towards Fractal Altruism or some other Post-EA thing

…ie an obvious and accessible attractor for smart people trying to figure out how to direct their resources (money, time, attention, intelligence) towards pragmatic care for each and every being they care about.

…that inherits these lovely aspects from Effective Altruism

• rigor — precision, accuracy, depth
• caring about numbers and scale
• do-ocracy
• willingness to look weird
• willingness to make bets on unlikely things
• sense that it is “up to us”
• https://bsky.app/profile/nathanpmyoung.com/post/3ldboib4f5t24
  • Radical/broad empathy
  • Scope sensitivity 
  • Scout mindset/curiosity 

…and doesn’t have these issues that Effective Altruism has

• moral obligation
  • which runs into problems of incommensurability with desires and one’s own flourishing
  • (relatedly, guilt-driven)
• an unquestioned frame of moral obligation
  • which is manipulative and forcy
• something around goodharting on legible metrics
  • (even tho aware of goodharting)
• certain blindspots to power
• super decoupled and inclined to accept repugnant conclusions rather than rejecting frames or premises
• some tendency towards rationalist errors, rejection of metarationality

Other Desiderata

• Desire-driven
• Spiritually alive – even religiously alive
• Parallax-oriented, not argument/debate-oriented 
• Wisdom-oriented at least as much as knowledge-oriented
• Memetics-aware / memetics-literate
• Trauma-aware
• Post-blame / post-punishment

Comments

Malcolm, Dec10, 2022: in general I think whatever-this-is would want to appeal to both current/former EAs as well as people of whatever ages who are asking these questions without having heard of or having been attracted to EA. I’m wondering if we actually want to consider super scrupulous folks (already EA or not? to be people we’re not interested in attracting. Like people who are sorta like “am I giving enough?!?!” but they mostly locally want to find a way for the answer to be yes so they can stop self-flagellating for now. Though maybe we can offer some of them a balm! I would also update substantially away from this take if Tyler said that he felt like the scrupulous shape (seems unlikely) or if the people messaging Val after his recent LW posts include many scrupulous types.

Obviously Game B is relevant to the whole thing as well. In some sense the puzzle is taking energy that starts as philanthropic or altruistic, and finding that energy a good way to plug into emerging Game B. And of course iterating towards the actual referent of Game B, not getting fixated on any community with that name which necessarily has various flaws and is not fully the thing etc etc.

Relevant links:

• Effective Altruism in the garden of ends by Tyler Alterman, re obligation & burnout
• Slack matters more than any outcome by Valentine Michael Smith
• short dev model thread from Richard Bartlett, which situates EA as stage 3 out of 4
• Malcolm tweets about this overall question, solicits comments
• Ellie Hain – “Exit the Void” talk (M hasn’t actually watched)
  • Welcome! On this page, you can watch my talk before it’s public. In the talk, I present a new vision for a cultural shift that puts meaning at the center. Think replacing utilitarianism, preference-liberalism, effective altruism and blandness of all kinds with a new social vision that celebrates ✨ what’s most beautiful in life ✨. If, after watching, you resonate with our vision, scroll down. You can help make it real by sharing it with the right people.
• Tyler tweet re microutopianism
• Relationship Economics Primer by Jean Robertson
• thoughts by Catherio on moral opportunity and virtue economics

Mostly written late 2022 or early 2023. I intended it to be a collaborative document, but didn’t get much engagement with it, so I’m publishing it here for reference, as part of my clearing-the-pipes project.

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