Consider the analogy with food production and food waste in relation to global hunger. We can grow enough food to feed the planet. Our ability to solve world hunger is not constrained by food production, but, in my understanding, by logistical issues involving waste, transportation, warfare, and governance problems.
Likewise, in EA, our ability to address the problems with which we are concerned may be increasingly unconstrained by funding. Instead, it’s bottlenecked by similar logistics problems: waste, governance, coordination within and between organizations, the challenges of vetting grants, finding talent, building new organizations, and, as you are pointing out, optics. Can’t blame lack of funding for your failures when you’re no longer bottlenecked by funding!
It’s important to understand that these optics and logistical problems are not a fluke, or the consequence of something we did wrong, but a natural consequence of growing to a certain size. It’s just the next set of problems for us to solve.
Going forward, I would advocate for basing perceptions issues on legible evidence. I have no problem with this post, which does a good job of furthering a meaningful conversation. I notice, however, that it’s full of uncited and possibly exaggerated opinion aggregation and andecdata:
“The influx of EA funding is brilliant news, but it has also left manyEAs feeling uncomfortable.” is representing two blog posts, plus the mixed reactions in the comments, as the unified opinion of “many” EAs.
“I’ve heard critical comments about a range of spending decisions. Several people asked me whether it was really a good use of EA money to pay for my transatlantic flights for EAG. Others challenged whether EAs seriously claim that the most effective way to spend money is to send privileged university students to an AirBNB for the weekend. And that’s before they hear about the Bahamas visitor programme…”
“Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to several organisers who aren’t convinced of longtermism but default to following the money nevertheless. I’ve even heard (joking?) conversations about whether it’s worth ‘pretending’ to be EA for the free trip. ”
If this is the best we’ve got, then so be it—anecdata > no data! Not a criticism of you or your post. But I think it would be valuable to run a more careful formal survey to understand what insiders, newcomers, leadership, allies, and people outside the movement think.
More worrying about optics at this level of the evidential pyramid seems to me to risk creating an optics issue.
One way it can create an optics issue is by selectively amplifying a few casual comments on one side of an issue into a perceived social consensus.
Another way is by putting effort into identifying ways that bad-faith criticism could make more damaging, meritless attacks on EA organizations and programs, an infohazard of sorts.
A third way is by making newcomers in EA, who are disproportionately the sort of people who lack evidence of having personally done something effectively altruistic, doubt themselves and feel guilty for ways they’ve indulged themselves in conferences and free food, or thought about applying for jobs and grants.
I would welcome more focused attention on this issue, but I think that there’s a burden of epistemic rigor that falls on an analysis of optics issues facing the EA movement.
With the caveat that this is obviously flawed data because the sample is “people who came to an all-expenses-paid retreat,” I think it’s useful to provide some actual data Harvard EA collected at our spring retreat. I was slightly concerned that the spending would rub people the wrong way, so I included as one of our anonymous feedback questions, “How much did the spending of money at this retreat make you feel uncomfortable [on a scale of 1 to 10]?” All 18 survey answerers provided an answer. Mean: 3.1. Median: 3. Mode: 1. High: 9.
I think it’s also worth noting that in response to the first question, “What did you think of the retreat overall?”, nobody mentioned money, including the person who answered 9 (who said “Excellent arrangements, well thought out, meticulous planning”). On the question “Imagine you’re on the team planning the next retreat, and it’s the first meeting. Fill in the blank: “One thing I think we could improve from the last retreat is ____”,” nobody volunteered spending less money; several suggestions involved adding things that would cost more money, including the person who answered 9, who suggested adding daily rapid tests. The question “Did participating in this retreat make you feel more or less like you want to be part of the EA community?” received mean 8.3, median 9, including a 9 from the person who felt most uncomfortable about the spending.
I concluded from this survey that, again, with the caveats for selection bias, the spending was not alienating people at the retreat, and especially not alienating enough to significantly affect their engagement with EA.
apologies if this was obvious from the responses in some other way, but did you consider that the person who gave a 9 might have had the scale backwards, i.e. been thinking of 1 as the maximally uncomfortable score?
Hmm, this does seem possible and maybe more than 50% likely. Reasons to think it might not be the case is that I know this person was fairly new to EA, not a longtermist, and somebody asked a clarifying question about this question that I think I answered in a clarifying way, but may not have clarified the direction of the scale. I don’t know!
Acknowledging that important caveat, I am very pleased to have this counterbalancing data available. I hope that we can continue to gather more of it and get a better sense of how the EA movement and its social surroundings think about these questions over time. Thank you for collecting it.
