What criteria were used to decide which orgs/āindividuals should be invited?
A small team of CEA staffers (I was not one of them) selected an initial invite list (58 people). At present, we see Leaders Forum as an event focused on movement building and coordination. We focus on inviting people who play a role in trying to shape the overall direction of the EA movement (whatever cause area they focus on), rather than people who mostly focus on direct research within a particular cause area. As youād imagine, this distinction can be somewhat fuzzy, but thatās the mindset with which CEA approaches invites (though other factors can play a role).
To give a specific example, while the Against Malaria Foundation is an important charity for people in EA who want to support global health, Iām not aware of any AMF staffers who have both a strong interest in the EA movement as a whole and some relevant movement-building experience. I donāt think that, say, Rob Mather (AMFās CEO), or a representative from the Gates Foundation, would get much value from the vast majority of conversations/āsessions at the event.
I should also note that the event has gotten a bit smaller over time. The first Leaders Forum (2016) had ~100 invitees and 62 attendees and wasnāt as focused on any particular topic. The next year, we shifted to a stronger focus on movement-building in particular (including community health, movement strategy, and risks to EA), which naturally led to a smaller, more focused invite list.
As with any other CEA program, Leaders Forum may continue to change over time; we arenāt yet sure how many people weāll invite next year.
Because of this, I donāt think it really makes sense to aggregate data over all cause areas.
I mostly agree! For several reasons, I wouldnāt put much stock in the cause-area data. Most participants likely arrived at their answers very quickly, and the numbers are of course dependent on the backgrounds of the people who both (a) were invited and (b) took the time to respond. However, because we did conduct the survey, it felt appropriate to share what information came out of it, even if the value of that information is limited.
I do, however, think itās good to have this information to check whether certain āextremeā conditions are present ā for example, it would have been surprising and notable if wild animal welfare had wound up with a median score of ā0ā, as that would seem to imply that most attendees think the cause doesnāt matter at all.
As stated, some orgs are small and so were not named, but still responded. Maybe a breakdown by the cause area for all the respondents would be more useful with the data you have already?
Given the limited utility of the prioritization data, I donāt know how much more helpful a cause-area breakdown would be. (Also, many if not most respondents currently work on more than one of the areas mentioned, but not necessarily with an even split between areas ā any number I came up with would be fairly subjective.)
It seems weird to me that DeepMind and the Good Food Institute are on this list, but not, say, the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, Giving What We Can, J-PAL, IPA, or the Humane League.
In addition to what I noted above about the types of attendees we aimed for, Iāll note that the list of respondent organizations doesnāt perfectly match who we invited; quite a few other organizations had invitees who didnāt fill out the survey. However, I will note that Giving What We Can (which is a project of CEA and was represented by CEA staff) did have representatives there.
As for organizations like DeepMind or GFI: While some of the orgs on the list are focused on a single narrow area, the employees we invited often had backgrounds in EA movement building and (in some cases) direct experience in other cause areas. (One invitee has run at least three major EA-aligned projects in three different areas.)
This wasnāt necessarily the case for every attendee (as I mentioned, we considered factors other than community-building experience), but itās an important reason that the org list looks the way it does.
At present, we see Leaders Forum as an event focused on movement building and coordination. We focus on inviting people who play a role in trying to shape the overall direction of the EA movement (whatever cause area they focus on), rather than people who mostly focus on direct research within a particular cause area. As youād imagine, this distinction can be somewhat fuzzy, but thatās the mindset with which CEA approaches invites (though other factors can play a role).
I really wish this had been included in the OP, in the section that discusses the weaknesses of the data. That section seems to frame the data as a more or less random subset of leaders of EA organizations (āThese results shouldnāt be taken as an authoritative or consensus view of effective altruism as a whole. They donāt represent everyone in EA, or even every leader of an EA organization.ā)
When I look at the list of organizations that were surveyed, it doesnāt look like the list of organizations most involved in movement building and coordination. It looks much more like a specific subset of that type of org: those focused on longtermism or x-risk (especially AI) and based in one of the main hubs (London accounts for ~50% of respondents, and the Bay accounts for ~30%).* Those that prioritize global poverty, and to a lesser extent animal welfare, seem notably missing. Itās possible the list of organizations that didnāt respond or werenāt named looks a lot different, but if thatās the case it seems worth calling attention to and possibly trying to rectify (e.g. did you email the survey to anyone or was it all done in person at the Leaders Forum?)
