Yeah, this post is pretty heavily premised on the assumption that EA community building is good. If you do not share that assumption (e.g. because you think FTX makes EA net negative in expectation) then donating to CEA seems unwise. (Maybe it would have been clearer if I’d made that premise explicit, but I’ll leave it as-is now.)
My honest experience is that there is a set of donors who basically buy the “talent is valuable, and if you ask people doing impactful work what influenced them, CEA is high on the list, so CEA is impactful” argument, and for some of them FTX was an update but not enough to change whether CEA was above their funding bar. And there is another set who just entirely disagree with this line of reasoning, and for them CEA was never above the funding bar. I’m having difficulty thinking of many of the donors we interact with directly for whom FTX moved CEA from being above to below the funding bar, but if this describes someone reading this comment I would be interested to hear from you.
My objection was specifically to the claim that “the last few years have proven the value of the EA community” which is an absurd thing to say given the FTX debacle.
It’s also odd to ask for money without explaining why you have a funding gap, what role CEA played in FTX, whether it could have done better, what has changed etc
Can you say why you think it’s absurd? A lot of people doing seemingly impactful work say that the EA community substantially helped them (see above). The arguments I know of which claim that the harms from FTX outweigh this deny the assumption that EA work is actually impactful (specifically: they usually say something like 1. AI is the only thing that matters, and 2. EA work on RLHF etc. sped up capabilities more than safety, making the average impact small/negative).
If this is your view than fair enough, but it’s not one that I (or, I think, most people) share.
This is the second CEA post to make claims like this without mentioning the FTX fraud.
Yeah, this post is pretty heavily premised on the assumption that EA community building is good. If you do not share that assumption (e.g. because you think FTX makes EA net negative in expectation) then donating to CEA seems unwise. (Maybe it would have been clearer if I’d made that premise explicit, but I’ll leave it as-is now.)
My honest experience is that there is a set of donors who basically buy the “talent is valuable, and if you ask people doing impactful work what influenced them, CEA is high on the list, so CEA is impactful” argument, and for some of them FTX was an update but not enough to change whether CEA was above their funding bar. And there is another set who just entirely disagree with this line of reasoning, and for them CEA was never above the funding bar. I’m having difficulty thinking of many of the donors we interact with directly for whom FTX moved CEA from being above to below the funding bar, but if this describes someone reading this comment I would be interested to hear from you.
(Note that CEA staff have written a bunch of things about FTX, including multiple posts from me personally. Readers may also be interested in this investigation into EA reforms.)
My objection was specifically to the claim that “the last few years have proven the value of the EA community” which is an absurd thing to say given the FTX debacle.
It’s also odd to ask for money without explaining why you have a funding gap, what role CEA played in FTX, whether it could have done better, what has changed etc
Can you say why you think it’s absurd? A lot of people doing seemingly impactful work say that the EA community substantially helped them (see above). The arguments I know of which claim that the harms from FTX outweigh this deny the assumption that EA work is actually impactful (specifically: they usually say something like 1. AI is the only thing that matters, and 2. EA work on RLHF etc. sped up capabilities more than safety, making the average impact small/negative).
If this is your view than fair enough, but it’s not one that I (or, I think, most people) share.
Perhaps the thinking was that FTX is not directly relevant to this specific post?
But I agree, clearly FTX is on the minds of many people reading this, so avoiding the elephant in the room is not working.
FTX is highly relevant to this post in all sorts of ways. Aside from that, sentences like the one I quoted are profoundly weird.