In one view, the concept post had 43 upvotes, the launch post had 28, and this post currently has 14. I don’t think this is problematic in itself, since this could just be an indication of hype dying down over time, rather than of support being retracted.
Part of what I’m tracking when I say that the EA community isn’t supportive of EA Funds is that I’ve spoken to several people in person who have said as much—I think I covered all of the reasons they brought up in my post, but one recurring theme throughout those conversations was that writing up criticism of EA was tiring and unrewarding, and that they often didn’t have the energy to do so (though one offered to proofread anything I wrote in that vein). So, a large part of my reason for feeling that there isn’t a great deal of community support for EA funds has to do with the ways in which I’d expect the data on how much support there actually is to be filtered. For example:
the method in which Kerry presented his survey data made it look like there was more support than there was
the fact that Kerry presented the data in this way suggests it’s relatively more likely that Kerry will do so again in the future if given the chance
social desirability bias should also make it look like there’s more support than there is
the fact that it’s socially encouraged to praise projects on the EA Forum and that criticism is judged more harshly than praise should make it look like there’s more support than there is. Contrast this norm with the one at LW, and notice how it affected how long it took us to get rid of Gleb.
we have a social norm of wording criticism in a very mild manner, which might make it seem like critics are less serious than they are.
It also doesn’t help that most of the core objections people have brought up have been acknowledged but not addressed. But really, given all of those filters on data relating to how well-supported the EA Funds are, and the fact that the survey data doesn’t show anything useful either way, I’m not comfortable with accepting the claim that EA Funds has been particularly well-received.
So I probably disagree with some of your bullet points, but unless I’m missing something I don’t think they can be the crux of our disagreement here, so for the sake of argument let’s suppose I fully agree that there are a variety of strong social norms in place here that make praise more salient, visible and common than criticism.
...I still don’t see how to get from here to (for example) ‘The community is probably net-neutral to net-negative on the EA funds, but Will’s post introducing them is the 4th most upvoted post of all time’. The relative (rather than absolute) nature of that claim is important; even if I think posts and projects on the EA forum generally get more praise, more upvotes, and less criticism than they ‘should’, why has that boosted the EA funds in particular over the dozens of other projects that have been announced on here over the past however-many years? To pick the most obviously-comparable example that quickly comes to mind, Kerry’s post introducing EA Ventures has just 16 upvotes*.
It just seems like the simplest explanation of your observed data is ‘the community at large likes the funds, and my personal geographical locus of friends is weird’.
And without meaning to pick on you in particular (because I think this mistake is super-common), in general I want to push strongly towards people recognising that EA consists of a large number of almost-disjoint filter bubbles that often barely talk to each other and in some extreme cases have next-to-nothing in common. Unless you’re very different to me, we are both selecting the people we speak to in person such that they will tend to think much like us, and like each other; we live inside one of the many bubbles. So the fact that everyone I’ve spoken to in person about the EA funds thinks they’re a good idea is particularly weak evidence that the community thinks they are good, and so is your opposing observation. I think we should both discount it ~entirely once we have anything else to go on. Relative upvotes are extremely far from perfect as a metric, but I think they are much better than in-person anecdata for this reason alone.
FWIW I’m very open to suggestions on how we could settle this question more definitively. I expect CEA pushing ahead with the funds if the community as a whole really is net-negative on them would indeed be a mistake. I don’t have any great ideas at the moment though.
It just seems like the simplest explanation of your observed data is ‘the community at large likes the funds, and my personal geographical locus of friends is weird’.
And without meaning to pick on you in particular (because I think this mistake is super-common), in general I want to push strongly towards people recognising that EA consists of a large number of almost-disjoint filter bubbles that often barely talk to each other and in some extreme cases have next-to-nothing in common. Unless you’re very different to me, we are both selecting the people we speak to in person such that they will tend to think much like us, and like each other; we live inside one of the many bubbles. So the fact that everyone I’ve spoken to in person about the EA funds thinks they’re a good idea is particularly weak evidence that the community thinks they are good, and so is your opposing observation.
I’d say this is correct. The EA Forum itself has such a selection effect, though it’s weaker than the ones either of our friend groups have. One idea would be to do a survey, as Peter suggests, though this makes me feel slightly uneasy given that a survey may weight the opinions of people who have considered the problem less or feel less strongly about it equally with the opinions of others. A relevant factor here is that it sometimes takes people a fair bit of reading or reflection to develop a sense for why integrity is particularly valuable from a consequentialist’s perspective, and then link this up to why EA Funds continuing has the consequence of showing people that projects others use relatively lower-integrity methods to report on and market can succeed despite (or even because?) of this.
I’d also agree that, at the time of Will’s post, it would have been incorrect to say:
The community is probably net-neutral to net-negative on the EA funds, but Will’s post introducing them is the 4th most upvoted post of all time
But what we likely care about is whether or not the community is positive on EA Funds at the moment, which may or may not be different from whether it was positive on EA Funds in the past.
