Frankly, yeah. I’m getting rather tired by the conversation, not bothering to check what’s been said.
A big issue I have is that I really don’t see where the fraud thing is getting us to. There are too many back-and-forth, and it’s too long.
It seems to depend a lot on definition of the term (fraud), and it’s a word that I find really blurry. So yeah, if you had a specific definition in mind, I certainly contradicted myself, and I used it poorly.
If you have an opportunity for me to improve animal activism, can you just tell it to me?
What is the thing you’d recommend doing? That’s just what I want to know.
It’s disrespectful of me, my time, and my forum to make careless posts.
I outlined an opportunity, regarding fraud, and you were dismissive.
You’re trying to solve very large, hard problems. I don’t have a short, easy answer.
You’re trying to solve complex problems. I don’t have a simple answer that you will immediately see is great. To accurately evaluate activist projects requires complex concepts and abstract thinking.
I can give you a concrete example: I looked at Tyson’s website and quickly found red flags for likely fraud. I don’t currently advise starting a lawsuit, contacting a regulator or doing a PR campaign about Tyson. More research, planning and conceptual understanding are needed before deciding what actions to take.
In summary, Tyson advertises that they have unbiased, independent beef audits, but actually uses a single auditor with deep ties to the meat industry. The auditor is so biased that they have anti-animal-activist propaganda on their public website. I don’t know how biased/corrupt/false their actual audits are, but I think activists could find out if they cared enough.
Fraud is a widespread problem accross all large companies, and improving fraud enforcement in society could potentially make many things better at once. It’s also an approach which an 80% majority of people could easily be in favor of. There are difficulties too, but if you understood the upsides you would be willing to look into it more and consider ways to overcome those difficulties. You’d also be more interested if you better understood how counter-productive the drawn-out, tribalist, polarizing fighting is, so you cared more to find an alternative. You’d also be more interested if you learned the classical liberal perspective on fraud – what it is, how bad it is, why it matters, etc.
You give up on root cause solutions because they seem too hard. You’d be better off reading political philosophy books instead of pursuing local optima solutions. Or, in the alternative, you could listen more to people who did that reading and studying. I can study books and then figure out what approaches they imply. Then you don’t have to do a bunch of work as a scholar. But that division of labor doesn’t work if you and other activists won’t listen to my conclusions. Expecting me to explain the books to you, so that you can understand for yourself (but keep it far shorter than the books, and make it intuitive and easy for you), is unreasonable – if you want personal understanding, you have to do more of your own study. (The division of labor approach also requires you to have a good approach to figuring out which experts to listen to and how to handle disagreements between experts.)
Tyson also has a heavily greenwashed sustainability website which likely contains lots of fraud. (Getting Tyson to make a greenwashed site where they claim to favor sustainability is an example of something activists might think is a victory, but which I have several reasons to think is counter-productive.)
It turns out I was wrong, as you suggested: I misrepresented the extent to which factory farm companies were committing fraud.
You might be interested in this report by The Humane League that I had not read yet:
It asserts that:
This report focuses on the USDA’s slaughterhouse inspections records from a span of six months in 2021, which document regulatory noncompliance at 300 of the 320 federally inspected poultry slaughterhouses in the US, including plants operated by industry giants like Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, Perdue Foods, and Koch Foods
This report dwelves into some detail about the laws regulating slaugterhouses, and how factory farms companies are breaking it.
So indeed animal activists have had some interest on the fraud done by factory farms, recorded things and took action on the topic.
I also found other actions related to fraud, like filling lawsuits to stop false advertising, or to overturn laws that criminalize whistle blowing.
Of course, I mentioned fraud relating specifically to animal welfare - I fail to see how getting Tyson to be sued because of greenwashing on its website would change much for the lives of animals. Fighting Tyson on corporate campaigns to adopt reforms that aren’t controversial (like no cages for chicken) appears to be as hard as fighting Tyson over fraud on another topic. But the former would yield more results for animals.
As for improving fraud enforcement in general, I understand the rationale behind it, and why it could in theory lead to good outcomes. But many, many groups of people have tried to change things in that regard, so I don’t think it is that neglected - it’s just extremely difficult to obtain serious results here (especially as it requires going against very big companies and entrenched interest). The fact that there is still widespread fraud in many sectors of the economy, despite the fact that fighting fraud is uncontroversial, is indicative of that.
Moreover, even if it were easier to fight fraud, that would not guarantee that the living conditions of animals would significantly improve - that would still require strong laws in favor of animal welfare.
