A few things (I will reply in more detail in the morning once I have worked out how to link to specific parts of your text in my comment). These comments do appear a bit blunt, and I do apologies, they are blunt for clarity sake rather than to imply aggressiveness or rudeness.
With regards to the Coordination Forum, even if no “official decisions” get worked out, how impactful over the overall direction of the movement do you think it is? Anyway, why are the attendees of this not public? If the point is to build trust between those community building and to understand the core gnarly disagreements, why is the people going and what goes on so secretive?
Your Carrick Flynn answer sort of didn’t really tell me which senior EA leaders if any encouraged Carrick to run/ knew before he announced etc, which is something I think is important to know. It also doesn’t explain the decision around the choice of campaign manager etc.
With regards to buying twitter: whilst it is Will’s right to do whatever he wants, it really does call into question whether it is correct for him to be the “leader of EA” (or EA to have a defacto leader in such a way). If he has that role, surely he has certain responsibilities, and if he doesn’t want to fulfil those responsibilities, surely its time for him to step away from that role? I guess maybe I think that a fuck up as big as how hard Will vouched for SBF should hugely call into question how much power we should be giving Will.
With regards to Zoe’s ideas, I think I would actually like to see Will’s reasoning. A number of them could have been run as experiments anyway (more democratic funding via delibrative groups, debates/double cruxxing etc at EAGs etc.), so it doesn’t seem the justification for implementing nothing is that strong. But nonetheless I would like to see the justification from Will.
With regards to hero worshipping, I guess the fact Will has done little to reduce it should be pretty concerning to us.
With regards to the fear of disagreement, I do braodly agree things are getting done, and I thank you for your work with the disagree vote on the forum. I still think the Karma system messes with things anyway, but thanks for implementing that. I do however think we need much braoder discussions about this.
With regards to private funding, I think its important to note it was FTX Future Funds decision to make the funding private; I wanted it public, indeed, I did publicise this on my website. This was funding not given through a recommendation or a regranter but directly, that me as the grantee wanted to be public knowledge.
With regards to coordiantion and the media, there does however seem to be decent levels of coordination. Will’s book got about $10 Million in funding (edit- this is unconfirmed although I have heard it from multiple sources, and I think the number is pretty plausible given how many adverts etc. the book got- I should also say if it was that much, I think it was probably a good use of money) and far more converage than even Toby’s book got. It seems to always be the same faces talking to the media (ie mostly Will to be honest), so either there is coordination, or Will is not pointing journalists to other members of the community to talk to. I guess either naturally EA has developed some kind of internal government which those who have that power should probably try and reduce, or there has been some coordiantion here and making and encouraging Will (and I guess until recently to a lesser extent SBF) the face of EA was some kind of more delibrate decision. Probably the former is more likely, but then there is questions as to why this hasn’t been more fought against (in other academic circles I have been in the “figurehead” of the community has refused interviews to try and encourge the putting of the spotlight on others, although this was presumably much harder when the coverage was all about Will’s book.
With regards to SBF lifestyle, I think it is probably true many of us in the UK was less well aware of this. But surely a bunch of the UK based leadership (eg Will) knew of this, and so this could and should have been communicated more broadly.
I guess I think none of these issues on their own are ridiculously concerning, but the lack of transparency and concentration of power without a sense of safeguards or ways for community members to input etc does scare me, which is why I want a better sense of how these decisions are made to know whether my reading of how EA is run, either formally or informally, is correct or not. Thanks so much for your help so far on this, it is really appreciated!
Wait, what!? What’s your source of information for that figure? I get hiring a research assistant or two, but $10m seems like two orders of magnitude too much. I can’t even imagine how you would spend anywhere near that much on writing a book. Where did this money come from?
The book was, in Will’s words “a decade of work”, with a large number of people helping to write it, with a moderately large team promoting it (who did an awesome job!). There were a lot of adverts certainly around London for the book, and Will flew around the world to promote the book. I would certainly be hugely surprised if the budget was under $1 million (I know of projects run by undergraduates with budgets over a million!), and to be honest $10 million seems to me in the right ball park. Things just cost a lot of money, and you don’t promote a book for free!
The source appears to be Émile P. Torres. Gideon, could you confirm that this is the case? Also, could you clarify if you ever reached out to Will MacAskill to confirm the accuracy of this figure?
I’ve heard it from a number of people saying it quite casually, so assumed it was correct as it’s the only figure I heard banded around and didn’t hear opposition to it. Just tried to confirm it and don’t see it publicly, so it may be wrong. They may have heard it from Emile, I don’t know. So take it with a hefty pinch of salt then.
I don’t quite think I have the level of access to just randomly email Will MacAskill unfortunately to confirm it, but if someone could, that would be great.
