I feel like a lot of castle discourse missed the point.
By default, OpenPhil/Dustin/Owen/EV don’t need anyone’s permission for how they spend their money.
And it is their money, AFAICT open phil doesn’t take small donations. I assume Dustin can advocate for himself here.
One might argue that the castle has such high negative externalities it can be criticized on that front. I haven’t seen anything to convince me of that, but it’s a possibility and “right to spend one’s own money” doesn’t override that.
You could argue OpenPhil etc made some sort of promise they are violating by buying the castle. I don’t think that’s true- but I also think the castle-complainers have a legitimate grievance.
I do think the word “open” conveys something of a promise, and I will up my sympathy for open phil if they change their name. But my understanding is they are more open than most foundations.
My guess is that lots of people entered EA with inaccurate expectations, and the volume at which this happens indicates a systemic problem, probably with recruiting. They felt ~promised that EA wasn’t the kind of place where people bought fancy castles, or would at least publicly announce they’d bought a retreat center and justify it with numbers.
Highly legible, highly transparent parts of EA exist, and I’m glad they do. But it’s not all of EA, and I don’t think it should be. I think it’s important to hold people to commitments, and open phil at one point did have a commitment to transparency, but they publicly renounced it years ago so that’s no longer in play. I think the problem lies with the people who set the false expectations, which I imagine happened in recruiting.
It’s hard for me to be more specific than this because I haven’t followed EA recruiting very closely, so what reaches me tends to be complaints about the worst parts. My guess is this lies in the more outward facing parts of Effective Ventures (GWWC, 80k, CEA’s university recruiting program, perhaps the formalization of EA groups in general).
[I couldn’t quickly verify this but my understanding is open phil provides a lot of the funding for at least some of these orgs, in which case it does bear some responsibility for the misleading recruiting]
I would like to see recruiting get more accurate about what to expect within EA. I want that partially because honesty is generally good, partially because this seems like a miserable experience for people who have been misled. And partially because I want EA to be a weird do-ocracy, and recruiting lots of people who object to doing weird things without permission slows that down.
I think the first point here—that the buyers “don’t need anyone’s permission” to purchase a “castle”—isn’t contested here. Other than maybe the ConcernedEA crowd, is anyone claiming that they were somehow required to (e.g.) put this to a vote?
I think the “right to spend one’s own money” in no way undermines other people’s “right to speak one’s own speech” by lambasting that expenditure. In the same way, my right to free speech doesn’t prevent other people from criticizing me for it, or even deciding not to fund/hire me if I were to apply for funding or a job. There are circumstances in which we have—or should have—special norms against negative reactions by third parties; for instance, no one should be retailiated against for reporting fraud, waste, abuse, harassment, etc. But the default rule is that what the critics have said here is fair game.
A feeling of EA having breached a “~promise[]” isn’t the only basis for standing here. Suppose a non-EA megadonor had given a $15MM presumably tax-deductible donation to a non-EA charity for buying a “castle.” Certainly both EAs and non-EAs would have the right to criticize that decision, especially because the tax-favored nature of the donation meant that millions’ worth of taxes were avoided by the donation. If one wishes to avoid most public scrutiny, one should make it clear that the donation was not tax-advantaged. In that case, it’s the same as the megadonor buying a “castle” for themselves.
Moreover, I think the level of negative externalities required to give third-party EAs standing to criticize is quite low. The “right to speak one’s own speech” is at least as fundamental as the proposed “right to spend one’s own money.” If the norm is going to be that third parties shouldn’t criticize—much less take adverse actions against—an EA entity unless the negative PR & other side effects of the entity’s action exceed those of the “castle” purpose, then that would seem a pretty fundamental shift in how things work. Because the magnitude of most entities’ actions—especially individuals—are generally an order of magnitude (or more) less than the magnitude of OP and EVF’s actions, the negative externalities will almost never meet this standard.
I 100% agree with you that people should be and are free to give their opinions, full stop.
Many specific things people said only make sense to me if they have some internal sense that they are owed a justification and input (example, example, example, example).
I almost-but-don’t-totally reject PR arguments. EA was founded on “do the thing that works not the thing that looks good”. EAs encourage many other things people find equally distasteful or even abhorrent, because they believe it does the most good. So “the castle is bad PR” is not a good enough argument, you need to make a case for “the castle is bad PR and meaningfully worse than these other things that are bad PR but still good”. I believe things in that category exist, and people are welcome to make arguments that the castle is one of them, but you do have to make the full argument.
I think you’re slightly missing the point of the ‘castle’ critics here.
By default, OpenPhil/Dustin/Owen/EV don’t need anyone’s permission for how they spend their money. And it is their money, AFAICT open phil doesn’t take small donations. I assume Dustin can advocate for himself here.
One might argue that the castle has such high negative externalities it can be criticized on that front. I haven’t seen anything to convince me of that, but it’s a possibility and “right to spend one’s own money” doesn’t override that.
Technically this is obviously true. And it was the main point behind one of the most popular responses to FTX and all the following drama. But I think that point and the post misses people’s concerns completely and comes off as quite tone-deaf.
To pick an (absolutely contrived) example, let’s say OpenPhil suddenly says it now believes that vegan diets are more moral and healthier than all other diets, and that B12 supplementation increases x-risk, and they’re going to funnel billions of dollars into this venture to persuade people to go Vegan and to drone-strike any factories producing B12. You’d probably be shocked and think that this was a terrible decision and that it had no place in EA.
OpenPhil saying “it’s our money, we can do what we want” wouldn’t hold much water for you, and the same thing I think goes for the Wytham Abbey critics—who I think do have a strong initial normative point that £15m counterfactually could do a lot of good with the Against Malaria Foundation, or Hellen Keller International.
Like it’s not just a concern about ‘high negative externalities’, many people saw this purchase, along with the lack of convincing explanation (to them), and think that this is just a negative EV purchase, and also negative with externalities—and then there was little in explanation forthcoming to change their mind.
I think OpenPhil maybe did this thinking it was a minor part of their general portfolio, without realising the immense power, both explicit and implicit, they have over the EA community, its internal dyanmics, and its external perception. They may not officially be in charge of EA, but by all accounts unofficially it works something like that (along with EVF), and I think that should at least figure into their decision-making somewhere
My guess is that lots of people entered EA with inaccurate expectations, and the volume at which this happens indicates a systemic problem, probably with recruiting. They felt ~promised that EA wasn’t the kind of place where people bought fancy castles, or would at least publicly announce they’d bought a retreat center and justify it with numbers.
open phil at one point did have a commitment to transparency, but they publicly renounced it years ago so that’s no longer in play.