My view is further that the community’s response to this sort of thing is partly a function of how debates on honesty and integrity have been resolved in the past; if lack of integrity in EA has been an issue in the past, the sort of people who care about integrity are less likely to stick around in EA, such that the remaining population of EAs will have fewer people who care about integrity, which itself affects how the average EA feels about future incidents relating to integrity (such as this one), and so on. So, on some level I’m positing that the public response to EA Funds would be more negative if we hadn’t filtered certain people out of EA by having an integrity problem in the first place.
(Sorry for the slower response, your last paragraph gave me pause and I wanted to think about it. I still don’t feel like I have a satisfactory handle on it, but also feel I should reply at this point.)
this makes me feel slightly uneasy given that a survey may weight the opinions of people who have considered the problem less or feel less strongly about it equally with the opinions of others.
This makes total sense to me, and I do currently perceive something of an inverse correlation between how hard people have thought about the funds and how positively they feel about them. I agree this is a cause for concern. The way I would describe that situation from your perspective is not ‘the funds have not been well-received’, but rather ‘the funds have been well-received but only because too many (most?) people are analysing the idea in a superficial way’. Maybe that is what you were aiming for originally and I just didn’t read it that way.
But what we likely care about is whether or not the community is positive on EA Funds at the moment, which may or may not be different from whether it was positive on EA Funds in the past.
True. That post was only a couple of months before this one though; not a lot of time for new data/arguments to emerge or opinions to change. The only major new data point I can think of since then is the funds raising ~$1m, which I think is mostly orthogonal to what we are discussing. I’m curious whether you personally a perceive a change (drop) in popularity in your circles?
My view is further that the community’s response to this sort of thing is partly a function of how debates on honesty and integrity have been resolved in the past; if lack of integrity in EA has been an issue in the past, the sort of people who care about integrity are less likely to stick around in EA, such that the remaining population of EAs will have fewer people who care about integrity, which itself affects how the average EA feels about future incidents relating to integrity (such as this one), and so on. So, on some level I’m positing that the public response to EA Funds would be more negative if we hadn’t filtered certain people out of EA by having an integrity problem in the first place.
This story sounds plausibly true. It’s a difficult one to falsify though (I could flip all the language and get something that also sounds plausibly true), so turning it over in my head for the past few days I’m still not sure how much weight to put on it.
It also doesn’t help that most of the core objections people have brought up have been acknowledged but not addressed.
My sense (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that the biggest concerns seem to be related to the fact that there is only one fund for each cause area and the fact that Open Phil/GiveWell people are running each of the funds.
I share this concern and I agree that it is true that EA Funds has not been changed to reflect this. This is mostly because EA Funds simply hasn’t been around for very long and we’re currently working on improving the core product before we expand it.
What I’ve tried to do instead is precommit to 50% or less of the funds being managed by Open Phil/GiveWell and give a general timeline for when we expect to start making good on that committment. I know that doesn’t solve the problem, but hopefully you agree that it’s a step in the right direction.
That said, I’m sure there are other concerns that we haven’t sufficiently addressed so far. If you know of some off the top of your head, feel free to post them as a reply to this comment. I’d be happy to either expand on my thoughts or address the issue immediately.
In one view, the concept post had 43 upvotes, the launch post had 28, and this post currently has 14. I don’t think this is problematic in itself, since this could just be an indication of hype dying down over time, rather than of support being retracted.
Part of what I’m tracking when I say that the EA community isn’t supportive of EA Funds is that I’ve spoken to several people in person who have said as much—I think I covered all of the reasons they brought up in my post, but one recurring theme throughout those conversations was that writing up criticism of EA was tiring and unrewarding, and that they often didn’t have the energy to do so (though one offered to proofread anything I wrote in that vein). So, a large part of my reason for feeling that there isn’t a great deal of community support for EA funds has to do with the ways in which I’d expect the data on how much support there actually is to be filtered. For example:
the method in which Kerry presented his survey data made it look like there was more support than there was
the fact that Kerry presented the data in this way suggests it’s relatively more likely that Kerry will do so again in the future if given the chance
social desirability bias should also make it look like there’s more support than there is
the fact that it’s socially encouraged to praise projects on the EA Forum and that criticism is judged more harshly than praise should make it look like there’s more support than there is. Contrast this norm with the one at LW, and notice how it affected how long it took us to get rid of Gleb.
we have a social norm of wording criticism in a very mild manner, which might make it seem like critics are less serious than they are.
It also doesn’t help that most of the core objections people have brought up have been acknowledged but not addressed. But really, given all of those filters on data relating to how well-supported the EA Funds are, and the fact that the survey data doesn’t show anything useful either way, I’m not comfortable with accepting the claim that EA Funds has been particularly well-received.
So I probably disagree with some of your bullet points, but unless I’m missing something I don’t think they can be the crux of our disagreement here, so for the sake of argument let’s suppose I fully agree that there are a variety of strong social norms in place here that make praise more salient, visible and common than criticism.