FYI I think it probably would have been a fantastic use of 10 million, which is why I also think its quite plausible
If you are unable to adduce any evidence for that particular figure, I think your reply should not be “take it with a hefty pinch of salt” but to either reach out to the person in a position to confirm or disconfirm it, or else issue a retraction.
I think a retraction would also be misleading (since I am worried it would indicate a disconformation). I think editing it to say that the number comes from unconfirmed rumors seems best to me.
FWIW, a $10MM estimate seems in the right order of magnitude based on random things I heard, though I also don’t have anything hard to go on (my guess is that it will have ended up less than $10MM, but I am like 80% confident it was more than $1.5MM, though again, purely based on vague vibes I got from talking to some people in the vague vicinity of the marketing campaign)
Why would a retraction be misleading? A valid reason for retracting a statement is failure to verify it. There is no indication in these cases that the statement is false.
If someone can’t provide any evidence for a claim that very likely traces back to Emile Torres, and they can’t be bothered to send a one-line email to Will’s team asking for confirmation, then it seems natural to ask this person to take back the claim. But I’m also okay with an edit to the original comment along the lines you suggest.
Huh, I definitely read strikethrough text by default as “disconfirmed”. My guess is I would be happy to take a bet on this and ask random readers what they think the truth value of a strike-through claim like this is.
But in any case, seems like we agree that an edit is appropriate.
Saying I “can’t be bothered to send a one line email”: I’m not a journalist and really didn’t expect this post to blow up as much as it did. I am literally a 19 year old kid and not sure that Will’s team will respond to me if I’m honest. Part of the hope for this post was to get some answers, which in some cases (ie Rob Wiblin- thanks!) i have got, but in others I haven’t.
Honestly, I think it is fine to relay second-hand information, as long as it is minimally trustworthy—i.e., heard from multiple sources—and you clearly caveat it as such. This is a forum for casual conversation, not an academic journal or a court of law. In this case, too, we are dealing with a private matter that is arguably of some public interest to the movement. It would be great if these things were fully transparent in the first place, in which case we wouldn’t have to depend on hearsay.
With that said: now we have heard the figure of $10m, it would be nice to know what the real sum was.
EDIT: Having just read Torres’ piece, Halstead’s letter to the editor, and the editorial note quoting Will’s response, there is no indication that anyone has disputed the $10m figure with which the piece began. Obviously that does not make it true, but it would seem to make it more likely to be true. One thing I had not realised, though, was that this money could have been used for the promotion of the book as well as its writing.
A few things (I will reply in more detail in the morning once I have worked out how to link to specific parts of your text in my comment). These comments do appear a bit blunt, and I do apologies, they are blunt for clarity sake rather than to imply aggressiveness or rudeness.
With regards to the Coordination Forum, even if no “official decisions” get worked out, how impactful over the overall direction of the movement do you think it is? Anyway, why are the attendees of this not public? If the point is to build trust between those community building and to understand the core gnarly disagreements, why is the people going and what goes on so secretive?
Your Carrick Flynn answer sort of didn’t really tell me which senior EA leaders if any encouraged Carrick to run/ knew before he announced etc, which is something I think is important to know. It also doesn’t explain the decision around the choice of campaign manager etc.
With regards to buying twitter: whilst it is Will’s right to do whatever he wants, it really does call into question whether it is correct for him to be the “leader of EA” (or EA to have a defacto leader in such a way). If he has that role, surely he has certain responsibilities, and if he doesn’t want to fulfil those responsibilities, surely its time for him to step away from that role? I guess maybe I think that a fuck up as big as how hard Will vouched for SBF should hugely call into question how much power we should be giving Will.
With regards to Zoe’s ideas, I think I would actually like to see Will’s reasoning. A number of them could have been run as experiments anyway (more democratic funding via delibrative groups, debates/double cruxxing etc at EAGs etc.), so it doesn’t seem the justification for implementing nothing is that strong. But nonetheless I would like to see the justification from Will.
With regards to hero worshipping, I guess the fact Will has done little to reduce it should be pretty concerning to us.
With regards to the fear of disagreement, I do braodly agree things are getting done, and I thank you for your work with the disagree vote on the forum. I still think the Karma system messes with things anyway, but thanks for implementing that. I do however think we need much braoder discussions about this.
With regards to private funding, I think its important to note it was FTX Future Funds decision to make the funding private; I wanted it public, indeed, I did publicise this on my website. This was funding not given through a recommendation or a regranter but directly, that me as the grantee wanted to be public knowledge.