But on this topic I redirect toward @Lebowski’s answer which I think is very good. Fighting fraud is uncontroversial, but actually making laws to enforce it is controversial and often involves people fighting, if only to get people to care about the specific law.
Of course, I may change my mind if I see ways of fighting fraud that actually led to some results for animals. This may be linked to my personality, but in general, I prefer joining forces with something that has a good track record, instead of building something from the ground up with highly uncertain chances of success.
On your side, you seem to care more about fraud specifically and are more well versed into political philosophy, so you may be more motivated than me at taking action on this issue. If you manage to get a good track record at fighting against fraud (relying on the uncontroversial nature on the topic) and getting laws adopted, then I would be interested. That would be promising.
In the meantime, I think I will leave the conversation for now. Thanks for your time, and I wish you a good year 2023.
You were wrong. Now you’re leaving before you can be corrected about anything else.
Your position is basically “I was wrong about step 1 in this line of reasoning, but Elliot is wrong about step 2”. You say this before I’ve spoken about step 2. You prevented me from speaking about step 2 yet by incorrectly fighting me on step 1. Now you’ve rushed ahead to speak a little on step 2, before me, then quit before I got to say anything about it.
You should expect that, given you were completely wrong about step 1, you might also be wrong about step 2. Instead, you’re confident now that step 2 goes your way, just as you were confident before that step 1 goes your way. You’re immediately repeating the same arrogant error.
Any activist who truly cared would not give up the opportunity to potentially be corrected again, by a smart person with a different perspective who has ideas to share, after you were just corrected. You said you wanted to see results, see a track record, etc. I succeeded. I was right and you were wrong. That’s a result. I’m better at discussion and reasoning than you. We just had a practical demonstration. But instead of being impressed and wanting more of the same, you’re leaving.
Not caring about your errors, and not wanting more corrections, shows you don’t respect your own intellect and judgment, which is actually fine and reasonable – you don’t know what you’re talking about. But in that case you shouldn’t be donating half your income based on your poor judgment and your trust in certain leaders. You’re being exploited. You should set aside the money and potentially donate it later instead of rushing to give it away now when you’re so ignorant and irrational.
There are approaches to fraud that have been tried, and other approaches that haven’t. You’re dismissive and leaving before you can find out about opportunities and fix some of your ignorance. Just when we made a major breakthrough, you rush to make a bunch of fresh assertions, then quit, showing you don’t actually care about the breakthrough. That means most of what you said in the conversation were dishonest excuses, not your real reasoning. That’s why instead of a breakthrough being useful and impressive to you, it’s just a hassle for you – you don’t want your excuses to be torn down and are running away as you run out of them because you don’t want to ever get to the heart of the matter about what is going on with your motivations and reasoning.
Just so you know, I disagree that @Lebowski’s answer is good. I think it is actually very bad & misleading social posturing.
This is something he has a history of doing on this forum. He writes misleading posts that mis-frame the conversation and what the other person has said so far. It can be very hard to unwind what he has said, and point out all the parts where he has mis-framed or misrepresented another person’s words or point. There are some examples in the history of the forum, but it is a lot of work to even read through them and understand all the parts and all the dishonesty in his posts. Because of this, I try not to talk to him directly at all.
I think the post that you are talking about is another example of him mis-framing a discussion.
I also disagree with what I take to be the main points in his post, but I don’t want to get into discussions with him, so I didn’t try replying to it. (For example, he called murder a “steelman” example, but it’s actually a straw man example, imo. There are really big issues with prosecuting murders which don’t come up at all with fraud violations. One big issue is that murder was a one time act which was usually not recorded or even witnessed and was perpetrated by an unknown individual. It is very hard to catch murderers. But the corporations are openly committing fraud in ways that are recorded and witnessed by multiple individuals, and they are often committing it openly over and over again on a daily basis, in a way that would be very easy to catch if anyone cared. We have so much more evidence of fraud happening than we do of actual murders happening.)
Prosecuting fraud that corporations commit is something that we could get agreement on right now from a lot of different people, not just animal activists. And it would be beneficial to a lot of different causes, not just to animal rights. Overall, it would be able to do way more good to society than just fighting for animal rights. It would help with such a huge number of things, including malnutrition, homelessness, building fires, building & infrastructure collapses, medical mistreatment, sexual assault & rapes, airplane crashes, car crashes.
It doesn’t make sense to me to avoid putting effort into something that could do so much good for humanity, and so much good for so many different causes, and instead have all these causes insist on individually putting their effort into only very small, parochial things, which will only help their very specific cause. (And in some instances don’t help their overall cause at all, and instead just move people from doing one type of harm to doing another type of harm.)