...I still don’t see how to get from here to (for example) ‘The community is probably net-neutral to net-negative on the EA funds, but Will’s post introducing them is the 4th most upvoted post of all time’. The relative (rather than absolute) nature of that claim is important; even if I think posts and projects on the EA forum generally get more praise, more upvotes, and less criticism than they ‘should’, why has that boosted the EA funds in particular over the dozens of other projects that have been announced on here over the past however-many years? To pick the most obviously-comparable example that quickly comes to mind, Kerry’s post introducing EA Ventures has just 16 upvotes*.
It just seems like the simplest explanation of your observed data is ‘the community at large likes the funds, and my personal geographical locus of friends is weird’.
And without meaning to pick on you in particular (because I think this mistake is super-common), in general I want to push strongly towards people recognising that EA consists of a large number of almost-disjoint filter bubbles that often barely talk to each other and in some extreme cases have next-to-nothing in common. Unless you’re very different to me, we are both selecting the people we speak to in person such that they will tend to think much like us, and like each other; we live inside one of the many bubbles. So the fact that everyone I’ve spoken to in person about the EA funds thinks they’re a good idea is particularly weak evidence that the community thinks they are good, and so is your opposing observation. I think we should both discount it ~entirely once we have anything else to go on. Relative upvotes are extremely far from perfect as a metric, but I think they are much better than in-person anecdata for this reason alone.
FWIW I’m very open to suggestions on how we could settle this question more definitively. I expect CEA pushing ahead with the funds if the community as a whole really is net-negative on them would indeed be a mistake. I don’t have any great ideas at the moment though.
*http://effective-altruism.com/ea/fo/announcing_effective_altruism_ventures/
I’d say this is correct. The EA Forum itself has such a selection effect, though it’s weaker than the ones either of our friend groups have. One idea would be to do a survey, as Peter suggests, though this makes me feel slightly uneasy given that a survey may weight the opinions of people who have considered the problem less or feel less strongly about it equally with the opinions of others. A relevant factor here is that it sometimes takes people a fair bit of reading or reflection to develop a sense for why integrity is particularly valuable from a consequentialist’s perspective, and then link this up to why EA Funds continuing has the consequence of showing people that projects others use relatively lower-integrity methods to report on and market can succeed despite (or even because?) of this.
I’d also agree that, at the time of Will’s post, it would have been incorrect to say:
But what we likely care about is whether or not the community is positive on EA Funds at the moment, which may or may not be different from whether it was positive on EA Funds in the past.
My view is further that the community’s response to this sort of thing is partly a function of how debates on honesty and integrity have been resolved in the past; if lack of integrity in EA has been an issue in the past, the sort of people who care about integrity are less likely to stick around in EA, such that the remaining population of EAs will have fewer people who care about integrity, which itself affects how the average EA feels about future incidents relating to integrity (such as this one), and so on. So, on some level I’m positing that the public response to EA Funds would be more negative if we hadn’t filtered certain people out of EA by having an integrity problem in the first place.
(Sorry for the slower response, your last paragraph gave me pause and I wanted to think about it. I still don’t feel like I have a satisfactory handle on it, but also feel I should reply at this point.)
This makes total sense to me, and I do currently perceive something of an inverse correlation between how hard people have thought about the funds and how positively they feel about them. I agree this is a cause for concern. The way I would describe that situation from your perspective is not ‘the funds have not been well-received’, but rather ‘the funds have been well-received but only because too many (most?) people are analysing the idea in a superficial way’. Maybe that is what you were aiming for originally and I just didn’t read it that way.
True. That post was only a couple of months before this one though; not a lot of time for new data/arguments to emerge or opinions to change. The only major new data point I can think of since then is the funds raising ~$1m, which I think is mostly orthogonal to what we are discussing. I’m curious whether you personally a perceive a change (drop) in popularity in your circles?
This story sounds plausibly true. It’s a difficult one to falsify though (I could flip all the language and get something that also sounds plausibly true), so turning it over in my head for the past few days I’m still not sure how much weight to put on it.
Perhaps a simple (random) survey? Or, if that’s not possible, a poll of some sort?
My sense (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that the biggest concerns seem to be related to the fact that there is only one fund for each cause area and the fact that Open Phil/GiveWell people are running each of the funds.
I share this concern and I agree that it is true that EA Funds has not been changed to reflect this. This is mostly because EA Funds simply hasn’t been around for very long and we’re currently working on improving the core product before we expand it.
What I’ve tried to do instead is precommit to 50% or less of the funds being managed by Open Phil/GiveWell and give a general timeline for when we expect to start making good on that committment. I know that doesn’t solve the problem, but hopefully you agree that it’s a step in the right direction.
That said, I’m sure there are other concerns that we haven’t sufficiently addressed so far. If you know of some off the top of your head, feel free to post them as a reply to this comment. I’d be happy to either expand on my thoughts or address the issue immediately.