Some of the organizations Iād have expected to see included, even if the focus was movement building/ācoordination: GiveWell (strategy/āgrowth staff, not pure research staff), LEAN, Charity Entrepreneurship, Vegan Outreach, Rethink Priorities, One for the World, Founders Pledge, etc. Most EAs would see these as EA organizations involved to some degree with movement building. But weāre not learning what they think, while we are apparently hearing from at least one org/āperson who āwant to avoid being connected explicitly to the EA movementāfor example, if almost all their work happens in non-EA circles, where EA might have a mixed reputation.ā
Iām worried that people who read this report are likely to misinterpret the data being presented as more broadly representative than it actually is (e.g. the implications of respondents believing ~30% of EA resources should go to AI work over the next 5 years are radically different if those respondents disproportionally omit people who favor other causes). I have the same concerns about this survey was presented as Jacy Reese expressed about how the leaders survey from 2 years ago (which also captured a narrow set of opinions) was presented:
My main general thought here is just that we shouldnāt depend on so much from the reader. Most people, even most thoughtful EAs, wonāt read in full and come up with all the qualifications on their own, so itās important for article writers to include those themselves, and to include those upfront and center in their articles.
Lastly, Iāll note that thereās a certain irony in surveying only a narrow set of people, given that even among those respondents: āThe most common theme in these answers [about problems in the EA community] seems to be the desire for EA to be more inclusive and welcoming. Respondents saw a lot of room for improvement on intellectual diversity, humility, and outreach, whether to distinct groups with different views or to the general population.ā I suspect if a more diverse set of leaders had been surveyed, this theme would have been expressed even more strongly.
* GFI and Effective Giving both have London offices, but Iāve assumed their respondents were from other locations.
I agree with you that the orgs you mentioned (e.g. One for the World) are more focused on movement building than some of the other orgs that were invited.
I talked with Amy Labenz (who organized the event) in the course of writing my original reply. We want to clarify that when we said: āAt present, we see Leaders Forum as an event focused on movement building and coordination. We focus on inviting people who play a role in trying to shape the overall direction of the EA movement (whatever cause area they focus on)ā. We didnāt mean to over-emphasize āmovement buildingā (in the sense of ābringing more people to EAā) relative to āpeople shaping the overall direction of the EA movement (in the sense of āfiguring out what the movement should prioritize, growth or otherwiseā).
My use of the term āmovement buildingā was my slight misinterpretation of an internal document written by Amy. The eventās purpose was closer to discussing the goals, health, and trajectory of the movement (e.g. āhow should we prioritize growth vs. other things?ā) than discussing how to grow/ābuild the movement (e.g. āhow should we introduce EA to new people?ā)
Thanks Aaron, thatās a helpful clarification. Focusing on āpeople shaping the overall direction of the EA movementā rather than just movement building seems like a sensible decision. But one drawback is that coming up with a list of those people is a much more subjective (and network-reliant) exercise than, for example, making a list of movement building organizations and inviting representatives from each of them.
Thanks for your feedback on including the eventās focus as a limitation of the survey. Thatās something weāll consider if we run a similar survey and decide to publish the data next year.
Some of the organizations you listed had representatives invited who either did not attend or did not fill out the survey. (The survey was emailed to all invitees, and some of those who filled it out didnāt attend the event.) If everyone invited had filled it out, I think the list of represented organizations would look more diverse by your criteria.
Thanks Aaron. Glad to hear the invitee list included a broader list of organizations, and that youāll consider a more explicit discussion of potential selection bias effects going forward.
(I was the interim director of CEA during Leaders Forum, and Iām now the executive director.)
