EA Forum discourse tracks actual stakes very poorly
Examples:
There have been many posts about EA spending lots of money, but to my knowledge no posts about the failure to hedge crypto exposure against the crypto crash of the last year, or the failure to hedge Meta/Asana stock, or EA’s failure to produce more billion-dollar start-ups. EA spending norms seem responsible for $1m–$30m of 2022 expenses, but failures to preserve/increase EA assets seem responsible for $1b–$30b of 2022 financial losses, a ~1000x difference.
People are demanding transparency about the purchase of Wytham Abbey (£15m), but they’re not discussing whether it was a good idea to invest $580m in Anthropic (HT to someone else for this example). The financial difference is ~30x, the potential impact difference seems much greater still.
Basically I think EA Forum discourse, Karma voting, and the inflation-adjusted overview of top posts completely fails to correctly track the importance of the ideas presented there. Karma seems to be useful to decide which comments to read, but otherwise its use seems fairly limited.
I think this is about scope of responsibility. To my knowledge, “EA” doesn’t own any Meta/Asana stock, didn’t have billions of (alleged) assets caught up in crypto, and didn’t pour $580MM into Anthropic. All that money belongs/belonged to private individuals or corporations (or so we thought...), and there’s arguably something both a bit unseemly and pointless about writing on a message board about how specific private individuals should conduct their own financial affairs.
On the other hand, EVF is a public charity—and its election of that status and solicitation of funds from the general public rightly call for a higher level of scrutiny of its actions vis-a-vis those of private individuals and for-profit corporations.
I don’t actually know the details, but as far as I know, EVF is primarily funded by private foundations/billionaires, too.
Also, some of this hedging could’ve been done by community members without actual ownership of Meta/Asana/crypto. Again, the lack of discussion of this seems problematic to me.
EVF and its US affiliate, CENTRE FOR EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM USA INC, are public charities. That means there is an indirect public subsidy (in terms of foregone tax revenues on money donated) by US and UK taxpayers somewhere in the ballpark of about 25% of donations. Based on the reports I linked, that seems to be about $10MM per year, probably more in recent years given known big grants. EVF also solicits donations from the general public on its website and elsewhere, which I don’t think is true of the big holder of Meta/Asana stock. (Good Ventures, which has somewhat favorable tax treatment as a private foundation, does not seem concentrated in this stock per the most recent 990-PF I could find.)
If an organization solicits from the public and accepts favorable tax treatment for its charitable status, the range of public scrutiny it should expect is considerably higher than for a private individual.
As far as I know, large philanthropic foundations often use DAFs to attain public charity status, getting the same tax benefits. And if they’re private foundations, they’re still getting a benefit of ~15%, and possibly a lot more via receiving donations of appreciated assets.
I also don’t think public charity status and tax benefits are especially relevant here. I think public scrutiny is not intrinsically important; I mainly care about taking actions that maximize social impact, and public scrutiny seems much worse for this than figuring out high-impact ways to preserve/increase altruistic assets.
there’s arguably something both a bit unseemly and pointless about writing on a message board about how specific private individuals should conduct their own financial affairs
I think you would care about this specific investment if you had more context (or at least I expect that you believe you would deserve to understand the argument). In some sense, this proves Jonas right.
discussing whether it was a good idea to invest $580m in Anthropic (HT to someone else for this example). The financial difference is ~30x, the potential impact difference seems much greater still.
There is a write-up specifically on this, that has been reviewed by some people. The author is now holding it back for ~4-6 weeks because they were requested to.
Yeah, I think making sure discussion of these topics (both Anthropic and Wytham) is appropriately careful seems good to me. E.g., the discussion of Wytham seemed very low-quality to me, with few contributors providing sound analysis of how to think about the counterfactuals of real estate investments.
At this point, I think it’s unfortunate that this post has not been published, a >2 month delay seems too long to me. If there’s anything I can do to help get this published, please let me know.
so we’re waiting 1.5 month to see if Anthropic was a bag idea?
