EA - On applause lights and costly counters by Will Aldred

Link to original articleWelcome 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: On applause lights and costly counters, published by Will Aldred on December 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: stream of consciousness.Edited to add: This was written as a personal blogpost (with the frontpage checkbox at the bottom unchecked), but it appears to be showing up on the frontpage. I'm not sure what's up with that (though it's probably my bad, I forgot to uncheck the box when I initially published, then unchecked later); if you do read this post, know that it's especially rough and off-the-cuff and to some extent the downstream effect of red wine.An applause light is an empty statement which evokes positive affect without providing new information.(LessWrong Wiki)I've heard a couple of applause lights in the recent past, spoken by EAs.The first: "I'm confused [about x]."EA culture tends to reward people who are open and transparent about what they don't know. This is a good thing... until it starts getting Goodharted. The statement, "I'm confused", is productive in so far as it gets others to:apply appropriate grains of salt to the claims you're making on the topic you say you're confused abouthelp you become less confusedthink more critically and flag appropriate uncertainty on claims they themselves makeHowever, several times now I've heard empty statements of "I'm confused" where there's really no intention to achieve any of the above, so far as I can tell. "I'm confused" is being used as an applause light.The second: "diversity".This one's particularly pernicious, because it's costly to argue against. A concrete example: Alice and Bob, plus a handful more people, run an internship. In a team meeting on the application process, Bob says, "We should promote diversity." Heads nod. Satisfied, Bob does not continue. He's made his point, he's scored some social points.Meanwhile, in Alice's head:Hmm, if we do want to promote diversity, what actions should we take to make that happen?And, which is more, do we actually want to promote diversity in the first place?...... On the one hand, one could make the moral claim, "diversity is a terminal goal."...... On the other hand, one could make an instrumental claim along the lines of, "Greater diversity entails a wider set of viewpoints. This leads to a more informed discourse, better conclusions, and, ultimately, better decisions. Better decisions are upstream of better achieving our terminal goals, such as raising the probability of a flourishing future."Now, I know Bob, he's an EA, he's pretty in on the whole utilitarian deal, I don't think he views diversity as a terminal goal. Moreover, diversity is definitely not a terminal goal of this internship: our raison d'être is to reduce x-risk.Okay, so, I'll assume Bob's statement was made in good faith, and that it's really about the extent to which diversity is instrumentally useful toward reducing x-risk. This is an empirical question. There's a trade-off at play here. I've mentioned some reasons for more diversity above (more viewpoints, and so on), but there are also reasons against more diversity. Top of this list is that most of our best applicants are male and white. So, if we want to include more females and more non-white folks, then, given our fixed quota of places, this will mean distorting the bar to being accepted. Now, I don't like that this is the reality of the situation. I would like it be easy to promote diversity (in order to get the instrumental benefits of diversity without giving anything up, like having lower-aptitude people as fellows), but that's not the reality we live in. We have to weight up costs and benefits and make a choice accordingly.Right, I'll say what I'm thinking...Alice's words were met with awkward silence, averted gazes, and negative social points.Inside Alice's head:Ah, I see....