So here is the thing, Chloe and her team’s virtues and flaws are amplified by virtue of them being in charge of millions. And so I think that having good models here requires mixing speculative judgments about personal character with cost-effectiveness estimates.
At this point I can either:
Not develop good models of the world
Develop ¿good? models but not share them
Develop them and share them
Ultimately I went with option 3, though I stayed roughly three months in option 2. It’s possible this wasn’t optimal. I think the deciding factor here was having two cost-effectiveness estimates which ranged over 2-3 orders of magnitude and yet were non-overlapping. But I could just have published those alone. But I don’t think they can stand alone, because the immediate answer is that Open Philanthropy knows something I don’t, and so the rest of the post is in part an exploration of whether that’s the case.
Chloe and Jesse are competent and committed people working in a cause area that does not meet the 1000x threshold currently set by GiveWell top charities. If it were easy to cross that bar, these charities would not be the gold standard for neartermist, human-focused giving. Open Phil chose to bet on CJR as a cause area, conduct a search, and hire Chloe anyway.
I don’t disagree with the meat of this paragraph. Though note that Jesse Rothman is not working on criminal justice reform any more, I think (see the CEA teams page)
I genuinely believe policy- and politics-focused EAs could learn a lot from the CJR team’s movement building work. Their strengths in political coordination and movement strategy are underrepresented in EA.
I imagine this is one of the reasons why CEA hired Jesse Rothman/Jesse Rothman chose to be hired to work on EA groups.
I bought the idea that we could synthesize knowledge from different fields and coordinate to solve the world’s most pressing problems. That won’t happen if we can’t respectfully engage with people who think or work differently from the community baseline.
We can’t significantly improve the world without asking hard questions. We can ask hard questions without dismissing others or assuming that difference implies inferiority.
Yes, but sometimes you can’t answer the hard questions without being really unflattering. For instance, assume for a moment that my cost effectiveness estimates are roughly correct. Then there were moments where Chloe could have taken the step of saying “you know what, actually donating $50M to GiveDirectly or to something else would be more effective than continuing my giving through JustImpact”. This would have been pretty heroic, and the fact that she failed to be heroic is at least a bit unflattering.
I’m not sure how this translates to your “assuming inferiority” framing. People routinely fail to be heroic. Maybe it’s too harsh and unattainable a standard. On the other hand, maybe holding people and organizations to that standard will help them become stronger, if they want to. I think that’s what I implicitly believe.
So here is the thing, Chloe and her team’s virtues and flaws are amplified by virtue of them being in charge of millions. And so I think that having good models here requires mixing speculative judgments about personal character with cost-effectiveness estimates.
At this point I can either:
Not develop good models of the world
Develop ¿good? models but not share them
Develop them and share them
Ultimately I went with option 3, though I stayed roughly three months in option 2. It’s possible this wasn’t optimal. I think the deciding factor here was having two cost-effectiveness estimates which ranged over 2-3 orders of magnitude and yet were non-overlapping. But I could just have published those alone. But I don’t think they can stand alone, because the immediate answer is that Open Philanthropy knows something I don’t, and so the rest of the post is in part an exploration of whether that’s the case.
I don’t disagree with the meat of this paragraph. Though note that Jesse Rothman is not working on criminal justice reform any more, I think (see the CEA teams page)
I imagine this is one of the reasons why CEA hired Jesse Rothman/Jesse Rothman chose to be hired to work on EA groups.
Yes, but sometimes you can’t answer the hard questions without being really unflattering. For instance, assume for a moment that my cost effectiveness estimates are roughly correct. Then there were moments where Chloe could have taken the step of saying “you know what, actually donating $50M to GiveDirectly or to something else would be more effective than continuing my giving through JustImpact”. This would have been pretty heroic, and the fact that she failed to be heroic is at least a bit unflattering.
I’m not sure how this translates to your “assuming inferiority” framing. People routinely fail to be heroic. Maybe it’s too harsh and unattainable a standard. On the other hand, maybe holding people and organizations to that standard will help them become stronger, if they want to. I think that’s what I implicitly believe.