Is the retreat from transparency true? If there are some references you could provide me for this? I also feel like there’s a bit of ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ implicit belief/attitude from OpenPhil here if true which I think is unfortunate and, honestly, counterproductive.
I would like to see recruiting get more accurate about what to expect within EA, but I’m not sure what that would look like. I mean I still think that EA “not being the kind of place where people buy fancy castles” is is a reasonable thing to expect and want from EA overall? So I’m not sure that I disagree that people are entering with these kind of expectations, but I’m confused about why you think it’s innacurate? Maybe it’s descriptively inaccurate but I’m a lot less sure that it’s normatively inaccurate?
Bombing B12 factories has negative externalities and is well covered by that clause. You could make it something less inflammatory, like funding anti-B12 pamphlets, and there would still be an obvious argument that this was harmful. Open Phil might disagree, and I wouldn’t have any way to compel them, but I would view the criticism as having standing due to the negative externalities. I welcome arguments the retreat center has negative externalities, but haven’t seen any that I’ve found convincing.
who I think do have a strong initial normative point that £15m counterfactually could do a lot of good with the Against Malaria Foundation, or the Hellen Keller Foundation.
My understanding is:
Open Phil deliberately doesn’t fill the full funding gap of poverty and health-focused charities.
While they have set a burn rate and are currently constrained by it, that burn rate was chosen to preserve money for future opportunities they think will be more valuable. If they really wanted to do both AMF and the castle, they absolutely could.
Given that, I think the castle is a red herring. If people want to be angry about open phil not filling the full funding gaps when it is able I think you can make a case for that, but the castle is irrelevant in the face of its many-billion dollar endowment.
Is the retreat from transparency true? If there are some references you could provide me for this?
Even assuming OP was already at its self-imposed cap for AMF and HKI, it could have asked GiveWell for a one-off recommendation. The practice of not wanting to fill 100% of a funding gap doesn’t mean the money couldn’t have been used profitably elsewhere in a similar organization.
are you sure GW has charities that meet their bar that they aren’t funding as much as they want to? I’m pretty sure that used to not be the case, although maybe it has changed. There’s also value to GW behaving predictably, and not wildly varying how much money it gives to particular orgs from year to year.
This might be begging the question, if the bar is raised due to anticipated under funding. But I’m pretty sure at one point they just didn’t have anywhere they wanted to give more money to, and I don’t know if that has changed.
2023: “We expect to find more outstanding giving opportunities than we can fully fund unless our community of supporters substantially increases its giving.”
Giving Season 2022: “We’ve set a goal of raising $600 million in 2022, but our research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding gaps. That leaves $300 million in funding gaps unfilled.”
July 2022: “we don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find.” Reports rolling over some money from 2021, but much less than originally believed.
Giving Season 2021: GiveWell expects to roll over $110MM, but also believes it will find very-high-impact opportunities for those funds in the next year or two.
Giving Season 2020: No suggestion that GW will run out of good opportunities—“If other donors fully meet the highest-priority needs we see today before Open Philanthropy makes its January grants, we’ll ask Open Philanthropy to donate to priorities further down our list. It won’t give less funding overall—it’ll just fund the next-highest-priority needs.”
Thanks for the response Elizabeth, and the link as well, I appreciate it.
On the B12 bombing example, it was deliberately provocative to show that, in extremis, there are limits to how convincing one would find the justification “the community doesn’t own its donor’s money” as a defence for a donation/grant
On the negative externality point, maybe I didn’t make my point that clear. I think a lot of critics I think are not just concerned about the externalities, but the actual donation itself, especially the opportunity cost of the purchase. I think perhaps you simply disagree with castle critics on the object level of ‘was it a good donation or not’.
I take the point about Open Phil’s funding gap perhaps being the more fundamental/important issue. This might be another case of decontextualising vs contextualising norms leading to difficult community discussions. It’s a good point and I might spend some time investigating that more.
I still think, in terms of expectations, the new EA joiners have a point. There’s a big prima facie tension between the drowning child thought experiment and the Wytham Abbey purchase. I’d be interested to hear what you think a more realistic ‘recruiting pitch’ to EA would look like, but don’t feel the need to spell that out if you don’t want.
I think a retreat center is a justifiable idea, I don’t have enough information to know if Wytham in particular was any good, and… I was going to say “I trust open phil” here, but that’s not quite right, I think open phil makes many bad calls. I think a world where open phil gets to trust its own judgement on decisions with this level of negative externality is better than one where it doesn’t.
I understand other people are concerned about the donation itself, not just the externalities. I am arguing that they are not entitled to have open phil make decisions they like, and the way some of them talk about Wytham only makes sense to me if they feel entitlement around this. They’re of course free to voice their disagreement, but I wish we had clarity on what they were entitled to.
I’d be interested to hear what you think a more realistic ‘recruiting pitch’ to EA would look like, but don’t feel the need to spell that out if you don’t want.
This is the million dollar question. I don’t feel like I have an answer, but I can at least give some thoughts.
I think the drowning child analogy is deceitful, manipulative, and anti-epistemic, so it’s no hardship for me to say we should remove that from recruiting.
Back in 2015 three different EA books came out- Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, and Nick Cooney’s How To Be Great At Doing Good. My recollection is that Cooney was the only one who really attempted to transmit epistemic taste and a drive to think things through. MacAskill’s book felt like he had all the answers and was giving the reader instructions, and Singer’s had the same issues. I wish EA recruiting looked more like Cooney’s book and less like MacAskill’s.
That’s a weird sentence because Nick Cooney has a high volume of vague negative statements about him. No one is very specific, but he shows up on a lot of animal activism #metoo type articles. So I want to be really clear this preference is for that book alone, and it’s been 8 years since I read it.
I think the emphasis on doing The Most Possible Good (* and nothing else counts) makes people miserable and less effective. It creates a mix of decision paralysis, excess deference, and pushes people into projects too ambitious for them to learn from, much less succeed at.
