Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Solve Corrigibility Week, published by elriggs on November 28, 2021 on The AI Alignment Forum.

A low-hanging fruit for solving alignment is to dedicate a chunk of time actually trying to solve a sub-problem collectively.

To that end, I’ve broken up researching the sub-problem of corrigibility into two categories in this google doc (you have suggestion privileges):

Previous Work: let’s not reinvent the wheel. Write out links to any past work on corrigibility. This can range from just links to links & summaries & analyses. Do comment reactions to other's reviews to provide counter-arguments. This is just a google doc, low-quality posts, comments, links are accepted; I want people to lean towards babbling more.

Tasks: what do we actually do this week to make progress? Suggest any research direction you find fruitful or general research questions or framings. Example: write an example of corrigibility (one could then comment an actual example).

Additionally, I’ll post 3 top-level comments for:

Meetups: want to co-work with others in the community? Comment availability, work preferences, and a way to contact you (eg calendly link, “dm me”, “ my email is bob and alice dot com”, etc) For example, I’m available most times this week with a Calendly link for scheduling 1-on-1 co-working sessions. Additionally, you yourself could message those you know to collaborate on this, or have a nerdy house co-working party.

Potential topics: what other topics besides corrigibility could we collaborate on in future weeks?

Meta: what are different formats this type of group collaboration could take? Comment suggestions with trade offs or discuss the cost/benefits of what I’m presenting in this post.

I do believe there’s a legitimate, albeit small, chance that we solve corrigibility or find its “core” this week. Nonetheless, I think it’s of great value to be able to make actual progress on alignment issues as a community and to figure out how to do that better. Additionally, it’s immensely valuable to have an alignment topic post include a literature review, the community's up-to-date thoughts, and possible future research directions to pursue. I also believe a collaborative project like this will put several community members on the same page as far as terminology and gears-level models.

I explicitly commit to 3 weeks of this (so corrigibility this week and two more the next two weeks). After that is Christmas and New Years, after which I may resume depending on how it goes.

Thanks to Alex Turner for reviewing a draft.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Solve Corrigibility Week, published by elriggs on November 28, 2021 on The AI Alignment Forum.

A low-hanging fruit for solving alignment is to dedicate a chunk of time actually trying to solve a sub-problem collectively.

To that end, I’ve broken up researching the sub-problem of corrigibility into two categories in this google doc (you have suggestion privileges):

Previous Work: let’s not reinvent the wheel. Write out links to any past work on corrigibility. This can range from just links to links & summaries & analyses. Do comment reactions to other's reviews to provide counter-arguments. This is just a google doc, low-quality posts, comments, links are accepted; I want people to lean towards babbling more.

Tasks: what do we actually do this week to make progress? Suggest any research direction you find fruitful or general research questions or framings. Example: write an example of corrigibility (one could then comment an actual example).

Additionally, I’ll post 3 top-level comments for:

Meetups: want to co-work with others in the community? Comment availability, work preferences, and a way to contact you (eg calendly link, “dm me”, “ my email is bob and alice dot com”, etc) For example, I’m available most times this week with a Calendly link for scheduling 1-on-1 co-working sessions. Additionally, you yourself could message those you know to collaborate on this, or have a nerdy house co-working party.

Potential topics: what other topics besides corrigibility could we collaborate on in future weeks?

Meta: what are different formats this type of group collaboration could take? Comment suggestions with trade offs or discuss the cost/benefits of what I’m presenting in this post.

I do believe there’s a legitimate, albeit small, chance that we solve corrigibility or find its “core” this week. Nonetheless, I think it’s of great value to be able to make actual progress on alignment issues as a community and to figure out how to do that better. Additionally, it’s immensely valuable to have an alignment topic post include a literature review, the community's up-to-date thoughts, and possible future research directions to pursue. I also believe a collaborative project like this will put several community members on the same page as far as terminology and gears-level models.

I explicitly commit to 3 weeks of this (so corrigibility this week and two more the next two weeks). After that is Christmas and New Years, after which I may resume depending on how it goes.

