I don’t believe CEA actually has that many resources to deeply vet organizations.
If someone were interested in donating to them enough money for them to do more vetting, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would do more.
I’d expect that the funders would have done more vetting. That said, some of the EA funders now are pretty time-constrained and don’t do very deep vetting.
My guess is that this sort of thing could be prevented with increased vetting and mentorship/oversight. In some worlds, strong managers could find ways for Nonlinear to have done good work, while discouraging/preventing the bad parts of it.
But, this is pretty expensive, and I don’t think there’s a lot of enthusiasm/interest for expanding this area soon. In fairness, note that it is difficult to set up this infrastructure, and the results are often fairly amorphous (it’s hard to detect problems that aren’t happening) and long-term.
Part of the reason I think it was worth Ben/Lightcone prioritizing this investigation is as a retro-active version of “evaluations.”
Like, it is pretty expensive to “vet” things.
But, if your org has practices that lead to people getting hurt (whether intentionally or not), and it’s reasonably likely that those will eventually come to light, orgs are more likely to proactively put more effort into avoiding this sort of outcome.
That sounds a lot like what I picture as an “evaluation”?
I agree that spending time on evaluations/investigations like this is valuable.
Generally, I agree that—the more (competent) evaluations/investigations are done, the less orgs will feel incentivized to do things that would look bad if revealed.
(I think we mainly agree, it’s just terminology here)
Thanks for the reply! I guess I thought that since the CEA already does vet people before they can attend EAG, that maybe this wouldn’t be that hard to do in practise. But I see that most people disagree with me and I appreciate your reply!
Yea. I think CEA does much less vetting than something like this would require. Ben put in hundreds of hours in this case. Maybe CEA has 10-60 minutes to decide on each organization that joins? Most of the time simple questions like, “were they funded by ea donors, and can a few EAs vouch for them” satisfy.
I think Nonlinear would seem pretty competitive with a quick review (you notice they were funded by EAs, the team is EA centric, they do projects that are used by EAs)
I don’t believe CEA actually has that many resources to deeply vet organizations.
If someone were interested in donating to them enough money for them to do more vetting, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would do more.
I’d expect that the funders would have done more vetting. That said, some of the EA funders now are pretty time-constrained and don’t do very deep vetting.
My guess is that this sort of thing could be prevented with increased vetting and mentorship/oversight. In some worlds, strong managers could find ways for Nonlinear to have done good work, while discouraging/preventing the bad parts of it.
But, this is pretty expensive, and I don’t think there’s a lot of enthusiasm/interest for expanding this area soon. In fairness, note that it is difficult to set up this infrastructure, and the results are often fairly amorphous (it’s hard to detect problems that aren’t happening) and long-term.
Part of the reason I think it was worth Ben/Lightcone prioritizing this investigation is as a retro-active version of “evaluations.”
Like, it is pretty expensive to “vet” things.
But, if your org has practices that lead to people getting hurt (whether intentionally or not), and it’s reasonably likely that those will eventually come to light, orgs are more likely to proactively put more effort into avoiding this sort of outcome.
That sounds a lot like what I picture as an “evaluation”?
I agree that spending time on evaluations/investigations like this is valuable.
Generally, I agree that—the more (competent) evaluations/investigations are done, the less orgs will feel incentivized to do things that would look bad if revealed.
(I think we mainly agree, it’s just terminology here)
Thanks for the reply! I guess I thought that since the CEA already does vet people before they can attend EAG, that maybe this wouldn’t be that hard to do in practise. But I see that most people disagree with me and I appreciate your reply!
Yea. I think CEA does much less vetting than something like this would require. Ben put in hundreds of hours in this case. Maybe CEA has 10-60 minutes to decide on each organization that joins? Most of the time simple questions like, “were they funded by ea donors, and can a few EAs vouch for them” satisfy.
I think Nonlinear would seem pretty competitive with a quick review (you notice they were funded by EAs, the team is EA centric, they do projects that are used by EAs)
Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.