I’m interested in what Charity Entrepreneurship thinks we should do. They consistently incubate the kind of small, gritty projects I think make up the substrate of a healthy ecosystem. TBH I don’t think any of their cause areas are as impactful as x-risk, but succeeding at them is better than failing to influence x-risk, and they’re skill-building while they do it. I feel like CE gets that real work takes time, and I’d like to see that attitude spread.
@Caleb Parikh has talked about how he grades people coming from “good” EA groups more harshly, because they’re more likely to have been socially pressured into “correct” views. That seems like a pretty bad state of affairs.
I think my EA group (seattle, 2014) handled this fantastically, there was a lot of arguing with each other and with EA doctrine. I’d love to see more things look like that. But that was made up heavily of adult rationalists with programming jobs, not college students.
Addendum: I just checked out Wytham’s website, and discovered they list six staff. Even if those people aren’t all full-time, several of them supervise teams of contractors. This greatly ups the amount of value the castle would need to provide to be worth the cost. AFAIK they’re not overstaffed relative to other venues, but you need higher utilization to break even.
Additionally, the founder (Owen Cotton-Barrat) has stepped back for reasons that seem merited (history of sexual harassment), but a nice aspect of having someone important and busy in charge was that he had a lot less to lose if it was shut down. The castle seems more likely to be self-perpetuating when the decisions are made by people with fewer outside options.
I still view this as fundamentally open phil’s problem to deal with, but it seemed good to give an update.
“I think the drowning child analogy is deceitful, manipulative, and anti-epistemic, so it’s no hardship for me to say we should remove that from recruiting. ”—I’m interested in why you think this?
It puts you in a high SNS activation state, which is inimical to the kind of nuanced math good EA requires
As Minh says, it’s based in avoidance of shame and guilt, which also make people worse at nuanced math.
The full parable is “drowning child in a shallow pond”, and the shallow pond smuggles in a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true for global health and poverty. Such as
“we know what to do”, “we know how to implement it”, and “the downside is known and finite”, which just don’t hold for global health and poverty work. Even if you believe sure fire interventions exist and somehow haven’t been fully funded, the average person’s ability to recognize them is dismal, and many options make things actively worse. The urgency of drowningchildgottasavethemnow makes people worse as distinguishing good charities from bad. The more accurate analogy would be “drowning child in a fast moving river when you don’t know how to swim”.
I think Peter Singer believes this so he’s not being inconsistent, I just think he’s wrong.
“you can fix this with a single action, after which you are done.” Solving poverty for even a single child is a marathon.
“you are the only person who can solve this”. I think there is something good about getting people to feel ownership over the problem and avoiding bystandard effect, but falsely invoking an analogy to a situation where that’s true is not the way to do it.
A single drowning child can be fixed via emergency action. A thousand drowning children scattered across my block, replenishing every day, requires a systemic fix. Maybe a fence, or draining the land. And again, the fight or flight mode suitable for saving a single child in a shallow pond is completely inappropriate for figuring out and implementing the systemic solution.
EA is much more about saying “sorry actively drowning children, I can more good by putting up this fence and preventing future deaths”.
When Singer first made the analogy clothes were much more expensive than they are now, and when I see the argument being made it’s typically towards people who care very little about clothes. What was “you’d make a substantial sacrifice if a child’s life was on the line” has become “you aren’t so petty as to care about your $30 fast fashion shoes, right?”. Just switching the analogy to “ruining your cell phone” would get more of the original intent.
Do people still care about drowning child analogy? Is it still used in recruiting? I’d feel kind of dumb railing against a point no one actually believed in.
I will say I also never use the Drowning Child argument. For several reasons:
I generally don’t think negative emotions like shame and guilt are a good first impression/initial reason to join EA. People tend to distance themselves from sources of guilt. It’s fine to mention the drowning child argument maybe 10-20 minutes in, but I prefer to lead with positive associations.
I prefer to minimise use of thought experiments/hypotheticals in intros, and prefer to use examples relatable to the other person. IMO, thought experiments make the ethical stakes seem too trivial and distant.
What I often do is to figure out what cause areas the other person might relate to based on what they already care about, describe EA as fundamentally “doing good, better” in the sense of getting people to engage more thoughtfully with values they already hold.
Just a quick comment that I strong upvoted this post because of the point about violated expectations in EA recruitment, and disagree voted because it’s missing some important points of why EAs should be concerned about how OP and other EA orgs spend their EA money.
I feel similarly to Jason and JWS. I don’t disagree with any of the literal statements you made but I think the frame is really off. Perhaps OP benefits from this frame, but I probably disagree with that too.
Another frame: OP has huge amounts of soft and hard power over the EA community. In some ways, it is the de facto head of the EA community. Is this justified? How effective is it? How do they react to requests for information about questionable grants that have predictably negative impacts on the wider EA community? What steps do they take to guard against motivated reasoning when doing things that look like stereotypical examples of motivated reasoning? There are many people who have a stake in these questions.
Thanks, that is interesting and feels like it has conversational hooks I haven’t heard before.
What would it mean to say Open Phil was justified or not justified in being the de facto head of the community? I assume you mean morally justified, since it seems pretty logical on a practical level.
Supposing a large enough contingent of EA decided it was not justified; what then? I don’t think anyone is turning down funding for the hell of it, so giving up open phil money would require a major restructuring. What does that look like? Who drives it? What constitutes large enough?
Example comment about how much some EAs defer to OP even when they know it’s bad reasoning.
OP’s epistemics are seen as the best in EA and jobs there are the most desirable.
The recent thread about OP allocating most of its neartermist budget to FAW and especially its comments shows much reduced deference (or at least more openly taking such positions) among some EAs.
As more critical attention is turned towards OP among EAs, I expect deference will reduce further. E.g. some of David Thorstad’s critical writings have been cited on this forum on this.
I expect this will continue happening organically, particularly in response to failures and scandals, and the castle played a role in reduced deference.
Hard power
I agree no one is turning down money willy-nilly, but if we ignore labels, how much OP money and effort actually goes into governance and health for the EA community, rather than recruitment for longtermist jobs?
In other words, I’m not convinced it would require restructuring or just structuring.
A couple of EAs I spoke to about reforms both talked about how huge sums of money are needed to restructure the community and it’s effectively impossible without a megadonor. I didn’t understand where they were coming from. Building and managing a community doesn’t take big sums of money and EA is much richer than most movements and groups.
