What does moral progress consist of?

I agree, and I think that focus on the welfare of animals while there is so much outstanding human suffering to be tackled is a weird mistake the EA community seems to be making. Even more importantly, the importance of aligning AI and the potential relevance of moral philosophy to that aim seems to vastly overwhelm anything whatsoever happening with the environment. If you want to help the environment or animals, the only plausible way to do so is to help align AI with your values (including your value of the environment and animals). We're at a super weird crux point where everything channels through that.

Likely relevant: Raising the Sanity Waterline [LW · GW].

I tend to think of much of this as coming down to coalitions. Different coalitions have different norms/beliefs/etc., and what you want to do is to make more people be in coalitions that support enlightenment norms and ideas.

There seem to be three main ways that this can be achieved:

1. Create an enlightenment-based coalition that is so attractive that people will naturally tend to want to join it and adopt its norms.
2. Enter into existing coalitions and gain power in them, and then use that power to shift them towards more enlightenment norms and beliefs.
3. Use force to destroy the alternative non-enlightenment coalitions, thereby making people need to adopt enlightened norms and beliefs.

Option 3 seems kind of contrary to the enlightenment ideals, e.g. one option for "force" could be censoring them, but censorship violates the enlightenment norm of freedom of speech.

The other two options are basically reliant on impressing the people within the coalitions that currently disagree with enlightenment norms. But there's a reason people follow those coalitions rather than the more pro-enlightenment ones, because they are not sufficiently impressed by the achievements and goals of enlightenment-aligned people compared to what their own coalitions have to offer. So the things that recruited people to the enlightenment-aligned groups are unlikely to work on the people in these competing groups.

I would support EA spending a chunk of its resources strategizing on whether and how to participate in politics, do activism, or lobby politicians. If we understood how to involve ourselves in politics in a way that didn’t pose a serious risk of destroying or corrupting EA, we might be able to find some important, tractable, and neglected levers to pull in at least some of these areas. We also need to figure out a way to think about these more sociological and qualitative issues; it’s not EA’s strong suit.

I’m very glad EA has tried to stay largely clear of politics so far, and our track record in our few attempts thus far is not encouraging. By contrast, EA seems to have a good thing going using its present strategy, and I don’t see an obvious slowdown looming for the movement.

On the flip side, learning how to be effective in politics might be crucial for pressing standard EA goals like AGI and biorisk. SBF already spent a pile of cash on a fruitless and possibly misguided attempt to gain political clout for his causes by getting an EA elected to congress. If money’s already being spent and EA’s reputation is already at risk from high-profile misguided political activity, maybe that’s a sign we ought to focus on learning how to do it well.

Many young people in the US are now attracted to socialism, an ideology that should have been left behind in the 20th century.

What makes you say this? The word "socialism" is so overloaded, I can't tell which specific interpretation of it you dislike and why. I support some ideologies that describe themselves as socialist, but repudiate others.

I am guilty of being a zero-to-one, rather than one-to-many, type person. It seems far easier and more interesting to me, to create new forms of progress of any sort, rather than convincing people to adopt better ideas.

I guess the project of convincing people seems hard? Like, if I come up with something awesome that's new, it seems easier to get it into people's hands, rather than taking an existing thing which people have already rejected and telling them "hey this is actually cool, let's look again".

All that said, I do find this idea-space intriguing partly thanks to this post - it makes me want to think of ways of doing more one-to-many type stuff. I've been recently drawn into living in DC and I think the DC effective altruism folks are much more on the one-to-many side of the world.

I should point out that the logic of the degrowth movement follows from a relatively straightforward analysis of available resources vs. first world consumption levels.  Our world can only sustain 7 billion human beings because the vast majority of them live not at first world levels of consumption, but third world levels, which many would argue to be unfair and an unsustainable pyramid scheme.  If you work out the numbers, if everyone had the quality of life of a typical American citizen, taking into account things like meat consumption to arable land, energy usage, etc., then the Earth would be able to sustain only about 1-3 billion such people.  Degrowth thus follows logically if you believe that all the people around the world should eventually be able to live comfortable, first world lives.

