Good to see a post that loosely captures my own experience of EAG London and comes up with a concrete idea for something to do about the problem (if a little emotionally presented).
I don’t have a strong view on the ideal level of transparency/communication here, but something I want to highlight is: Moving too slowly and cautiously is also a failure mode.
In other words, I want to emphasise how important “this is time consuming, and this time is better spent making more grants/doing something else” can be. Moving fast and breaking things tends to lead to much more obvious, salient problems and so generally attracts a lot more criticism. On the other hand, “Ideally, they should have deployed faster” is not a headline. But if you’re as consequentialist as the typical EA is, you should be ~equally worried about not spending money fast enough. Sometimes to help make this failure mode more salient, I imagine a group of chickens in a factory farm just sitting around in agony waiting for us all to get our act together (not the most relevant example in this case, but the idea is try to counteract the salience bias associated with the problems around moving fast). Maybe the best way for e.g. CEA to help these chickens overall is to invest more time reducing “reputational and epistemic risks to EA”. Maybe it’s to keep trying to get resources out the door according to their best judgements and accepting their predicted levels of failed grants, confused community members, and loss of potentially useful feedback that could come from more external scrutiny. It’s not clear to me. But it seems like it could well be the latter. True, “these things have a much higher than average chance of doing harm”, but there’s also a lot more at stake if they move too slowly.
To be clear: This is not to say FTX/CEA are getting the balance right (and even if they broadly are, your suggestion for them to say something like “this seems plausibly good and we have enough money to throw spaghetti at the wall” still seems good to me). I just wanted to give more prominence to a consideration on the other side of the argument that seems to be relatively neglected in these discussions. So, à la your sidenote: Props to FTX for moving fast.
Thanks so much for this comment. I find it incredibly hard not to be unwarrantedly risk averse. It feels really tempting to focus on avoiding doing any harm, rather than actually helping people as much as I can. This is such an eloquent articulation of the urgency we face, and why we need to keep pushing ourselves to move faster.
I think this is going to be useful for me to read periodically in the future—I’m going to bookmark it for myself.
A related thought: If an org is willing to delay spending (say) $500M/year due to reputational/epistemic concerns, then it should easily be willing to pay $50M to hire top PR experts to figure out the reputational effects of spending at different rates.
(I think delays in spending by big orgs are mostly due to uncertainty about where to donate, not about PR. But off the cuff, I suspect that EA orgs spend less than the optimal amount on strategic PR (as opposed to “un-strategic PR”, e.g., doing whatever the CEO’s gut says is best for PR).)
I’m not sure I agree with you that I find it equally worrying as moving so fast that we break too many things, but it’s a good point to raise. On a practical level, I partly wrote this because FTX is likely to have a lull after their first grant round where they could invest in transparency.
I also think a concern is what seems to be such an enormous double standard. The argument above could easily be used to justify spending aggressively in global health or animal welfare (where, notably, we have already done a serious, serious amount of research and found amazing donation options; and, as you point out, the need is acute and immediate). Instead, it seems like it might be ‘don’t spend money on anything below 5x GiveDirectly’ in one area, and the spaghetti-wall approach in another.
Out of interest, did you read the post as emotional? I was aiming for brevity and directness but didn’t/don’t feel emotional about it. Kind of the opposite, actually—I feel like this could help to make us more factually aligned and less driven by emotional reactions to things that might seem like ‘boondoggles’.
Yeah personally speaking, I don’t have very developed views on when to go with Spaghetti-wall vs RCT, so feel free to ignore the following which is more of a personal story. I’d guess there’s a bunch of ‘Giving Now vs Giving Later’ content lying around that’s much more relevant.
I think I used to be a lot more RCT because:
I was first motivated to take cost-effectiveness research seriously after hearing the Giving What We Can framing of “this data already exists, it’s just that it’s aimed at the health departments of LMICs rather than philanthropists”—that’s some mad low-hanging fruit right there (OTOH I seem to remember a bunch of friends wrestling with whether to fund Animal Charity Evaluators or ACE’s current best guesses—was existing cost-effectiveness research enough to go on yet?)
I was basically a student trying to change the world with a bunch of other students—surely the grown-ups mostly know what they’re doing and I should only expect to have better heuristics if there’s a ton of evidence behind them
My personality is very risk-averse
Over time, however:
I became more longtermist and there’s no GiveWell for longtermism
We grew up, and basically the more I saw of the rest of the world the less faith I had in people generally being sensible and altruistic and having their **** together
I recognised how much of my aversion to Spaghetti-wall is a personality thing [edit: maybe writing my undergrad dissertation on risk aversion in ethics made me acknowledge this more fully :P]
| Out of interest, did you read the post as emotional? I was aiming for brevity and directness
Ah, that might be it. I was reading the demanding/requesting tone (“show us your numbers!”, “could FTX and CEA please publish” and “If this is too time-consuming...hire some staff” vs “Here’s an idea/proposal”) as emotional, but I can see how you were just going for brevity/directness, which I generally endorse (and have empathy for emotional FWIW, but generally don’t feel like I should endorse as such).