Thanks to Alex Turner for reviewing a draft.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman explains why he took the pledge, published by Pepijn on November 26, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Hi! I'm an Amsterdam-based writer interested in EA. While I was researching EA initiatives in The Netherlands for a longform article I found out that Dutch popular historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman (author of Utopia for Realists and HumanKind) had taken the Giving What We Can pledge to donate >10% of his income. I asked Rutger for an interview to find out why he took the pledge. This is a translated crosspost from my newsletter on underrated ideas and progress, De Optimist (Dutch only).

🗓️ Please note that Giving What We Can hosts several "Effective Giving" day events next Tuesday!

Inequality

“Inequality has always interested me. While I was researching my book Utopia for Realists I discovered the “How Rich Am I” calculator. You can enter your income and see how rich you are compared to the rest of the world. Back then Occupy Wallstreet and the slogan “we are the 99%” were gaining traction. Yet when I got back the results from the calculator I said to myself: whoa, Rutger, you don’t belong to the 99%! You belong to the 1%. An average income in the Netherlands puts you in the 3.5% richest in the world. Even if you have homeless benefits in the Netherlands, you already belong to the richest 15% of the world. By the way, I don't mean to say that the homeless benefits in The Netherlands are so generous. It mainly says how terribly poor the rest of the world still is. The average global citizen earns only about $16 a day per person.”

Royalties

“We were taught at home that it is important to give away a substantial part of your income. So the idea was always to arrange that properly. I just kept postponing the moment. “That will come some day,” I kept telling myself. But in hindsight it was an excuse to do nothing. And the need of the world is now. The people who benefit from my money don't care about the motivation that I kept postponing my donations. Once the royalties on my books started rolling in, more and more money piled up in my bank account. Only then did I seriously start to wonder what responsibility that money entailed. That is how I ended up at Giving What We Can.”

A serious percentage

“There are two ways to do a better job of donating than most Dutch people do now. First, if you don't live in poverty yourself, you can probably donate more than you do now. Dutch households give an average of 0.4% of their income to charities. I find this percentage rather low. I wondered: what would be a serious percentage? Then I arrived at 10% of my gross income, it’s also an elegant number. That is twenty times what the average Dutch person gives. I don't think that donating ten percent will be a tremendous sacrifice for the readers of your newsletter. Sure, you will have to sacrifice something for it. In most cases, a slightly less fancy holiday. Maybe a slightly less fancy car. But if you earn well it will not really have a big impact on your happiness in life. I'm not afraid to give a sermon here. I think that everyone who earns well in The Netherlands should seriously think about giving more. That, in my view, is a moral obligation.”

Get going

“Second, it's better to give intentionally than impulsively - for instance, when someone knocks on your door. You have to get started yourself. I do my annual donations righter after my tax return, then I know what my aggregate income is and I take 10% of that. Then I have a conversation with my wife what charities we are going to select. I'm so glad I've finally taken these matters into my own hands.

I don’t like the way mainstream charities recruit, like someone ringing my doorbell who starts talking out of the blue. Or being approached at Utrecht Central Station...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman explains why he took the pledge, published by Pepijn on November 26, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Hi! I'm an Amsterdam-based writer interested in EA. While I was researching EA initiatives in The Netherlands for a longform article I found out that Dutch popular historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman (author of Utopia for Realists and HumanKind) had taken the Giving What We Can pledge to donate >10% of his income. I asked Rutger for an interview to find out why he took the pledge. This is a translated crosspost from my newsletter on underrated ideas and progress, De Optimist (Dutch only).

🗓️ Please note that Giving What We Can hosts several "Effective Giving" day events next Tuesday!

Inequality

“Inequality has always interested me. While I was researching my book Utopia for Realists I discovered the “How Rich Am I” calculator. You can enter your income and see how rich you are compared to the rest of the world. Back then Occupy Wallstreet and the slogan “we are the 99%” were gaining traction. Yet when I got back the results from the calculator I said to myself: whoa, Rutger, you don’t belong to the 99%! You belong to the 1%. An average income in the Netherlands puts you in the 3.5% richest in the world. Even if you have homeless benefits in the Netherlands, you already belong to the richest 15% of the world. By the way, I don't mean to say that the homeless benefits in The Netherlands are so generous. It mainly says how terribly poor the rest of the world still is. The average global citizen earns only about $16 a day per person.”

