Can I suggest that anyone who wants to dig into whether Amanda/Daniela were lying here head over to this related post, and that comments on this post stay focused on the general idea of EA Adjacency as FTX trauma?
Fully endorse that I think EA is getting a lot of bad comms advice. I think a good comms person would have prepared Antrhopic folks way better, assuming those quotes weren’t taken agressively out of context or something.
That said, I am not sure I agree that EA adjacency is mostly ascribable to FTX trauma in the personal PR “project will fail” sense, because I think there are two other explanations of EA adjacency. One, which could be related to FTX trauma, is leadership betrayal. The other is brand confusion.
Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became “EA Adjacent” when Scott Alexander’s followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little—that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values. I then talked to a bunch of EA insiders about it and found the response extremely weak (“I know Scott personally and he’s a nice guy,” as though people who are nice to their friends can’t also be racists and weirdly into monarchy[1]).
Whether you love Scott Alexander or not, what I’m trying to point out is that there is another cause of “EA Adjacency” besides personal brand protection, and it might be leadership betrayal. I had been EA since 2012 in a low-key way when I found out about Scott, and I actively told people I was into EA, and even referenced it in career-related things I was doing as something that was shaping my goals and career choices. I wasn’t working in the space, but I hoped to eventually, and I was pretty passionate about it! I tried to promote it to a lot of people! I stopped doing this after talking to CEA’s community health team and several other prominent EAs, because of feeling like EA leadership was massively not walking the walk and that this thing I thought was the only community whose values I had ever trusted had sort of betrayed my trust. I went through some serious soul searching after this; it was very emotionally taxing, and I decoupled EA from my identity pretty substantially as a result. Probably healthy, tbh.
I am not sure the extent to which the post-FTX adjacency might be attributed to brand protection and what percent is toward leadership betrayal, but I suspect both could be at play, because many people could have felt betrayed by the fact that EA leadership was well aware of FTX sketchiness and didn’t say anything (or weren’t aware, but then maybe you’d be betrayed by their incompetence).
Brand confusion: After brand embarrassment and leadership betrayal, I think a 3rd potential explanation for EA adjacency is a sort of brand confusion problem. Here, I think EA is sort of like Christianity—there’s an underlying set of beliefs that almost everyone in the general Christian community agrees with, but different factions can be WILDLY different culturally and ideologically. Unfortunately, only EA insiders are familiar with these distinctions. So right now, acknowledging being an EA is like acknowledging you’re a Christian to someone who only knows about Mormons. If you’re actually a liberal Episcopalian and don’t want to be seen as being a Mormon, maybe you don’t have time to get into the fact that yes, technically you are a Christian but not that kind of Christian. I wonder if EA-adjacent folks would be more comfortable acknowledging EA connection if they could identify a connection with only one part or faction of EA, and there was greater clarity in the public eye about the fact that EA is not a monolith.
In terms of what behavior I’d like to see from other EAs and EA-adjacents: If I’m talking to an EA insider, I still say I have issues with parts of EA while acknowledging that I have a ton of shared values and work in the space. If someone is mocking EA as an outsider, I am actually MORE likely to admit connection and shared values with EA, because I usually think they are focusing on the wrong problems.
Another, very obvious reason is just that more EA people are near real power now than in 2018, and with serious involvement in power and politics comes tactical incentives to avoid saying what you actually think. I think that is probably a lot of what is going on with Anthropic people playing down their EA connections.
Is that a separate reason from the one OP names and the ones in my comment? If EA had an excellent brand, tactical incentives would encourage naming yourself as an EA, not discourage it. It’s the intersection of bad brand and/or brand confusion with tactics that leads to this result, not tactics alone, right?
I think the most likely explanation, particularly for people working at Anthropic is that EA has a lot of “takes” on AI, many of which they (for good or bad reasons) very strongly disagree with. This might fall into “brand confusion”, but I think some of it’s simply a point of disagreement. It’s probably accurate to characterise the AI safety wing of EA as generally regarding it as very important to debate whether AGI is safe to attempt to develop. Anthropic and their backers have obviously picked a side on that already.