Yeah, I didn’t respond to Lebowski partly due to ongoing problems and his disinterest in self-improvement. And partly because the post was such low quality and so misleading. It’s just nasty office politics. The post basically agreed with me and backed up my claims, but presented itself as disagreeing (partly by jumping ahead to issues I hadn’t yet spoken about, and then expressing some initial difficulties involved, which I already knew about and agree are real problems that need some solutions, but which I don’t react to by immediately giving up).
Partly, the post acted like it was disagreeing with me, then said my ideas (including some parts I was going to say but hadn’t gotten to yet), which is a typical office politics way of taking credit for other people’s ideas.
Instead of presenting himself as agreeing with me and backing me up, he mostly reached my conclusions while framing it like they were his own new ideas and I was somehow wrong. Saying some of my ideas that I hadn’t said yet was also interfering in a discussion where I was purposefully trying to go step by step. (Also what enabled Lebowski to jump ahead and predict some of the ideas I would have said next? Because he’s been reading my articles for many years, is familiar with my perspective, and is able to pick up on where I’m going with my arguments more than most people. I’ve already talked about a lot of the same stuff elsewhere, and he’s read it.)
The worst example of low quality was:
This was said after @CorentinBiteau was very clear that he denies they’re breaking the law. It’s either completely disrespecting CB and denying he and his ideas exist, or an accident due to not paying any attention to the thread before joining in (but even just skimming my recent posts would reveal CB’s position, which I’d been talking about too, so there’s no way there could be a reasonable accident).
Basically, Lebowski was saying here that obviously I’m right, and it’s uncontroversial and no one disagrees. That was his comment regarding the current issue I was debating with CB. So that’s strong agreement with the thing I was claiming, not with CB!
But CB responded based on the social vibes Lebowski was putting out, rather than the specific text that mistreated him. CB is vulnerable to office politics, and that kind of stuff is one of the way EA is able to trick and exploit him and others.
It’s hard to argue with Lebowski because he put out social vibes and framing that I’m wrong, but the actual substance of his post basically agreed with me. So to reply, I’d have to argue with stuff he said between the lines or by implication, rather than the primary text, which is way harder.
Sorry for leaving abruptly, I owe you a deeper explanation.
I don’t disagree that enforcing laws that fight fraud more efficiently is good.
In fact, I absolutely agree with that. I would also like to be less fraud, and less abuse by big companies.
I have also underestimated the extent to which animal charities were also trying to fight fraud. And I used a poor definition that led me to say that factory farms were doing it less fraud than they actually did. They’re certainly not innocent.
So yes, fraud is important.
However, there is the question of what I can actually do with this information. I (personally) am looking for things that are actionable.
As I said, my strategy involves joining something with a track record that shows that this strategy worked, to some extent. There are several reasons for that:
A core idea from Effective Altruism is that charity is hard. Clever plans conceived by brilliant researchers often don’t actually improve the world. Most well-intentioned, well-conceived plans falter on contact with reality. It has taken exhaustive trial and error and volumes of empirical research to establish even the most basic things about what works and what doesn’t to improve peoples’ lives.
I am not good at taking initiatives and launching projects. I’m getting better, but this requires a lot of personal development, so I need time.
Executing a good idea is much harder than coming up with one. If the idea you propose requires skills like governance, setting up a good team with the right people, structures and processes, I simply do not have the skills to do that. Maybe in the future, but not right now.
This is just a position I have, but I’m looking for things with high short to medium term impact. This is related to the big changes I anticipate due to peak oil and resources depletion that make me uncertain about the value of long term actions, like education (again, we might not agree).
So this is why I rather tend to follow stuff that already showed that it worked, to some extent. Since so many great ideas fail, I tend to be wary of stuff that is untested, no matter how promising (this is one reason I’m unconvinced by the research on AI safety in EA). I’m just not the right fit for launching an entirely new project, whether it is a campaign against fraud or something else.
A good example is actually from animal charities. They spent a lot of time trying to convince people to go vegetarian. But the data seems to show that there is not much evidence that works. One of the reasons is that, as you said, convincing people (so fighting against their current position) is hard.
But a few charities switched to doing corporate action, like The Humane League I mentioned. This involves much less fighting - since the public is usually saying it is against cages (>80% in French surveys), and the campaigns make people realize that they’ve been misled by meat companies. It involves putting some pressure, but less than suing companies for fraud (it’s faster than a lawsuit, and most companies tend to follow through when a big competitor has commited to change).
So there is a good track record here - securing cage-free commitments from Yum! Brands or Sodexo.