I'll also point out that socialism is, like liberalism, a child of the Enlightenment and general beliefs that reason and science could be used to solve political and economic problems.  Say what you will about the failed socialist experiments of the 20th century, but the idea that government should be able to engineer society to function better than the ad-hoc arrangement that is capitalism, is very much an Enlightenment rationalist, materialist, and positivist position that can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Fourier, and other philosophes before Karl Marx came along and made it particularly popular.  Marxism in particular, at least claims to be "scientific socialism", and historically emphasized reason and science, to the extent that most Marxist states were officially atheist (something you might like given your concerns about religions).

In practice, many modern social policies, such as the welfare state, Medicare, public pensions, etc., are heavily influenced by socialist thinking and put in place in part as a response by liberal democracies to the threat of the state socialist model during the Cold War.  No country in the world runs on laissez-faire capitalism, we all utilize mixed market economies with varying degrees of public and private ownership.  The U.S. still has a substantial public sector, just as China, an ostensibly Marxist Leninist society in theory, has a substantial private sector (albeit with public ownership of the "commanding heights" of the economy).  It seems that all societies in the world eventually compromised in similar ways to achieve reasonably functional economies balanced with the need to avoid potential class conflict.  This convergence is probably not accidental.

If you're truly more concerned with truth seeking than tribal affiliations, you should be aware of your own tribe, which as far as I can tell, is western, liberal, and democratic.  Even if you honestly believe in the moral truth of the western liberal democratic intellectual tradition, you should still be aware that it is, in some sense, a tribe.  A very powerful one that is arguably predominant in the world right now, but a tribe nonetheless, with its inherent biases (or priors at least) and propaganda.

Just some thoughts.

I don’t think we have time before AGI comes to deeply change global culture.

But I never hear EA folks talk about these kinds of issues, and these ideas don’t seem to resonate with the community when I bring them up. I’m still left wondering, what is the disconnect here?

I've noticed that LW is generally more cynical about civilization (probably inspired by EY) compared to EA. You can see it in the framings. The "reducing existential risk" framing focuses on risks, not on making something happen that gives us more control than we currently have. The implicit theme is that “humans will be in control by default.” Whereas the way EY frames things, it's more like "there's a big challenge coming up but civilization isn't reacting properly; we have a lot of work to do forming pockets of sanity and saving everyone with the help of magic-like technology which we're forced to develop and master fast enough (because others are going to fuck it up by default)." 

To address the title only, for each person moral progress consists of everyone else adopting their moral views. For they believe that their moral views are right (otherwise they would not be their views); therefore everyone else is wrong to the extent that they differ.

People who disagree about physical things can resolve their differences by reason applied to observation and experiment. Nothing of the sort seems to be available for morality. There is no evidence, no Bayesian updating. Without that, what sound epistemology can there be? Instead, there is only warfare, metaphorical or actual, cold or hot. The fundamental imperative of morality is to take over everyone else's mind, and all that differs is what methods one's morality permits.

I am sometimes tempted to ask ████s why, if they believe ███ █ ████, and not merely believe that they believe it, they aren't out █████ing ██ ███s, but I don't, because I think there would be too much risk of them actually doing that.

In the US, "socialism" is a derogatory word used for the belief the government shouldn't let you die, and that it should serve you (rather than you it). This works fine in Europe, and there is no connection to socialism or communism.

It's not possible to infer, from a single-ruling murderous party failing to govern acceptably (the central example of "communism"), that what ring right-wing (or other) Americans call "socialism" is negative or undesirable in any way.

"Moral progress" is first and foremost what it takes for people to get along.  An ongoing process at the individual and group levels.

"a lot of problems rarely discussed among EAs."

While I'm floored by the civil, intelligent and sincere discussion I've recently found here at LW , the rootier problem to what is discussed often is, IMO, that no person seems immune to the avoidance of self-regulation. The imperative to do so noted in B. Russell's Nobel Prize acceptance speech "The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior"(1950) in which he describes universal human desires that are insatiable.

Communities of those striving to self-regulate know they must be mindful of the constant maintenance required to balance individual and societal needs as well as wants.

cite: From Walden, 1854: "Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails."  Also, Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean.