I'm going to try and invert
that. I'm going to try and think, well, how
would I start to see the world if I actually
thought: “Philosophical arguments don't
have a very good track record. Why should
I trust this abstract reasoning when my particular
intuitions seem so correct to me?” And this
is going to be hard for me. It would mean
believing that my entire career to date has
been a waste of time, but I'm at least going
to give it a go.
So if you find me, and you want to accost
me in some sort of a philosophical argument,
I'll try my best to be an intuitionist rather
than one of the theory people. I want you
to try and experiment with this over
the course of the conference. If you find
you have interesting experiences as well,
if you have some updates for ways in which
you think wow, that actually changed my worldview
a little bit, or at least understood what
it seems like to have a different worldview,
then please do just email me at will@effectivealtruism.org,
and I'll try and mention some of the interesting
updates people have had. I'll do it anonymously
in the closing talk as well. Perhaps it will
be a total disaster in which case I'll pretend
I never suggested it.
This is the idea of staying curious. For this
weekend, really try and indulge your curiosity,
really try and think “What are the things
I really wish I'd figured out? Those assumptions
that I've been acting on for quite a while,
but that I really want to scrutinize.”
And yeah, hope you have a great time. Thank
you.