Why can’t EAs set up a fee-paying society? People could pay annual membership fees and in exchange be part of a body that provided advice for donations, news about popular cause areas and the EA community, a forum, annual meetings, etc. Leadership positions could be decided by elections. I’m just spitballing here.
Of course this depends on what one’s vision for the EA community is.
Why can’t EAs set up a fee-paying society? People could pay annual membership fees and in exchange be part of a body that provided advice for donations, news about popular cause areas and the EA community, a forum, annual meetings, etc. Leadership positions could be decided by elections. I’m just spitballing here.
The math suggests that the meta would look much different in this world. CEA’s proposed budget for 2024 is $31.4MM by itself, about half for events (mostly EAG), about a quarter for groups. There are of course other parts of the meta. There were 3567 respondents to the EA Survey 2022, which could be an overcount or undercount of the number of people who might join a fee-paying society. Only about 60% were full-time employed or self-employed; most of the remainder were students.
Maybe a leaner, more democratic meta would be a good thing—I don’t have a firm opinion on that.
To make sure I understand; this is an answer to “what should EA do if it decides OpenPhil’s power isn’t justified?” And the answer is “defer less, and build a grassroots community structure?”
I’m not sure what distinction you’re pointing at with structure vs. restructure. They both take money that would have to come from somewhere (although we can debate how much money). Maybe you mean OP wouldn’t actively oppose this effort?
To the first: Yup, it’s one answer. I’m interested to hear other ideas too.
Structure vs restructuring: My point was that a lot of the existing community infrastructure OP funds is mislabelled and is closer to a deep recruitment funnel for longtermist jobs rather than infrastructure for the EA community in general. So for the EA community to move away from OP infrastructure wouldn’t require relinquishing as much infrastructure as the labels might suggest.
For example, and this speaks to @Jason’s comment, the Center for Effective Altruism is primarily funded by the OP longtermist team to (as far as I can tell) expand and protect the longtermist ecosystem. It acts and prioritizes accordingly. It is closer to a longtermist talent recruitment agency than a center for effective altruism. EA Globals (impact often measured in connections) are closer to longtermist job career fairs than a global meeting of effective altruists. CEA groups prioritize recruiting people who might apply for and get OP longtermist funding (“highly engaged EAs”).
I think we have a lot of agreement in what we want. I want more community infrastructure to exist, recruiting to be labeled as recruiting, and more people figuring out what they think is right rather than deferring to authorities.
I don’t think any of these need to wait on proving open phil’s power is unjustified. People can just want to do them, and then do them. The cloud of deference might make that harder[1], but I don’t think arguing about the castle from a position of entitlement makes things better. I think it’s more likely to make things worse.
Acting as if every EA has standing to direct open phil’s money reifies two things I’d rather see weakened. First it reinforces open phil’s power, and promotes deference to it (because arguing with someone implies their approval is necessary). But worse, it reinforces the idea that the deciding body is the EA cloud, and not particular people making their own decisions to do particular things[2]. If open phil doesn’t get to make its own choices without community ratification, who does?
I remember reading a post about a graveyard of projects CEA had sniped from other people and then abandoned. I can’t find that post and it’s a serious accusation so I don’t want to make it without evidence, but if it is true, I consider it an extremely serious problem and betrayal of trust.
narrow is meant to be neutral to positive here. No event can be everything to all people, I think it’s great they made an explicit decision on trade-offs. They maybe could have marketed it more accurately. They’re moving that way now and I wish it had gone farther earlier. But I think even perfectly accurate marketing would have left a lot of people unhappy.
Maybe some people argued from a position of entitlement. I skimmed the comments you linked above and I did not see any entitlement. Perhaps you could point out more specifically what you felt was entitled, although a few comments arguing from entitlement would only move me a little so this may not be worth pursuing.
The bigger disagreement I suspect is between what we think the point of EA and the EA community is. You wrote that you want it to be a weird do-ocracy. Would you like to expand on that?
Maybe you two might consider having this discussion using the new Dialogue feature? I’ve really appreciated both of your perspectives and insights on this discussion, and I think the collaborative back-and-forth your having seems a very good fit for how Dialogues work.
So in this hypothetical, certain functions transfer to the fee-paying society, and certain functions remain funded by OP. That makes sense, although I think the range of what the fee-paying society can do on fees alone may be relatively small. If we estimate 2,140 full fee-payers at $200 each and 1,428 students at $50 each, that’s south of $500K. You’d need a diverse group of EtGers willing to put up $5K-$25K each for this to work, I suspect. I’m not opposed; in fact, my first main post on the Forum was in part about the need for the community to secure independent funding for certain epistemically critical functions. I just want to see people who advocate for a fee-paying society to bite the bullet of how much revenue fees could generate and what functions could be sustained on that revenue. It sounds like you are willing to do so.
But looping back to your main point about “huge amounts of soft and hard power over the EA community” held by OP, how much would change in this hypothetical? OP still funds the bulk of EA, still pays for the “recruitment funnel,” pays the community builders, and sponsors the conferences. I don’t think characterizing the bulk of what CEA et al. do as a “recruitment funnel” for the longtermist ecosystem renders those functions less important as sources of hard and soft power. OP would still be spending ~ $20-$30MM on meta versus perhaps ~ $1-2MM for the fee-paying society.
OP and most current EA community work takes a “Narrow EA” approach. The theory of change is that OP and EA leaders have neglected ideas and need to recruit elites to enact these ideas. Buying castles and funding expensive recruitment funnels is consistent with this strategy.
I am talking about something closer to a big tent EA approach. One vision could be to help small and medium donors in rich countries spend more money more effectively on philanthropy, with a distinctive emphasis on cause neutrality and cause prioritization. This can and probably should be started in a grassroots fashion with little money. Spending millions on fancy conferences and paying undergraduate community builders might be counter to the spirit and goals of this approach.
A fee-paying society is a natural fit for big tent EA and not for narrow EA.
I didn’t know that the huge amounts of power held by OP was my main point! I was trying to use that to explain why EA community members were so invested in the castle. I’m not sure I succeeded, especially since I agree with @Elizabeth’s points that no one needs to wait for permission from OP or anyone else to pursue what they think is right, and the EA community cannot direct OP’s donations.