Royalties

“We were taught at home that it is important to give away a substantial part of your income. So the idea was always to arrange that properly. I just kept postponing the moment. “That will come some day,” I kept telling myself. But in hindsight it was an excuse to do nothing. And the need of the world is now. The people who benefit from my money don't care about the motivation that I kept postponing my donations. Once the royalties on my books started rolling in, more and more money piled up in my bank account. Only then did I seriously start to wonder what responsibility that money entailed. That is how I ended up at Giving What We Can.”

A serious percentage

“There are two ways to do a better job of donating than most Dutch people do now. First, if you don't live in poverty yourself, you can probably donate more than you do now. Dutch households give an average of 0.4% of their income to charities. I find this percentage rather low. I wondered: what would be a serious percentage? Then I arrived at 10% of my gross income, it’s also an elegant number. That is twenty times what the average Dutch person gives. I don't think that donating ten percent will be a tremendous sacrifice for the readers of your newsletter. Sure, you will have to sacrifice something for it. In most cases, a slightly less fancy holiday. Maybe a slightly less fancy car. But if you earn well it will not really have a big impact on your happiness in life. I'm not afraid to give a sermon here. I think that everyone who earns well in The Netherlands should seriously think about giving more. That, in my view, is a moral obligation.”

Get going

“Second, it's better to give intentionally than impulsively - for instance, when someone knocks on your door. You have to get started yourself. I do my annual donations righter after my tax return, then I know what my aggregate income is and I take 10% of that. Then I have a conversation with my wife what charities we are going to select. I'm so glad I've finally taken these matters into my own hands.

I don’t like the way mainstream charities recruit, like someone ringing my doorbell who starts talking out of the blue. Or being approached at Utrecht Central Station...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How many EA 2021 $s would you trade off against a 0.01% chance of existential catastrophe?, published by Linch on November 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm interested in how many 2021 $s you'd think it's rational for EA be willing to trade (or perhaps the equivalent in human capital) against 0.01% (or 1 basis point) of existential risk.

This question is potentially extremely decision-relevant for EA orgs doing prioritization, like Rethink Priorities. For example, if we assign $X to preventing 0.01% of existential risk, and we take Toby Ord's figures on existential risk (pg. 167, The Precipice) on face value, then we should not prioritize asteroid risk (~1/1,000,000 risk this century), if all realistic interventions we could think of costs 1% of $X, or prioritize climate change (~1/1,000 risk this century) if realistic interventions costs $10X, at least on direct longtermism grounds (though there might still be neartermist or instrumental reasons for doing this research). To a lesser extent, it may be relevant for individuals considering whether it's better to earn-to-give vs contribute to existential risk reduction, whether in research or in real-world work.

Assume the money comes from a very EA-aligned (and not too liquidity-constrained) org like Open Phil. Note: I hereby define existential risk the following way(see discussion in comments for why I used a non-standard definition):

Existential risk – A risk of catastrophe where an adverse outcome would permanently cause Earth-originating intelligent life's astronomical value to be <50% of what it would otherwise be capable of.

Note that extinction (0%) and maximally bad[1] s-risks (-100%) are special cases of <50%.[1] assuming symmetry between utility and disutility

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How many EA 2021 $s would you trade off against a 0.01% chance of existential catastrophe?, published by Linch on November 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm interested in how many 2021 $s you'd think it's rational for EA be willing to trade (or perhaps the equivalent in human capital) against 0.01% (or 1 basis point) of existential risk.

This question is potentially extremely decision-relevant for EA orgs doing prioritization, like Rethink Priorities. For example, if we assign $X to preventing 0.01% of existential risk, and we take Toby Ord's figures on existential risk (pg. 167, The Precipice) on face value, then we should not prioritize asteroid risk (~1/1,000,000 risk this century), if all realistic interventions we could think of costs 1% of $X, or prioritize climate change (~1/1,000 risk this century) if realistic interventions costs $10X, at least on direct longtermism grounds (though there might still be neartermist or instrumental reasons for doing this research). To a lesser extent, it may be relevant for individuals considering whether it's better to earn-to-give vs contribute to existential risk reduction, whether in research or in real-world work.