I think that’s probably more important for them to disassociate from than FTX or individuals being problematic in other ways.
Personally, I think disagreements like this fit under the definition of brand confusion, at least as I intended it—if everyone understood that there were EAs who are debating AGI is safe, and others who have already made a decision on that, then someone who spent a lot of time reading about EA/talking about EA/being married to EA leadership wouldn’t feel as bad saying “Yeah, I’m EA” just because they disagreed with some other EAs.
Also, I don’t like Scott Alexander’s politics at all, but in the interests of strict accuracy I don’t think he is a monarchist, or particularly monarchism sympathetic (except insofar as he finds some individuals with far-right views who like monarchy kind of endearing.) If anything, I had the impression that whilst Scott has certainly been influenced by and promoted the far right in many ways, a view that monarchism is just really, really silly was one of the things that genuinely kept him from regarding himself as fully in sympathy with the neo-reactionaries.
Not saying something in this realm is what’s happening here, but in terms of common causes of people identifying as EA adjacent, I think there are two potential kinds of brand confusion one may want to avoid:
Associations with a particular brand (what you describe)
Associations with brands in general:
I think EAs often want to be seen as relatively objective evaluators of the world, and this is especially true about the issues they care about. The second you identify as being part of a team/movement/brand, people stop seeing you as an objective arbiter of issues associated with that team/movement/brand. In other words, they discount your view because they see you as more biased. If you tell someone you’re a fan of the New York Yankees and then predict they’re going to win the World Series, they’ll discount your view relative to if you just said you follow baseball but aren’t on the Yankees bandwagon in particular. I suspect some people identify as politically independent for this same reason: they want to and/or want to seem like they’re appraising issues objectively. My guess is this second kind of brand confusion concern is the primary thing leading many EAs to identify as EA adjacent; whether or not that’s reasonable is a separate question, but I think you could definitely make the case that it is.
I completely feel the same way that racism and sympathy toward far-right and authoritarian views in effective altruism is a reason for me to want to distance myself from the movement. As well as people maybe not agreeing with these views but basically shrugging and acting like it’s fine.
Here’s a point I haven’t seen many people discuss:
...many people could have felt betrayed by the fact that EA leadership was well aware of FTX sketchiness and didn’t say anything (or weren’t aware, but then maybe you’d be betrayed by their incompetence).
What did the EA leadership know and when did they know it? About a year ago, I asked in a comment here about a Time article that claims Will MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky, Nick Beckstead, and maybe some others were warned about FTX and/or Sam Bankman-Fried. I might have missed some responses to this, but I don’t remember ever getting a clear answer on this.
If EA leaders heard credible warnings and ignored them, then maybe that shows poor judgment. Hard to say without knowing more information.
Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became “EA Adjacent” when Scott Alexander’s followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little—that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values.
Scott Alexander isn’t in EA leadership
This is also extremely factually inaccurate—every clause in the part of your comment I’ve italicized is at least half false.
I downvoted this comment because it’s not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn’t take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn’t relevant to my point.
Thanks, that’s a great reason to downvote my comment and I appreciate you explaining why you did it (though it has gotten some upvotes so I wouldn’t have noticed anyone downvoted except that you mentioned it). And yes, I misread whom your paragraph was referring to; thanks for the clarification.
However, you’re incorrect that those factual errors aren’t relevant. Your feelings toward EA leadership are based on a false factual premise, and we shouldn’t be making decisions about branding with the goal of appealing to people who are offended based on their own misunderstanding.
I think there’s something to what you’re saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I’d argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.
Let’s say for arguments sake that I’m totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn’t that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It’s that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant—it’s still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that’s something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I’d argue it’s because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it’s because I’m totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I’m having is still useful to begin the conversation.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re irrational, you’re just mistaken about Scott being racist and what happened with the Cade Metz article. If someone in EA is really racist, and you complain to EA leadership and they don’t do anything about it, you could reasonably be angry with them. If the person in question is not in fact racist, and you complain about them to CEA and they don’t do anything about it, they made the right call and you’d be upset due to the mistaken beliefs, but conditional on those beliefs, it wasn’t irrational to be upset.)