I personally would love to see a big-tent organization like the one you describe! I think it less-than-likely that the existence of such an organization would have made most of the people who were “so invested in the castle” significantly less so. But there’s no way to test that. I agree that a big-tent organization would bring in other people—not currently involved in EA—who would be unlikely to care much about the castle.
“Castles”, plural. The purchase of Wytham Abbey gets all the attention, but everyone ignores that during that same time there was also the purchase of a chateau in Hostačov using FTX funding.
I feel like a lot of castle discourse missed the point.
By default, OpenPhil/Dustin/Owen/EV don’t need anyone’s permission for how they spend their money.
And it is their money, AFAICT open phil doesn’t take small donations. I assume Dustin can advocate for himself here.
One might argue that the castle has such high negative externalities it can be criticized on that front. I haven’t seen anything to convince me of that, but it’s a possibility and “right to spend one’s own money” doesn’t override that.
You could argue OpenPhil etc made some sort of promise they are violating by buying the castle. I don’t think that’s true- but I also think the castle-complainers have a legitimate grievance.
I do think the word “open” conveys something of a promise, and I will up my sympathy for open phil if they change their name. But my understanding is they are more open than most foundations.
My guess is that lots of people entered EA with inaccurate expectations, and the volume at which this happens indicates a systemic problem, probably with recruiting. They felt ~promised that EA wasn’t the kind of place where people bought fancy castles, or would at least publicly announce they’d bought a retreat center and justify it with numbers.
Highly legible, highly transparent parts of EA exist, and I’m glad they do. But it’s not all of EA, and I don’t think it should be. I think it’s important to hold people to commitments, and open phil at one point did have a commitment to transparency, but they publicly renounced it years ago so that’s no longer in play. I think the problem lies with the people who set the false expectations, which I imagine happened in recruiting.
It’s hard for me to be more specific than this because I haven’t followed EA recruiting very closely, so what reaches me tends to be complaints about the worst parts. My guess is this lies in the more outward facing parts of Effective Ventures (GWWC, 80k, CEA’s university recruiting program, perhaps the formalization of EA groups in general).
[I couldn’t quickly verify this but my understanding is open phil provides a lot of the funding for at least some of these orgs, in which case it does bear some responsibility for the misleading recruiting]
I would like to see recruiting get more accurate about what to expect within EA. I want that partially because honesty is generally good, partially because this seems like a miserable experience for people who have been misled. And partially because I want EA to be a weird do-ocracy, and recruiting lots of people who object to doing weird things without permission slows that down.
I think the first point here—that the buyers “don’t need anyone’s permission” to purchase a “castle”—isn’t contested here. Other than maybe the ConcernedEA crowd, is anyone claiming that they were somehow required to (e.g.) put this to a vote?
I think the “right to spend one’s own money” in no way undermines other people’s “right to speak one’s own speech” by lambasting that expenditure. In the same way, my right to free speech doesn’t prevent other people from criticizing me for it, or even deciding not to fund/hire me if I were to apply for funding or a job. There are circumstances in which we have—or should have—special norms against negative reactions by third parties; for instance, no one should be retailiated against for reporting fraud, waste, abuse, harassment, etc. But the default rule is that what the critics have said here is fair game.
A feeling of EA having breached a “~promise[]” isn’t the only basis for standing here. Suppose a non-EA megadonor had given a $15MM presumably tax-deductible donation to a non-EA charity for buying a “castle.” Certainly both EAs and non-EAs would have the right to criticize that decision, especially because the tax-favored nature of the donation meant that millions’ worth of taxes were avoided by the donation. If one wishes to avoid most public scrutiny, one should make it clear that the donation was not tax-advantaged. In that case, it’s the same as the megadonor buying a “castle” for themselves.
Moreover, I think the level of negative externalities required to give third-party EAs standing to criticize is quite low. The “right to speak one’s own speech” is at least as fundamental as the proposed “right to spend one’s own money.” If the norm is going to be that third parties shouldn’t criticize—much less take adverse actions against—an EA entity unless the negative PR & other side effects of the entity’s action exceed those of the “castle” purpose, then that would seem a pretty fundamental shift in how things work. Because the magnitude of most entities’ actions—especially individuals—are generally an order of magnitude (or more) less than the magnitude of OP and EVF’s actions, the negative externalities will almost never meet this standard.
I 100% agree with you that people should be and are free to give their opinions, full stop.
Many specific things people said only make sense to me if they have some internal sense that they are owed a justification and input (example, example, example, example).
I almost-but-don’t-totally reject PR arguments. EA was founded on “do the thing that works not the thing that looks good”. EAs encourage many other things people find equally distasteful or even abhorrent, because they believe it does the most good. So “the castle is bad PR” is not a good enough argument, you need to make a case for “the castle is bad PR and meaningfully worse than these other things that are bad PR but still good”. I believe things in that category exist, and people are welcome to make arguments that the castle is one of them, but you do have to make the full argument.
I think you’re slightly missing the point of the ‘castle’ critics here.
Technically this is obviously true. And it was the main point behind one of the most popular responses to FTX and all the following drama. But I think that point and the post misses people’s concerns completely and comes off as quite tone-deaf.
To pick an (absolutely contrived) example, let’s say OpenPhil suddenly says it now believes that vegan diets are more moral and healthier than all other diets, and that B12 supplementation increases x-risk, and they’re going to funnel billions of dollars into this venture to persuade people to go Vegan and to drone-strike any factories producing B12. You’d probably be shocked and think that this was a terrible decision and that it had no place in EA.
OpenPhil saying “it’s our money, we can do what we want” wouldn’t hold much water for you, and the same thing I think goes for the Wytham Abbey critics—who I think do have a strong initial normative point that £15m counterfactually could do a lot of good with the Against Malaria Foundation, or Hellen Keller International.
Like it’s not just a concern about ‘high negative externalities’, many people saw this purchase, along with the lack of convincing explanation (to them), and think that this is just a negative EV purchase, and also negative with externalities—and then there was little in explanation forthcoming to change their mind.
I think OpenPhil maybe did this thinking it was a minor part of their general portfolio, without realising the immense power, both explicit and implicit, they have over the EA community, its internal dyanmics, and its external perception. They may not officially be in charge of EA, but by all accounts unofficially it works something like that (along with EVF), and I think that should at least figure into their decision-making somewhere
Is the retreat from transparency true? If there are some references you could provide me for this? I also feel like there’s a bit of ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ implicit belief/attitude from OpenPhil here if true which I think is unfortunate and, honestly, counterproductive.
