A glance at AMF’s financial data, cross-checked against a recent GiveWell Form 990, suggests ~ half of AMF’s revenue flows through GiveWell. Given GiveWell’s own compensation practices, and its well-known practices for evaluating charities, the idea that GiveWell (and allied donors who route donations through GiveWell) cares more about overhead than effectiveness seems questionable. Although the source of the other ~ half of AMF’s funding is unclear to me, the assertion about AMF donor preferences needs support in light of GiveWell’s prominence and given the alternative explanations posted elsewhere on the thread. Furthermore, AMF’s administrative costs of ~ 1% are covered by a small set of private donors, reducing the probability that AMF thinks its mainline donors care as much about them on the margin.
In addition, AMF has always been funding constrained. CEA is now tightening the purse strings a bit, but my understanding is that it has felt non-financial constraints more than financial ones in the past, which would partially explain a looser hand on spending. Moreover, it is difficult to change an existing salary structure over the short run. Donor-focused explanations seem significantly less likely here than organization-focused or labor pool-focused ones to me.
CEA is widely perceived as grossly ineffective whereas AMF is perceived as highly effective.
CEA has three major projects I’m aware of, and executes poorly on all of them.
EA Forum
The glorified subreddit you’re reading this on costs $2M per year to run, ~$30 per hour of user engagement on non-community posts. By their own admission, they could run it for 10x less than this.
EA Globals
They won’t reveal what they’ve spent on them, but there’s good reason to think it’s too much. At EAG London, they had three staff standing behind each 1m x 4m table. I asked 5 of them to rate their boredom on a scale of 1-10. The lowest answer I got was 12. They insist on throwing workshops, which the vast majority of users perceive to be a waste of time—it’s the one-to-one’s that produce the value. If they embraced that fact, they’d be able to choose much cheaper venues.
Community Building and Health
Their own community builders perceive them as incompetent. Most people are too scared to criticize them under their own names because they fear reprisals. You likely underestimate how poorly they are perceived for this reason. EAs don’t trust them, which makes them the worst people you could put in charge of community health.
Other Effects
They’re directly or indirectly responsible for most of EA’s scandals, Ni****gate to Castlegate. They were in the best position to prevent FTX’s ponzi scheming and did nothing, they may even have been complicit.
Some good points here, can I nominate you for the EA criticism panel? Also I’m curious to hear more about how CEA caused the scandal where Nick Bostrom wrote an email in 1990.
CEA staff have so much karma that they can tank any comment with a single downvote. Don’t think that the agreement vote score is representative of the community’s opinion.
A recurrent disappointment with EA Forum comments related to the karma system is the frequency with which they assume that a particular explanation of the karma score of a given comment is correct, without even considering alternative explanations. One doesn’t have to be very creative or contrarian to think of plausible reasons users may have disagreed-voted with the statement “CEA is widely perceived as grossly ineffective whereas AMF is perceived as highly effective” other than that “CEA staff have so much karma that they can tank any comment with a single downvote”.
In my limited experience any post about lower salaries and overhead is likely to get disagree votes, even if the post itself makes a lot of sense and isn’t necessarily supporting the lower salaries.
To everyone who downvoted this: please explain why you think it’s wrong.
(edit: the comment above was at −7 agreement when I wrote this)
A glance at AMF’s financial data, cross-checked against a recent GiveWell Form 990, suggests ~ half of AMF’s revenue flows through GiveWell. Given GiveWell’s own compensation practices, and its well-known practices for evaluating charities, the idea that GiveWell (and allied donors who route donations through GiveWell) cares more about overhead than effectiveness seems questionable. Although the source of the other ~ half of AMF’s funding is unclear to me, the assertion about AMF donor preferences needs support in light of GiveWell’s prominence and given the alternative explanations posted elsewhere on the thread. Furthermore, AMF’s administrative costs of ~ 1% are covered by a small set of private donors, reducing the probability that AMF thinks its mainline donors care as much about them on the margin.
In addition, AMF has always been funding constrained. CEA is now tightening the purse strings a bit, but my understanding is that it has felt non-financial constraints more than financial ones in the past, which would partially explain a looser hand on spending. Moreover, it is difficult to change an existing salary structure over the short run. Donor-focused explanations seem significantly less likely here than organization-focused or labor pool-focused ones to me.
CEA is widely perceived as grossly ineffective whereas AMF is perceived as highly effective.
CEA has three major projects I’m aware of, and executes poorly on all of them.
EA Forum
The glorified subreddit you’re reading this on costs $2M per year to run, ~$30 per hour of user engagement on non-community posts. By their own admission, they could run it for 10x less than this.
EA Globals
They won’t reveal what they’ve spent on them, but there’s good reason to think it’s too much. At EAG London, they had three staff standing behind each 1m x 4m table. I asked 5 of them to rate their boredom on a scale of 1-10. The lowest answer I got was 12. They insist on throwing workshops, which the vast majority of users perceive to be a waste of time—it’s the one-to-one’s that produce the value. If they embraced that fact, they’d be able to choose much cheaper venues.
Community Building and Health
Their own community builders perceive them as incompetent. Most people are too scared to criticize them under their own names because they fear reprisals. You likely underestimate how poorly they are perceived for this reason. EAs don’t trust them, which makes them the worst people you could put in charge of community health.
Other Effects
They’re directly or indirectly responsible for most of EA’s scandals, Ni****gate to Castlegate. They were in the best position to prevent FTX’s ponzi scheming and did nothing, they may even have been complicit.
Some good points here, can I nominate you for the EA criticism panel? Also I’m curious to hear more about how CEA caused the scandal where Nick Bostrom wrote an email in 1990.
CEA staff have so much karma that they can tank any comment with a single downvote. Don’t think that the agreement vote score is representative of the community’s opinion.
A recurrent disappointment with EA Forum comments related to the karma system is the frequency with which they assume that a particular explanation of the karma score of a given comment is correct, without even considering alternative explanations. One doesn’t have to be very creative or contrarian to think of plausible reasons users may have disagreed-voted with the statement “CEA is widely perceived as grossly ineffective whereas AMF is perceived as highly effective” other than that “CEA staff have so much karma that they can tank any comment with a single downvote”.
In my limited experience any post about lower salaries and overhead is likely to get disagree votes, even if the post itself makes a lot of sense and isn’t necessarily supporting the lower salaries.