If this is too time-consuming for the current FTX advisers, hire some staff
Hiring is an extremely labour and time intensive process, especially if the position you’re hiring for requires great judgement. I think responding to a concern about whether something is a good use of staff time with ‘just hire more staff’ is pretty poor form, and given the context of the rest of the post it wouldn’t be unreasonable to respond to it with ‘do you want to post a BOTEC comparing the cost of those extra hires you think we should make to the harms you’re claiming?’
The top-voted suggestion in FTX’s call for megaproject ideas was to evaluate the impacts of FTX’s own (and other EA) grantmaking. It’s hard to conduct such an evaluation without, at some point, doing the kind of analysis Jack is calling for. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether it’s better for FTX to hire in-house staff to do this analysis or have it be conducted externally (I think either is defensible), but either way, there’s a strong demonstrated demand for it and it’s hard to see how it happens without EA dollars being deployed to make it possible. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all for Jack to make this suggestion, even if it could have been worded a bit more politely.
That’s right, and this was very casually phrased, so thanks for pulling me up on it. A better way of saying this would be: “if you’re going to distribute billions of dollars in funding, in a way that is unusually capable of being harmful, but don’t have the time to explain the reasoning behind that distribution, it’s reasonable to ask you to hire people to do this for you (and hiring is almost certainly necessary for lots of other practical reasons).”
I agree with you that it’s important to account for hiring being very expensive.
My view on more transparency is that its main benefit (which I don’t think OP mentions) is as a long-term safeguard to reduce poor but well intentioned reasoning, mistakes and nepotism around grant processes, and is likely to be worth hiring costs even if we don’t expect to identify ongoing harms.
In other words, I think the stronger case for EA grantmakers being more transparent is the potential for transparency to reduce future harms, rather than its potential to reveal possible ongoing harms.
Hiring is an extremely labour and time intensive process, especially if the position you’re hiring for requires great judgement. I think responding to a concern about whether something is a good use of staff time with ‘just hire more staff’ is pretty poor form, and given the context of the rest of the post it wouldn’t be unreasonable to respond to it with ‘do you want to post a BOTEC comparing the cost of those extra hires you think we should make to the harms you’re claiming?’
The top-voted suggestion in FTX’s call for megaproject ideas was to evaluate the impacts of FTX’s own (and other EA) grantmaking. It’s hard to conduct such an evaluation without, at some point, doing the kind of analysis Jack is calling for. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether it’s better for FTX to hire in-house staff to do this analysis or have it be conducted externally (I think either is defensible), but either way, there’s a strong demonstrated demand for it and it’s hard to see how it happens without EA dollars being deployed to make it possible. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all for Jack to make this suggestion, even if it could have been worded a bit more politely.
That’s right, and this was very casually phrased, so thanks for pulling me up on it. A better way of saying this would be: “if you’re going to distribute billions of dollars in funding, in a way that is unusually capable of being harmful, but don’t have the time to explain the reasoning behind that distribution, it’s reasonable to ask you to hire people to do this for you (and hiring is almost certainly necessary for lots of other practical reasons).”
I agree with you that it’s important to account for hiring being very expensive.
My view on more transparency is that its main benefit (which I don’t think OP mentions) is as a long-term safeguard to reduce poor but well intentioned reasoning, mistakes and nepotism around grant processes, and is likely to be worth hiring costs even if we don’t expect to identify ongoing harms.
In other words, I think the stronger case for EA grantmakers being more transparent is the potential for transparency to reduce future harms, rather than its potential to reveal possible ongoing harms.
Relevant comment from Sam Bankman-Fried in his recent 80,000 Hours podcast episode: “In terms of staffing, we try and run relatively lean. I think often people will try to hire their way out of a problem, and it doesn’t work as well as they’re hoping. I’m definitely nervous about that.” (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-high-risk-approach-to-crypto-and-doing-good/#ftx-foundation-002022)