The post does raise some valid concerns, though I don’t agree with a lot of the framing. I don’t think of it in terms of lying. I do, however, see that the existing incentive structure is significantly at odds with epistemic virtue and truth-seeking. It’s remarkable that many EA orgs have held themselves to reasonably high standards despite not having strong incentives to do so.
In brief:
EA orgs’ and communities’ growth metrics are centered around numbers of people and quantity of money moved. These don’t correlate much with epistemic virtue.
(more speculative) EA orgs’ donors/supporters don’t demand much epistemic virtue. The orgs tend to hold themselves to higher standards than their current donors.
(even more speculative; not much argument offered) Even long-run growth metrics don’t correlate too well with epistemic virtue.
Quantifying (some aspects of) quality and virtue into metrics seems to me to have the best shot at changing the incentive structure here.
The incentive structure of the majority of EA-affiliated orgs has centered around growth metrics related to number of people (new pledge signups, number of donors, number of members), and money moved (both for charity evaluators and for movement-building orgs). These are the headline numbers they highlight in their self-evaluations and reports, and these are the numbers that people giving elevator pitches about the orgs use (“GiveWell moved more than $100 million in 2015” or “GWWC has (some number of hundreds of millions) in pledged money”). Some orgs have slightly different metrics, but still essentially ones that rely on changing the minds of large numbers of people: 80,000 Hours counts Impact-Adjusted Significant Plan Changes, and many animal welfare orgs count numbers of converts to veganism (or recruits to animal rights activism) through leafleting.
These incentives don’t directly align with improved epistemic virtue! In many cases, they are close to orthogonal. In some cases, they are correlated but not as much as you might think (or hope!).
I believe the incentive alignment is strongest in cases where you are talking about moving moderate to large sums of money per donor in the present, for a reasonable number of donors (e.g., a few dozen donors giving hundreds of thousands of dollars). Donors who are donating those large sums of money are selected for being less naive (just by virtue of having made that much money) and the scale of donation makes it worth their while to demand high standards. I think this is related to GiveWell having relatively high epistemic standards (though causality is hard to judge).
With that said, the organizations I am aware of in the EA community hold themselves to much higher standards than (as far I can make out) their donor and supporter base seems to demand of them. My guess is that GiveWell could have been a LOT more sloppy with their reviews and still moved pretty similar amounts of money as long as they produced reviews that pattern-matched a well-researched review. (I’ve personally found their review quality improved very little from 2014 to 2015 and much more from 2015 to 2016; and yet I expect that the money moved jump from 2015 to 2016 will be less, or possibly even negative). I believe (with weaker confidence) that similar stuff is true for Animal Charity Evaluators in both directions (significantly increasing or decreasing review quality won’t affect donations that much). And also for Giving What We Can: the amount of pledged money doesn’t correlate that well with the quality or state of their in-house research.
The story I want to believe, and that I think others also want to believe, is some version of a just-world story: in the long run epistemic virtue ~ success. Something like “Sure, in the short run, taking epistemic shortcuts and bending the truth leads to more growth, but in the long run it comes back to bite you.” I think there’s some truth to this story: epistemic virtue and long-run growth metrics probably correlate better than epistemic virtue and short-run growth metrics. But the correlation is still far from perfect.
My best guess is that unless we can get a better handle on epistemic virtue and quantify quality in some meaningful way, the incentive structure problem will remain.
There is significant room for other EA organizations to adopt this practice in their own areas (and apply it more broadly, e.g. regarding future evaluations of their strategy, etc).
I believe the incentive alignment is strongest in cases where you are talking about moving moderate to large sums of money per donor in the present, for a reasonable number of donors (e.g., a few dozen donors giving hundreds of thousands of dollars). Donors who are donating those large sums of money are selected for being less naive (just by virtue of having made that much money) and the scale of donation makes it worth their while to demand high standards. I think this is related to GiveWell having relatively high epistemic standards (though causality is hard to judge).
This is part of my thinking behind promoting donor lotteries: by increasing the effective size of donors, it lets them more carefully evaluate organizations and opportunities, providing better incentives and resistance to exploitation by things that look good on first glance but don’t hold up on close and extended inspection (they can also share their findings with the broader community).
The story I want to believe, and that I think others also want to believe, is some version of a just-world story: in the long run epistemic virtue ~ success. Something like “Sure, in the short run, taking epistemic shortcuts and bending the truth leads to more growth, but in the long run it comes back to bite you.” I think there’s some truth to this story: epistemic virtue and long-run growth metrics probably correlate better than epistemic virtue and short-run growth metrics. But the correlation is still far from perfect.
