Integral Altruism

People and Orgs
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This seems like a group we should keep in touch with - and they are very much discussing the Second Renaissance white papers and other material at their meetings. I hope to attend their next meeting in March.

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Big :+1::+1:

Also think that writing some proper pieces on “evolving (from) EA” or “transcending and including EA” would be good.

PS: I’ve wanted to do this for ages and have a few scattered pieces but nothing coherent.

PPS: given that i find “prototype courses” a good forcing function for producing material … I wonder about doing a course like “Beyond Effective Altruism” or “Introduction to the Second Renaissance for Effective Altruists” or similar. I’d love a partner on this – perhaps you’d be interested @JonahW

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Sounds great, I’ll have a think about possible approaches and let’s discuss

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Hi @rufuspollock and @JonahW , Ben here - part of the Integral Altruism group. Rufus, you and I spoke about this topic on a connection call a while back and, Jonah, we had a whatsapp exchange the other day about Int/a - there’s a few of us keen to talk about collaborating on this. In fact if you dm me your emails, I can add you to a very rough google doc I started yesterday

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@BenRSmith that’s fantastic. I remember well our chat on the second renaissance connection call - have you been back? (I wonder if i can dig out the video of that … not sure if there was a recording)

PS: as per my previous comment i’d love to do maybe a dialog about “transcending and including EA” or similar. Maybe we could make this a three way dialog and record it and if it’s good we share it …

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@rufuspollock & @JonahW
I would be interested in collaborating on this:
(1) co-developing a course on “Beyond Effective Altruism” / an “Introduction to the Second Renaissance for Effective Altruists”
(2) co-authoring writings on “evolving (from) EA” or “transcending and including EA”

I have previously designed three reading lists / curriculums along these lines:

The Redteaming Effective Altruism Fellowship (REAF) – I have just finished running the first iteration of this through EA Oxford.

  • And I have plans to build the fellowship into the Redteaming Effective Altruism Division (READ) 'an alumni network, wider community and research initiative (continual project) for assembling, evaluating and refining critiques of actually-existing EA with the goal of constructively incorporating critical insights into reforming the movement, influencing its discourse and ultimately steering EA towards an aligned future.*

Metachyrsalis: The Metacrisis Foundations Program – I would like to run this as a ‘work-flow’ / ‘productive’ research collective (rather than simply a discussion-based reading group) for creating an initial sequence for launching the Metacrisis Forum (an adjacent, aligned social technology and digital infrastructure to the 2R Forum)

The ‘Alethia’ AI x Philosophy Fellowship (AIP) – I developed this as part of joining a unofficial special project team for BlueDot Impact. It is a critical parallel to a seminar series (of the same name) by the Cosmos Institute (that seems to be more liberal and traditional).

Edited Version of Part of an Email I sent to Catherine

I’m currently running a Redteaming Effective Altruism Fellowship (that I designed) through EA Oxford (where I’m a ‘committee member’ and ‘community-building organiser’) that ‘adopts divergent, heterodox and critical perspectives on actually-existing EA as a method of formulating internal critiques’.

I have also designed Metachrysalis: the Metacrisis Foundations Program which is more of an independent, meta-crisis oriented project (that functions as a critical alternative to and external-critique of EA) aiming ‘to harness the collective intelligence of the metacrisis community to enhance humanity’s collective knowledge of the metacrisis and facilitate collective action towards addressing it.’

I have also produced (or am in the process of producing) writings – and have larger projects-in-progress – myself that answer Rufus’ call (on the 2R Forum) for constructively critiquing and transcending Effective Altruism, Existential Risk studies and Progress studies. These are just a selection:

Short Writings

Larger Research Projects

Ultimately, my research project(s) has many affinities with the Metacrisis, Integral-EA and the Second Renaissance and so I would be interested in collaborating with Jona and Rufus on developing a course and a sequence of writings.**

The Life Itself Spring Gathering - including the Research Community Retreat - and the Mini Collaborathon Hackathon would be great opportunities to meet in-person and start collaborating on this.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing where this goes.
-Max

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I’m really enjoying reading your “Redteaming”.

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Thanks @Martin!
Do you mean the ‘Redteaming Fellowship’ or my ‘Redteaming’ in general, through my various projects/writings?
I’d be interested to hear what particular parts or ideas you’re resonating with!
(Really appreciate you taking the time to check out my materials by the way : )

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Some initial thoughts on what the basic structure of such a course might look like:

  1. Cultural evolution as a potential EA cause area
  • Existing similar cause areas and directions within EA (e.g. moral circle expansion)
  • Existing criticisms of EA from point of view of systemic change (e.g. The good it promises)
  • General category of systemic change as cause area, with cultural change as subcategory
  • Tractability, Neglectedness, Importance
  • Issue of evidence (comparison with AI risk)
  • EA priors about cultural evolution - context of analytic philosophy vs continental philosophy, little exposure to sociology etc.
  1. Integral/2R ideas applied to personal decision-making from a broadly EA perspective
  • what would equivalent of 80,000 hours advice be - importance of developing skills in EA, broader concept of relevant skills in integral
  • importance of community, motivation and avoiding burnout in EA and Integral/2R
  1. Integral/2R ideas compared to the utilitarian ethics underlying EA
  • Virtue ethics as alternative to utilitarianism
  • Virtue ethics and spirituality
  • Connections: cause neutrality, effectiveness as potential virtues

Google docs link for collaboration: From Effective Altruism to Second Renaissance: Course outline - Google Docs

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In a few weeks, I’ll be teaching a course on Secure Software Development. The introductory lecture for that course is titled “Information Technology and the Problem of Evil”. In a follow up lecture, I introduce alternative ethical frameworks (in a course that is otherwise entirely about code analysis, penetration testing, threat modelling, and other technical topics). Quoting mostly from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the frameworks placed on the menu for students to consider include:

  • deontology
  • utilitarianism
  • virtue ethics
  • discourse ethics (Habermasian)

My personal stance is mostly Habermasian. Which is why the class features discourse about ethics.

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Nice. Yea the first three on your list are usually seen as the ‘big three’ approaches to ethics - you could see discourse ethics as an updated version of deontology.

Personally I find virtue ethics has the most resonances with the spiritual and psychological aspects of integral/metamodern thinking, but I can see that discourse ethics might play a role too, particularly when thinking about alternative governance structures.

Struggling to think how to connect discourse ethics to affective altruism though!

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Not necessarily suggesting you do!

My context is a public education setting, with very diverse students, and learning objectives that are professional/technical in nature. It’s just that for topics like AI and IT Security, ethics is suddenly landing on the table (despite IT faculty’s general lack of training in philosophy or philosophic pedagogy). My encounter with Habermas began as an investigation of the deeper roots under Paulo Freire and bel hooks. It’s about how to do liberation pedagogy in late-capitalist professional/technical settings. So in that tradition, for me as instructor to advocate for this or that virtue would be counter-productive. If students are drawn to the path of virtue, it won’t be my voice speaking to them. That pull towards virtue needs to come from a deeper, more personal place.

Re: EA - I’m not really drawn to it. But suppose one or more of my students come to class advocating that framework. Habermasian discourse will result. I’m more drawn to IA, but again, putting all that on the table for students with largely no metatheoretical background at all seems a stretch. But if something pithy falls out of 2R-EA or 2R-IA dialogs, then that could be interesting