If a project to achieve better fraud fighting led to such results, I’d certainly join forces.
So I’m not saying that fighting fraud is a bad idea - quite the opposite. I think it’s valuable. I’m just saying that I’m not the right fit for launching a project aiming to do that. If this were an ongoing project with a good track record, I’d be interested.
It’s just that I’ve seen so many great theoretical ideas fall apart when it came to the actual implementation - I have trouble trusting ideas that weren’t tested. We might not agree on that, and probably have different opinions about the value of what could work in theory.
This is why I don’t feel like I was the profile you hoped to talked to - somebody more keen to take risks and launch new stuff would have been a better suit. But as I said, if your idea were to show good results, I’d be interested!
You’re putting inaccurate words in my mouth. Stop speaking for me. I did not ask to talk to someone fitting that profile. You are making up untruths about me, and introducing these brand new false claims into the conversation right as you leave. That is not OK. This is part of a pattern of misquoting-adjacent posting by you.
You’re making up excuses for leaving and ending the conversation. You have an agenda – to save face and get out of here – and don’t care what’s true or whether your comments have negative effects on other people.
I was not asking you to take risks or launch new stuff. I was telling you that the stuff you were donating to is poor quality, is exploiting you, and is often counter-productive. You said you were open to considering this and that you appreciated my kindness to try to help you, but you’ve clearly been biased against hearing it and have at multiple times treated me as an enemy.
Now you’re leaving after finding out you were badly wrong, in order to avoid finding out what else you’re wrong about.
I wasn’t suggesting that you start a charity or try to begin any new activist project. I gave examples during a discussion, as you asked for.
You never let me finish explaining. You derailed my explanations by fighting with one of my first premises (that factory farms do lots of fraud) so that I wouldn’t get to say other more advanced and important stuff. Now you’re trying to rush out the door before the important stuff gets said. You use one tactic after another to avoid rational planning, resist accurate project evaluation, etc.
You’re being led by people with anti-liberal values to do anti-liberal activism. You’re indoctrinated so much that when I bring up things like peace and social harmony, you are oppositional instead of interested. Your leaders hate the advocates of liberalism, like Mises and Hazlitt – and don’t want to ever say why or give arguments. They have enough control over you to keep you from ever learning about liberalism. Or about Goldratt and how to make project planning actually work.
Yeah, EA doesn’t know how to plan effectively. EA leaders are poor intellectuals who use the wrong planning methods. That doesn’t prove that planning with other methods, like Goldratt’s, would not work.
Trial and error only works if you know what is an error and what is a success. You keep talking about track records and results, but you don’t understand how those are interpreted through lenses like EA’s anti-liberal values. Meanwhile, I interpret success and failure very differently through my lens of liberal values and rational philosophy.
You should recognize that you don’t know enough to allocate a bunch of money. You’re poorly informed on what activists are doing, what activists should be doing, how to evaluate the results of activism, or what helps anti-liberal causes. Save your money to potentially donate later after you learn more. Stop rushing into the wrong causes. You are part of the problem. Millions of people acting like you is one of the main reasons the world is such a mess (but you’re doing more harm than most because you donate more and take more actions).
We discussed and we found out that you were wrong about a claim you had high confidence in. It’s time to do a post mortem of what root causes led to your error, followed by analyzing what other errors they would lead to, followed by fixing those other errors. Until you have that figured out, you should stop your activism and other risky activities. Your confidence is calibrated incorrectly. You finding out that you were wrong is a concrete demonstration and practical result of our discussion, but you’re interpreting it incorrectly and trying to end discussion before finding out what else you’re wrong about. EA leaders are taking advantage of you and have influenced you to do this; they want ignorant young people donating for their agendas who are too impatient to reach conclusions in discussions.
CB says so many problematic things, but responding to each one isn’t a reasonable or effective approach.
E.g. he said he had 80-90% confidence that animals can suffer and then later started saying 90% because that number was more in his favor given what was being said in the later discussion. That’s bias.
Or he asked me for an example of a cause that I’m over 90% confidence is productive not counter-productive. I gave some like vitamin A for anti-blindness, and he responded that there are debates about how effective it is (that is, the degree of effectiveness above zero, not whether the effectiveness is above or below zero). That kind of context dropping was a reoccurring problem. I tried to be tolerant and discuss anyway but it’s very hard to deal with people who keep getting things wrong and then lose patience with discussion due to their own errors derailing their discussions.
