Severin
Posts 31
Comments65
Agree with everything.
Your friend sounds delightful! I think actually, what I'm trying to point towards here is closer to "lifestyle anarchism" than classic virtue ethics. Coincidentally, I found myself defaulting back to explaining my values in anarchist terms when I announced my career transition from active EA community builder to baby influencer in my first blog post.
I guess it's no coincidence that Rocky's "on living without idols" is my all-time favorite on the EA forum.
Thanks! I'm still grappling with putting the intuitions behind this post into words, so this is valuable feedback.
Personally, my heuristic in the example you describe is rolling with what I feel like. Considerations that go into that are:
1. Will it kill me? (I'm allergic to red meat)
2. Would I be actively disgusted eating it? (The case for most if not all non-vegetarian stuff.)
3. Do I lack the spoons to have a debate about this, given which amount of pushback/disappointment I expect from the host?
...and when all of them get a "no":
4. Do I feel like my nutrient profile is sufficiently covered atm? Will this, or asking for a vegan alternative make me feel more alert and healthy? (I all-too-often default to lacto-vegetarianism in stressful times. Low-effort vegan foods tend to give me deficiencies (probably protein) that give me massive cheese cravings. From utilitarianism I learned to prioritize not feeling crap over always causing minimum harm.)
While studying philosophy in Uni, I also hated virtue ethics for years due to its intrinsic fuzziness.
Things that changed since then and turned it into a very attractive default:
1. Picking up a meditation habit that made my gut feeling more salient and coherent, and my verbal reasoning less loud/coercive.
2. Learning Focusing to a reasonable level of fluency. The mental motion of checking with my system 1 what the best course forward would be is pretty much the same as pausing to tune in to my felt sense and gauging where it draws me.
Strongly agree!
Actually, the seeds for a bunch of my current knowledge about and approach to community building were sown during various unconferences over the years.
The 2020 Unconference was my first in-person encounter with EA. After my first contact point with EA was reading a bunch of 80k articles which didn't quite seem to have me as part of their target audience, I was very positively surprised by how warm and caring and non-elitist the community was.
I learned to get these things out of EAG(x)s as well. But, had the fancy professional events been my first contact with the community, I might well not be around anymore.
The unconference-format in EA evolved into several directions since its inception. For example, the AI Safety Europe retreat this year was an unconference with a framing that optimized for a clear personal/professional separation. In my impression, it worked wonderfully in that. Not only in regards to combining the flat hierarchies of the format with a professional vibe, but also in regards to connections made. Meanwhile, the German unconferences evolved away from a professional focus, into funconferences into a no longer EA-affiliated summercamp that's completely organized by volunteers and participant-funded.
I started drafting a follow-up to this post with practical suggestions today. Doing more unconferences is on the list.
Yep - it reflects how many things in EA already work implicitly. That's one of the things I love about EA. And, I think it would be good if we use this as an explicit model more often, too.
If you want to dive a little bit deeper into these kinds of management practices, you may want to have a look into the Reinventing Organizations-wiki: https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/en/theory/decision-making/
If you want to dive very, very deep, Frederik Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations" might be a worthwhile read. I'm halfway through, and it helped me build a whole bunch of intuitions for how to do community building better.
My personal gold standard of good organizing is the Advice Process. Description by Burning Nest:
"The general principle is that anyone should be able to make any decision regarding Burning Nest.
Before a decision is made, you must ask advice from those who will be impacted by that decision, and those who are experts on that subject.
Assuming that you follow this process, and honestly try to listen to the advice of others, that advice is yours to evaluate and the decision yours to make."[1]
One of the problems the Advice Process tackles is what anarchist visionary madman Robert Anton Wilson calls the SNAFU-principle ["Situation Normal, All Fucked Up"]:
"Communication only occurs between equals–real communication, that is–because when you are dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything they don’t want to hear, the response is, “One more word Bumstead and I’ll fire you!” Or in the military, “One more word and you’re court-martialed.” It’s throughout the whole system.
So the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more lies are being told to flatter those above them. So those at the top have no idea what is going on at all. Those at the bottom have to adjust to the rules made by those at the top who don’t know what’s going on. Those at the top can write rules about this, that and the other, while those at the bottom have got to adjust reality to fit the rules as much as they can."
"So I call this the burden of omniscience: those on the top are supposed to be doing the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and all the sensing, apprehending and conceptualizing for the whole society and those at the bottom have to adjust to what those at the top think based on all the misinformation flowing up in a hierarchy where any speaking of the truth can get you punished."[2]
And the Advice Process does more than just prevent SNAFU: It also prevents the eternal deadlock of consensus-based decisionmaking I've suffered through in nonhierarchical collectives of the political left, the eternal bad compromises of basic democracy, and incredible amounts of time wasted on having to be in the room while decisions are made that you don't actually care about all that much.
1947, Churchill said:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" [3]
Luckily, it is not 1947 anymore. Now, we have the Advice Process. It is very good, so you might want to use it.
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Cited after http://www.idleworm.com/ideas/snafu.shtml , because most of my books are currently buried in cardboard boxes.
- ^
Since writing this, I've done a bunch more debating and thinking about how to handle romantic attraction in communities I'm actively involved in responsibly. So, here's the rule I want to commit to from now on:
Some specifications:
1. Both formal and informal hierarchies count. For example, attendees of workshops I facilitate pro bono or during unconferences still count as "lower in the hierarchy".
2. Responding to advances people lower in hierarchies make towards me is fine. (Unless other reasons make that seem unethical.)
3. Escalation can only happen if and only if the other person signals at least an obvious 6 on the Decide10 scale. I.e., a lack of proactiveness counts as a "no".
4. Galaxy brain slytherining a la "I'll just make friends for now and set things up so that they are more likely to propose to me later on." or "You knoooow, I committed to a certain rule because I'm SUCH an ethical person, so if you were to have interest in me, you'd have to be the one to make the first step *wink wink*" is prohibited.
5. I might adjust this rule over time as evidence accumulates, but only *after* consulting with people I trust in these matters.
6. I think a version of this might help us handle EA's gender imbalance better: It might be good if if heterosexual men in general would just accept/decline advances from women, and not proactively flirt themselves.