Assume the money comes from a very EA-aligned (and not too liquidity-constrained) org like Open Phil. Note: I hereby define existential risk the following way(see discussion in comments for why I used a non-standard definition):

Existential risk – A risk of catastrophe where an adverse outcome would permanently cause Earth-originating intelligent life's astronomical value to be <50% of what it would otherwise be capable of.

Note that extinction (0%) and maximally bad[1] s-risks (-100%) are special cases of <50%.[1] assuming symmetry between utility and disutility

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Frame Control, published by Aella on November 27, 2021 on LessWrong.

Crossposted from my blog

When I mention my dad’s abuse, I mention salient things - physical pain, insults, and controlling behavior. These are “clearly bad” - if I tell you that he often told me I was lazy and would fail horribly at life once I left home, you know it's bad, because it’s concrete, easy to imagine and obviously unkind. But this wasn’t the worst of the abuse; the most terrible parts were extraordinarily hard to understand or describe.In his world, I felt insane - I couldn’t tell what was real, who was at fault, or why my heart hurt so much. My sense of clarity around my own intentions crumbled; everything I thought or did might have seemed good on the surface, but that goodness became just a disguise for my true, darker intentions - all helpfully revealed to me by my dad. And none of it was salient or concrete or easily understandable; I remember my mom once telling me, “I can’t describe what this is like to other people.

The individual things seem so silly, I can’t put the important thing into words.”

I’m going to try to put it into words, and the words I personally use for “the important thing” are frame control.

This isn’t just about my dad, and he wasn’t even particularly good at it when children weren’t his targets; frame control pops up elsewhere. It’s a feature of cults, leaders, of some charismatic people, of abusers in relationships, of some parents, of some ideological movements. It’s hit communities around me, hurt friends of mine. I don’t know how to fight it, but I at least want to name it. And naming it is really hard, because at first glance frame control looks like completely normal behavior. Every individual instance is “not that bad”; and when the knife that wounds you is invisible, you might doubt that you’re bleeding at all. Frame control is inherently illegible; it’s not something that checks a few clear boxes, it’s only really visible through the experience of the receiver.

In this post I’m going to advocate for some perspectives that I think can also be really dangerous. I’m going to avoid too many disclaimers or safety warnings throughout, and will discuss safety altogether at the end.

Your frame is basically the set of assumptions you hold about the world around you, in every way there is - your values, your identity, your beliefs about meaning and social norms and economics and whatever, although most of it tends to be implicit or subconscious; probably only a small portion of your frame is directly expressible! Your frame might encompass anything from “Jesus is my savior” to “It’s bad to touch the sidewalk with your hands” to “I am valuable because I’m funny”

Imagine your frame exists as a box around you; when someone engages with you, they try to get you out of your box and into their box in various ways. This can be via stuff like:

Debate: Trying to demonstrate, through reason and facts, how their box is better (“No, sex isn’t about power, it’s about sex, here’s a study!”)

Recommendation: Showing that the box they’re in has been really good for them (“Viewing my body tension as actually about childhood trauma really cleared things up”)

Pressure: Holding social alliance with them as conditional on them joining you in your box (“I only really respect people who believe all lives matter”)

Rescue: Offering up their box as the solution for an issue you have (“Want to escape your suffering? Become aware of no-self”)

Aggression: Trying to push you into their box (“You’re a piece of shit for denying climate change, you’re the reason we’re all going to die”)

These are all attempts to control your frame, but none of these is what I mean by frame control. These techniques can be manipulative or abusive, but they’re also broadcast clearly; in a similar way to how a man...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Frame Control, published by Aella on November 27, 2021 on LessWrong.

Crossposted from my blog

When I mention my dad’s abuse, I mention salient things - physical pain, insults, and controlling behavior. These are “clearly bad” - if I tell you that he often told me I was lazy and would fail horribly at life once I left home, you know it's bad, because it’s concrete, easy to imagine and obviously unkind. But this wasn’t the worst of the abuse; the most terrible parts were extraordinarily hard to understand or describe.In his world, I felt insane - I couldn’t tell what was real, who was at fault, or why my heart hurt so much. My sense of clarity around my own intentions crumbled; everything I thought or did might have seemed good on the surface, but that goodness became just a disguise for my true, darker intentions - all helpfully revealed to me by my dad. And none of it was salient or concrete or easily understandable; I remember my mom once telling me, “I can’t describe what this is like to other people.