It’s amazing to me that CB goes on about track records and results (while never engaging with the need for interpretation), then says EA has a track record of their planning being wrong and ineffective. But then instead of saying “OK EA is bad as their track record shows” he just interprets it as planning itself not working. Why then are other people able to plan more successfully than EA? Has he thought seriously about all the apparently successful examples of planning in the world and created an informed, serious opinion that none of them actually worked? No. He just makes biased excuses for the people who he’s giving way too much money to.
It doesn’t take “exhaustive trial and error and volumes of empirical research to establish even the most basic things about what works and what doesn’t to improve peoples’ lives”.
For example:
It’s better to have a backpack with some basic items in it instead of a garbage bag.
This does work to improve people’s lives. No exhaustive trial and error is needed to know that.
You need lots of research when you’re working on hard, complex, controversial causes, which involve fighting with people, and many of which are wrong. EA often tries to do clever things instead of using common sense. You could instead do easier, simpler things that are actually good.
Doing hard, clever things is not necessarily bad but it can more easily go wrong. But it’s an error to say that charity is just inherently that hard. It isn’t. That’s due to the types of causes you’re choosing. You choose hard causes then say charity is hard.
If you insist on doing hard things that require great intellectual leaders to be effective, then you could find people with track records of successful planning, or could learn from authors who know about planning. Just taking people who come up with bad plans, that don’t work, and calling them “brilliant” is a biased refusal to face the reality that their track record is bad. Calling plans “well-conceived” which failed in reality is a refusal to care about their track record. Plans that fail were usually not well-conceived.
This is largely irrelevant since I’ve been arguing that various things are counter-productive (in other words, have negative impact). Short time preference is no excuse for doing harm. CB has never appeared to seriously consider this. His reactions about counter-productive causes have repeatedly given me the impression he’s only hearing that maybe the positive impact is lower than he thought, but he’s not actually listening to and considering what I’m saying.
Also, if CB’s take on energy informs his approach to other activism, then we should have been talking about energy the whole time. He had his explicit choice of topics and chose animals over energy. Why would you choose the dependent topic over the independent one if you actually believe your approach to one topic depends on the other? This seems like an excuse tacked on at the end – throwing argument spaghetti at the wall – a Gish gallop as LW sometimes calls it – rather than a serious position. It’d probably fall apart under further discussion just like denying that factory farms commit fraud or other lawbreaking did. It unfortunately looks like another comment made in bad faith. It looks like CB doesn’t expect follow up discussion to happen, so he thinks he can get away with shoddy excuses on his way out the door.
The bigger picture is that (to the best of both my and CB’s knowledge) neither EA nor animal activism has anyone willing and able to do better than CB in discussion. (I take that to be the best of CB’s knowledge or else he’d ask that other person to talk with me, or tell me where to find them, or something. Plus I brought this up before and he didn’t contradict me.)
Remembering your ideas that you said in a discussion is easy if they are seriously-considered opinions you’ve held continuously for years before the discussion started. Whereas if you make stuff up for local optima tactical reasons, it’s hard to track what you said – just like people who spin webs of lies struggle to keep track of everything they made up.
It’s hard to deal with people who post unstable ideas but won’t admit what they’re doing and will likely get offended and deny it (out of defensiveness, not truth seeking) if you accuse them of doing it. As usual, discussion problems boil down to dishonesty.
If you struggle to remember your own ideas that you said in a discussion, that’s a huge indicator of posting half-baked, unstable ideas. Those are not suitable for debate. Why ask other people to criticize ideas that you haven’t applied serious self-criticism to? You’re wasting people’s time and misleading them by implying that criticism of those ideas you said would actually matter.
People seem to hate differentiating between their serious opinions (that they will stand behind and take responsibility for) and their ad hoc claims that they will just change later. They want the flexibility to see which ones are working better and emphasize those. If you need that kind of flexibility, just admit “I don’t know”. Then honestly discuss the consequences of that – what can and should you do about that situation? You can discuss that using simple statements and ideas for which you do know something.
1- If you ask me to do a debate on a topic that looks important, because you think I made a mistake in my reasoning, I will accept
2 - I will answer until I recognize I am wrong on something, or I provide counterpoints to everything you say, or we both agree we have different hypotheses about the world and can’t come to an agreement
I didn’t think this was a good idea. He left out limitations to protect his time and give him ways to unilaterally exit discussions. He ignored large parts of what I say in my articles about debate policies. (He also failed to link to my articles or give me credit.)
CB wouldn’t listen to me about how to make a debate policy he could actually follow, and never seriously thought through and intended to follow his policy, but used parts of my ideas to help make himself sound rational.
