We had some discussion with Brendon, and I think his opinion can be rounded to “there are almost no bad projects, so to worry about them is premature”. I disagree with that.
I do not think your interpretation of my opinion on bad projects in EA is aligned with what I actually believe. In fact, I actually stated my opinion in writing in a response to you two days ago which seems to deviate highly from your interpretation of my opinion.
I never said that there are “almost no bad projects.” I specifically said I don’t think that “many immediately obvious negative EV projects exist.” My main point was that my observations of EA projects in the entire EA space over the last five years do not line up with a lot of clearly harmful projects floating around. This does not preclude the possibility of large numbers of non-obviously bad projects existing, or small numbers of obviously bad projects existing.
I also never stated anything remotely similar to “to worry about [bad projects] is premature.” In fact, my comment said that the EA Angel Group helps prevent the “risk of one funder making a mistake and not seeking additional evaluations from others before funding something” because there is “an initial staff review of projects followed by funders sharing their evaluations of projects with each other to eliminate the possibility of one funder funding something while not being aware of the opinion of other funders.”
I believe that being attentive to the risks of projects is important, and I also stated in my comment that risk awareness could be of even higher importance when it comes to projects that seek to impact x-risks/the long-term future, which I believe is your perspective as well.
Also, given the Brendon’s angel group is working, evaluating and funding projects since October, I would be curious what projects were funded, what was the total amount of funding allocated, how many applications they got.
Based on what I know I’m unconvinced that Brendon or BERI should have some outsized influence how evaluations should be done; part of the point of the platform would be to serve broader community.
I’m not entirely sure what your reasons are for having this opinion, or what you even mean. I am also not exactly sure what you define as an “evaluation.” I am interpreting evaluations to mean all of the assessments of projects happening in the EA community from funders or somewhat structured groups designed to do evaluations.
I can’t speak for BERI, but I currently have no influence on how evaluations should be done, and I also currently have no interest in influencing how evaluations should be done. My view on evaluations seems to align with Oliver Habryka’s view that “in practice I think people will have models that will output a net-positive impact or a net-negative impact, depending on certain facts that they have uncertainty about, and understanding those cruxes and uncertainties is the key thing in understanding whether a project will be worth working on.” I too believe this is how things work in practice, and evaluation processes seem to involve one or more people, ideally with diverse views and backgrounds, evaluate a project, sometimes with a more formalized evaluation framework taking certain factors into account. Then, a decision is made, and the process repeats at various funding entities. Perhaps this could be optimized by having argument maps or a process that involves more clearly laying out assumptions and assigning mathematical weights to them, but I currently have no plans to try to go to EA funders and suggest they all follow the same evaluation protocol. Highly successful for-profit VCs employ a variety of evaluation models and have not converged on a single evaluation method. This suggests that perhaps evaluators in EA should use different evaluation protocols since different protocols might be more or less effective with certain cause areas, circumstances, types of projects, etc.
I actually stated my opinion in writing in a response to you two days ago which seems to deviate highly from your interpretation of my opinion.
I think I’ve seen forum discussions where language has been an unacknowledged barrier to understanding in the past, so it might be worth flagging that Jan is from the Czech Republic and likely does not speak English as his mother tongue.
Thanks for pointing that out! Jan and I have also talked outside the EA Forum about our opinions on risk in the EA project space. I’ve been more optimistic about the prevalence of negative EV projects, so I thought there was a chance that greater optimism was being misinterpreted as a lack of concern about negative EV projects, which isn’t my position.
My impression was based mostly on our conversations several months ago—quoting the notes from that time
lot of the discussion and debate derives from differing assumptions held by the participants regarding the potential for bad/risky projects: Benjamin/Brendon generally point out the lack of data/signal in this area and believe launching an open project platform could provide data to reduce uncertainty, whereas Jan is more conservative and prioritizes creating a rigorous curation and evaluation system for new projects.