I would like to see recruiting get more accurate about what to expect within EA, but I’m not sure what that would look like. I mean I still think that EA “not being the kind of place where people buy fancy castles” is is a reasonable thing to expect and want from EA overall? So I’m not sure that I disagree that people are entering with these kind of expectations, but I’m confused about why you think it’s innacurate? Maybe it’s descriptively inaccurate but I’m a lot less sure that it’s normatively inaccurate?
Bombing B12 factories has negative externalities and is well covered by that clause. You could make it something less inflammatory, like funding anti-B12 pamphlets, and there would still be an obvious argument that this was harmful. Open Phil might disagree, and I wouldn’t have any way to compel them, but I would view the criticism as having standing due to the negative externalities. I welcome arguments the retreat center has negative externalities, but haven’t seen any that I’ve found convincing.
My understanding is:
Open Phil deliberately doesn’t fill the full funding gap of poverty and health-focused charities.
While they have set a burn rate and are currently constrained by it, that burn rate was chosen to preserve money for future opportunities they think will be more valuable. If they really wanted to do both AMF and the castle, they absolutely could.
Given that, I think the castle is a red herring. If people want to be angry about open phil not filling the full funding gaps when it is able I think you can make a case for that, but the castle is irrelevant in the face of its many-billion dollar endowment.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/update-on-how-were-thinking-about-openness-and-information-sharing/
Even assuming OP was already at its self-imposed cap for AMF and HKI, it could have asked GiveWell for a one-off recommendation. The practice of not wanting to fill 100% of a funding gap doesn’t mean the money couldn’t have been used profitably elsewhere in a similar organization.
are you sure GW has charities that meet their bar that they aren’t funding as much as they want to? I’m pretty sure that used to not be the case, although maybe it has changed. There’s also value to GW behaving predictably, and not wildly varying how much money it gives to particular orgs from year to year.
This might be begging the question, if the bar is raised due to anticipated under funding. But I’m pretty sure at one point they just didn’t have anywhere they wanted to give more money to, and I don’t know if that has changed.
2023: “We expect to find more outstanding giving opportunities than we can fully fund unless our community of supporters substantially increases its giving.”
Giving Season 2022: “We’ve set a goal of raising $600 million in 2022, but our research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding gaps. That leaves $300 million in funding gaps unfilled.”
July 2022: “we don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find.” Reports rolling over some money from 2021, but much less than originally believed.
Giving Season 2021: GiveWell expects to roll over $110MM, but also believes it will find very-high-impact opportunities for those funds in the next year or two.
Giving Season 2020: No suggestion that GW will run out of good opportunities—“If other donors fully meet the highest-priority needs we see today before Open Philanthropy makes its January grants, we’ll ask Open Philanthropy to donate to priorities further down our list. It won’t give less funding overall—it’ll just fund the next-highest-priority needs.”
Thanks for the response Elizabeth, and the link as well, I appreciate it.
On the B12 bombing example, it was deliberately provocative to show that, in extremis, there are limits to how convincing one would find the justification “the community doesn’t own its donor’s money” as a defence for a donation/grant
On the negative externality point, maybe I didn’t make my point that clear. I think a lot of critics I think are not just concerned about the externalities, but the actual donation itself, especially the opportunity cost of the purchase. I think perhaps you simply disagree with castle critics on the object level of ‘was it a good donation or not’.
I take the point about Open Phil’s funding gap perhaps being the more fundamental/important issue. This might be another case of decontextualising vs contextualising norms leading to difficult community discussions. It’s a good point and I might spend some time investigating that more.
I still think, in terms of expectations, the new EA joiners have a point. There’s a big prima facie tension between the drowning child thought experiment and the Wytham Abbey purchase. I’d be interested to hear what you think a more realistic ‘recruiting pitch’ to EA would look like, but don’t feel the need to spell that out if you don’t want.
I think a retreat center is a justifiable idea, I don’t have enough information to know if Wytham in particular was any good, and… I was going to say “I trust open phil” here, but that’s not quite right, I think open phil makes many bad calls. I think a world where open phil gets to trust its own judgement on decisions with this level of negative externality is better than one where it doesn’t.
I understand other people are concerned about the donation itself, not just the externalities. I am arguing that they are not entitled to have open phil make decisions they like, and the way some of them talk about Wytham only makes sense to me if they feel entitlement around this. They’re of course free to voice their disagreement, but I wish we had clarity on what they were entitled to.
This is the million dollar question. I don’t feel like I have an answer, but I can at least give some thoughts.
I think the drowning child analogy is deceitful, manipulative, and anti-epistemic, so it’s no hardship for me to say we should remove that from recruiting.
Back in 2015 three different EA books came out- Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, and Nick Cooney’s How To Be Great At Doing Good. My recollection is that Cooney was the only one who really attempted to transmit epistemic taste and a drive to think things through. MacAskill’s book felt like he had all the answers and was giving the reader instructions, and Singer’s had the same issues. I wish EA recruiting looked more like Cooney’s book and less like MacAskill’s.
That’s a weird sentence because Nick Cooney has a high volume of vague negative statements about him. No one is very specific, but he shows up on a lot of animal activism #metoo type articles. So I want to be really clear this preference is for that book alone, and it’s been 8 years since I read it.
I think the emphasis on doing The Most Possible Good (* and nothing else counts) makes people miserable and less effective. It creates a mix of decision paralysis, excess deference, and pushes people into projects too ambitious for them to learn from, much less succeed at.
I’m interested in what Charity Entrepreneurship thinks we should do. They consistently incubate the kind of small, gritty projects I think make up the substrate of a healthy ecosystem. TBH I don’t think any of their cause areas are as impactful as x-risk, but succeeding at them is better than failing to influence x-risk, and they’re skill-building while they do it. I feel like CE gets that real work takes time, and I’d like to see that attitude spread.
(@Judith, @Joey would love to get your take here)
@Caleb Parikh has talked about how he grades people coming from “good” EA groups more harshly, because they’re more likely to have been socially pressured into “correct” views. That seems like a pretty bad state of affairs.
I think my EA group (seattle, 2014) handled this fantastically, there was a lot of arguing with each other and with EA doctrine. I’d love to see more things look like that. But that was made up heavily of adult rationalists with programming jobs, not college students.