I think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways (e.g. I think that I made a mistake when I published an āEA handbookā without sufficiently consulting non-longtermist researchers, and in a way that probably over-represented AI safety and under-represented material outside of traditional EA cause areas, resulting in a product that appeared to represent EA, without accurately doing so). Given this background, I think itās reasonable to be suspicious of CEAās cause prioritisation.
(Iāll be writing more about this in the future, and it feels a bit odd to get into this in a comment when itās a major-ish update to CEAās strategy, but I think itās better to share more rather than less.) In the future, Iād like CEA to take a more agnostic approach to cause prioritisation, trying to construct non-gameable mechanisms for making decisions about how much we talk about different causes. An example of how this might work is that we might pay for an independent contractor to try to figure out who has spent more than two years full time thinking about cause prioritization, and then surveying those people. Obviously that project would be complicatedāitās hard to figure out exactly what ācause prioā means, it would be important to reach out through diverse networks to make sure there arenāt network biases etc.
Anyway, given this background of pushing longtermism, I think itās reasonable to be skeptical of CEAās approach on this sort of thing.
When I look at the list of organizations that were surveyed, it doesnāt look like the list of organizations most involved in movement building and coordination. It looks much more like a specific subset of that type of org: those focused on longtermism or x-risk (especially AI) and based in one of the main hubs (London accounts for ~50% of respondents, and the Bay accounts for ~30%).* Those that prioritize global poverty, and to a lesser extent animal welfare, seem notably missing. Itās possible the list of organizations that didnāt respond or werenāt named looks a lot different, but if thatās the case it seems worth calling attention to and possibly trying to rectify (e.g. did you email the survey to anyone or was it all done in person at the Leaders Forum?)
I think youāre probably right that there are some biases here. How the invite process worked this year was that Amy Labenz, who runs the event, draws up a longlist of potential attendees (asking some external advisors for suggestions about who should be invited). Then Amy, Julia Wise, and I voted yes/āno/āmaybe on all of the individuals on the longlist (often adding comments). Amy made a final call about who to invite, based on those votes. I expect that all of this means that the final invite list is somewhat biased by our networks, and some background assumptions we have about individuals and orgs.
Given this, I think that it would be fair to view the attendees of the event as āsome people who CEA staff think it would be useful to get together for a few daysā rather than āthe definitive list of EA leadersā. I think that we were also somewhat loose about what the criteria for inviting people should be, and Iād like us to be a bit clearer on that in the future (see a couple of paragraphs below). Given this, I think that calling the event āEA Leaders Forumā is probably a mistake, but others on the team think that changing the name could be confusing and have transition costsāweāre still talking about this, and havenāt reached resolution about whether weāll keep the name for next year.
I also think CEA made some mistakes in the way we framed this post (not just the author, since it went through other readers before publication.) I think the post kind of frames this as āEA leaders think Xā, which I expect would be the sort of thing that lots of EAs should update on. (Even though I think it does try to explicitly disavow this interpretation (see the section on āWhat this data does and does not representā, I think the title suggests something thatās more like āEA leaders think these are the prioritiesāprobably you should update towards these being the prioritiesā). I think that the reality is more like āsome people that CEA staff think itās useful to get together for an event think Xā, which is something that people should update on less.
Weāre currently at a team retreat where weāre talking more about what the goals of the event should be in the future. I think that itās possible that the event looks pretty different in future years, and weāre not yet sure how. But I think that whatever we decide, we should think more carefully about the criteria for attendees, and that will include thinking carefully about the approach to cause prioritization.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, Max. I appreciate your engagement, your explanation of how the invitation process worked this year, and your willingness to acknowledge that CEA may have historically been too aggressive in how it has pushed longtermism and how it has framed the results of past surveys.
In the future, Iād like CEA to take a more agnostic approach to cause prioritisation, trying to construct non-gameable mechanisms for making decisions about how much we talk about different causes.
Very glad to hear this. As you note, implementing this sort of thing in practice can be tricky. As CEA starts designing new mechanisms, Iād love to see you gather input (as early possible) from people who have expressed concern about CEAās representativeness in the past (Iād be happy to offer opinions if youād like). These also might be good people to serve as āexternal advisorsā who generate suggestions for the invite list.