The correlation gets better when you consider total impact and not just growth.
Prediction-making in my Open Phil work does feel like progress to me, because I find making predictions and writing them down difficult and scary, indicating that I wasn’t doing that mental work as seriously before :) I’m quite excited to see what comes of it.
I like your thoughts and agree with reframing it as epistemic virtue generally instead of just lying. But I think EAs are always too quick to think about behavior in terms of incentives and rational action. Especially when talking about each other. Since almost no one around here is rationally selfish, some people are rationally altruistic, and most people are probably some combination of altruism, selfishness and irrationality. But here people are thinking that it’s some really hard problem where rational people are likely be dishonest and so we need to make it rational for people to be honest and so on.
We should remember all the ways that people can be primed or nudged to be honest or dishonest. This might be a hard aspect of an organization to evaluate from the outside but I would guess that it’s at least as internally important as the desire to maximize growth metrics.
For one thing, culture is important. Who is leading? What is their leadership style? I’m not in the middle of all this meta stuff, but it’s weird (coming from the Army) that I see so much talk about organizations but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone even mention the word “leadership.”
Also, who is working at EA organizations? How many insiders and how many outsiders? I would suggest that ensuring that a minority of an organization is composed of identifiable outsiders or skeptical people would compel people to be more transparent just by making them feel like they are being watched. I know that some people have debated various reasons to have outsiders work for EA orgs—well here’s another thing to consider.
I don’t have much else to contribute, but all you LessWrong people who have been reading behavioral econ literature since day one should be jumping all over this.
Military has a culture of leadership, which is related to people taking pride in their organization, as I described in a different comment. There are training classes and performance evaluations emphasizing leadership, but I don’t think those make a large difference.
I suspect that a crux of the issue about the relative importance of growth vs. epistemic virtue is whether you expect most of the value of the EA community comes from novel insights and research that it does, or through moving money to the things that are already known about.
In the early days of EA I think that GiveWell’s quality was a major factor in getting people to donate, but I think that the EA movement is large enough now that growth isn’t necessarily related to rigor—the largest charities (like Salvation Army or YMCA) don’t seem to be particularly epistemically rigorous at all. I’m not sure how closely the marginal EA is checking claims, and I think that EA is now mainstream enough that more people don’t experience strong social pressure to justify it.
The idea that EA charities should somehow court epistemic virtue among their donors seems to me to be over-asking in a way that will drastically reduce their effectiveness.
No human behaves like some kind of Spock stereotype making all their decisions merely by weighing the evidence. We all respond to cheerleading and upbeat pronouncements and make spontaneous choices based on what we happen to see first. We are all more likely to give when asked in ways which make us feel bad/guilty for saying no or when we forget that we are even doing it (annual credit card billing).
If EA charities insist on cultivating donations only in circumstances where the donors are best equipped to make a careful judgement, e.g., eschewing ‘Give Now’ impulse donations, fundraising parties with liquor and peer pressure and insist on reminding us each time another donation is about to be deducted from our account, they will lose out on a huge amount of donations. Worse, because of the role of overhead in charity work, the lack of sufficient donations will actually make such charities bad choices.
Moreover, there is nothing morally wrong with putting your organization’s best foot forward or using standard charity/advertising tactics. Despite the joke it’s not morally wrong to make a good first impression. If there is a trade off between reducing suffering and improving epistemic virtue there is no question which is more important and if that requires implying they are highly effective so be it.
I mean it’s important charities are incentivized to be effective but imagine if the law required every charitable solicitation to disclose the fraction of donations that went into fundraising and overhead. It’s unlikely the increased effectiveness that resulted would make up for the huge losses that forcing people to face the unpleasant fact that even the best charities can only send a fraction of their donation to the intended beneficiaries.
What EA charities should do, however, is pursue a market segmentation strategy. Avoid any falsehoods (as well as annoying behavior likely to result in substantial criticism) when putting a good face on their situation/effectiveness and make sure detailed truthful and complete data and analysis is available for those who put in the work to look for it.
