Thanks for responding to my points! You didn't have to go through line by line, but its appreciated.

Obviously a line by line response to your line by line response to my line by line response to your article would be somewhat over the top. So I'll refrain!

The general point I'd make though is that this almost feels like an argument for something before you've decided what you want to argue for. There feels like a conceptual hole in the middle of this piece (as you say, people are still trying to work out what the problem is). But then you also respond to most of (not all) my points without actually giving a counter-argument, just claiming that I'm clearly mistaken. This makes it quite hard to actually engage with what you've written.

Maybe, as Alexander seems to think, I'm just a poor blinkered fool who can't understand other people's perspectives - but I am actually tryign to engage with what you've written here, not sh*t posting.

I wonder if this statement might simply reflect your ability to understand and steelman other people's perspectives. Food for thought?!

Now this is uncharitable

Thanks!

I had a bit of a negative reaction to this comment - it seems a bit uncharitable to me

That's fair, I might have been a bit mean there!

I was interested in this because I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea that we might not give enough attention to bigger systems. But for me, this post only really strengthened my EA tendencies.

So the core argument in favour of the metacrisis being ‘a thing’ (upon which the later arguments that we should take it seriously hang) seems to be:

a. Technology makes us more powerfu and the world is more interconnected

b. As a result, our capacity for self destruction has massively increased

c. Our ‘culture, the implicit assumptions, symobls, sense-making tools and values of society’ are not ‘mature’ enough to ensure this capacity is managed in a low risk manner

d. Therefore, some kind of existential risk is more likely

Propositions A and B seem basically correct to me. But I think proposition C is very weak. I have two main problems with it:

1) there is just so many different things inside of that grouping, the article only makes an argument as to why a set of implicit assumptions are a cause of the problem, then sneaks in all this other stuff in this one central paragraph. It seems highly likely to me that some things (like society's values) are more important to how well the world goes than others (like symbols)

2) I think C stands to be proved. While there are many problems with society and global coordination, it seems like often at the crunch global coordination pulls through (nuclear proliferation, chemical weapons and CFCs are examples). I think you can make an argument we don’t have the right tools, but I think equally you can make at least as strong an argument to say that we know exactly what the right tools are and we should be putting our efforts into strengthening global institutions of coordination.

I think the Diego character makes a number of other mistakes which I’m not sure are necessarily core to the argument, but certainly weaken my sense of its credibility for me:

1. The idea that system change is intractable is just an intuition - this clearly isn’t true. If we look at successful social movements, they consistently work through breaking problems down and taking them one at a time. This ends up looking like systems change eventually because it can lead to paradigm shifts, but these shifts only come later on as an accumulation of smaller wins (some examples would be the abolition of slavery, LGBT rights, universal suffrage in the UK). We can also point to plenty of folk talking about how everything is connected and getting no where at all. So the claim 'system change is not tractable' may not be correct, but it is clearly based on more than mere intuiton.
2. The idea that rivalry (caused by human nature) is a background assumption and not necessarily the case: the point here surely is that, yes of course humans can be more or less cooperative at times and given different cultural assumptions, but this kind of game theory describes dynamics that are independent of how most people behave. It only takes a small number of people to act in a rivalrous or antisocial manner for things to become bad, given we can't rule out that someone will behave in this way, we have to respond accordingly.
3. The argument that we ‘diefy’ technology and assume wealth is always good: this is almost straying into ‘degrowther’ territory. Technology is the primary driver of increased productivity and therefore a key part of driving growth. Growth has historically been the single biggest driver of human welbeing. While I’m in favour of redistribution, I think we have to be realistic that simply stopping growth and improving people’s lives soley through redistribution would be politically impossible. It also places a celling on possible human wellbeing and so is plausibly much much worse than a world of high, sustainable growth.
4. The idea that the notion of the perfect/wellfunctioning market is rarely questioned: obviously not true, this is a hugely contested idea
5. (This is a small one): Modernity has led to the mental health crisis: I’m just not sure this empyrically stacks up. It is really hard to measure mental health over time, given that its measurement is so culturally contingent (among other things)
6. The argument that we know eventually civilisation will collapse because all previous civilisations have collapsed: this feels like a very ‘cakeism’ style argument, you can’t have it both ways. Either it is the case that the history of all these very different societies shows the inevitability of our eventual destruction (in which case it seems that changing our culture isn’t going to help) or culture is the key to our doom (in which case all these other cultures being destroyed can't be evidence about our own culture because the key variable is different)
7. Tractability is surprisingly high: how can you possibly assess the tractability of this problem when - in your own words - you have no idea what the problem is? Compare this to wild animal suffering (as Diego does): in wild animal suffering we have a clearly defined problem: lots of animals suffer a lot and this is bad. We have some solutions that actually seem very good, like getting rid of screw worms. There are some empirical frameworks we can use to assess the problems and make decisions, and we can at least in some cases run experiments to gain a better understanding. This all seems like much more progress towards tractable solutions than this metacrisis thing
8. Cultural change is actually happening very fast: Diego is using culture in two almost entirely different ways. First that its about our underlying paradigm for seeing the world to argue that culture is this deep seated root problem (for most of the article) then in this thin way about changing cultural artefacts or taste to argue that it changes very quickly. These are obviously two different propositions and one can’t be used to argue the other.

I like the idea of doing more thinking through Socratic dialogues and there were a couple of jokes here which actually made me laugh out loud. But it has left me closer to thinking this integral/metacrisis thing is lacking in substance. Putting this author aside, it seems like many of the folk who talk about this stuff are merely engaging in self-absorbed obscurantism.

Even amongst academic conferences, this seems quite outside of my personal experience. I've been to a small number of academic animal law conferences and - while there is plenty to complain about from an EA perspective - most people were there because they cared about animals and the food was all vegan.

Thanks - should be fixed now

Hi Ben, thanks for responding. I think you raise some valid points, we hope that we are avoiding being dishonest as we agree with you that we shouldn't be.

What the standard donor gets is to control where the bonus fund goes. What the bonus donor gets is to help encourage more donations. We do explain this on our site.

One broader point I'd make is that there is a real tension between being very precise and transparent and being concise enough that we won't switch most people off with too much information too soon. We're trying to tread that line, but we welcome critical feedback where we might not be getting the right balance.

Hi Jeff - thanks very much for taking the time to comment. In the case of FarmKind, however, I think this specific critique is a little wide of the mark. We address this specific concern on our page about the matching fund (just click 'More detail on how it works' for a drop down with a detailed review). Link here.

In short, donating with us determines where the money in the bonus fund goes, including which favourite charity they choose, which super-effective charity they choose, and how much to allocate to each.

More broadly, we've tried to be as transparent as possible about how things work with our entire system. In an ideal world, we'd have loads of information right up front with plenty of footnotes, but we have to recognise that this is going to put off the majority of donors. So, we've had to strike a balance: all the info is there if for those who want to look for it.

But, we're always listening and happy to take on board critiques :)

Congrats on the launch! Especially on getting up and at it so quickly :) The website looks great!