Good luck with the retreat! I look forward to seeing your strategy update once thatās written up.
Some of the organizations you listed had representatives invited who either did not attend or did not fill out the survey. [...] If everyone invited had filled it out, I think the list of represented organizations would look more diverse by your criteria.
Depends a bit on how much you mean to stretch the word āsomeāā¦ This is false as far as I can tell.. at best I would describe your comment as highly misleading.
Iām not sure what you mean, Peter, but Iāll try to be more clear. Of the seven organizations listed in the comment to which I replied, three of them had people invited, according to the list of people who were recorded as having been sent the invite email.
How did you interpret the word āsomeā? Is there another sense in which you saw the comment as misleading?
Iām sorry. I was reading uncharitably and wrote too quickly. Your latest response sounds clear and fair to me. Thanks for providing the numbers and Iām sorry for misjudging the situation.
A small team of CEA staffers (I was not one of them) selected an initial invite list (58 people). At present, we see Leaders Forum as an event focused on movement building and coordination. We focus on inviting people who play a role in trying to shape the overall direction of the EA movement (whatever cause area they focus on), rather than people who mostly focus on direct research within a particular cause area. As youād imagine, this distinction can be somewhat fuzzy, but thatās the mindset with which CEA approaches invites (though other factors can play a role).
To give a specific example, while the Against Malaria Foundation is an important charity for people in EA who want to support global health, Iām not aware of any AMF staffers who have both a strong interest in the EA movement as a whole and some relevant movement-building experience. I donāt think that, say, Rob Mather (AMFās CEO), or a representative from the Gates Foundation, would get much value from the vast majority of conversations/āsessions at the event.
I should also note that the event has gotten a bit smaller over time. The first Leaders Forum (2016) had ~100 invitees and 62 attendees and wasnāt as focused on any particular topic. The next year, we shifted to a stronger focus on movement-building in particular (including community health, movement strategy, and risks to EA), which naturally led to a smaller, more focused invite list.
As with any other CEA program, Leaders Forum may continue to change over time; we arenāt yet sure how many people weāll invite next year.
I mostly agree! For several reasons, I wouldnāt put much stock in the cause-area data. Most participants likely arrived at their answers very quickly, and the numbers are of course dependent on the backgrounds of the people who both (a) were invited and (b) took the time to respond. However, because we did conduct the survey, it felt appropriate to share what information came out of it, even if the value of that information is limited.
I do, however, think itās good to have this information to check whether certain āextremeā conditions are present ā for example, it would have been surprising and notable if wild animal welfare had wound up with a median score of ā0ā, as that would seem to imply that most attendees think the cause doesnāt matter at all.
Given the limited utility of the prioritization data, I donāt know how much more helpful a cause-area breakdown would be. (Also, many if not most respondents currently work on more than one of the areas mentioned, but not necessarily with an even split between areas ā any number I came up with would be fairly subjective.)
In addition to what I noted above about the types of attendees we aimed for, Iāll note that the list of respondent organizations doesnāt perfectly match who we invited; quite a few other organizations had invitees who didnāt fill out the survey. However, I will note that Giving What We Can (which is a project of CEA and was represented by CEA staff) did have representatives there.
As for organizations like DeepMind or GFI: While some of the orgs on the list are focused on a single narrow area, the employees we invited often had backgrounds in EA movement building and (in some cases) direct experience in other cause areas. (One invitee has run at least three major EA-aligned projects in three different areas.)
This wasnāt necessarily the case for every attendee (as I mentioned, we considered factors other than community-building experience), but itās an important reason that the org list looks the way it does.