I think it is fair to say you expected very low risk from creating an open platform where people would just post projects and seek volunteers and funding, while I expected with minimum curation this creates significant risk (even if the risk is coming from small fraction of projects). Sorry if I rounded off suggestions like “let’s make an open platform without careful evaluation and see” and “based on the project ideas lists which existed several years ago the amount of harmful projects seems low” to “worrying about them is premature”.
Reading your recent comment, it seems more careful, and pointing out large negative outcomes are more of a problem with x-risk/long-term oriented projects.
In our old discussions I also expressed some doubt about your or altruism.vc ability to evaluate x-risk and similar projects, where your recent post states that projects that impact x-risks by doing something like AI safety research has not yet applied to the EA Angel Group.
I guess part of the disagreement comes from the fact that I have focus on x-risk and the long-term future, and I’m more interested both in improving the project landscape in these areas, and more worried about negative outcomes.
If open platforms or similar evaluation process also accept mitigating x-risk and similar proposals, in my opinion, unfortunately the bar how good/expert driven evaluations you need is higher, and unfortunately signals like “this is a competent team” which VCs would mainly look at are not enough.
Because I would expect the long-term impact will come mainly from long-term, meta-, exploratory or very ambitious projects, I think you can be basically right about low obvious risk of all the projects historically posted on hackpad or proposed to altruism.vc, and still miss the largest term in the EV.
Thanks—both of that happened after I posted my comment, and also I still do not see the numbers which would help me estimate the ratio of projects which applied and which got funded. I take as mildly negative signal that someone had to ask, and this info was not included in the post, which solicits project proposals and volunteer work.
In my model it seems possible you have something like chicken-and-egg problem, not getting many great proposals, and the group of unnamed angels not funding many proposals coming via that pipeline.
If this is the case and the actual number of successfully funded projects is low, I think it is necessary to state this clearly before inviting people to work on proposals. My vague impression was we may disagree on this, which seems to indicate some quite deep disagreement about how funders should treat projects.
I’m not entirely sure what your reasons are for having this opinion, or what you even mean
The whole context was, Ryan suggested I should have sought some feedback from you. I actually did that, and your co-founder noted that he will try to write the feedback on this today or tomorrow, on 11th of Mar—which did not happen. I don’t think this is large problem, as we had already discussed the topic extensively.
When writing it I was somewhat upset about the mode of conversation where critics do ask whether I tried to coordinate with someone, but just assume I did not. I apologize for the bad way it was written.
Overall my summary is we probably still disagree in many assumptions, we did invest some effort trying to overcome them, it seems difficult for us to reach some consensus, but this should not stop us trying to move forward.
I think it is fair to say you expected very low risk from creating an open platform where people would just post projects and seek volunteers and funding, while I expected with minimum curation this creates significant risk (even if the risk is coming from small fraction of projects). Sorry if I rounded off suggestions like “let’s make an open platform without careful evaluation and see” and “based on the project ideas lists which existed several years ago the amount of harmful projects seems low” to “worrying about them is premature”.
The community has already had many instances of openly writing about ideas, seeking funding on the EA Forum, Patreon, and elsewhere, and posting projects in places like the .impact hackpad and the currently active EA Work Club. Since posting about projects and making them known to community members seems to be a norm, I am curious about your assessment of the risk and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Do you propose that all EA project leaders seek approval from a central evaluation committee or something before talking with others about and publicizing the existence of their project? This would highly concern me because I think it’s very challenging to predict the outcomes of a project, which is evidenced by the fact that people have wildly different opinions on how good of an idea or how good of a startup something is. Such a system could be very negative EV by greatly reducing the number of projects being pursued by providing initial negative feedback that doesn’t reflect how the project would have turned out or decreasing the success of projects because other people are afraid to support a project that did not get backing from an evaluation system. I expect significant inaccuracy from my own project evaluation system as well as the project evaluation systems of other people and evaluation groups.
Thanks—both of that happened after I posted my comment, and also I still do not see the numbers which would help me estimate the ratio of projects which applied and which got funded. I take as mildly negative signal that someone had to ask, and this info was not included in the post, which solicits project proposals and volunteer work.
In my model it seems possible you have something like chicken-and-egg problem, not getting many great proposals, and the group of unnamed angels not funding many proposals coming via that pipeline.