Everyone is better off this way. No on is lied to. The charities get more money and can do more with it. The people who decide to give for impulsive or other less than rational reasons can feel good about themselves rather than feeling guilty they didn’t put more time into their charitable decisions. The people who care about choosing the most effective evidence backed charitable efforts can access that data and feel good about themselves for looking past the surface. Finally, by having the same institution chase both the smart and dumb money the system works to funnel the dumb money toward smart outcomes (charities which lose all their smart money will tend to wither or at least change practices).
The post does raise some valid concerns, though I don’t agree with a lot of the framing. I don’t think of it in terms of lying. I do, however, see that the existing incentive structure is significantly at odds with epistemic virtue and truth-seeking. It’s remarkable that many EA orgs have held themselves to reasonably high standards despite not having strong incentives to do so.
In brief:
EA orgs’ and communities’ growth metrics are centered around numbers of people and quantity of money moved. These don’t correlate much with epistemic virtue.
(more speculative) EA orgs’ donors/supporters don’t demand much epistemic virtue. The orgs tend to hold themselves to higher standards than their current donors.
(even more speculative; not much argument offered) Even long-run growth metrics don’t correlate too well with epistemic virtue.
Quantifying (some aspects of) quality and virtue into metrics seems to me to have the best shot at changing the incentive structure here.
The incentive structure of the majority of EA-affiliated orgs has centered around growth metrics related to number of people (new pledge signups, number of donors, number of members), and money moved (both for charity evaluators and for movement-building orgs). These are the headline numbers they highlight in their self-evaluations and reports, and these are the numbers that people giving elevator pitches about the orgs use (“GiveWell moved more than $100 million in 2015” or “GWWC has (some number of hundreds of millions) in pledged money”). Some orgs have slightly different metrics, but still essentially ones that rely on changing the minds of large numbers of people: 80,000 Hours counts Impact-Adjusted Significant Plan Changes, and many animal welfare orgs count numbers of converts to veganism (or recruits to animal rights activism) through leafleting.
These incentives don’t directly align with improved epistemic virtue! In many cases, they are close to orthogonal. In some cases, they are correlated but not as much as you might think (or hope!).
I believe the incentive alignment is strongest in cases where you are talking about moving moderate to large sums of money per donor in the present, for a reasonable number of donors (e.g., a few dozen donors giving hundreds of thousands of dollars). Donors who are donating those large sums of money are selected for being less naive (just by virtue of having made that much money) and the scale of donation makes it worth their while to demand high standards. I think this is related to GiveWell having relatively high epistemic standards (though causality is hard to judge).
With that said, the organizations I am aware of in the EA community hold themselves to much higher standards than (as far I can make out) their donor and supporter base seems to demand of them. My guess is that GiveWell could have been a LOT more sloppy with their reviews and still moved pretty similar amounts of money as long as they produced reviews that pattern-matched a well-researched review. (I’ve personally found their review quality improved very little from 2014 to 2015 and much more from 2015 to 2016; and yet I expect that the money moved jump from 2015 to 2016 will be less, or possibly even negative). I believe (with weaker confidence) that similar stuff is true for Animal Charity Evaluators in both directions (significantly increasing or decreasing review quality won’t affect donations that much). And also for Giving What We Can: the amount of pledged money doesn’t correlate that well with the quality or state of their in-house research.
The story I want to believe, and that I think others also want to believe, is some version of a just-world story: in the long run epistemic virtue ~ success. Something like “Sure, in the short run, taking epistemic shortcuts and bending the truth leads to more growth, but in the long run it comes back to bite you.” I think there’s some truth to this story: epistemic virtue and long-run growth metrics probably correlate better than epistemic virtue and short-run growth metrics. But the correlation is still far from perfect.
My best guess is that unless we can get a better handle on epistemic virtue and quantify quality in some meaningful way, the incentive structure problem will remain.
One bit of progress on this front is Open Phil and GiveWell starting to make public and private predictions related to grants to improve their forecasting about outcomes, and create track records around that.
There is significant room for other EA organizations to adopt this practice in their own areas (and apply it more broadly, e.g. regarding future evaluations of their strategy, etc).
This is part of my thinking behind promoting donor lotteries: by increasing the effective size of donors, it lets them more carefully evaluate organizations and opportunities, providing better incentives and resistance to exploitation by things that look good on first glance but don’t hold up on close and extended inspection (they can also share their findings with the broader community).
The correlation gets better when you consider total impact and not just growth.
Prediction-making in my Open Phil work does feel like progress to me, because I find making predictions and writing them down difficult and scary, indicating that I wasn’t doing that mental work as seriously before :) I’m quite excited to see what comes of it.