I really wish this had been included in the OP, in the section that discusses the weaknesses of the data. That section seems to frame the data as a more or less random subset of leaders of EA organizations (āThese results shouldnāt be taken as an authoritative or consensus view of effective altruism as a whole. They donāt represent everyone in EA, or even every leader of an EA organization.ā)
When I look at the list of organizations that were surveyed, it doesnāt look like the list of organizations most involved in movement building and coordination. It looks much more like a specific subset of that type of org: those focused on longtermism or x-risk (especially AI) and based in one of the main hubs (London accounts for ~50% of respondents, and the Bay accounts for ~30%).* Those that prioritize global poverty, and to a lesser extent animal welfare, seem notably missing. Itās possible the list of organizations that didnāt respond or werenāt named looks a lot different, but if thatās the case it seems worth calling attention to and possibly trying to rectify (e.g. did you email the survey to anyone or was it all done in person at the Leaders Forum?)
Some of the organizations Iād have expected to see included, even if the focus was movement building/ācoordination: GiveWell (strategy/āgrowth staff, not pure research staff), LEAN, Charity Entrepreneurship, Vegan Outreach, Rethink Priorities, One for the World, Founders Pledge, etc. Most EAs would see these as EA organizations involved to some degree with movement building. But weāre not learning what they think, while we are apparently hearing from at least one org/āperson who āwant to avoid being connected explicitly to the EA movementāfor example, if almost all their work happens in non-EA circles, where EA might have a mixed reputation.ā
Iām worried that people who read this report are likely to misinterpret the data being presented as more broadly representative than it actually is (e.g. the implications of respondents believing ~30% of EA resources should go to AI work over the next 5 years are radically different if those respondents disproportionally omit people who favor other causes). I have the same concerns about this survey was presented as Jacy Reese expressed about how the leaders survey from 2 years ago (which also captured a narrow set of opinions) was presented:
Lastly, Iāll note that thereās a certain irony in surveying only a narrow set of people, given that even among those respondents: āThe most common theme in these answers [about problems in the EA community] seems to be the desire for EA to be more inclusive and welcoming. Respondents saw a lot of room for improvement on intellectual diversity, humility, and outreach, whether to distinct groups with different views or to the general population.ā I suspect if a more diverse set of leaders had been surveyed, this theme would have been expressed even more strongly.
* GFI and Effective Giving both have London offices, but Iāve assumed their respondents were from other locations.
I agree with you that the orgs you mentioned (e.g. One for the World) are more focused on movement building than some of the other orgs that were invited.
I talked with Amy Labenz (who organized the event) in the course of writing my original reply. We want to clarify that when we said: āAt present, we see Leaders Forum as an event focused on movement building and coordination. We focus on inviting people who play a role in trying to shape the overall direction of the EA movement (whatever cause area they focus on)ā. We didnāt mean to over-emphasize āmovement buildingā (in the sense of ābringing more people to EAā) relative to āpeople shaping the overall direction of the EA movement (in the sense of āfiguring out what the movement should prioritize, growth or otherwiseā).
My use of the term āmovement buildingā was my slight misinterpretation of an internal document written by Amy. The eventās purpose was closer to discussing the goals, health, and trajectory of the movement (e.g. āhow should we prioritize growth vs. other things?ā) than discussing how to grow/ābuild the movement (e.g. āhow should we introduce EA to new people?ā)
Thanks Aaron, thatās a helpful clarification. Focusing on āpeople shaping the overall direction of the EA movementā rather than just movement building seems like a sensible decision. But one drawback is that coming up with a list of those people is a much more subjective (and network-reliant) exercise than, for example, making a list of movement building organizations and inviting representatives from each of them.
Thanks for your feedback on including the eventās focus as a limitation of the survey. Thatās something weāll consider if we run a similar survey and decide to publish the data next year.
Some of the organizations you listed had representatives invited who either did not attend or did not fill out the survey. (The survey was emailed to all invitees, and some of those who filled it out didnāt attend the event.) If everyone invited had filled it out, I think the list of represented organizations would look more diverse by your criteria.
Thanks Aaron. Glad to hear the invitee list included a broader list of organizations, and that youāll consider a more explicit discussion of potential selection bias effects going forward.
(I was the interim director of CEA during Leaders Forum, and Iām now the executive director.)