If this is the case and the actual number of successfully funded projects is low, I think it is necessary to state this clearly before inviting people to work on proposals. My vague impression was we may disagree on this, which seems to indicate some quite deep disagreement about how funders should treat projects.
I wrote about the chicken and the egg problem here. As noted in my comments on the announcement post, the angels have significant amounts of funding available. Other funders do not disclose some of these statistics, and while we may do so in the future, I do not think it is necessary before soliciting proposals. The time cost of applying is pretty low, particularly if people are recycling content they have already written. I think we are the first grantmaking group to give all applicants feedback on their application which I think is valuable even if people do not get funded.
The whole context was, Ryan suggested I should have sought some feedback from you. I actually did that, and your co-founder noted that he will try to write the feedback on this today or tomorrow, on 11th of Mar—which did not happen. I don’t think this is large problem, as we had already discussed the topic extensively.
Ben commented on your Google Document that was seeking feedback. I wouldn’t say we’ve discussed the topic “extensively” in the brief call that we had. The devil is in the details, as they say.
I do not think your interpretation of my opinion on bad projects in EA is aligned with what I actually believe. In fact, I actually stated my opinion in writing in a response to you two days ago which seems to deviate highly from your interpretation of my opinion.
I never said that there are “almost no bad projects.” I specifically said I don’t think that “many immediately obvious negative EV projects exist.” My main point was that my observations of EA projects in the entire EA space over the last five years do not line up with a lot of clearly harmful projects floating around. This does not preclude the possibility of large numbers of non-obviously bad projects existing, or small numbers of obviously bad projects existing.
I also never stated anything remotely similar to “to worry about [bad projects] is premature.” In fact, my comment said that the EA Angel Group helps prevent the “risk of one funder making a mistake and not seeking additional evaluations from others before funding something” because there is “an initial staff review of projects followed by funders sharing their evaluations of projects with each other to eliminate the possibility of one funder funding something while not being aware of the opinion of other funders.”
I believe that being attentive to the risks of projects is important, and I also stated in my comment that risk awareness could be of even higher importance when it comes to projects that seek to impact x-risks/the long-term future, which I believe is your perspective as well.
Milan asked this question and I answered it.
I’m not entirely sure what your reasons are for having this opinion, or what you even mean. I am also not exactly sure what you define as an “evaluation.” I am interpreting evaluations to mean all of the assessments of projects happening in the EA community from funders or somewhat structured groups designed to do evaluations.
I can’t speak for BERI, but I currently have no influence on how evaluations should be done, and I also currently have no interest in influencing how evaluations should be done. My view on evaluations seems to align with Oliver Habryka’s view that “in practice I think people will have models that will output a net-positive impact or a net-negative impact, depending on certain facts that they have uncertainty about, and understanding those cruxes and uncertainties is the key thing in understanding whether a project will be worth working on.” I too believe this is how things work in practice, and evaluation processes seem to involve one or more people, ideally with diverse views and backgrounds, evaluate a project, sometimes with a more formalized evaluation framework taking certain factors into account. Then, a decision is made, and the process repeats at various funding entities. Perhaps this could be optimized by having argument maps or a process that involves more clearly laying out assumptions and assigning mathematical weights to them, but I currently have no plans to try to go to EA funders and suggest they all follow the same evaluation protocol. Highly successful for-profit VCs employ a variety of evaluation models and have not converged on a single evaluation method. This suggests that perhaps evaluators in EA should use different evaluation protocols since different protocols might be more or less effective with certain cause areas, circumstances, types of projects, etc.
I think I’ve seen forum discussions where language has been an unacknowledged barrier to understanding in the past, so it might be worth flagging that Jan is from the Czech Republic and likely does not speak English as his mother tongue.
Thanks for pointing that out! Jan and I have also talked outside the EA Forum about our opinions on risk in the EA project space. I’ve been more optimistic about the prevalence of negative EV projects, so I thought there was a chance that greater optimism was being misinterpreted as a lack of concern about negative EV projects, which isn’t my position.
