Was in a grumpy mood and rebelling against self-censorship so I did an unpopular opinions thread.
Effective altruism is the worst byproduct of the rationalist movement considered broadly, because it is both successful and based on one of the most pernicious premises in that memeplex. Your values *should* center around you and your (physical or value-space) local region.
Can you go into further detail on this one, and in particular what sense of “should” you mean?
I mean “should” in the moral sense. You will live a better life and be a better person if you focus on what actually matters to you and adds value to your life, and that is not distance-invariant.
“Actually” is doing a lot of work there. Let’s set aside, for the moment, the fact that almost all effective altruists do focus their lives on the near-at-hand, and that their charitable donations are a small part of their finances and their lives in general.
Many people find that what matters to them is treating people equally, taking the long view, systematizing their actions, and doing good for the world, broadly defined. And when they think about it, they find that to be true to themselves and their natures, they want to know that their charity is in fact doing the most it can, given those values. Who are you to say that this is not what actually matters to them, and they would be better off donating to their local library rather than trying to fight malaria?
Effective Altruism is difficult for me to call bad but it encourages and stems from a certain kind of “partitioned” view of life and politics.
“Bowling Alone” really hit me, it’s almost like it gave me permission to kvetch about things that are really hard for me.
In that book, Putnam details how, over the second half of the 20th century, people’s relationships with charitable orgs became more and more monetary. Instead of, I don’t know, going door to door, you pay a charity money, which they invest in professional marketing.
Basically, Effective Altruism relies on Utilitarian views of effectiveness which means that, for a first-world person, local problems are never going to be pressing or effective enough to be worth adding your effective dollar to.
EA people aren’t paperclip maximizers, I’ve never seen one who would argue that local concerns are unimportant, but because of the way EA is conceived of they will inherently be outside that framework.
And my experience is that because they are outside of that framework they are generally, in my experience, conceived of as things that don’t require much systemic thinking and really just take care of themselves, which leaves you in a bit of a lurch when they don’t.
Like, my stereotype of rationalists is still,
“See, the mid-century was bad because bowling leagues and fraternal organizations that are too strong and embedded inhibit social movement and freedom, and atomized individualism is way better!
“Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my group home because my polycule and the other one I live with are having a board game night. Boy, I don’t know what I’d do without them helping with my mental illness!”
And the thing is, when you don’t spontaneously find one of those close-knit groups, the question of how you would can only be answered with vague aphorisms about hard work, because systemic thinking is for the objectively important problems. And actually, there’s an undertone of “If we thought about cultivating this kind of thing on a larger or systemic level, it would automatically become coercive, and the only way to keep it from being so is to not do so.”
Local problems like “I only have a few friends and a very low paying job and I can’t figure out how to change” ought to be handled intuitively, privately and locally, which often means that they simply aren’t handled at all.
I also think that this is a major unrecognized problem with the broad American left.
Like, my stereotype of rationalists is still,
“See, the mid-century was bad because bowling leagues and fraternal organizations that are too strong and embedded inhibit social movement and freedom, and atomized individualism is way better!
“Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my group home because my polycule and the other one I live with are having a board game night. Boy, I don’t know what I’d do without them helping with my mental illness!”
This is a pretty flattering stereotype, suggesting that they have their priorities in order.
…you don’t get mental-illness-ameliorating setups like the one you describe in environments without a lot of atomization, freedom-of-movement, and suchlike. Not if you’re weird, anyway. There are plenty of far-end-of-the-bell-curve neurobizarre folk who live in actual inherited obligatory thick supportive interpersonal networks – which is to say, they live with their families – and on average they’re not doing so great. Being able to find a setup that works for you, if “works for you” is at all an issue, is dependent on not being trapped within a setup that doesn’t work for you. Atomized individualism may not be sufficient but it sure is necessary.
(One is put in mind of the trad types who wax rhapsodic about the days of arranged marriages. Presumably they are, for the most part, legitimately very lonely; presumably they are suffering greatly because of what they lack in their lives. But, like, an arranged marriage would not make things better, odds are it would be so much worse you can’t even imagine, and this would be obvious if you weren’t drowning in your own fantasies of what not-being-miserable might look like.)
Anyway.
The claim about “systemic thinking is only for EA” (or even “systemic thinking is for nonlocal issues”) strikes me as odd, as far as stereotypes go. Aren’t rationalists the people who come out with a new pronouncement every month about how they’re going to live their lives in a completely different way henceforth, in accordance with these awesome theoretical ideas that they’ve been developing?