Addendum: I just checked out Wytham’s website, and discovered they list six staff. Even if those people aren’t all full-time, several of them supervise teams of contractors. This greatly ups the amount of value the castle would need to provide to be worth the cost. AFAIK they’re not overstaffed relative to other venues, but you need higher utilization to break even.
Additionally, the founder (Owen Cotton-Barrat) has stepped back for reasons that seem merited (history of sexual harassment), but a nice aspect of having someone important and busy in charge was that he had a lot less to lose if it was shut down. The castle seems more likely to be self-perpetuating when the decisions are made by people with fewer outside options.
I still view this as fundamentally open phil’s problem to deal with, but it seemed good to give an update.
“I think the drowning child analogy is deceitful, manipulative, and anti-epistemic, so it’s no hardship for me to say we should remove that from recruiting. ”—I’m interested in why you think this?
It puts you in a high SNS activation state, which is inimical to the kind of nuanced math good EA requires
As Minh says, it’s based in avoidance of shame and guilt, which also make people worse at nuanced math.
The full parable is “drowning child in a shallow pond”, and the shallow pond smuggles in a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true for global health and poverty. Such as
“we know what to do”, “we know how to implement it”, and “the downside is known and finite”, which just don’t hold for global health and poverty work. Even if you believe sure fire interventions exist and somehow haven’t been fully funded, the average person’s ability to recognize them is dismal, and many options make things actively worse. The urgency of drowningchildgottasavethemnow makes people worse as distinguishing good charities from bad. The more accurate analogy would be “drowning child in a fast moving river when you don’t know how to swim”.
I think Peter Singer believes this so he’s not being inconsistent, I just think he’s wrong.
“you can fix this with a single action, after which you are done.” Solving poverty for even a single child is a marathon.
“you are the only person who can solve this”. I think there is something good about getting people to feel ownership over the problem and avoiding bystandard effect, but falsely invoking an analogy to a situation where that’s true is not the way to do it.
A single drowning child can be fixed via emergency action. A thousand drowning children scattered across my block, replenishing every day, requires a systemic fix. Maybe a fence, or draining the land. And again, the fight or flight mode suitable for saving a single child in a shallow pond is completely inappropriate for figuring out and implementing the systemic solution.
EA is much more about saying “sorry actively drowning children, I can more good by putting up this fence and preventing future deaths”.
When Singer first made the analogy clothes were much more expensive than they are now, and when I see the argument being made it’s typically towards people who care very little about clothes. What was “you’d make a substantial sacrifice if a child’s life was on the line” has become “you aren’t so petty as to care about your $30 fast fashion shoes, right?”. Just switching the analogy to “ruining your cell phone” would get more of the original intent.
I think this might be a good top level post—would be keen for you more people to see and discuss this point
Do people still care about drowning child analogy? Is it still used in recruiting? I’d feel kind of dumb railing against a point no one actually believed in.
I’m not sure (my active intro cb days were ~2019), but I think it is possibly still in the intro syllabus ? You could add a disclaimer at the top.
I will say I also never use the Drowning Child argument. For several reasons:
I generally don’t think negative emotions like shame and guilt are a good first impression/initial reason to join EA. People tend to distance themselves from sources of guilt. It’s fine to mention the drowning child argument maybe 10-20 minutes in, but I prefer to lead with positive associations.
I prefer to minimise use of thought experiments/hypotheticals in intros, and prefer to use examples relatable to the other person. IMO, thought experiments make the ethical stakes seem too trivial and distant.
What I often do is to figure out what cause areas the other person might relate to based on what they already care about, describe EA as fundamentally “doing good, better” in the sense of getting people to engage more thoughtfully with values they already hold.
Thanks that’s helpful!
Just a quick comment that I strong upvoted this post because of the point about violated expectations in EA recruitment, and disagree voted because it’s missing some important points of why EAs should be concerned about how OP and other EA orgs spend their EA money.
if you have the energy, I’d love to hear your disagreement on open phil or ownership of money.
I feel similarly to Jason and JWS. I don’t disagree with any of the literal statements you made but I think the frame is really off. Perhaps OP benefits from this frame, but I probably disagree with that too.
Another frame: OP has huge amounts of soft and hard power over the EA community. In some ways, it is the de facto head of the EA community. Is this justified? How effective is it? How do they react to requests for information about questionable grants that have predictably negative impacts on the wider EA community? What steps do they take to guard against motivated reasoning when doing things that look like stereotypical examples of motivated reasoning? There are many people who have a stake in these questions.
Thanks, that is interesting and feels like it has conversational hooks I haven’t heard before.
What would it mean to say Open Phil was justified or not justified in being the de facto head of the community? I assume you mean morally justified, since it seems pretty logical on a practical level.
Supposing a large enough contingent of EA decided it was not justified; what then? I don’t think anyone is turning down funding for the hell of it, so giving up open phil money would require a major restructuring. What does that look like? Who drives it? What constitutes large enough?
Briefly in terms of soft and hard power:
Soft power
Deferring to OP
Example comment about how much some EAs defer to OP even when they know it’s bad reasoning.
OP’s epistemics are seen as the best in EA and jobs there are the most desirable.
The recent thread about OP allocating most of its neartermist budget to FAW and especially its comments shows much reduced deference (or at least more openly taking such positions) among some EAs.
As more critical attention is turned towards OP among EAs, I expect deference will reduce further. E.g. some of David Thorstad’s critical writings have been cited on this forum on this.
I expect this will continue happening organically, particularly in response to failures and scandals, and the castle played a role in reduced deference.
Hard power
I agree no one is turning down money willy-nilly, but if we ignore labels, how much OP money and effort actually goes into governance and health for the EA community, rather than recruitment for longtermist jobs?
In other words, I’m not convinced it would require restructuring or just structuring.
A couple of EAs I spoke to about reforms both talked about how huge sums of money are needed to restructure the community and it’s effectively impossible without a megadonor. I didn’t understand where they were coming from. Building and managing a community doesn’t take big sums of money and EA is much richer than most movements and groups.
Why can’t EAs set up a fee-paying society? People could pay annual membership fees and in exchange be part of a body that provided advice for donations, news about popular cause areas and the EA community, a forum, annual meetings, etc. Leadership positions could be decided by elections. I’m just spitballing here.