Wanted to offer something stronger than an up vote in starting the prediction-making: that sounds like a great idea and want to see how it goes. :)
I like your thoughts and agree with reframing it as epistemic virtue generally instead of just lying. But I think EAs are always too quick to think about behavior in terms of incentives and rational action. Especially when talking about each other. Since almost no one around here is rationally selfish, some people are rationally altruistic, and most people are probably some combination of altruism, selfishness and irrationality. But here people are thinking that it’s some really hard problem where rational people are likely be dishonest and so we need to make it rational for people to be honest and so on.
We should remember all the ways that people can be primed or nudged to be honest or dishonest. This might be a hard aspect of an organization to evaluate from the outside but I would guess that it’s at least as internally important as the desire to maximize growth metrics.
For one thing, culture is important. Who is leading? What is their leadership style? I’m not in the middle of all this meta stuff, but it’s weird (coming from the Army) that I see so much talk about organizations but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone even mention the word “leadership.”
Also, who is working at EA organizations? How many insiders and how many outsiders? I would suggest that ensuring that a minority of an organization is composed of identifiable outsiders or skeptical people would compel people to be more transparent just by making them feel like they are being watched. I know that some people have debated various reasons to have outsiders work for EA orgs—well here’s another thing to consider.
I don’t have much else to contribute, but all you LessWrong people who have been reading behavioral econ literature since day one should be jumping all over this.
What sort of discussion of leadership would you like to see? How was this done in the Army?
Military has a culture of leadership, which is related to people taking pride in their organization, as I described in a different comment. There are training classes and performance evaluations emphasizing leadership, but I don’t think those make a large difference.
I suspect that a crux of the issue about the relative importance of growth vs. epistemic virtue is whether you expect most of the value of the EA community comes from novel insights and research that it does, or through moving money to the things that are already known about.
In the early days of EA I think that GiveWell’s quality was a major factor in getting people to donate, but I think that the EA movement is large enough now that growth isn’t necessarily related to rigor—the largest charities (like Salvation Army or YMCA) don’t seem to be particularly epistemically rigorous at all. I’m not sure how closely the marginal EA is checking claims, and I think that EA is now mainstream enough that more people don’t experience strong social pressure to justify it.
The idea that EA charities should somehow court epistemic virtue among their donors seems to me to be over-asking in a way that will drastically reduce their effectiveness.
No human behaves like some kind of Spock stereotype making all their decisions merely by weighing the evidence. We all respond to cheerleading and upbeat pronouncements and make spontaneous choices based on what we happen to see first. We are all more likely to give when asked in ways which make us feel bad/guilty for saying no or when we forget that we are even doing it (annual credit card billing).
If EA charities insist on cultivating donations only in circumstances where the donors are best equipped to make a careful judgement, e.g., eschewing ‘Give Now’ impulse donations, fundraising parties with liquor and peer pressure and insist on reminding us each time another donation is about to be deducted from our account, they will lose out on a huge amount of donations. Worse, because of the role of overhead in charity work, the lack of sufficient donations will actually make such charities bad choices.
Moreover, there is nothing morally wrong with putting your organization’s best foot forward or using standard charity/advertising tactics. Despite the joke it’s not morally wrong to make a good first impression. If there is a trade off between reducing suffering and improving epistemic virtue there is no question which is more important and if that requires implying they are highly effective so be it.
I mean it’s important charities are incentivized to be effective but imagine if the law required every charitable solicitation to disclose the fraction of donations that went into fundraising and overhead. It’s unlikely the increased effectiveness that resulted would make up for the huge losses that forcing people to face the unpleasant fact that even the best charities can only send a fraction of their donation to the intended beneficiaries.
What EA charities should do, however, is pursue a market segmentation strategy. Avoid any falsehoods (as well as annoying behavior likely to result in substantial criticism) when putting a good face on their situation/effectiveness and make sure detailed truthful and complete data and analysis is available for those who put in the work to look for it.
Everyone is better off this way. No on is lied to. The charities get more money and can do more with it. The people who decide to give for impulsive or other less than rational reasons can feel good about themselves rather than feeling guilty they didn’t put more time into their charitable decisions. The people who care about choosing the most effective evidence backed charitable efforts can access that data and feel good about themselves for looking past the surface. Finally, by having the same institution chase both the smart and dumb money the system works to funnel the dumb money toward smart outcomes (charities which lose all their smart money will tend to wither or at least change practices).