Wasn’t the Future Fund quite explicitly about longtermist projects?
I mean if you worked for an animal foundation and were in a call about give directly, I can understand that somebody might say: “Look we are an animal fund, global poverty is outside our scope”.
Obviously saying “I don’t care about poverty” or something sufficiently close that your counterpart remembers it as that, is not ideal, especially not when you’re speaking to an ex-minister of the United Kingdom.
But before we get mad at those who ran the Future Fund, please consider there’s much context we don’t have. Why did this call get set up in the first place? I would expect them to be screening mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of mismatch. What Rory remembers might not have been what the Future Fund grant maker remembers and there might have been a mismatch between the very blunt ‘SF culture’ the future fund operated by and what an ex-minister expects.
That said I have a very positive impression of Rory Stewart, and it saddens me to hear our community gave him this perception. Had I been in his shoes, I’m not sure I would have thought any different.
There’s some truth here, but I think it’s part of your job as the head of any EA org to present the best side of all aspects of effective altruism. Even if you disagree with nearterm causes, speaking with grace and understanding of those who work to alleviate poverty will help the PR of your longtermist org
I think we should get the context from the future fund people, but really they should probably adjust have already commented here to explain if they were misrepresented, and called Rory Stewart to apologise and clear things up.
I think it’s part of your job as the head of any EA org to present the best side of all aspects of effective autism
Why? We should hire leaders based on how well suited they are to running the organization in question. There is no requirement that to work in EA you have to agree with all EA causes, or that you should pretend that you do.
We should hire leaders based on how well suited they are to running the organization in question
I’d argue that an important part of running a new philanthropic organisation is stakeholder engagement and relationship management, and this was not a good example of fostering a good relationship with someone who is highly influential and a likely source of valuable connections with respect to FF’s goals.
I’m somewhere in the middle—we should not expect org leaders to be true believers in everything other EAs do, but we should score at least to some extent against making other orgs/EAs work more difficult without good cause. An EA in which each cause area / org optimizes solely for its own work is an EA that gets less good done than possible.
I don’t know what actually happened between Rory and Nick, of course. There are plausible versions of what happened in which Nick’s actions and comments deserve criticism, and others in which they do not.
Wasn’t the Future Fund quite explicitly about longtermist projects?
I mean if you worked for an animal foundation and were in a call about give directly, I can understand that somebody might say: “Look we are an animal fund, global poverty is outside our scope”.
Obviously saying “I don’t care about poverty” or something sufficiently close that your counterpart remembers it as that, is not ideal, especially not when you’re speaking to an ex-minister of the United Kingdom.
But before we get mad at those who ran the Future Fund, please consider there’s much context we don’t have. Why did this call get set up in the first place? I would expect them to be screening mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of mismatch. What Rory remembers might not have been what the Future Fund grant maker remembers and there might have been a mismatch between the very blunt ‘SF culture’ the future fund operated by and what an ex-minister expects.
That said I have a very positive impression of Rory Stewart, and it saddens me to hear our community gave him this perception. Had I been in his shoes, I’m not sure I would have thought any different.
There’s some truth here, but I think it’s part of your job as the head of any EA org to present the best side of all aspects of effective altruism. Even if you disagree with nearterm causes, speaking with grace and understanding of those who work to alleviate poverty will help the PR of your longtermist org
I think we should get the context from the future fund people, but really they should probably adjust have already commented here to explain if they were misrepresented, and called Rory Stewart to apologise and clear things up.
Can’t tell if joke or typo, but I enjoyed it either way
Sorry mistake, corrected lol
Can’t tell if the correction is joke or genuine misunderstanding, but I enjoyed this even more
Why? We should hire leaders based on how well suited they are to running the organization in question. There is no requirement that to work in EA you have to agree with all EA causes, or that you should pretend that you do.
I’d argue that an important part of running a new philanthropic organisation is stakeholder engagement and relationship management, and this was not a good example of fostering a good relationship with someone who is highly influential and a likely source of valuable connections with respect to FF’s goals.
I’m somewhere in the middle—we should not expect org leaders to be true believers in everything other EAs do, but we should score at least to some extent against making other orgs/EAs work more difficult without good cause. An EA in which each cause area / org optimizes solely for its own work is an EA that gets less good done than possible.
I don’t know what actually happened between Rory and Nick, of course. There are plausible versions of what happened in which Nick’s actions and comments deserve criticism, and others in which they do not.