Of course this depends on what one’s vision for the EA community is.
What do you think?
The math suggests that the meta would look much different in this world. CEA’s proposed budget for 2024 is $31.4MM by itself, about half for events (mostly EAG), about a quarter for groups. There are of course other parts of the meta. There were 3567 respondents to the EA Survey 2022, which could be an overcount or undercount of the number of people who might join a fee-paying society. Only about 60% were full-time employed or self-employed; most of the remainder were students.
Maybe a leaner, more democratic meta would be a good thing—I don’t have a firm opinion on that.
To make sure I understand; this is an answer to “what should EA do if it decides OpenPhil’s power isn’t justified?” And the answer is “defer less, and build a grassroots community structure?”
I’m not sure what distinction you’re pointing at with structure vs. restructure. They both take money that would have to come from somewhere (although we can debate how much money). Maybe you mean OP wouldn’t actively oppose this effort?
To the first: Yup, it’s one answer. I’m interested to hear other ideas too.
Structure vs restructuring: My point was that a lot of the existing community infrastructure OP funds is mislabelled and is closer to a deep recruitment funnel for longtermist jobs rather than infrastructure for the EA community in general. So for the EA community to move away from OP infrastructure wouldn’t require relinquishing as much infrastructure as the labels might suggest.
For example, and this speaks to @Jason’s comment, the Center for Effective Altruism is primarily funded by the OP longtermist team to (as far as I can tell) expand and protect the longtermist ecosystem. It acts and prioritizes accordingly. It is closer to a longtermist talent recruitment agency than a center for effective altruism. EA Globals (impact often measured in connections) are closer to longtermist job career fairs than a global meeting of effective altruists. CEA groups prioritize recruiting people who might apply for and get OP longtermist funding (“highly engaged EAs”).
I think we have a lot of agreement in what we want. I want more community infrastructure to exist, recruiting to be labeled as recruiting, and more people figuring out what they think is right rather than deferring to authorities.
I don’t think any of these need to wait on proving open phil’s power is unjustified. People can just want to do them, and then do them. The cloud of deference might make that harder[1], but I don’t think arguing about the castle from a position of entitlement makes things better. I think it’s more likely to make things worse.
Acting as if every EA has standing to direct open phil’s money reifies two things I’d rather see weakened. First it reinforces open phil’s power, and promotes deference to it (because arguing with someone implies their approval is necessary). But worse, it reinforces the idea that the deciding body is the EA cloud, and not particular people making their own decisions to do particular things[2]. If open phil doesn’t get to make its own choices without community ratification, who does?
I remember reading a post about a graveyard of projects CEA had sniped from other people and then abandoned. I can’t find that post and it’s a serious accusation so I don’t want to make it without evidence, but if it is true, I consider it an extremely serious problem and betrayal of trust.
yes, everyone has standing to object to negative externalities
narrow is meant to be neutral to positive here. No event can be everything to all people, I think it’s great they made an explicit decision on trade-offs. They maybe could have marketed it more accurately. They’re moving that way now and I wish it had gone farther earlier. But I think even perfectly accurate marketing would have left a lot of people unhappy.
Maybe some people argued from a position of entitlement. I skimmed the comments you linked above and I did not see any entitlement. Perhaps you could point out more specifically what you felt was entitled, although a few comments arguing from entitlement would only move me a little so this may not be worth pursuing.
The bigger disagreement I suspect is between what we think the point of EA and the EA community is. You wrote that you want it to be a weird do-ocracy. Would you like to expand on that?
Maybe you two might consider having this discussion using the new Dialogue feature? I’ve really appreciated both of your perspectives and insights on this discussion, and I think the collaborative back-and-forth your having seems a very good fit for how Dialogues work.
That’s helpful.
So in this hypothetical, certain functions transfer to the fee-paying society, and certain functions remain funded by OP. That makes sense, although I think the range of what the fee-paying society can do on fees alone may be relatively small. If we estimate 2,140 full fee-payers at $200 each and 1,428 students at $50 each, that’s south of $500K. You’d need a diverse group of EtGers willing to put up $5K-$25K each for this to work, I suspect. I’m not opposed; in fact, my first main post on the Forum was in part about the need for the community to secure independent funding for certain epistemically critical functions. I just want to see people who advocate for a fee-paying society to bite the bullet of how much revenue fees could generate and what functions could be sustained on that revenue. It sounds like you are willing to do so.
But looping back to your main point about “huge amounts of soft and hard power over the EA community” held by OP, how much would change in this hypothetical? OP still funds the bulk of EA, still pays for the “recruitment funnel,” pays the community builders, and sponsors the conferences. I don’t think characterizing the bulk of what CEA et al. do as a “recruitment funnel” for the longtermist ecosystem renders those functions less important as sources of hard and soft power. OP would still be spending ~ $20-$30MM on meta versus perhaps ~ $1-2MM for the fee-paying society.
OP and most current EA community work takes a “Narrow EA” approach. The theory of change is that OP and EA leaders have neglected ideas and need to recruit elites to enact these ideas. Buying castles and funding expensive recruitment funnels is consistent with this strategy.
I am talking about something closer to a big tent EA approach. One vision could be to help small and medium donors in rich countries spend more money more effectively on philanthropy, with a distinctive emphasis on cause neutrality and cause prioritization. This can and probably should be started in a grassroots fashion with little money. Spending millions on fancy conferences and paying undergraduate community builders might be counter to the spirit and goals of this approach.
A fee-paying society is a natural fit for big tent EA and not for narrow EA.
I didn’t know that the huge amounts of power held by OP was my main point! I was trying to use that to explain why EA community members were so invested in the castle. I’m not sure I succeeded, especially since I agree with @Elizabeth’s points that no one needs to wait for permission from OP or anyone else to pursue what they think is right, and the EA community cannot direct OP’s donations.
I personally would love to see a big-tent organization like the one you describe! I think it less-than-likely that the existence of such an organization would have made most of the people who were “so invested in the castle” significantly less so. But there’s no way to test that. I agree that a big-tent organization would bring in other people—not currently involved in EA—who would be unlikely to care much about the castle.
“Castles”, plural. The purchase of Wytham Abbey gets all the attention, but everyone ignores that during that same time there was also the purchase of a chateau in Hostačov using FTX funding.