On the other hand: Wytham Abbey was purchased by EV / CEA and made the news. Anthropic is a private venture. If Anthropic shows up in an argument, I can just say I don’t have anything to do with that. But if someone mentioned that Wytham Abbey was bought by the guy who wrote the basics of how we evaluate areas and projects… I still don’t know what to say.
Are there posts about those things which you think are under karma’d? My guess is the problem is more that people aren’t writing about them, rather than karma not tracking the importance of things which are written about. (At least in these two specific cases.)
Cool, fwiw I’d predict that a well-written anthropic piece would get more than the 150 karma the Whytam post currently has, though I acknowledge that “well-written” is vague. Based on what this commenter says, we might get to test that prediction soon.
FWIW the Wytham Abbey post also received ~240 votes, and I doubt that a majority of downvotes were given for the reason that people found the general topic unimportant. Instead I think it’s because the post seemed written fairly quickly and in a prematurely judgemental way. So it doesn’t seem right to take the karma level as evidence that this topic actually didn’t get a ton of attention.
Good point, I wasn’t tracking that the Wytham post doesn’t actually have that much Karma. I do think my claim would be correct regarding my first example (spending norms vs. asset hedges).
My claim might also be correct if your metric of choice was the sum of all the comment Karma on the respective posts.
Yeah, seems believable to me on both counts, though I currently feel more sad that we don’t have posts about those more important things than the possibility that the karma system would counterfactually rank those posts poorly if they existed.
A tangentially related point about example 1: Wow, it really surprises me that crypto exposure wasn’t hedged! I can think of a few reasons why those hedges might be practically infeasible (possibilities: financial cost, counterparty risk of crypto hedge, relationship with donor, counterparty risk of donor). I take your point that it’d be appropriate if these sorts of things got discussed more, so I think I will write something on this hedging tomorrow. Thanks for the inspiration!
I agree that the hedges might be practically infeasible or hard. But my point is that this deserves more discussion and consideration, not that it was obviously easy to fix.
EA Forum discourse tracks actual stakes very poorly
Examples:
There have been many posts about EA spending lots of money, but to my knowledge no posts about the failure to hedge crypto exposure against the crypto crash of the last year, or the failure to hedge Meta/Asana stock, or EA’s failure to produce more billion-dollar start-ups. EA spending norms seem responsible for $1m–$30m of 2022 expenses, but failures to preserve/increase EA assets seem responsible for $1b–$30b of 2022 financial losses, a ~1000x difference.
People are demanding transparency about the purchase of Wytham Abbey (£15m), but they’re not discussing whether it was a good idea to invest $580m in Anthropic (HT to someone else for this example). The financial difference is ~30x, the potential impact difference seems much greater still.
Basically I think EA Forum discourse, Karma voting, and the inflation-adjusted overview of top posts completely fails to correctly track the importance of the ideas presented there. Karma seems to be useful to decide which comments to read, but otherwise its use seems fairly limited.
(Here’s a related post.)
I think this is about scope of responsibility. To my knowledge, “EA” doesn’t own any Meta/Asana stock, didn’t have billions of (alleged) assets caught up in crypto, and didn’t pour $580MM into Anthropic. All that money belongs/belonged to private individuals or corporations (or so we thought...), and there’s arguably something both a bit unseemly and pointless about writing on a message board about how specific private individuals should conduct their own financial affairs.
On the other hand, EVF is a public charity—and its election of that status and solicitation of funds from the general public rightly call for a higher level of scrutiny of its actions vis-a-vis those of private individuals and for-profit corporations.
I don’t actually know the details, but as far as I know, EVF is primarily funded by private foundations/billionaires, too.
Also, some of this hedging could’ve been done by community members without actual ownership of Meta/Asana/crypto. Again, the lack of discussion of this seems problematic to me.
EVF and its US affiliate, CENTRE FOR EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM USA INC, are public charities. That means there is an indirect public subsidy (in terms of foregone tax revenues on money donated) by US and UK taxpayers somewhere in the ballpark of about 25% of donations. Based on the reports I linked, that seems to be about $10MM per year, probably more in recent years given known big grants. EVF also solicits donations from the general public on its website and elsewhere, which I don’t think is true of the big holder of Meta/Asana stock. (Good Ventures, which has somewhat favorable tax treatment as a private foundation, does not seem concentrated in this stock per the most recent 990-PF I could find.)