I think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways (e.g. I think that I made a mistake when I published an āEA handbookā without sufficiently consulting non-longtermist researchers, and in a way that probably over-represented AI safety and under-represented material outside of traditional EA cause areas, resulting in a product that appeared to represent EA, without accurately doing so). Given this background, I think itās reasonable to be suspicious of CEAās cause prioritisation.
(Iāll be writing more about this in the future, and it feels a bit odd to get into this in a comment when itās a major-ish update to CEAās strategy, but I think itās better to share more rather than less.) In the future, Iād like CEA to take a more agnostic approach to cause prioritisation, trying to construct non-gameable mechanisms for making decisions about how much we talk about different causes. An example of how this might work is that we might pay for an independent contractor to try to figure out who has spent more than two years full time thinking about cause prioritization, and then surveying those people. Obviously that project would be complicatedāitās hard to figure out exactly what ācause prioā means, it would be important to reach out through diverse networks to make sure there arenāt network biases etc.
Anyway, given this background of pushing longtermism, I think itās reasonable to be skeptical of CEAās approach on this sort of thing.
I think youāre probably right that there are some biases here. How the invite process worked this year was that Amy Labenz, who runs the event, draws up a longlist of potential attendees (asking some external advisors for suggestions about who should be invited). Then Amy, Julia Wise, and I voted yes/āno/āmaybe on all of the individuals on the longlist (often adding comments). Amy made a final call about who to invite, based on those votes. I expect that all of this means that the final invite list is somewhat biased by our networks, and some background assumptions we have about individuals and orgs.
Given this, I think that it would be fair to view the attendees of the event as āsome people who CEA staff think it would be useful to get together for a few daysā rather than āthe definitive list of EA leadersā. I think that we were also somewhat loose about what the criteria for inviting people should be, and Iād like us to be a bit clearer on that in the future (see a couple of paragraphs below). Given this, I think that calling the event āEA Leaders Forumā is probably a mistake, but others on the team think that changing the name could be confusing and have transition costsāweāre still talking about this, and havenāt reached resolution about whether weāll keep the name for next year.
I also think CEA made some mistakes in the way we framed this post (not just the author, since it went through other readers before publication.) I think the post kind of frames this as āEA leaders think Xā, which I expect would be the sort of thing that lots of EAs should update on. (Even though I think it does try to explicitly disavow this interpretation (see the section on āWhat this data does and does not representā, I think the title suggests something thatās more like āEA leaders think these are the prioritiesāprobably you should update towards these being the prioritiesā). I think that the reality is more like āsome people that CEA staff think itās useful to get together for an event think Xā, which is something that people should update on less.
Weāre currently at a team retreat where weāre talking more about what the goals of the event should be in the future. I think that itās possible that the event looks pretty different in future years, and weāre not yet sure how. But I think that whatever we decide, we should think more carefully about the criteria for attendees, and that will include thinking carefully about the approach to cause prioritization.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, Max. I appreciate your engagement, your explanation of how the invitation process worked this year, and your willingness to acknowledge that CEA may have historically been too aggressive in how it has pushed longtermism and how it has framed the results of past surveys.
Very glad to hear this. As you note, implementing this sort of thing in practice can be tricky. As CEA starts designing new mechanisms, Iād love to see you gather input (as early possible) from people who have expressed concern about CEAās representativeness in the past (Iād be happy to offer opinions if youād like). These also might be good people to serve as āexternal advisorsā who generate suggestions for the invite list.
Good luck with the retreat! I look forward to seeing your strategy update once thatās written up.
Depends a bit on how much you mean to stretch the word āsomeāā¦ This is false as far as I can tell.. at best I would describe your comment as highly misleading.
Iām not sure what you mean, Peter, but Iāll try to be more clear. Of the seven organizations listed in the comment to which I replied, three of them had people invited, according to the list of people who were recorded as having been sent the invite email.
How did you interpret the word āsomeā? Is there another sense in which you saw the comment as misleading?
Iām sorry. I was reading uncharitably and wrote too quickly. Your latest response sounds clear and fair to me. Thanks for providing the numbers and Iām sorry for misjudging the situation.