With regards to coordiantion and the media, there does however seem to be decent levels of coordination. Will’s book got about $10 Million in funding (edit- this is unconfirmed although I have heard it from multiple sources, and I think the number is pretty plausible given how many adverts etc. the book got- I should also say if it was that much, I think it was probably a good use of money) and far more converage than even Toby’s book got. It seems to always be the same faces talking to the media (ie mostly Will to be honest), so either there is coordination, or Will is not pointing journalists to other members of the community to talk to. I guess either naturally EA has developed some kind of internal government which those who have that power should probably try and reduce, or there has been some coordiantion here and making and encouraging Will (and I guess until recently to a lesser extent SBF) the face of EA was some kind of more delibrate decision. Probably the former is more likely, but then there is questions as to why this hasn’t been more fought against (in other academic circles I have been in the “figurehead” of the community has refused interviews to try and encourge the putting of the spotlight on others, although this was presumably much harder when the coverage was all about Will’s book.
With regards to SBF lifestyle, I think it is probably true many of us in the UK was less well aware of this. But surely a bunch of the UK based leadership (eg Will) knew of this, and so this could and should have been communicated more broadly.
I guess I think none of these issues on their own are ridiculously concerning, but the lack of transparency and concentration of power without a sense of safeguards or ways for community members to input etc does scare me, which is why I want a better sense of how these decisions are made to know whether my reading of how EA is run, either formally or informally, is correct or not. Thanks so much for your help so far on this, it is really appreciated!
Wait, what!? What’s your source of information for that figure? I get hiring a research assistant or two, but $10m seems like two orders of magnitude too much. I can’t even imagine how you would spend anywhere near that much on writing a book. Where did this money come from?
Definitely not 2 orders of magnitude too much.
The book was, in Will’s words “a decade of work”, with a large number of people helping to write it, with a moderately large team promoting it (who did an awesome job!). There were a lot of adverts certainly around London for the book, and Will flew around the world to promote the book. I would certainly be hugely surprised if the budget was under $1 million (I know of projects run by undergraduates with budgets over a million!), and to be honest $10 million seems to me in the right ball park. Things just cost a lot of money, and you don’t promote a book for free!
The source appears to be Émile P. Torres. Gideon, could you confirm that this is the case? Also, could you clarify if you ever reached out to Will MacAskill to confirm the accuracy of this figure?
I’ve heard it from a number of people saying it quite casually, so assumed it was correct as it’s the only figure I heard banded around and didn’t hear opposition to it. Just tried to confirm it and don’t see it publicly, so it may be wrong. They may have heard it from Emile, I don’t know. So take it with a hefty pinch of salt then. I don’t quite think I have the level of access to just randomly email Will MacAskill unfortunately to confirm it, but if someone could, that would be great. FYI I think it probably would have been a fantastic use of 10 million, which is why I also think its quite plausible
If you are unable to adduce any evidence for that particular figure, I think your reply should not be “take it with a hefty pinch of salt” but to either reach out to the person in a position to confirm or disconfirm it, or else issue a retraction.
I think a retraction would also be misleading (since I am worried it would indicate a disconformation). I think editing it to say that the number comes from unconfirmed rumors seems best to me.
FWIW, a $10MM estimate seems in the right order of magnitude based on random things I heard, though I also don’t have anything hard to go on (my guess is that it will have ended up less than $10MM, but I am like 80% confident it was more than $1.5MM, though again, purely based on vague vibes I got from talking to some people in the vague vicinity of the marketing campaign)
Why would a retraction be misleading? A valid reason for retracting a statement is failure to verify it. There is no indication in these cases that the statement is false.
If someone can’t provide any evidence for a claim that very likely traces back to Emile Torres, and they can’t be bothered to send a one-line email to Will’s team asking for confirmation, then it seems natural to ask this person to take back the claim. But I’m also okay with an edit to the original comment along the lines you suggest.
Huh, I definitely read strikethrough text by default as “disconfirmed”. My guess is I would be happy to take a bet on this and ask random readers what they think the truth value of a strike-through claim like this is.
But in any case, seems like we agree that an edit is appropriate.
Well I have put an edit in there.
Saying I “can’t be bothered to send a one line email”: I’m not a journalist and really didn’t expect this post to blow up as much as it did. I am literally a 19 year old kid and not sure that Will’s team will respond to me if I’m honest. Part of the hope for this post was to get some answers, which in some cases (ie Rob Wiblin- thanks!) i have got, but in others I haven’t.
Honestly, I think it is fine to relay second-hand information, as long as it is minimally trustworthy—i.e., heard from multiple sources—and you clearly caveat it as such. This is a forum for casual conversation, not an academic journal or a court of law. In this case, too, we are dealing with a private matter that is arguably of some public interest to the movement. It would be great if these things were fully transparent in the first place, in which case we wouldn’t have to depend on hearsay.
With that said: now we have heard the figure of $10m, it would be nice to know what the real sum was.
EDIT: Having just read Torres’ piece, Halstead’s letter to the editor, and the editorial note quoting Will’s response, there is no indication that anyone has disputed the $10m figure with which the piece began. Obviously that does not make it true, but it would seem to make it more likely to be true. One thing I had not realised, though, was that this money could have been used for the promotion of the book as well as its writing.