Chris Leong
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Currently doing local AI safety Movement Building in Australia and NZ.
Posts 46
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Thanks for writing up this post.
I think it makes sense for us to increase the amount of work that happens under specific cause areas, but I think it’s also important for us to maintain the EA brand. I agree that we should be reluctant to discard a proven brand that has done a great job of attracting the kind of people who are capable of having a significant impact.
I've listened to Beff Jezos on Twitter spaces and he (+ some other e/accs in the space) support a philosophy for all intents and purposes consists of worshipping of entropy. Obviously, they would deny that their philosophy is engaging in any kind of worship and they wouldn't be lying when they say this, because from their perspective I expect it just feels like they doing nothing more than observing the truth.
However, it makes sense to say that descriptively they worship entropy as they unironically argue that the purpose of the universe is to increase entropy as fast as possible and that it should therefore be our purpose as well.
If you try to point out that this is the naturalistic fallacy and that just because this is what the universe does, it doesn't automatically follow that it is good, then instead of them addressing this argument, they start arguing that it is pointless to fight against the universe as you'll lose.
I think it's interesting to observe a fundamental contradiction in the movement. The movement presents itself as strong and brave and masculine and driving humanity forward, but when you reflect on the defeatism it becomes apparent that at least the Beff Jezos version of e/acc philosophy is weak and cowardly and definitely not masculine and completely anti-human.
I did have some hesitation in typing the previous paragraph as I know that some commentators here might feel that I'm being overly harsh/uncharitable. At the same time, when you have a movement that is mostly driven by vibes rather than by arguments, it seems important to actually talk about and consider to what extent the movement's image actually corresponds to reality.
I was leaning this direction, but they've recently they seem to have had some success with their outreach efforts. We now have the CEO of Notion and the President of YCombinator identifying as e/acc.
So the strategy of not engaging may slow their growth, but it may also allow them to persuade people who could have been persuaded otherwise if they were exposed to robust counter-argument.
I don't know, but this critique feels like 5 years too late. There was a time when the focus of many within EA on longtermist issues wasn't as upfront, but there's been a sustained effort to be more upfront on this and anyone who's done the intro course will know that it is a big focus of EA.
I'd love to know if anyone thinks that there are parts of this critique that hold up today. There very well might be as I've only read the summary above and not the original post.
One difference between our perspectives is that I don't take for granted that this process will occur unless the conditions are right. And the faster a movement grows, the less likely it is for lessons to be passed on to those who are coming in. This isn't dismissing these people, just how group dynamics work and a reality of more experienced people having less time to engage.
I want to see EA grow fast. But at a high enough speed, I'm not sure what exactly, at which this will most likely degrade our culture. All this said, I'm less concerned about this than before. As terrible as the FTX collapse and recent events have been, I wouldn't be surprised if we no longer have to worry about potentially growing too fast.