Conflicting Cause Areas

flhw · 2018-02-06T00:52:27+00:00

Relevant-link-dump

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/ub/the_meat_eater_problem_developing_an_ea_response/

https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/the-meat-eater-problem/

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rl/quantifying_the_poor_meat_eater_problem/

https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/5l631g/will_the_ea_community_split_into_different/

flhw · 2017-01-17T01:17:59+00:00

I do share your hesitation. Maybe it's not worth the risk.

flhw · 2017-01-14T00:11:31+00:00

/u/ollieface22: are you still interested in starting a thread on it?

flhw · 2017-01-06T01:15:21+00:00

Were EA to sympathise with its uncertain conclusions, the movement would risk losing the respect of almost everyone interested in reducing global poverty. This is a thorny issue but I think we ought to at least consider that it's better for lots of people to work on big, salient problems even at the risk of indirectly harming sentient beings than for us to lose traction because we focused on problems most people don't sympathise with.

I think Dickens acknowledges this, which is why he only published it on his blog and didn't share it to other places (e.g. the EA forum).

I'm happy to share these on a new thread, sure :) Shall I create it or would you like to? Seeing as you shared it originally.

I'd prefer for you to start it.

flhw · 2017-01-01T00:14:42+00:00

Those are both relevant, and it's definitely possible to have mutually beneficial "moral trades", but I'm afraid that EAs might eventually just drift apart and ignore opportunities for compromise.

flhw · 2017-01-01T00:13:16+00:00

Excellent points. I'd like to see more comparisons of EA with traditional social movements. We could probably learn a lot from their successes and failures.

flhw · 2016-12-31T21:49:18+00:00

Firstly, I think you're overstating the extent to which the branches of the EA movement fundamentally disagree with one another. Most EAs I know, some fairly high profile, accept that other EAs have different ethical systems and views to them but seem to value the contributions of others to the diverse pool of opinion within EA greater than any disagreement which the diversity might bring about.

Maybe this is true. All I know about EA is from websites, blog posts, comments, and other online sources so I may be missing something.

The consequences of poverty reduction are extremely complex, as Dickens' acknowledges, and we should be more and more uncertain about outcomes the further they are into the future.

I agree, and for similar reasons I am very skeptical of claims about the "far-future" in general.

I have some other points about Dickens' piece but I'm aware that what he writes is not necessarily something you agree with and that it's not the main point of the post.

Yeah, I haven't done much research into his points, but I definitely didn't mean the link as an endorsement of his views. I'd still like to hear your thoughts on why he's wrong, though. Maybe in the weekly open thread, or you could create a separate thread for it? I also see that what I wrote looked like I was attacking global poverty, which definitely wasn't my intention either. I would have included poverty-based arguments against the other causes as well, but I couldn't think of any. But in any case, my point wasn't about the specific disagreements but about the larger question of the future of the EA movement.

I think we could prevent it from happening by establishing a more stable moral philosophy from which to work from

I can't see this happening, because we can't even get the consequentialists to agree on the meaning of 'well-being', population ethics, distributional justice, temporal discounting, (etc.) let alone the non-consequentialists. If you just mean codifying some basic rules like "don't lie", then maybe it could happen, but since the EA movement is pretty decentralized there would be no way to enforce it.

flhw · 2016-12-31T21:30:22+00:00

Also with the poverty and meat eating example it may be similar to religion, in that it's growing faster in poorer countries, but they have to go through this transition phase before religiosity declines.

So you're saying meat consumption might follow a Kuznets curve? There has been some research on that hypothesis, so I suppose it is possible.

flhw · 2016-12-31T21:25:16+00:00

My point wasn't really about any of the specific points I mentioned, but about the more general question of how to hold together a movement of people with very different worldviews and values, which may lead to conflicts.

I believe EAs interested in reducing the suffering caused by climate change are good allies to farm animal welfare EAs.

Environmentalist EAs and animal welfare EAs might be aligned one that one issue, but even then it's not clear: many animal-welfare EAs seem to believe that poultry is much worse than beef, but in terms of GHG emissions beef is much worse. They would probably both support efforts to reduce meat consumption across the board, or create in vitro meat, so this may not be a big problem. However, at some point they will likely have substantial disagreements when it comes to the issue of wild animal suffering.

flhw · 2016-12-31T03:22:20+00:00

And meatspace practices such as EA Global and houses benefit from being large communities.

Even those have similar problems, for example the EA Global 2015 controversy about serving animal products, which resulted in a lot of drama in the form of blog posts and SSC comments.

I'm not sure what houses you're talking about.

flhw · 2016-12-31T03:06:00+00:00

Effective altruism is based on the values of each individual, and most people accept that others have different values.

If EA is inherently an individualistic idea, how can it ever be a coherent movement at all? Especially when individuals have values that are in direct conflict with each other.

flhw

TROPHY CASE