Now he’s breaking his word, as was predictable. He didn’t bother to even remember that his policy existed, and make an excuse to pretend to follow it, when leaving his debate with me.
I hope he’ll at least retract the debate policy now, and replace it with an apology, instead of continuing to lie to people (and involving me in his lies).
Looking back, I made several mistakes. There are several things I could have done to lead to a conversation that ended better than this.
These mistakes I made include:
I should have noticed quickly that I did not use a good definition for fraud, and should have updated better to lead to a more productive discussion. I did not have a clear enough overview of the topic of the relationship between factory farms and fraud - this was an unstable idea and yet still engaged.
I handled poorly the end of the conversation, and got defensive. I’m used to conversations providing information faster, so I got impatient.
I answered too quickly to the fraud topic to understand what you were getting at. I still do not really understand exactly why you brought up the topic (since it was not to propose a new cause area), so I should have waited to know the full explanation of why you were proposing it.
I did not make it clear from the beginning that I was looking for things with a short to medium term payback because of energy constraints (I mentioned my position on energy but did not made the link correctly). I agree that if I thought I could afford to wait 30 more years to do more research, I would do that, but I do not think I have that time. Still, I should have mentioned that.
I did not get how to use correctly debate policies, and removed it on my profile
Leaving the conversation quickly was not kind to you. I was also not honest about one element that made me want to end the conversation quickly.
This is because of something I did not want to bring up since people usually dislike such feedback - but you said you appreciate honesty so I leave it in the following section if you wish to check.
Reasons
The reason I wanted to leave was because my faith that I can learn something productive from this conversation has been shaken. Maybe I entered the conversation expecting too much from someone who seemed to have a huge knowledge of rationality, but I started to have doubts.
In the first conversation on debate methodology, you did not provide much in the way of practical advice, despite me asking repeatedly. In the discussion about animal suffering, I expected a much higher level of proof than “It’s a tie when it comes to evidence, so let’s use Occam’s razor to decide” (this is a simpification on my part and not a quote) - especially when I’m not sure Occam’s razor points to your side and we’re talking about the suffering of most beings on Earth.
I got more worried when I checked recently the u/curi profile on LessWrong. I was rather disappointed to learn that it was the most downvoted account in the history of the website. I understand that being downvoted does not necessarily mean being wrong, but I imagine someone rational as being able to see reality correctly and to adapt and to do better if an approach is failing - such a number of downvotes is not indicative of that.
A worrying aspect was that people on the website underlined that they downvoted not because of the substance (although that’s a part for some conversations) - but because of your approach to communication, as conversations with you tended be to be too long and ended up with both side disagreeing. This was something I was starting to feel too. A possibility is that you’re right and all these people are wrong, as you’ll probably argue, but the chances are very slim (especially as what I read in [these conversations] seemed familiar (Open Letter to MIRI + Tons of Interesting Discussion - LessWrong)).
I feared I would end up like in the conversation with Lumifer [here] (Questions about AGI's Importance - LessWrong). This worried me, especially as the discussion on fraud seemed to be going nowhere (at least I didn’t understand the point you were trying to make).
Still, I did not say that explicitly and this did not allow for a productive end of conversation. I apologize for the harm caused.
Understood. Is it possible to understand what you were getting at? I still do not get where this topic leads to.
I did not say that, nor that planning never worked. I quoted from a link saying that poverty is very difficult to solve, with many, many people and charities failing to obtain results. The link did not say they were necessarily EAs. Although I can understand how you may have gotten that from the context. The link makes a more general point, so the best would be to read it directly.
Do you mean that other planning methods, like Golratt’s, have a better track record when it comes to fighting poverty?
I said, I quote, “Vitamin A is pretty good”.
I said there was more debate about deworming.
Does your point here still stand?
EAs working on global health and poverty use references like number of life saved, or number of years in good health saved, or DALY or QALY. For animals, it’s more blurry but it can be number of years affected for animals (although charities vary a lot, so other methods are usually used). These metrics can be debated (and they are - they also differ in other cause areas), but they provide a common framework for evaluation.
What do you think would be a better reference, using liberal values?
It is one thing to say that I underestimated the amount of fraud factory farms are doing (and to underestimate how much charities are already tackling it).
However, it is another thing to say that I am causing harm. This is a strong claim, and quite important. I think it requires a more precise explanation.
If I understand your point, it’s that controversial causes end up causing friction being a problem for peace and harmony. However, the charities I support mostly do corporate campaigns that, I think, should fill several of your criterias.
Cage free have a wide support (as I said, >85% in France)
Limited fighting (specific people in a few companies)
They have a large impact (millions of birds affected).