The individual things seem so silly, I can’t put the important thing into words.”

I’m going to try to put it into words, and the words I personally use for “the important thing” are frame control.

This isn’t just about my dad, and he wasn’t even particularly good at it when children weren’t his targets; frame control pops up elsewhere. It’s a feature of cults, leaders, of some charismatic people, of abusers in relationships, of some parents, of some ideological movements. It’s hit communities around me, hurt friends of mine. I don’t know how to fight it, but I at least want to name it. And naming it is really hard, because at first glance frame control looks like completely normal behavior. Every individual instance is “not that bad”; and when the knife that wounds you is invisible, you might doubt that you’re bleeding at all. Frame control is inherently illegible; it’s not something that checks a few clear boxes, it’s only really visible through the experience of the receiver.

In this post I’m going to advocate for some perspectives that I think can also be really dangerous. I’m going to avoid too many disclaimers or safety warnings throughout, and will discuss safety altogether at the end.

Your frame is basically the set of assumptions you hold about the world around you, in every way there is - your values, your identity, your beliefs about meaning and social norms and economics and whatever, although most of it tends to be implicit or subconscious; probably only a small portion of your frame is directly expressible! Your frame might encompass anything from “Jesus is my savior” to “It’s bad to touch the sidewalk with your hands” to “I am valuable because I’m funny”

Imagine your frame exists as a box around you; when someone engages with you, they try to get you out of your box and into their box in various ways. This can be via stuff like:

Debate: Trying to demonstrate, through reason and facts, how their box is better (“No, sex isn’t about power, it’s about sex, here’s a study!”)

Recommendation: Showing that the box they’re in has been really good for them (“Viewing my body tension as actually about childhood trauma really cleared things up”)

Pressure: Holding social alliance with them as conditional on them joining you in your box (“I only really respect people who believe all lives matter”)

Rescue: Offering up their box as the solution for an issue you have (“Want to escape your suffering? Become aware of no-self”)

Aggression: Trying to push you into their box (“You’re a piece of shit for denying climate change, you’re the reason we’re all going to die”)

These are all attempts to control your frame, but none of these is what I mean by frame control. These techniques can be manipulative or abusive, but they’re also broadcast clearly; in a similar way to how a man...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How should Effective Altruists think about Leftist Ethics?, published by AppliedDivinityStudies on November 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

In their report on Charter Cities, DavidBernard and Jason Schukraft write:

Finally, the laboratories of governance model may add to the neocolonialist critique of charter cities. Charter cities are not only risky, they are also controversial... Whether or not this criticism is justified, it would probably resonate with many socially-minded individuals, thereby reducing the appeal of charter cities.

I want to preface my comments by saying that I respect the authors, I thought the report as a whole was super useful, and I'm personally biased because I like Charter Cities.

Having said that, I thought this particular piece of reasoning was really poor.

Note the phrasing "Whether or not this criticism is justified". The authors are bracketing the question of actual material harms, instead invoking the neocolonialist critique only to point out that it might entail PR risk.

There are various reasonable ways to engage with Leftist Ethics, but this strikes me as among the worst. As I understand it (admittedly a bit uncharitably), the authors are saying:

We don't care whether or not neocolonialism is actually bad.

But we are worried someone might think that it's bad.

So we should avoid grant-making that could be critiqued on those grounds.

There are several problems here:

We should care if neocolonialism is real, if it's bad, and if it's induced by Charter Cities. If so, that should impact the cost-effectiveness estimate, not just factor in as a side-comment about PR-risk.

The question of PR-risk is a purely logistical question that should be bracketed from discussions of cost-effectiveness. In the case that an intervention is found to have high cost-effectiveness and high PR-risk, we should think strategically about how to fund it, perhaps by privately recommending the intervention to individual donors as opposed to foundations.

We should cite and engage with specific arguments, not imagine and then be haunted by some imagined spectre of Leftism. The authors mention the "neocolonialist critique" three times, never bothering to actually explain what it is, who advocates for it, how harmful it is, or how it could be avoided.

