<edit: Ben deleted the tweets, so it doesnât feel right to keep them up after that. The rest of the text is unchanged for now, but I might edit this later. If you want to read a longer, thoughtful take from Ben about EA post-FTX, then you can find one here>
This makes me feel bad, and Iâm going to try and articulate why. (This is mainly about my gut reaction to seeing/âreading these tweets, but Iâll ping @Benjamin_Todd because I think subtweeting/âvagueposting is bad practice and I donât want to be hypocritical.) I look forward to Ben elucidating his thoughts if he does so and will reflect and respond in greater detail then.
At a gut-level, this feels like an influential member of the EA community deciding to âdefectâ and leave when the going gets tough. Itâs like deciding to âwalk away from Omelasâ when you had a role in the leadership of the city and benefitted from that position. In contrast, I think the right call is to stay and fight for EA ideas in the âThird Waveâ of EA.
Furthermore,if you do think that EA is about ideas, then I donât think dissassociating from the name of EA without changing your other actions is going to convince anyone about what youâre doing by âgetting distanceâ from EA. Ben is a GWWC pledger, 80k founder, and is focusing his career on (existential?) threats from advanced AI. To do this and then deny being an EA feels disingenuous for ~most plausible definitions of EA to me.
Similar considerations to the above make me very pessimisitic about the âjust take the good parts and people from EA, rebrand the name, disavow the old name, continue operating as per usualâ strategy to work at all
I also think that actions/âstatements like this make it more likely for the whole package of the EA ideas/âcommunity/âbrand/âmovement to slip into a negative spiral which ends up wasting its potential, and given my points above such a collapse would also seriously harm any attempt to get a âtotally not EA yeah weâre definitely not those guysâ movement off the ground.
In general itâs easy pattern for EA criticism to be something like âEA ideas good, EA community badâ but really that just feels like a deepity. For me a better criticism would be explicit about focusing on the funding patterns, or focusing on epistemic responses to criticism, because attacking the EA community at large to me means ~attacking every EA thing in total.
If you think that all of EA is bad because certain actors have had overwhelmingly negative impact, you could just name and shame those actors and not implicitly attack GWWC meetups and the like.
In the case of these tweets, I think a future post from Ben would ideally benefit from being clear about what âthe EA Communityâ actually means, and who it covers.
These comments were off-hand and unconstructive, have been interpreted in ways I didnât intend, and twitter isnât the best venue for them, so I apologise for posting, and Iâm going to delete them. My more considered takes are here. Hopefully I can write more in the future.
Hey Ben, Iâll remove the tweet images since youâve deleted them. Iâll probably rework the body of the post to reflect that and happy to make any edits/âretractions that you think arenât fair.
I apologise if you got unfair pushback as a result of my post, and regardlesss of your present/âfuture affiliation with EA, I hope youâre doing well.
Side note: Is there a single EA culture? My experience is that GH, AI and Animal Welfare people are in general super different culturally, and even within these branches there is lots of heterogeneity. I think EA is and should be very loosely tied together, with only the minimal amount of overlap required (such as wanting to help others and prioritizing amongst ways of doing so). The looser EAs are tied together the more meaningless will it be to leave. Like âIâm leaving liberal democraciesâ just seems strange and people rarely say it even if they move countries or change political affiliations.
At a gut-level, this feels like an influential member of the EA community deciding to âdefectâ and leave when the going gets tough. Itâs like deciding to âwalk away from Omelasâ when you had a role in the leadership of the city and benefitted from that position. In contrast, I think the right call is to stay and fight for EA ideas in the âThird Waveâ of EA.
Iâm sure you mean this in good faith, but I think we should probably try to consider and respond meaningfully to criticism, as opposed to making ad hominem style rebuttals that accuse betrayal. It seems to me to be serious epistemic error to target those who wish to leave a community or those who make criticism of it, especially by saying something akin to âyouâre not allowed to criticize us if youâve gained something from us.â This doesnât mean at all that we shouldnât analyze, understand, and respond to this phenomenon of âEA distancingââjust that we should do it with a less caustic approach that centers on trends and patterns, not criticism of individuals.
I appreciate the pushback anormative, but I kinda stand by what I said and donât think your criticisms land for me. I fundamentally reject with your assessment of what I wrote/âbelieve as âtargeting those who wish to leaveâ, or saying people âarenât allowed to criticise usâ in any way.