They have a history of quick victories
Of course, they’re not a panacea (as you said, factory farms without cages are still bad - they’re just less worse), but some progress has been made here.
For instance, let’s take on one hand a campaign that would lead to having a million chicken not boiled alive in factory farms. On the other hand, this would lead to some “controversy” by having a few communication campaigns showing that big companies are doing harm. Wouldn’t the suffering avoided outweigh the negative impact of the controversy? If yes, how would you calculate when the cost-benefits involved make it worth it?
I’m also not so sure that there are that many causes that are uncontroversial and do not require fighting AND high impact - or I’d like historical examples. For instance, you say in your post that seatbelts have >80% support. But in 1984, 65% of Americans opposed seat-belt laws, when they were made mandatory. By your logic, does that mean that the government should not have voted these laws, since they were leading to a lot of fighting?
I think the core difficulty is not to find something that works. It is to find something that is highly cost-effective, i.e. it impacts positively a lot of people per dollar. The Comfort Cases you linked to certainly does good - but it seems to be low impact, targeting a low number of people in a wealthy country. It’s $10 for a bag. For $7, you can protect a child from malaria. What is more important?
The best charities can have an impact 10 to 100 times greater than an average or poor charity. It’s of course better to target such charities - but it’s hard to know which ones can have such an impact. Hence the focus on research.
This is why I’m not looking for something that has no flaws. What I’m looking for is for something that is better that what I currently support - i.e. that has more impact per dollar, it improves more lives.
If you could provide that, I would be glad. Of course, I need solid evidence that it will work (which usually means testing and getting results). If I find something better with evidence that is works, then I would change.
I don’t think it will work well for me to attempt to explain ideas while you’re in the middle of leaving. And there are various other difficulties.
And I already wrote more explanations that I don’t think you’ve read, and which you haven’t engaged with even if you did read them. So if you wish to continue – if you want more explanations from me – you’re welcome to read and comment on what I already wrote down.
As you know, recommendations for books and articles are also available on topics like epistemology, project planning or liberalism.
I think the EA community doesn’t want or appreciate an energetic thinker who writes and records ~50 things critical of EA. Nor do they value a critic who has a bunch of background knowledge that most EAs do not have, and who therefore has different perspectives on the world – and perhaps challenges and undermines the foundations of EA.
It’s not an accident that EA thought leaders didn’t learn about and engage with those other ideas themselves already (some are well known; others more obscure but findable by motivated seekers).
For some ideas, some of EA’s intellectuals would claim they did already learn about and reject those ideas – but they won’t cite decisive refutations and couldn’t summarize the ideas in a way that an advocate would agree with. They don’t approach the matter in a way where I could learn why the ideas I believe are wrong and change my mind, nor will they take actions so that the disagreement could be resolved in favor of whatever is true.
There are many complex, interconnected issues which are hard to organize, untangle, evaluate, etc. I’m one of the few intellectuals who has been working on such things for a long time. I don’t think EA has any intellectuals who are seriously willing to try.
In a better world, you could share some of my points, and some literature I respect, with EAs (or I could) and they would either share pre-existing refutations that they were already familiar with or else some people would be interested and curious to learn more (either by learning about the ideas and/or by seeking out refutations by people who already learned and evaluated the ideas). And they’d pursue the matter until satisfied with the refutations they found or created, or until they changed their mind. (And then they’d share their refutations with anyone else who comes along and is interested in those ideas, and they would be interested in criticism of their refutations.) But we don’t live in that world.
This sort of irrationality is common, not unique to EA. But it makes EA, and many other groups, counter-productive.
As to the new reasons for ending discussion: I appreciate being told these reasons as against silence. But I think they’re bad reasons. I’ll explain:
I don’t know what you’re referring to and you haven’t given quotes or examples. If this was an important enough problem to play a significant role in your justification for quitting the conversation, you should have said so at the time instead of moving on.
You didn’t want to learn Popperian epistemology, which says that levels of proof are a misconception. Ideas are instead judged by rivals and refutations. (You also didn’t refute Popperian epistemology, so it’s inappropriate to reach conclusions premised on it being false.)
The rival theory you offered was uncertainty about how animals work and whether they suffer. You offered no refutation of my model of animals. Uncertainty is the correct conclusion when all positive claims are refuted, so to reach objective uncertainty they all have to be evaluated, which you didn’t do. You can of course reach personal uncertainty by simply not knowing enough. You choose not to study the matter enough to learn my hypothesis in detail, refute it, or reach objective uncertainty. (If anyone else agreed with you and did some of that work, you could cite it instead of doing everything yourself, but you didn’t do that either.) That was your choice, your decision. You now seem to be holding it against me.