In other words, the authors take Leftist Ethics both too seriously, and not seriously enough.

Of course we can all come up with some caricature of the neocolonialist critique, but that's precisely the problem. You can think of it as a kind of inverted-Strawman. In the classical version, you invent an ideological opponent in order to dismiss it. In the inverted version, you invent an ideological opponent in order to fall prey to it, and then avoid engaging with it seriously by saying "we don't care if it's true, but other people might think it is."

Although Charter Cities are just one application of this flavor of argument, were we to apply its logic more generally, we would arrive at a devastating and paralyzing ideology. Leftist Ethics genuinely does warn against many things, but imagined Leftist Ethics potentially warns against everything.

So not only is the logic itself poor, the principle it entails backtests horribly against important EA causes and interventions:

Funding bednets? Isn't it too paternalistic to think you know better than poor people? How can you justify any intervention other than GiveDirectly?

AI Safety? That's just a speculative distraction from the real problems of algorithmic bias, predictive policing and government surveillance.

I'm not even making this up. Here's a recent GiveDirectly post on EA Forum explaining that "The GiveWell team is incredibly intelligent, but they're mainly Americans or Europeans who haven't spent significant time in environments of extreme poverty... We think ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How should Effective Altruists think about Leftist Ethics?, published by AppliedDivinityStudies on November 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

In their report on Charter Cities, DavidBernard and Jason Schukraft write:

Finally, the laboratories of governance model may add to the neocolonialist critique of charter cities. Charter cities are not only risky, they are also controversial... Whether or not this criticism is justified, it would probably resonate with many socially-minded individuals, thereby reducing the appeal of charter cities.

I want to preface my comments by saying that I respect the authors, I thought the report as a whole was super useful, and I'm personally biased because I like Charter Cities.

Having said that, I thought this particular piece of reasoning was really poor.

Note the phrasing "Whether or not this criticism is justified". The authors are bracketing the question of actual material harms, instead invoking the neocolonialist critique only to point out that it might entail PR risk.

There are various reasonable ways to engage with Leftist Ethics, but this strikes me as among the worst. As I understand it (admittedly a bit uncharitably), the authors are saying:

We don't care whether or not neocolonialism is actually bad.

But we are worried someone might think that it's bad.

So we should avoid grant-making that could be critiqued on those grounds.

There are several problems here:

We should care if neocolonialism is real, if it's bad, and if it's induced by Charter Cities. If so, that should impact the cost-effectiveness estimate, not just factor in as a side-comment about PR-risk.

The question of PR-risk is a purely logistical question that should be bracketed from discussions of cost-effectiveness. In the case that an intervention is found to have high cost-effectiveness and high PR-risk, we should think strategically about how to fund it, perhaps by privately recommending the intervention to individual donors as opposed to foundations.

We should cite and engage with specific arguments, not imagine and then be haunted by some imagined spectre of Leftism. The authors mention the "neocolonialist critique" three times, never bothering to actually explain what it is, who advocates for it, how harmful it is, or how it could be avoided.

In other words, the authors take Leftist Ethics both too seriously, and not seriously enough.

Of course we can all come up with some caricature of the neocolonialist critique, but that's precisely the problem. You can think of it as a kind of inverted-Strawman. In the classical version, you invent an ideological opponent in order to dismiss it. In the inverted version, you invent an ideological opponent in order to fall prey to it, and then avoid engaging with it seriously by saying "we don't care if it's true, but other people might think it is."

Although Charter Cities are just one application of this flavor of argument, were we to apply its logic more generally, we would arrive at a devastating and paralyzing ideology. Leftist Ethics genuinely does warn against many things, but imagined Leftist Ethics potentially warns against everything.

So not only is the logic itself poor, the principle it entails backtests horribly against important EA causes and interventions:

Funding bednets? Isn't it too paternalistic to think you know better than poor people? How can you justify any intervention other than GiveDirectly?

AI Safety? That's just a speculative distraction from the real problems of algorithmic bias, predictive policing and government surveillance.

I'm not even making this up. Here's a recent GiveDirectly post on EA Forum explaining that "The GiveWell team is incredibly intelligent, but they're mainly Americans or Europeans who haven't spent significant time in environments of extreme poverty... We think ...