If an organization solicits from the public and accepts favorable tax treatment for its charitable status, the range of public scrutiny it should expect is considerably higher than for a private individual.
As far as I know, large philanthropic foundations often use DAFs to attain public charity status, getting the same tax benefits. And if they’re private foundations, they’re still getting a benefit of ~15%, and possibly a lot more via receiving donations of appreciated assets.
I also don’t think public charity status and tax benefits are especially relevant here. I think public scrutiny is not intrinsically important; I mainly care about taking actions that maximize social impact, and public scrutiny seems much worse for this than figuring out high-impact ways to preserve/increase altruistic assets.
I think you would care about this specific investment if you had more context (or at least I expect that you believe you would deserve to understand the argument). In some sense, this proves Jonas right.
There is a write-up specifically on this, that has been reviewed by some people. The author is now holding it back for ~4-6 weeks because they were requested to.
Yeah, I think making sure discussion of these topics (both Anthropic and Wytham) is appropriately careful seems good to me. E.g., the discussion of Wytham seemed very low-quality to me, with few contributors providing sound analysis of how to think about the counterfactuals of real estate investments.
At this point, I think it’s unfortunate that this post has not been published, a >2 month delay seems too long to me. If there’s anything I can do to help get this published, please let me know.
Actually, this particular post was drafted by a person who has been banned from the Forum, so I think it’s fine that it’s not published
so we’re waiting 1.5 month to see if Anthropic was a bag idea? On the other hand: Wytham Abbey was purchased by EV / CEA and made the news. Anthropic is a private venture. If Anthropic shows up in an argument, I can just say I don’t have anything to do with that. But if someone mentioned that Wytham Abbey was bought by the guy who wrote the basics of how we evaluate areas and projects… I still don’t know what to say.
Requested to, by who/for what reason? Is this information you have access to?
Are there posts about those things which you think are under karma’d? My guess is the problem is more that people aren’t writing about them, rather than karma not tracking the importance of things which are written about. (At least in these two specific cases.)
There aren’t posts about them I think, but I’d also predict that they’d get less Karma if they existed.
Cool, fwiw I’d predict that a well-written anthropic piece would get more than the 150 karma the Whytam post currently has, though I acknowledge that “well-written” is vague. Based on what this commenter says, we might get to test that prediction soon.
FWIW the Wytham Abbey post also received ~240 votes, and I doubt that a majority of downvotes were given for the reason that people found the general topic unimportant. Instead I think it’s because the post seemed written fairly quickly and in a prematurely judgemental way. So it doesn’t seem right to take the karma level as evidence that this topic actually didn’t get a ton of attention.
How do you see it got 240 votes?
Anyway I agree that I wrote it quickly and prematurely. I edited it to add my current thoughts.
You can see the number of votes by hovering your mouse above the karma.
Good point, I wasn’t tracking that the Wytham post doesn’t actually have that much Karma. I do think my claim would be correct regarding my first example (spending norms vs. asset hedges).
My claim might also be correct if your metric of choice was the sum of all the comment Karma on the respective posts.
Yeah, seems believable to me on both counts, though I currently feel more sad that we don’t have posts about those more important things than the possibility that the karma system would counterfactually rank those posts poorly if they existed.
A tangentially related point about example 1: Wow, it really surprises me that crypto exposure wasn’t hedged!
I can think of a few reasons why those hedges might be practically infeasible (possibilities: financial cost, counterparty risk of crypto hedge, relationship with donor, counterparty risk of donor). I take your point that it’d be appropriate if these sorts of things got discussed more, so I think I will write something on this hedging tomorrow. Thanks for the inspiration!
I agree that the hedges might be practically infeasible or hard. But my point is that this deserves more discussion and consideration, not that it was obviously easy to fix.
Ah, I see—I’ll edit it a bit for clarity then
Edit: should be better now