Consider the analogy with food production and food waste in relation to global hunger. We can grow enough food to feed the planet. Our ability to solve world hunger is not constrained by food production, but, in my understanding, by logistical issues involving waste, transportation, warfare, and governance problems.
Likewise, in EA, our ability to address the problems with which we are concerned may be increasingly unconstrained by funding. Instead, it’s bottlenecked by similar logistics problems: waste, governance, coordination within and between organizations, the challenges of vetting grants, finding talent, building new organizations, and, as you are pointing out, optics. Can’t blame lack of funding for your failures when you’re no longer bottlenecked by funding!
It’s important to understand that these optics and logistical problems are not a fluke, or the consequence of something we did wrong, but a natural consequence of growing to a certain size. It’s just the next set of problems for us to solve.
Going forward, I would advocate for basing perceptions issues on legible evidence. I have no problem with this post, which does a good job of furthering a meaningful conversation. I notice, however, that it’s full of uncited and possibly exaggerated opinion aggregation and andecdata:
“The influx of EA funding is brilliant news, but it has also left many EAs feeling uncomfortable.” is representing two blog posts, plus the mixed reactions in the comments, as the unified opinion of “many” EAs.
“I’ve heard critical comments about a range of spending decisions. Several people asked me whether it was really a good use of EA money to pay for my transatlantic flights for EAG. Others challenged whether EAs seriously claim that the most effective way to spend money is to send privileged university students to an AirBNB for the weekend. And that’s before they hear about the Bahamas visitor programme…”
“Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to several organisers who aren’t convinced of longtermism but default to following the money nevertheless. I’ve even heard (joking?) conversations about whether it’s worth ‘pretending’ to be EA for the free trip. ”
If this is the best we’ve got, then so be it—anecdata > no data! Not a criticism of you or your post. But I think it would be valuable to run a more careful formal survey to understand what insiders, newcomers, leadership, allies, and people outside the movement think.
More worrying about optics at this level of the evidential pyramid seems to me to risk creating an optics issue.
One way it can create an optics issue is by selectively amplifying a few casual comments on one side of an issue into a perceived social consensus.
Another way is by putting effort into identifying ways that bad-faith criticism could make more damaging, meritless attacks on EA organizations and programs, an infohazard of sorts.
A third way is by making newcomers in EA, who are disproportionately the sort of people who lack evidence of having personally done something effectively altruistic, doubt themselves and feel guilty for ways they’ve indulged themselves in conferences and free food, or thought about applying for jobs and grants.
I would welcome more focused attention on this issue, but I think that there’s a burden of epistemic rigor that falls on an analysis of optics issues facing the EA movement.
With the caveat that this is obviously flawed data because the sample is “people who came to an all-expenses-paid retreat,” I think it’s useful to provide some actual data Harvard EA collected at our spring retreat. I was slightly concerned that the spending would rub people the wrong way, so I included as one of our anonymous feedback questions, “How much did the spending of money at this retreat make you feel uncomfortable [on a scale of 1 to 10]?” All 18 survey answerers provided an answer. Mean: 3.1. Median: 3. Mode: 1. High: 9.
I think it’s also worth noting that in response to the first question, “What did you think of the retreat overall?”, nobody mentioned money, including the person who answered 9 (who said “Excellent arrangements, well thought out, meticulous planning”). On the question “Imagine you’re on the team planning the next retreat, and it’s the first meeting. Fill in the blank: “One thing I think we could improve from the last retreat is ____”,” nobody volunteered spending less money; several suggestions involved adding things that would cost more money, including the person who answered 9, who suggested adding daily rapid tests. The question “Did participating in this retreat make you feel more or less like you want to be part of the EA community?” received mean 8.3, median 9, including a 9 from the person who felt most uncomfortable about the spending.
I concluded from this survey that, again, with the caveats for selection bias, the spending was not alienating people at the retreat, and especially not alienating enough to significantly affect their engagement with EA.
apologies if this was obvious from the responses in some other way, but did you consider that the person who gave a 9 might have had the scale backwards, i.e. been thinking of 1 as the maximally uncomfortable score?
Hmm, this does seem possible and maybe more than 50% likely. Reasons to think it might not be the case is that I know this person was fairly new to EA, not a longtermist, and somebody asked a clarifying question about this question that I think I answered in a clarifying way, but may not have clarified the direction of the scale. I don’t know!
Acknowledging that important caveat, I am very pleased to have this counterbalancing data available. I hope that we can continue to gather more of it and get a better sense of how the EA movement and its social surroundings think about these questions over time. Thank you for collecting it.