Can I suggest that anyone who wants to dig into whether Amanda/Daniela were lying here head over to this related post, and that comments on this post stay focused on the general idea of EA Adjacency as FTX trauma?
Fully endorse that I think EA is getting a lot of bad comms advice. I think a good comms person would have prepared Antrhopic folks way better, assuming those quotes weren’t taken agressively out of context or something.
That said, I am not sure I agree that EA adjacency is mostly ascribable to FTX trauma in the personal PR “project will fail” sense, because I think there are two other explanations of EA adjacency. One, which could be related to FTX trauma, is leadership betrayal. The other is brand confusion.
Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became “EA Adjacent” when Scott Alexander’s followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little—that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values. I then talked to a bunch of EA insiders about it and found the response extremely weak (“I know Scott personally and he’s a nice guy,” as though people who are nice to their friends can’t also be racists
and weirdly into monarchy[1]).Whether you love Scott Alexander or not, what I’m trying to point out is that there is another cause of “EA Adjacency” besides personal brand protection, and it might be leadership betrayal. I had been EA since 2012 in a low-key way when I found out about Scott, and I actively told people I was into EA, and even referenced it in career-related things I was doing as something that was shaping my goals and career choices. I wasn’t working in the space, but I hoped to eventually, and I was pretty passionate about it! I tried to promote it to a lot of people! I stopped doing this after talking to CEA’s community health team and several other prominent EAs, because of feeling like EA leadership was massively not walking the walk and that this thing I thought was the only community whose values I had ever trusted had sort of betrayed my trust. I went through some serious soul searching after this; it was very emotionally taxing, and I decoupled EA from my identity pretty substantially as a result. Probably healthy, tbh.
I am not sure the extent to which the post-FTX adjacency might be attributed to brand protection and what percent is toward leadership betrayal, but I suspect both could be at play, because many people could have felt betrayed by the fact that EA leadership was well aware of FTX sketchiness and didn’t say anything (or weren’t aware, but then maybe you’d be betrayed by their incompetence).
Brand confusion: After brand embarrassment and leadership betrayal, I think a 3rd potential explanation for EA adjacency is a sort of brand confusion problem. Here, I think EA is sort of like Christianity—there’s an underlying set of beliefs that almost everyone in the general Christian community agrees with, but different factions can be WILDLY different culturally and ideologically. Unfortunately, only EA insiders are familiar with these distinctions. So right now, acknowledging being an EA is like acknowledging you’re a Christian to someone who only knows about Mormons. If you’re actually a liberal Episcopalian and don’t want to be seen as being a Mormon, maybe you don’t have time to get into the fact that yes, technically you are a Christian but not that kind of Christian. I wonder if EA-adjacent folks would be more comfortable acknowledging EA connection if they could identify a connection with only one part or faction of EA, and there was greater clarity in the public eye about the fact that EA is not a monolith.
In terms of what behavior I’d like to see from other EAs and EA-adjacents: If I’m talking to an EA insider, I still say I have issues with parts of EA while acknowledging that I have a ton of shared values and work in the space. If someone is mocking EA as an outsider, I am actually MORE likely to admit connection and shared values with EA, because I usually think they are focusing on the wrong problems.
struck for accuracy, see comments
Another, very obvious reason is just that more EA people are near real power now than in 2018, and with serious involvement in power and politics comes tactical incentives to avoid saying what you actually think. I think that is probably a lot of what is going on with Anthropic people playing down their EA connections.
Is that a separate reason from the one OP names and the ones in my comment? If EA had an excellent brand, tactical incentives would encourage naming yourself as an EA, not discourage it. It’s the intersection of bad brand and/or brand confusion with tactics that leads to this result, not tactics alone, right?
I think the most likely explanation, particularly for people working at Anthropic is that EA has a lot of “takes” on AI, many of which they (for good or bad reasons) very strongly disagree with. This might fall into “brand confusion”, but I think some of it’s simply a point of disagreement. It’s probably accurate to characterise the AI safety wing of EA as generally regarding it as very important to debate whether AGI is safe to attempt to develop. Anthropic and their backers have obviously picked a side on that already.
