If you owned zero Bitcoins would you buy some to speculate? If no then sell, otherwise you are falling victim to the endowment effect bias.

start to find the things that are actually the best thing for the far future

I have strong doubts about your (not personal but generic) ability to evaluate the far-future consequences of most anything.

Most of the Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World. An example:

Our World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Explosions, Rising Stars.

Mathematically Literate World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Inflation, Rising Population.

First: I agree with your broad point that more segmentation in the EA community would be helpful. I don't think we disagree as much as you think we do, and in fact I would categorize this post as part of the "being introspective about being a movement" that I'm advocating. So perhaps I'm accusing you of failure to be meta-contrarian :P

We need to accept, as EA’s, what Lesswrong as blog has accepted, there will always be a group that is passive, and feeling-oriented, and a group that is outcome-oriented. Even if the subject matter of Effective Altruism is outcome.

I really appreciate this point and it's something that didn't occur to me. Naively it seems strange to me that people would look to feeling-oriented activity in effective altruism, which is pretty much explicitly about disregarding feeling orientation; but on reflection, seeming strange is not much of a reason why it shouldn't be true, whereas in fact this is obviously happening.

I think you understand this, but under this framework, my objection might be something like: the feeling-oriented people think they're outcome-oriented, or have to signal outcome-orientation in order to fit in and satisfy their need for feeling-oriented interaction. (This is where my epithet of "pretending" comes in; perhaps "signalling trying" is more appropriate.) Having feeling-oriented people signalling outcome-orientation is stopping the outcome-oriented people from pushing forward the EA state of the art, because it adds epistemic inertia (feeling-oriented people have less belief pressure from truth-seeking and more from social satisficing).

it is false that the entire movement is a single monolithic entity making wrong and right decisions in a void

I understand this. However, the apostasy was against associating with EA as a movement. If I say "it's a problem that EA doesn't do X" I mean "it's a problem that nobody within EA has caused X to come about/social norms are not set up to encourage X/etc." For whatever reason, X has failed to happen, and from the point of view of an apostate, I don't really care whether it was because EA monolithically decided not to do X or because every individual decided not to or because there was some failure of incentives going on. That's an implementation detail of the solution, not a feature of the critique.

Each one of us is also not one single monolithic agent. We have good and bad days, and we are made of lots of tiny little agents within, whose goals and purposes are only our own when enough of them coalesce so that our overall behavior goes in a certain direction. Just like you can’t critize EA as a whole for something that it’s subsets haven’t done (the fancy philosophers word for this is mereological fallacy), likewise you can’t claim about a particular individual that he, as a whole, pretends to try, because you’ve seen him have one or two lazy days, or if he is still addicted to a particular video game.

True. But if you see people making large life decisions that look like they're pretending to try (e.g. satisficing on donations or career choice), this should be a red flag. This isn't the kind of decision you make on one bad day (at least, I hope not).

Ben’s post makes the case for really effective altruism too demanding. Not even inside we are truly and really a monolithic entity, or a utility function optimizer - regardless of how much we may wish we were. My favoured reading of the current state of the Effective Altruist people is not that they are pretending to really try, but that most people are finding, for themselves, which are the aspects of their personalities they are willing to bend for altruism, and which they are not.

If people are "finding" this, they are only finding it intuitively--the fact that it's a personal thing is not always rising to the level of conscious awareness. I would be pretty OK with people finding out which aspects they aren't willing to bend and saying e.g. "oh, I satisficed on donations because of analysis paralysis", but instead what comes out is a huge debate that feels like it's truth-seeking, but actually people have a personal stake in it.