You didn’t want to discuss abstract stuff too much, nor read philosophy literature, not cite philosophy literature to make arguments for you. But now you’re complaining that I didn’t give enough proof. You opted out of more proof-like parts of the discussion.
I attempted to be tolerant and helpful by finding productive ways to continue which met your preferences and requests. For example, I tried to explain why your uncertainty regarding whether animals suffer was adequate reason to try much harder to stay out of tribalist fights. I thought that was something we could productively discuss without you learning epistemology or learning my model of animals in detail.
Making some guesses that go beyond what you said, I think something very common is going on here: you find some other intellectuals are able to influence your conclusions more strongly and quickly than I do. So you think I’m worse by comparison. I disagree: I think they use manipulation as a short cut (they also tend to use claims which are more similar to what you already believe, so their job is easier). This is itself a big, complex topic (which I have pre-existing, high-effort, stable ideas about).
Among many huge problems with this, there’s the factual timeline. I engaged with LW three separate times and the results were: big downvotes in 2011, small downvotes in 2017, small upvotes in 2020. In other words, I did adapt. Even habryka (the person who banned me with no warning and no claim that I broke any rule) admitted: “I do also think his most recent series of posts and comments is overall much less bad than the posts and comments he posted a few years ago (where most of his negative karma comes from)”. (Note: I believe that’s factually inaccurate because I believe most of the downvotes were from 2011 not 2017.)
So you decided to quit the conversation due to false beliefs you created, separate from our conversation, and which you gave me no opportunity to rebut. Can you see how unfair that is? Here you are destroying a project I put substantial time into, for reasons I had no knowledge of and could not have predicted, which involve factual errors, which I get no opportunity to know about or respond to until after it’s too late.
CB forming factually false beliefs about my history at Less Wrong – then rushing to judgment before I could refute anything – is an example of Curiosity – Shoddy Argument Pattern
I already read about half of these, and either I tended to agree, either I failed to see what I should do with this information (probably too abstract for me). I do not really see the link with the discussion about fraud.
Yes, I’ve seen your article on that, and appreciated that it was all in one post - although I didn’t have had the time to check the books yet.
I wonder if the works on liberalism address the claims made in this book that I’m reading, however. It provides a view of history that is rarely told, from the viewpoints of exploited people throughout history, especially from the many victims of the accumulation of power of the last 5 centuries (especially the colonized ones). I don’t think you will agree with it, but it is well sourced.
Looking back, I have misremembered things a bit, sorry. I said that “to actually improve, I need practical advice on how to improve” here but it was just before the end of the conversation due to the CC problem.
So it was rather that I didn’t remember getting practical advice and assumed it was you who didn’t give it, but it wasn’t necessarily your fault, mostly bad timing.
I just don’t see how philosophy can “prove” something here. I don’t trust the track record of philosophy when it comes to predicting things that cannot be verified. It’s just too easy to think of something that makes logical sense but reality turns out to be totally different.
Of course, refutation is important. But I have trouble refuting things that cannot be verified - everyone does, almost by definition. This doesn’t mean the unverifiable thing is true, however.
I just give a lot of value to the argument that “When I crush its leg, a dog has a similar behavior than when I crush the leg of an human - it doesn’t like it”. Asserting that animals are somehow not suffering when humans do requires a high level of proof. I didn’t feel I got that, especially as I’m pretty unconvinced by the argument ‘knowledge creation is required for suffering’.
Oh, indeed. I missed that difference in timeline. I was wrong to say that then.
Small upvotes is not really impressive, but it’s a noticeable improvement indeed.
I think I had high expectations when you asserted that you were very good at winning debates and I was expecting a lot and I was so surprised I failed to notice the upward trend leading to posts getting a bit more upvoted.
My appreciation of things was wrong here.
That was unfair of me. You’re right. I should have addressed that better, and made several mistakes.
In retrospect, I think my main problem that I felt I wasn’t learning so much compared to what I expected, and felt frustrated about that and blamed you for that. But I probably misjudged things here. Rather, it could rather be that we have very different ways of looking at the world, as we’re not really talking the same language.
We give very different weights to abstract concepts and evidence, and I expected things with a lot of evidence going for it, as I give much less weigh to philosophy. So I didn’t get what I expected, but I shouldn’t blame you for that.
The problem is rather that our way to apprehend things is so different, that I fail to see how we can reconcile that.
But I should thank you for having tried to engage with me, even though I wasn’t the best person to discuss with.