My impression was based mostly on our conversations several months ago—quoting the notes from that time
I think it is fair to say you expected very low risk from creating an open platform where people would just post projects and seek volunteers and funding, while I expected with minimum curation this creates significant risk (even if the risk is coming from small fraction of projects). Sorry if I rounded off suggestions like “let’s make an open platform without careful evaluation and see” and “based on the project ideas lists which existed several years ago the amount of harmful projects seems low” to “worrying about them is premature”.
Reading your recent comment, it seems more careful, and pointing out large negative outcomes are more of a problem with x-risk/long-term oriented projects.
In our old discussions I also expressed some doubt about your or altruism.vc ability to evaluate x-risk and similar projects, where your recent post states that projects that impact x-risks by doing something like AI safety research has not yet applied to the EA Angel Group.
I guess part of the disagreement comes from the fact that I have focus on x-risk and the long-term future, and I’m more interested both in improving the project landscape in these areas, and more worried about negative outcomes.
If open platforms or similar evaluation process also accept mitigating x-risk and similar proposals, in my opinion, unfortunately the bar how good/expert driven evaluations you need is higher, and unfortunately signals like “this is a competent team” which VCs would mainly look at are not enough.
Because I would expect the long-term impact will come mainly from long-term, meta-, exploratory or very ambitious projects, I think you can be basically right about low obvious risk of all the projects historically posted on hackpad or proposed to altruism.vc, and still miss the largest term in the EV.
Thanks—both of that happened after I posted my comment, and also I still do not see the numbers which would help me estimate the ratio of projects which applied and which got funded. I take as mildly negative signal that someone had to ask, and this info was not included in the post, which solicits project proposals and volunteer work.
In my model it seems possible you have something like chicken-and-egg problem, not getting many great proposals, and the group of unnamed angels not funding many proposals coming via that pipeline.
If this is the case and the actual number of successfully funded projects is low, I think it is necessary to state this clearly before inviting people to work on proposals. My vague impression was we may disagree on this, which seems to indicate some quite deep disagreement about how funders should treat projects.
The whole context was, Ryan suggested I should have sought some feedback from you. I actually did that, and your co-founder noted that he will try to write the feedback on this today or tomorrow, on 11th of Mar—which did not happen. I don’t think this is large problem, as we had already discussed the topic extensively.
When writing it I was somewhat upset about the mode of conversation where critics do ask whether I tried to coordinate with someone, but just assume I did not. I apologize for the bad way it was written.
Overall my summary is we probably still disagree in many assumptions, we did invest some effort trying to overcome them, it seems difficult for us to reach some consensus, but this should not stop us trying to move forward.
The community has already had many instances of openly writing about ideas, seeking funding on the EA Forum, Patreon, and elsewhere, and posting projects in places like the .impact hackpad and the currently active EA Work Club. Since posting about projects and making them known to community members seems to be a norm, I am curious about your assessment of the risk and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Do you propose that all EA project leaders seek approval from a central evaluation committee or something before talking with others about and publicizing the existence of their project? This would highly concern me because I think it’s very challenging to predict the outcomes of a project, which is evidenced by the fact that people have wildly different opinions on how good of an idea or how good of a startup something is. Such a system could be very negative EV by greatly reducing the number of projects being pursued by providing initial negative feedback that doesn’t reflect how the project would have turned out or decreasing the success of projects because other people are afraid to support a project that did not get backing from an evaluation system. I expect significant inaccuracy from my own project evaluation system as well as the project evaluation systems of other people and evaluation groups.
I wrote about the chicken and the egg problem here. As noted in my comments on the announcement post, the angels have significant amounts of funding available. Other funders do not disclose some of these statistics, and while we may do so in the future, I do not think it is necessary before soliciting proposals. The time cost of applying is pretty low, particularly if people are recycling content they have already written. I think we are the first grantmaking group to give all applicants feedback on their application which I think is valuable even if people do not get funded.
Ben commented on your Google Document that was seeking feedback. I wouldn’t say we’ve discussed the topic “extensively” in the brief call that we had. The devil is in the details, as they say.