The Effective Altruist community does not need to get introspectively even more focused on effectiveness

I agree with what I think you mean, although I'm not quite sure what you mean by "effectiveness" in this case. EA needs to get more introspectively focused on directly being effective. It needs to get more introspectively focused on being a movement that can last a long time, while maintaining (acquiring?) the ability to come to non-trivial true beliefs about what is effective. This largely does not consist of us directly trying to solve the problem of "how do we, the EA movement, become better utilitarians?" but rather sub-questions like "how do we build good dialogue" and "how do we

And last, a couple technical issues (which I don't think affect either of our main points very much):

He used the fact that that critique had not been written, as sufficiently strong indication that the whole movement, a monolithic, single entity, had failed it’s task of being introspective enough about it’s failure modes. This is unfair on two accounts, someone had to be the first (at some cost to all of us), and the movement seems young enough that that is not a problem, and it is false that the entire movement is a single monolithic entity making wrong and right decisions in a void. The truth is that there are many people in the EA community in different stages of life, and of involvement with the movement. We should account for that and make room for newcomers as well as for ancient sages. EA is not one single entity that made one huge mistake. It is a couple thousand people, whose subgroups are working hard on several distinct things, frequently without communicating, and whose supergoal is reborn every day with the pushes and drifts going on inside the community.

This is wrong: I cited a lot of other evidence that effective altruists were stopping thinking too early, including not working very hard on population ethics, satisficing on cause choice, not caring about historical outside views, not caring about diversity, not making a good case for their edge over e.g. the Gates Foundation, and having an inconsistent attitude towards rigor. The organization of the conclusion made the "no critiques" argument seem more central than I intended (which was my bad), but it's definitely not the crux of the argument (and has been partially rebutted by Will MacAskill on Facebook anyway, where he brought up several instances that this has happened in private).

EDIT: Diego removed the parenthetical remark; the following no longer applies. (How do I strikethrough?)

(at some cost to all of us)

I would prefer that you turn this, which reads to me like a pot-shot, into a substantive criticism or discarded it. On Facebook you said, "...I really don't think the text does good, and I strongly fear some of its possible aftereffects," but you haven't elaborated very much. I'd very much like to hear your objections--you can private message me if you think they're sensitive.

I did it!

Question about EA and CFAR. I think I've heard some people express sentiments that CFAR might be a good place for EAs to donate, due to the whole "raising the sanity waterline" thing.

On its face, this seems silly to me. From the outside view, CFAR just looks like a small self-help organization, though probably better than most such organizations, and it seems unlikely that it'll affect any significant portion of the population.

I think CFAR is great; I went to minicamp, and I think it probably improved my life, although I suspect I'm not as enthusiastic about it as most people who went. But if I were to give CFAR any money, it would be because it helps me and people I know, not because I think it's actually likely to have a large impact on the world.

Are there people around here who believe CFAR is actually likely to have a large impact on the world? Could you explain your reasoning why?

So I get home from a weekend trip and go directly to the HPMOR page. No new chapter yet. But there is a link to what seems to be a rationalist Death Note.

The way he saw it, the world was a pretty awful place. Corrupt politicians, cruel criminals, evil CEOs and even day-to-day evil acts made it that way, but everyday stupidity ensured it would stay like that. Nobody could make even a simple utility calculation. The only saving grace was that this was as true for the villains as for the heroes.

I am going to read it. Here are my next thoughts:

So, it seems like Eliezer succeeded to create a whole new genre of literature: rationalist fiction. Nice job!

Wait, what?! Is "a story where the protagonist behaves rationally" really a new genre of literature? There is something horribly wrong with this world if this is true.

Discussing with my girlfriend about which stories should be x-rationalizated next, she suggests HPMOR. Someone should make a HPMOR fanfic where the protagonist is even more rational than the rational Harry. Would that lead to a spiral of even more and more rational heroes?

What exactly could the MoreRational!Harry do? It would be pretty awesome if he could somehow deduce the existence of magic before he was contacted from Hogwarts. For example, he could start doing some research about his biological parents; after realizing they were killed he could try to find out the villain, and gradually discover the existence of magic.

Only one problem: MoreRational!Voldemort would have killed MoreRational!Harry as a baby. Using a knife.

This is what cfar is for