Status: highly speculative, 1-hour braindump; curious which of these points would be valuable for me to flesh out, or what seems flat-out wrong.
- I identify as an EA. Unlike 97% of you, I also identify as a practicing Catholic
- When I mentioned this at a recent meetup, someone was like “oh you should meet <the literal other practicing Catholic>”
- Weird, right? 1B Catholics among 8b people imply 12% base rates.
- Am I qualified to write this post? Shrug.
- EA credentials: Founder at Manifold Markets, more than half our funding is from EA sources. Took the GWWC pledge.
- Catholic credentials: I still go to church every week; pescatarian diet inspired by Lenten Fridays
- Notably: Not super involved with either community; most of my friends are neither EA nor Catholic
- FWIW, more EA than Catholic at this point
Why EAs should learn from Catholicism
- Catholicism has succeeded
- If EA aims to be effective, we may want to study its success
- And, of course, avoid its failures
- Tithing is a well-established idea (this is why I personally took the GWWC pledge)
- Catholicism and EA are both demanding
- There’s a lot of actual alignment!
Alignment between EA and Catholicism
- Look at the Nicene Creed
- God
- AGI? Creator of our simulation?
- Sin
- Importance of morality; that there is a right and a wrong thing to do, and we often do wrong, but we can strive to do right
- Hell: X-Risk. Heaven: Utopia
- Resurrection/eternal life: If we get this right, we get it right forever
- Holy Spirit
- Ever present, always with us
- Kinds of things EA and Catholic Church demand of members
- To maintain alignment in service to EA
- “Love your god with all your heart, soul, spirit, might”
- To equate the desires of other people with their own desires
- “Love your neighbor as yourself”
- To do the most good (parable of talents)
- Warning: May be motivated reasoning; eg tempting think I was right all along by practicing Catholicism
- But occasionally, it’s good to have something to motivate your reasoning, esp to bring up a bunch of points outside the overton window
Things EAs can learn from Catholicism
- Commitment
- Closing out of total opportunity space in order to achieve a group goal
- Schelling point/game theoretic stuff: how to operationalize it
- Commandments
- You shall not have any other gods: EA is not compatible with some beliefs, like hedonism
- Love your neighbor as yourself: Utilitarianism in a nutshell
- Do not kill/steal/covet relationships: Universalizability
- Honor your parents: importance of respecting ancestors.
- We talk about protecting the future, but what about the past? Out of 100B humans to have ever existed, we are only 8B.
- “What we owe the past”
- Rituals
- Sacraments
- Confirmation - I stand up and avow that I commit to being part of this movement
- Confession - Speaking to someone about what I’ve done wrong ⇒ having an outlet for forgiveness; acknowledging where I’ve made mistakes
- Priesthood - I am now committed to serve the community
- Matrimony - I am now committed to serve this other person
- Fasting, suffering
- Suffering is not a thing to be avoided in your personal life
- Holidays
- “More Rationalist holidays”
- Rituals are a unifying force for bringing members together
- Worry: are they exclusionary?
- Community
- How to coordinate on a massive group problem: keep everyone on the same page
- You have to go to mass every week, or you go to hell. This is what I literally believed as a kid
- Then: After mass, you get to eat snacks!
- And then: Sit in a classroom with a cohort of people you like, and learn from a teacher
- Rationality has dojos? EA should have churches.
- Enough “independent alignment research”, that’s not how anything actually gets done
- Physical churches
- This place that you can show up to and get help
- This place you know anyone is always welcome
- This place where we set aside earthly concerns and focus on the mission
- Tragedy that REACH dissolved
- Service/Volunteering
- What, you mean ineffective altruism?
- Aside: How Austin invented EA
- 7th grade. Catholic mission trip to Tijuana, Mexico: sending a bunch of kids to build a house for a single impoverished family
- But the inefficiency/bizarreness of that struck me later, in my adult life. What was salient to teenage me:
- We organized a car wash where dozens of teens and their parents got together, big hubbub, raised: $200
- Remember thinking: Multiplying out the number of hours we spent (12 x 6 = 72) we were making less than $3/hour
- Wait, why didn’t we just go... work at McDonald’s?
- Okay now here’s why volunteering can be good: Church spread because nonbelievers could see what believers DID.
- Not by fiat or force, but by “hey look, there’s this other amazing way we can live”
- Missionaries - going to spread the word, yes, but mostly by integrating into the community and serving them
- “They will know we are Christians by our love”
- Catholic church emphasizes good works (Christian emphasizes belief, more)
- What does EA accomplish, that other people would care about?
- “Grow EA size”, “Raise money for EA” ⇒ not very impressive; from the outside looks like this group trying to accumulate status and wealth for itself.
- Cannot worship both money and God
- Critique from my smart AI researcher friend: what has alignment accomplished in the last 6 years, for ~$50m spent? Eg Since Concrete Problems was published.
- There’s no writeup I can point to!
- A call: the focus on developing world interventions should not be relegated as low-status among EA folks, in favor of the weird contrarian XRisk/Longtermism stuff
- I think everyone would espouse agreement, but huge gap between stated values and experienced life
- Been thinking I should visit Africa at some point...
- Humility
- You are not too important to serve other people in ways large and small
- You are not too smart to ignore the things that other people have to say
- (I struggle with this a lot, as a fairly confident/arrogant person; routinely count pride among my sins)
Explainer: Catholicism vs Christianity
- My summary: Catholics share a unity of tradition AND a unity of institution
- (Catholic means unity)
- The “institution” half is really really important!
- Pope leads bishops leads cardinals leads priests leads the congregation
- Christians memorize the bible; Catholics regard that as a really “christian” thing to do
- Most of my learning was through a body of interpretation on top of the Bible
- Centuries of discourse among the most learned scholars of the day
- Yes, an older civilization is dumber than a newer one, we shouldn’t idolize the words of the past. But - discount rates. Ancestors have thought a lot about the same problems that we think about.
- Reason to privilege their knowledge: some things that haven’t changed very much (eg human nature, group psychology)
Action items
- Internal:
- Build (or buy) some churches
- Support priests (community managers)
- Run a weekly service
- External:
- Go out and volunteer (unconditionally help people who are not EAs)
- Understand their goals, and help them achieve them
- EA assessment of climate issues - people care a lot about these!
- EA assessment of racial/systemic issues, theories of change
- ???
Aside: I’m not interested in...
- Defending the epistemics of “did X miracle actually happen”; a miracle being something inexplicable under known physics
- Having my one individual quirky thoughts be taken as representative for Catholics as a whole
- Imagine if someone did this to you for EA. “You’re an EA, what do you think about X?” “Uh......”
Caveats
- Lots of things the Catholic church does is bad; eg:
- Power allocation to women (no women priests or popes)
- Respect for LGBT persons (my brother is gay! my sister is trans! guess who stayed!)
- This really screwed my family over
- Tolerance of corruption and abuse?
- I don’t know much about this, not sure if just newsworthy or actually endemic
- But: It’s always easy to focus on the bad stuff
- I believe the church did an excellent job at raising the moral waterline
- Now there’s more disruptive innovation
- If you only pay attention to some movement’s flaws, you ignore the 90% of stuff that they do well
- Cf Zvi Mowshowitz as director of FDA
- Cf Easy to outperform Scott Alexander by copying all his predictions and placing bets on where you disagree
- Not a reason to ignore its methods
Inspirations
Appendix
- Thanks to X for editing and Y for ideas can sometimes turn into a laundry list of “oh look at all the cool people I know who will vouch for me”
- But also credit is really motivating and just. I hate not being credited. Don’t know how to solve this problem.