I think that’s probably more important for them to disassociate from than FTX or individuals being problematic in other ways.
Personally, I think disagreements like this fit under the definition of brand confusion, at least as I intended it—if everyone understood that there were EAs who are debating AGI is safe, and others who have already made a decision on that, then someone who spent a lot of time reading about EA/talking about EA/being married to EA leadership wouldn’t feel as bad saying “Yeah, I’m EA” just because they disagreed with some other EAs.
Also, I don’t like Scott Alexander’s politics at all, but in the interests of strict accuracy I don’t think he is a monarchist, or particularly monarchism sympathetic (except insofar as he finds some individuals with far-right views who like monarchy kind of endearing.) If anything, I had the impression that whilst Scott has certainly been influenced by and promoted the far right in many ways, a view that monarchism is just really, really silly was one of the things that genuinely kept him from regarding himself as fully in sympathy with the neo-reactionaries.
I have mixed feelings about this but since the point isn’t critical to the intention of my comment I’m happy to strike it.
Not saying something in this realm is what’s happening here, but in terms of common causes of people identifying as EA adjacent, I think there are two potential kinds of brand confusion one may want to avoid:
Associations with a particular brand (what you describe)
Associations with brands in general:
I think EAs often want to be seen as relatively objective evaluators of the world, and this is especially true about the issues they care about. The second you identify as being part of a team/movement/brand, people stop seeing you as an objective arbiter of issues associated with that team/movement/brand. In other words, they discount your view because they see you as more biased. If you tell someone you’re a fan of the New York Yankees and then predict they’re going to win the World Series, they’ll discount your view relative to if you just said you follow baseball but aren’t on the Yankees bandwagon in particular. I suspect some people identify as politically independent for this same reason: they want to and/or want to seem like they’re appraising issues objectively. My guess is this second kind of brand confusion concern is the primary thing leading many EAs to identify as EA adjacent; whether or not that’s reasonable is a separate question, but I think you could definitely make the case that it is.
I completely feel the same way that racism and sympathy toward far-right and authoritarian views in effective altruism is a reason for me to want to distance myself from the movement. As well as people maybe not agreeing with these views but basically shrugging and acting like it’s fine.
Here’s a point I haven’t seen many people discuss:
What did the EA leadership know and when did they know it? About a year ago, I asked in a comment here about a Time article that claims Will MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky, Nick Beckstead, and maybe some others were warned about FTX and/or Sam Bankman-Fried. I might have missed some responses to this, but I don’t remember ever getting a clear answer on this.
If EA leaders heard credible warnings and ignored them, then maybe that shows poor judgment. Hard to say without knowing more information.
Scott Alexander isn’t in EA leadershipThis is also extremely factually inaccurate—every clause in the part of your comment I’ve italicized is at least half false.
I downvoted this comment because it’s not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn’t take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn’t relevant to my point.
Thanks, that’s a great reason to downvote my comment and I appreciate you explaining why you did it (though it has gotten some upvotes so I wouldn’t have noticed anyone downvoted except that you mentioned it). And yes, I misread whom your paragraph was referring to; thanks for the clarification.
However, you’re incorrect that those factual errors aren’t relevant. Your feelings toward EA leadership are based on a false factual premise, and we shouldn’t be making decisions about branding with the goal of appealing to people who are offended based on their own misunderstanding.
Cool, I adjusted my vote, thanks for addressing.
I think there’s something to what you’re saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I’d argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.
Let’s say for arguments sake that I’m totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn’t that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It’s that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant—it’s still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that’s something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I’d argue it’s because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it’s because I’m totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I’m having is still useful to begin the conversation.
Obviously, I don’t think my opinion is based on factual errors, but that’s neither here nor there.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re irrational, you’re just mistaken about Scott being racist and what happened with the Cade Metz article. If someone in EA is really racist, and you complain to EA leadership and they don’t do anything about it, you could reasonably be angry with them. If the person in question is not in fact racist, and you complain about them to CEA and they don’t do anything about it, they made the right call and you’d be upset due to the mistaken beliefs, but conditional on those beliefs, it wasn’t irrational to be upset.)