It is, of course, not hugely surprising that their effort is not going into problems that they view as solved, and to the extent that they’re living blissfully in supportive group houses, one presumes that “how do you find friends?” doesn’t seem like a very pressing problem.
One presumes further that their answer, if pressed, would be “move to the Bay area and attend rationalist events.” For all sorts of reasons this is not useful for many people, even for many people who are basically rationalist-oid in their outlook. But –
The actual answer has to start with “find your people.” Humans are not fungible, and if you’re unusual, selection effects are going to outweigh any kind of community-building technology to an overwhelming degree. People generally don’t like talking about this, because it comes across as elitist and weird. And yet. There’s your systemic thinking right there, and unfortunately it obliterates any hope of a one-size-fits-all universalist answer.
And if I said, “How do I get more involved with effective Altruism?” all of a sudden I would have a wealth of specific ideas to pour through and work on.
First of all, I know we’ve had this conversation before, but every time I say, “It’s harder to put together a regular game night with your friends today then it was in the 70s” you go, “That’s because inherited obligatory social bonds are bad actually” and you do that without ever making the case that card game night has ever been an obligatory or inherited social bond.
Second… Funny how everybody says there are no rules only to get 20/20 hindsight about how none of the stuff I do could possibly have worked.
“You have to find your people!”
“I thought my people were at art school, but when I went there I thought I made friends but none of them kept in touch after I sank into depression.”
“Oh, well college doesn’t usually produce those kinds of relationships anyway, that was never going to work.”
“What should I have done instead?”
“Oh, it’s different for everyone! Keep working on it!”
“I’m scared to ask women out, but I always go around in circles where everyone says how dumb gender roles are so I bet I’ll get asked out a lot.”
“Oh, that doesn’t happen in those circles, why would you think it would?”
“Where should I go instead?”
“It’s different for everyone, keep working on it!”
To me this feels like the equivalent of saying that chess can’t be taught, since every opponent is different. I mean, we can’t just make a list of moves because your opponent wouldn’t stick to it, so there’s literally nothing to be said that could help you be better at chess.
I should start by saying: I sincerely apologize to the extent that this feels like shadowboxing. The actual people and positions against which I’m arguing mostly aren’t represented here, except by tangential reference; I’m carrying in baggage from other conversations (in which I mostly don’t engage because it would be pointless and unpleasant).
I mean, yeah, the riposte to
“It’s harder to put together a regular game night with your friends today then it was in the 70s”
is “that may be true, but in the 70s you probably would have hated your friends.” That’s not me being snide; I know a number of oddball nerdy boomers, and to a one they were all kind of wrecked by the extent to which they fit poorly in the cultures within which they were inescapably embedded. The ‘90s media proliferation began the process of subcultural sorting, the internet has turbo-boosted it, and while that’s had a lot of deleterious effects it’s done wonders for finding your people.
But enough. You’re not really arguing for Going Back to the Old Ways, and me continuing to punch at that shadow is a waste of your time.
I’m sorry. I really am. It’s a hard problem, and if it sounds like I’m saying that it’s not, all I can plead is that I’m communicating badly. I am certainly aware of the extent to which I “solved” it by being very lucky rather than by doing anything clever or wise. (I did walk out of college with a social circle that’s survived in some substantive way to this day, for more than a decade, despite trials and schisms, because some people with better social skills than mine wanted that circle to be a real and lasting thing.)
The apt parallel, I think, is less “how do I play chess well?” and more “how do I get a job from a ground state of unemployment?” It’s obviously an important question, but in fact the answers are incredibly vague and situational, and the people who are interested in trying to answer it over-weight their own random experiences hugely. Also it’s the kind of problem where widely disseminating any very specific answer is quickly going to make that answer useless, however great it might have been before you did that.
I’m in no position to say anything comprehensive on this topic, but in the vein of concrete actionable advice – which is probably obvious, but hell, saying something obvious is better than not saying anything actionable –
There are real advantages to glomming onto an existing community, with its own network of relationships and its own social infrastructure already in place, as opposed to trying to cobble something together yourself out of a bunch of disparate friendships. This goes double if you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing generally. A community will probably have its own methodologies for absorbing new people, and it’s likelier to have a much higher density of stuff going on. It also, frankly, provides some amount of social cushion; if a few people are enthusiastic about you, their approval will make it much easier for you to keep hanging around long enough for other more-lukewarm-on-you people to get to know you better.
