Look, I think Will has worked very hard to do good and I don’t want to minimize that, but at some point (after the full investigation has come out) a pragmatic decision needs to be made about whether he and others are more valuable in the leadership or helping from the sidelines. If the information in the article is true, I think the former has far too great a cost.
This was not a small mistake. It is extremely rare for charitable foundations to be caught up in scandals of this magntiude, and this article indicates that a signficant amount of the fallout could have been prevented with a little more investigation at key moments, and that clear signs of unethial behaviour were deliberately ignored. I think this is far from competent.
We are in the charity business. Donors expect high standards when it comes to their giving, and bad reputations directly translate into dollars. And remember, we want new donors, not just to keep the old ones. I simply don’t see how “we have high standards, except when it comes to facilitating billion dollar frauds” can hold up to scrutiny. I’m not sure we can “credibly convince people” if we keep the current leadership in place. The monetary cost could be substantial.
We also want to recruit people to the movement. Being associated with bad behaviour will hurt our ability to recruit people with strong moral codes. Worse though, would be if we encouraged “vultures”. A combination of low ethical standards and large amounts of money would make our movement an obvious target for unethical exploiters, as appears to have already happened with SBF.
Being a brilliant philosopher or intellectual does not necessarily make you a great leader. I think we can keep the benefits of the former while recognizing that someone is no longer useful at the latter. Remaining in a leadership position is a privilege, not a right.
If a global health organization made a mistake in judgment that caused [its] effectiveness to permanently decline by (say) 30%, and it was no longer effective in comparison to alternatives we could counterfactually fund, I suspect very few of us would support continuing to fund it. I would find it potentially concerning, from a standpoint of impartiality, if we do not apply the same standard to leaders. After all, we didn’t protect the hypothetical global health organization’s beneficiaries merely out of a sense of fairness.
I see the argument that applying such a standard to leaders could discourage them from making EV-positive bets. However, experiencing an adverse outcome on most EV-positive bets won’t materially impact a leader’s long-term future effectiveness. Moreover, it could be difficult to evaluate leaders from a 100% ex ante perspective. There’s a risk of evaluating successful bets by their outcome (because outsiders may not understand that there was a significant bet + there is low incentive to evaluate the ex ante wisdom of taking a risk if all turned out well) but unsuccessful bets from an ex ante perspective. That would credit the leader with their winnings but not with most of their losses, and would overincentivize betting.
Right—I think a major crux between Nathan and Titotal’s comments involve assumptions or beliefs about the extent to which certain leaders’ long-term effectiveness has been impaired. My gut says there will ultimately be very significant impairment as applied to public-facing / high-visibility roles, less so for certain other roles.
If almost all current leaders would be better than any plausible replacement, even after a significant hit to long-term effectiveness, then I think that says something about the leadership development pipeline that is worth observing.
If almost all current leaders would be better than any plausible replacement, even after a significant hit to long-term effectiveness, then I think that says something about the leadership development pipeline that is worth observing.
I think it’s relatively obvious that there’s a dearth of competent leadership/management in EA. I think this is even more extreme for EA qua EA, since the personal costs : altruistic rewards tradeoff for EA qua EA work is arguably worse than e.g. setting up an AI governance initiative or leading a biosecurity project.
I don’t think we actually want to incentivise positive-EV bets as such? Some amount of risk aversion ought to be baked in. Going solely by EV only makes sense if you make many repeated uncorrelated bets, which isn’t really what Longtermists are doing.
Fair enough—my attempted point was to acknowledge concerns that being too quick to replace leaders when a bad outcome happened might incentivize them to be suboptimally conservative when it comes to risk.
Look, I think Will has worked very hard to do good and I don’t want to minimize that, but at some point (after the full investigation has come out) a pragmatic decision needs to be made about whether he and others are more valuable in the leadership or helping from the sidelines. If the information in the article is true, I think the former has far too great a cost.
This was not a small mistake. It is extremely rare for charitable foundations to be caught up in scandals of this magntiude, and this article indicates that a signficant amount of the fallout could have been prevented with a little more investigation at key moments, and that clear signs of unethial behaviour were deliberately ignored. I think this is far from competent.
We are in the charity business. Donors expect high standards when it comes to their giving, and bad reputations directly translate into dollars. And remember, we want new donors, not just to keep the old ones. I simply don’t see how “we have high standards, except when it comes to facilitating billion dollar frauds” can hold up to scrutiny. I’m not sure we can “credibly convince people” if we keep the current leadership in place. The monetary cost could be substantial.
We also want to recruit people to the movement. Being associated with bad behaviour will hurt our ability to recruit people with strong moral codes. Worse though, would be if we encouraged “vultures”. A combination of low ethical standards and large amounts of money would make our movement an obvious target for unethical exploiters, as appears to have already happened with SBF.
Being a brilliant philosopher or intellectual does not necessarily make you a great leader. I think we can keep the benefits of the former while recognizing that someone is no longer useful at the latter. Remaining in a leadership position is a privilege, not a right.
If a global health organization made a mistake in judgment that caused [its] effectiveness to permanently decline by (say) 30%, and it was no longer effective in comparison to alternatives we could counterfactually fund, I suspect very few of us would support continuing to fund it. I would find it potentially concerning, from a standpoint of impartiality, if we do not apply the same standard to leaders. After all, we didn’t protect the hypothetical global health organization’s beneficiaries merely out of a sense of fairness.
I see the argument that applying such a standard to leaders could discourage them from making EV-positive bets. However, experiencing an adverse outcome on most EV-positive bets won’t materially impact a leader’s long-term future effectiveness. Moreover, it could be difficult to evaluate leaders from a 100% ex ante perspective. There’s a risk of evaluating successful bets by their outcome (because outsiders may not understand that there was a significant bet + there is low incentive to evaluate the ex ante wisdom of taking a risk if all turned out well) but unsuccessful bets from an ex ante perspective. That would credit the leader with their winnings but not with most of their losses, and would overincentivize betting.
I suspect a big part of the disagreement here is whether this aspect of the analogy holds?
Right—I think a major crux between Nathan and Titotal’s comments involve assumptions or beliefs about the extent to which certain leaders’ long-term effectiveness has been impaired. My gut says there will ultimately be very significant impairment as applied to public-facing / high-visibility roles, less so for certain other roles.
If almost all current leaders would be better than any plausible replacement, even after a significant hit to long-term effectiveness, then I think that says something about the leadership development pipeline that is worth observing.
I think it’s relatively obvious that there’s a dearth of competent leadership/management in EA. I think this is even more extreme for EA qua EA, since the personal costs : altruistic rewards tradeoff for EA qua EA work is arguably worse than e.g. setting up an AI governance initiative or leading a biosecurity project.
I don’t think we actually want to incentivise positive-EV bets as such? Some amount of risk aversion ought to be baked in. Going solely by EV only makes sense if you make many repeated uncorrelated bets, which isn’t really what Longtermists are doing.
Fair enough—my attempted point was to acknowledge concerns that being too quick to replace leaders when a bad outcome happened might incentivize them to be suboptimally conservative when it comes to risk.