I’ve worked with EA-related organizations, as have many of my friends.
On a system-1 level, I honestly just want to scrap the entire EA project and start over. EAA strikes me as particularly scrappable, but that’s just my values.
On a system-2 level, I see the community being eaten by Moloch, roughly as a consequence of Darwinian pressure towards growth conflicting with a need for bona fide epistemic rigor. The reason that we seem to be getting especially eaten by this is that there’s a widespread belief that our cause is just, so we’re rapidly developing notions that play the functional role of ‘heresy’ for EA. I’ve seen well-respected and high-profile organizations going after critics of their work, engaging in internal purges of folk associated with them, and compelling simple lies to manage the optics of criticism. I have direct knowledge of times when such organizations have decided to ignore the content of criticism and instead spin.
This has been a problem since at least 2013. It’s not merely the Open Philanthropy Project / Good Ventures / GiveWell drama, Intentional Insights, the pledge, or Sarah Constantin’s honesty thing. It’s systemic, and those examples are merely so public as to be unavoidable on Facebook.
How to fix this problem? I think the meta level of EA needs to be pruned. Organizations with specific goals (e.g., GiveWell’s top recommended charities or the AI folk) seem to have less of a problem, because they have to actually engage with reality somewhere. At worst, they’re just wrong. The problem arises much more with GiveWell or the Centre for Effective Altruism and their spawn, because there aren’t clear progress metrics. The incentives to ‘grow first, be right later’ then are strong.
Anonymous #14 added:
[When I mentioned ‘the Open Philanthropy Project / Good Ventures / GiveWell drama’] I was referring to the question of whether the Open Philanthropy Project was wrong about fully funding the Against Malaria Foundation. I’m aware that Open Phil is now asserting that their last dollar will go somewhere more effective (in expectation) than AMF. But I don’t buy their reasoning, and I find it (evidentially) deeply troubling that they are using it. I suspect strongly that organizations that claim that they should keep money when there are obvious effective things to do right now—and claim this on the basis of less-than-fully-formal, less-than-fully-public models—will in fact not end up using the money. More generally, I suspect strongly that organizations with a tendency to push the flock to do one thing while they do something else will not be goal-oriented.
Anonymous #14:
Anonymous #14 added:
Link to the Open Philanthropy Project’s current view on giving now vs. later: http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/good-ventures-and-giving-now-vs-later-2016-update