Good to see a post that loosely captures my own experience of EAG London and comes up with a concrete idea for something to do about the problem (if a little emotionally presented).
I don’t have a strong view on the ideal level of transparency/communication here, but something I want to highlight is: Moving too slowly and cautiously is also a failure mode.
In other words, I want to emphasise how important “this is time consuming, and this time is better spent making more grants/doing something else” can be. Moving fast and breaking things tends to lead to much more obvious, salient problems and so generally attracts a lot more criticism. On the other hand, “Ideally, they should have deployed faster” is not a headline. But if you’re as consequentialist as the typical EA is, you should be ~equally worried about not spending money fast enough. Sometimes to help make this failure mode more salient, I imagine a group of chickens in a factory farm just sitting around in agony waiting for us all to get our act together (not the most relevant example in this case, but the idea is try to counteract the salience bias associated with the problems around moving fast). Maybe the best way for e.g. CEA to help these chickens overall is to invest more time reducing “reputational and epistemic risks to EA”. Maybe it’s to keep trying to get resources out the door according to their best judgements and accepting their predicted levels of failed grants, confused community members, and loss of potentially useful feedback that could come from more external scrutiny. It’s not clear to me. But it seems like it could well be the latter. True, “these things have a much higher than average chance of doing harm”, but there’s also a lot more at stake if they move too slowly.
To be clear: This is not to say FTX/CEA are getting the balance right (and even if they broadly are, your suggestion for them to say something like “this seems plausibly good and we have enough money to throw spaghetti at the wall” still seems good to me). I just wanted to give more prominence to a consideration on the other side of the argument that seems to be relatively neglected in these discussions. So, à la your sidenote: Props to FTX for moving fast.
Thanks so much for this comment. I find it incredibly hard not to be unwarrantedly risk averse. It feels really tempting to focus on avoiding doing any harm, rather than actually helping people as much as I can. This is such an eloquent articulation of the urgency we face, and why we need to keep pushing ourselves to move faster.
I think this is going to be useful for me to read periodically in the future—I’m going to bookmark it for myself.
A related thought: If an org is willing to delay spending (say) $500M/year due to reputational/epistemic concerns, then it should easily be willing to pay $50M to hire top PR experts to figure out the reputational effects of spending at different rates.
(I think delays in spending by big orgs are mostly due to uncertainty about where to donate, not about PR. But off the cuff, I suspect that EA orgs spend less than the optimal amount on strategic PR (as opposed to “un-strategic PR”, e.g., doing whatever the CEO’s gut says is best for PR).)
I like this.
I’m not sure I agree with you that I find it equally worrying as moving so fast that we break too many things, but it’s a good point to raise. On a practical level, I partly wrote this because FTX is likely to have a lull after their first grant round where they could invest in transparency.
I also think a concern is what seems to be such an enormous double standard. The argument above could easily be used to justify spending aggressively in global health or animal welfare (where, notably, we have already done a serious, serious amount of research and found amazing donation options; and, as you point out, the need is acute and immediate). Instead, it seems like it might be ‘don’t spend money on anything below 5x GiveDirectly’ in one area, and the spaghetti-wall approach in another.
Out of interest, did you read the post as emotional? I was aiming for brevity and directness but didn’t/don’t feel emotional about it. Kind of the opposite, actually—I feel like this could help to make us more factually aligned and less driven by emotional reactions to things that might seem like ‘boondoggles’.
Yeah personally speaking, I don’t have very developed views on when to go with Spaghetti-wall vs RCT, so feel free to ignore the following which is more of a personal story. I’d guess there’s a bunch of ‘Giving Now vs Giving Later’ content lying around that’s much more relevant.
I think I used to be a lot more RCT because:
I was first motivated to take cost-effectiveness research seriously after hearing the Giving What We Can framing of “this data already exists, it’s just that it’s aimed at the health departments of LMICs rather than philanthropists”—that’s some mad low-hanging fruit right there (OTOH I seem to remember a bunch of friends wrestling with whether to fund Animal Charity Evaluators or ACE’s current best guesses—was existing cost-effectiveness research enough to go on yet?)
I was basically a student trying to change the world with a bunch of other students—surely the grown-ups mostly know what they’re doing and I should only expect to have better heuristics if there’s a ton of evidence behind them
My personality is very risk-averse
Over time, however:
I became more longtermist and there’s no GiveWell for longtermism
We grew up, and basically the more I saw of the rest of the world the less faith I had in people generally being sensible and altruistic and having their **** together
I recognised how much of my aversion to Spaghetti-wall is a personality thing [edit: maybe writing my undergrad dissertation on risk aversion in ethics made me acknowledge this more fully :P]
| Out of interest, did you read the post as emotional? I was aiming for brevity and directness
Ah, that might be it. I was reading the demanding/requesting tone (“show us your numbers!”, “could FTX and CEA please publish” and “If this is too time-consuming...hire some staff” vs “Here’s an idea/proposal”) as emotional, but I can see how you were just going for brevity/directness, which I generally endorse (and have empathy for emotional FWIW, but generally don’t feel like I should endorse as such).