Finding existing communities of compatible people is easier said than done, of course, and I won’t pretend that I’ve ever done it successfully on purpose (as opposed to stumbling into one face-first). The general-purpose comment, I guess, is “go find a public-facing group that’s into a thing that you’re into.” Such groups may be more or less thick on the ground depending on where you are and what you’re into. I can specifically vouch for theater LARPing as a thing that gets people immersed in active nerdy social communities real fast. I gather that the Bay area rationalist-sphere does much the same.
So… the concrete advice here is… essentially… to join a bowling league.
More later.
Why do you think rationalists hate bowling leagues? In general, it’s kind of weird to criticize rationalists for not putting enough time and effort into making social dynamics work well. If anything ‘actually working social dynamics where adults can make friends’ is one of the things the community is the best at! This is not entirely an accident.
Many rationalists spend a huge amount of effort into keeping meetups and other public events going. I live in New York and the meetup here has been going for over a decade. Over the years a lot of people have put in serious effort. For a simple example, I actually chose the apartment I live in mostly so that the NYC group would not lose its main organizer and its main meetup spot at the same time. This apartment was more expensive than I was comfortable with but it felt like someone needed to take the spot.
Many cities have at least one yearly Solstice ritual. At least the winter Solstice rituals are involved and only happen because the organizers volunteer serious effort. Rationalists are also fairly likely to be involved in other communities such as the SCA.
So yeah find a community where you are a good fit and join.
Okay, context: A guy named Robert Putnam wrote a semi-influrential book called Bowling Alone. Basically, it details what he calls a “slump” in civic participation for Americans over a period from around the middle of the century to the year 2,000.
I could have sworn that I heard about this book in Rationalist circles, but it turns out that whenever I bring it up there is a lot of push-back from Rats and rat-adjacent people who go, “Yeah, but that’s good, because civic participation was held together by strong, regressive social ties enforced through religious, political and social intolerance, and now that those are dissolved people have real freedom to find their own groups!”
Except that’s not what Putnam says he found; he didn’t find a decrease in socially conservative organizations matched by an increase in the informal, soft organizations @balioc tells me I should be looking for, rather, he finds that there has been a decrease in the incredibly broad category that might best be described as “Doing a semi-organized thing with other people.”
That’s why the effing book is called Bowling Alone! because league bowling suffered the same slump as all the other organizations he looked at and by 2000 it was harder to find a bowling league then it was in the 60s. Card game nights, cocktail parties at home, bowling leagues, these things didn’t come in to replace the bad old coercive churches, they also slumped and dried up over the same period.
The very things people keep telling me I should go to to find “my people” were ALSO hit by that slump and it’s infuriating that when I go, “It feels really hard to find groups like that, and I have data saying that for most of my life it has been objectively harder to find those groups then it was in my parents’ day, people just reject the data and the premise and go, “Actually, it must be easier, because if it was harder that would be ammunition for scary trad types.”
It is tremendously frustrating.
…I feel as though my position is being mischaracterized here. I’m going to chalk this up to my own failures of communication, but it may be worth trying to spell out what I actually think, and how it relates to Putnam.
Cut for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t want to deal with my long-winded takes on this shit anymore.
If all you want is “people doing a semi-organized thing with other people,” then…yes, you’re quite right, that is harder to find today than it was in 1960. In 1960 you would have all sorts of opportunities to spend time socially with your neighbors, with your coworkers, with the people from your church. That doesn’t really happen so much these days.
For some people this is a real loss, I’m sure. Not for me, and I’d bet money not for you either. Because weird people are miserable in unsorted groups dominated by non-weird people whose norms and preferences are hostile to them.
In 1960, I would have been an embittered loner, because I would have lots of socialization spaces available to me and all of them would have been vile in about the same way. (This is not, for whatever it’s worth, pure unfounded speculation; this is a reaction to the experiences of my own father, and to other people-kinda-like-me who came of age in Putnam’s golden era of social capital.)
There are fewer social communities now, but there’s a much greater diversity amongst those that exist – especially in the age of Internet-enabled finding and sorting, which Putnam was just barely too early to address. So, yes, it is easier to find your people in the age of atomization, because your people are now actually congregating with each other, instead of being scattered amongst a thousand local Rotary Club chapters.