Maybe your perception of âaccusation of betrayalâ came from the use of âdefectâ which was maybe unfortunate on my part. Iâm trying to use it in a game theory âco-operate/âdefectâ framing. See Matthew Reardon from 80k here.[1]
Iâm not against Ben leaving/âdisassociating (he can do whatever he wants), but I am upset/âconcerned that formerly influential people disassociating from EA leaves the rest of the EA community, who are by and large individuals with a lot less power and influence, to become bycatch.[2]
I think a load-bearing point for me is Benâs position and history in the EA Community.
If an âordinary EAâ were to post something similar, Iâd feel sad but feel no need to criticise them individually (I might gather arguments that present a broader trend and respond to them, as you suggest).
I think there is some common-sense/âvalue-ethics intuition I feel fairly strongly that being a good leader means being a leader when things are tough and not just when times are good.
I think it is fair to characterise Ben as an EA Leader: Ben was a founder of 80,000 Hours, one of the leading sources of Community growth and recruitment. He was likely a part of the shift from the GH&D/âE2G version of 80k to the longtermist/âx-risk focused version, a move that was followed by the rest of EA. He was probably invited to attend (though I canât confirm if he did or not) the EA Leadership/âMeta Co-ordination Forum for multiple years.
If the above is true, then Ben had a much more significant role shaping the EA Community than almost all other members of it.
To the extent Ben thinks that Community is bad/âharmful/âdangerous, the fact that he contributed to it implies some moral responsibility for correcting it. This is what I was trying to get at the with âOmelasâ reference in my original quick take.
As for rebuttals, Ben mentions that he has criticisms of the community but doesnât shared them to an extent they can be rebutted. When he does I look forward to reading and analysing them.[3] Even in the original tweets Ben himself mentions this âlooks a lot like following vibesâ, and heâs right, it does.
Like Helen Toner might have disassociated/âdistanced herself from the EA Community or EA publicly, but her actions around the OpenAI board standoff have had massively negative consequences for EA imo
I expect Iâll probably agree with a lot of his criticisms, but disagree that they apply to âthe EA Communityâ as a whole as opposed to specific individuals/âworldviews who identify with EA
Yes I agree with all those points, and in general I donât think these kind of tweets are the best approach to discussing tough and sensitive issues like this. Keep it in person or bring it to the forum.⊠@Nathan Young
On a really basic object level as well, surely the careers of 80% of people who identify with EA donât depend on 10 people in San Francisco?
Not literally, but on a broader level I think that EAâs reputation is too centralised in a handful of influential people, many of whom live in San Francisco and the Bay (also in the past tense when considering various scandals that have affected EAâs current reputation)
<edit: Ben deleted the tweets, so it doesnât feel right to keep them up after that. The rest of the text is unchanged for now, but I might edit this later. If you want to read a longer, thoughtful take from Ben about EA post-FTX, then you can find one here>
This makes me feel bad, and Iâm going to try and articulate why. (This is mainly about my gut reaction to seeing/âreading these tweets, but Iâll ping @Benjamin_Todd because I think subtweeting/âvagueposting is bad practice and I donât want to be hypocritical.) I look forward to Ben elucidating his thoughts if he does so and will reflect and respond in greater detail then.
At a gut-level, this feels like an influential member of the EA community deciding to âdefectâ and leave when the going gets tough. Itâs like deciding to âwalk away from Omelasâ when you had a role in the leadership of the city and benefitted from that position. In contrast, I think the right call is to stay and fight for EA ideas in the âThird Waveâ of EA.
Furthermore,if you do think that EA is about ideas, then I donât think dissassociating from the name of EA without changing your other actions is going to convince anyone about what youâre doing by âgetting distanceâ from EA. Ben is a GWWC pledger, 80k founder, and is focusing his career on (existential?) threats from advanced AI. To do this and then deny being an EA feels disingenuous for ~most plausible definitions of EA to me.
Similar considerations to the above make me very pessimisitic about the âjust take the good parts and people from EA, rebrand the name, disavow the old name, continue operating as per usualâ strategy to work at all
I also think that actions/âstatements like this make it more likely for the whole package of the EA ideas/âcommunity/âbrand/âmovement to slip into a negative spiral which ends up wasting its potential, and given my points above such a collapse would also seriously harm any attempt to get a âtotally not EA yeah weâre definitely not those guysâ movement off the ground.
In general itâs easy pattern for EA criticism to be something like âEA ideas good, EA community badâ but really that just feels like a deepity. For me a better criticism would be explicit about focusing on the funding patterns, or focusing on epistemic responses to criticism, because attacking the EA community at large to me means ~attacking every EA thing in total.
If you think that all of EA is bad because certain actors have had overwhelmingly negative impact, you could just name and shame those actors and not implicitly attack GWWC meetups and the like.
In the case of these tweets, I think a future post from Ben would ideally benefit from being clear about what âthe EA Communityâ actually means, and who it covers.
Hey JWS,
These comments were off-hand and unconstructive, have been interpreted in ways I didnât intend, and twitter isnât the best venue for them, so I apologise for posting, and Iâm going to delete them. My more considered takes are here. Hopefully I can write more in the future.
Hey Ben, Iâll remove the tweet images since youâve deleted them. Iâll probably rework the body of the post to reflect that and happy to make any edits/âretractions that you think arenât fair.
I apologise if you got unfair pushback as a result of my post, and regardlesss of your present/âfuture affiliation with EA, I hope youâre doing well.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Side note: Is there a single EA culture? My experience is that GH, AI and Animal Welfare people are in general super different culturally, and even within these branches there is lots of heterogeneity. I think EA is and should be very loosely tied together, with only the minimal amount of overlap required (such as wanting to help others and prioritizing amongst ways of doing so). The looser EAs are tied together the more meaningless will it be to leave. Like âIâm leaving liberal democraciesâ just seems strange and people rarely say it even if they move countries or change political affiliations.
Iâm sure you mean this in good faith, but I think we should probably try to consider and respond meaningfully to criticism, as opposed to making ad hominem style rebuttals that accuse betrayal. It seems to me to be serious epistemic error to target those who wish to leave a community or those who make criticism of it, especially by saying something akin to âyouâre not allowed to criticize us if youâve gained something from us.â This doesnât mean at all that we shouldnât analyze, understand, and respond to this phenomenon of âEA distancingââjust that we should do it with a less caustic approach that centers on trends and patterns, not criticism of individuals.
I appreciate the pushback anormative, but I kinda stand by what I said and donât think your criticisms land for me. I fundamentally reject with your assessment of what I wrote/âbelieve as âtargeting those who wish to leaveâ, or saying people âarenât allowed to criticise usâ in any way.
Maybe your perception of âaccusation of betrayalâ came from the use of âdefectâ which was maybe unfortunate on my part. Iâm trying to use it in a game theory âco-operate/âdefectâ framing. See Matthew Reardon from 80k here.[1]
Iâm not against Ben leaving/âdisassociating (he can do whatever he wants), but I am upset/âconcerned that formerly influential people disassociating from EA leaves the rest of the EA community, who are by and large individuals with a lot less power and influence, to become bycatch.[2]
I think a load-bearing point for me is Benâs position and history in the EA Community.
If an âordinary EAâ were to post something similar, Iâd feel sad but feel no need to criticise them individually (I might gather arguments that present a broader trend and respond to them, as you suggest).
I think there is some common-sense/âvalue-ethics intuition I feel fairly strongly that being a good leader means being a leader when things are tough and not just when times are good.
I think it is fair to characterise Ben as an EA Leader: Ben was a founder of 80,000 Hours, one of the leading sources of Community growth and recruitment. He was likely a part of the shift from the GH&D/âE2G version of 80k to the longtermist/âx-risk focused version, a move that was followed by the rest of EA. He was probably invited to attend (though I canât confirm if he did or not) the EA Leadership/âMeta Co-ordination Forum for multiple years.
If the above is true, then Ben had a much more significant role shaping the EA Community than almost all other members of it.
To the extent Ben thinks that Community is bad/âharmful/âdangerous, the fact that he contributed to it implies some moral responsibility for correcting it. This is what I was trying to get at the with âOmelasâ reference in my original quick take.
As for rebuttals, Ben mentions that he has criticisms of the community but doesnât shared them to an extent they can be rebutted. When he does I look forward to reading and analysing them.[3] Even in the original tweets Ben himself mentions this âlooks a lot like following vibesâ, and heâs right, it does.
and hereâwhich is how I found out about the original tweets in the first place
Like Helen Toner might have disassociated/âdistanced herself from the EA Community or EA publicly, but her actions around the OpenAI board standoff have had massively negative consequences for EA imo
I expect Iâll probably agree with a lot of his criticisms, but disagree that they apply to âthe EA Communityâ as a whole as opposed to specific individuals/âworldviews who identify with EA
Yes I agree with all those points, and in general I donât think these kind of tweets are the best approach to discussing tough and sensitive issues like this. Keep it in person or bring it to the forum.⊠@Nathan Young
On a really basic object level as well, surely the careers of 80% of people who identify with EA donât depend on 10 people in San Francisco?
Not literally, but on a broader level I think that EAâs reputation is too centralised in a handful of influential people, many of whom live in San Francisco and the Bay (also in the past tense when considering various scandals that have affected EAâs current reputation)