I’ve only skimmed this so far, but lots of good ideas, very timely (I was almost waiting for someone to post something like this with all the similar discussion that’s been happening recently, and I’m thinking mostly in conversation), and you’ve gone up in my estimations. Thank you. Upvoted.
However, I also want to say that I still think of you as being wildly overconfident in general. This is partly based on previous interactions with you, partly based on a fellow EA with a great deal more investment experience than me being initially excited by Antigravity Investments and then thinking there wasn’t much of substance there when he dug a bit deeper, partly because of the time you spent with Leverage Research (who I’ve also found to be generally wildly overconfident).
There’s probably not much more I feel I can say at this point, even psuedoanonymised, and I apologise to everyone for that (and also for not expressing concern to a large group of people when I saw that Antigravity had appeared to have taken over the EA Peer Funding Facebook group). Take this as it is: A vague, unsubstantiated claim from an anonymous-for-now member of the community.
But if people do start considering supporting Brendon to have control of such a grantmaking entity—distributed or otherwise—I’d encourage you to DM me and I’ll think about what further details I’m able to give. I’d also encourage more people at that point to give their impressions of Brendon’s level of epistemic humility (e.g. perhaps it has dramatically improved in recent years). He is no doubt an impressive, altruistic individual, but I personally would feel uncomfortable having him decide who gets to be an EA grantmaker.
I’m not sure who you are, but I appreciate the candid feedback. I would like to point out, however, that giving anonymous, discrediting feedback in a public setting is discouraging to the receiver and quite possibly harmful. I am not sure if anonymous, discrediting feedback is a useful community norm or not; I haven’t thought about this in much detail. Prior examples in the community appear to have individuals give public and non-anonymous feedback in very extreme cases with a tremendous amount of supporting information. Perhaps you can share additional thoughts about your choice to provide anonymous discrediting feedback with minimal information, as opposed to pursuing another course of action, such as privately discussing your concerns with me and updating your opinion of me based on what I share privately before offering to go around offering to share negative opinions about me without my say in the matter and as someone who barely knows me.
Your post makes me feel obligated to defend myself in order to prevent possible misconceptions from spreading. I get the sense that you are judging me based on a highly limited number of data points, and that you do not have a good sense of me as a person or what I’ve done. I believe judging people too quickly is generally considered a bad practice.
I will respond to your examples individually.
I have attempted to launch many early stage projects before. In order to make sure projects are useful, a large amount of feedback must be obtained, and projects must be presented in their worst possible state, without much validation and with shoddy, minimum viable product execution, by virtue of being early stage. Additionally, entrepreneurs have to express both high optimism to the public and themselves, while simultaneously trying to poke holes in the idea from every possible direction, for the purpose of maintaining self motivation and the motivation of team members, funders, etc while ensuring that what is being built is actually of value. Interactions with people working on early stage ventures could induce an impression of overconfidence, incompetence, or other potentially negative traits when viewed without any additional data points (for instance, “risks” are not part of standard pitch decks to VCs, and founders are instructed to generally act highly optimistic, but not to the point of deception of course).
You mention that you have found me wildly overconfident, but I do not think most/all the people who know me think that, so perhaps you are basing this off of one datapoint, maybe by hearing me speak about an early stage project in a promotional context. I have expressed very high uncertainty about cause areas, donating now vs later, the value of projects I’m working on, the value of projects other people are working on, AI timelines, and many other EA topics as well as pretty much every belief like “the value of taking alpha lipoic acid daily” to provide completely random examples I have thought of recently. My very limited experiments with self calibration in both casual and formal settings (like using PredictionBook.com) don’t indicate anything amiss to me. However, there is a probability that I may be overconfident in some ways, or appearing like that in certain contexts, so I can definitely get additional feedback regarding that from other EAs that know me well.
Regarding your comments about Antigravity Investments, I would imagine this person’s opinion was rather old, perhaps from over a year ago when I solicited some very early feedback from various EAs. Many of them thought some parts of the idea were not useful. This is a normal part of validating whether an idea and various features are a good idea; I would be shocked if 100% of people expressed high enthusiasm about 100% of the idea. There is pretty much always very high variance in feedback on any sort of idea, startup or not, although curing cancer at $1 per treatment will probably get pretty much universal enthusiasm. I hope that you are not implying or thinking that I ignore feedback and pursue projects blindly. As someone who has personally shut down a lot of things I’ve started myself, I take outside feedback very seriously. As entrepreneurs know, market feedback and market traction is everything, not the theoretical optimality of an idea. In fact, I terminated an idea similar to EA Funds solely based on one EA’s opinion that a web-based donor advised fund would experience nearly zero traction due to a lack of broad market demand and was thus not worth pursuing. There are now many startups and projects doing something very similar now, maybe over 5 separate teams in the EA community alone. The balance between weighing an internal model versus weighing external feedback on parts of that model can be challenging to balance in both directions.
Finally, I spent literally one week at Leverage Research many years ago as a 13–14 year old high school freshman doing an “internship” learning about creating strategic plans using the yEd graphing software. I have not had any contact with Leverage since then, have not worked on any Leverage Research projects at any point in my life, etc. Hopefully this is obvious, but I think claiming an association between a one week internship spent learning yEd as a young teenager and my current level of confidence is a little bit of a stretch.
No offense, but I would personally feel uncomfortable having you in the community warning about others in the community based on the quality of your analysis and your judgement in posting this, although I am again open to changing my opinion if people have thought about this and think this sort of thing is a good norm. And my opinion about you is also based on a very limited data point, which may not indicate much about your interpersonal demeanor, personality traits, overall judgement, etc.
The anonymous thing is mostly me realising that I hardly ever criticise people, wanting to practice, but knowing I’m going to make a ton of mistakes as I’m kinda new to this! I refrain from criticising people out of fear, so I thought I’d hide a bit under a cloak of anonymity until I get more skilled at this (also criticism is a particularly emotional thing so I don’t want to unfairly tarnish my reputation after a few early mistakes).
Sorry again for the initial upset this probably caused. Fortunately, I’m pretty sure the community’s on your side (I mean, I am, for starters!)
The anonymous thing is mostly me realising that I hardly ever criticise people, wanting to practice, but knowing I’m going to make a ton of mistakes as I’m kinda new to this
I found this baffling. Rough analogy: “I hard ever punch people, so I thought I’d practise on you”. You should criticise people if and when they merit criticism, not because you want to practise. I would have expected you caused a great deal of upset to Brendon (this would have upset me greatly), which, for the question benefit of ‘practising criticism’ does not seem justified. I urge you to refrain from this sort of thing in future. If you want to improve in a safer way, I suggest you write up your criticisms and then show them to someone else to collect feedback before deciding whether or not to post them.
Oh man, that’s not what I meant, sorry! I wasn’t deliberately overdoing it for practice (and I’ve generally been much more critical on here than I am in person, I haven’t singled out Brendon). I have doubts about people’s reasoning in my mind all the time, but it’s very rare that I say them out loud, and thereby give others the chance to learn from them, present evidence to the contrary or say how they think I’m being irrational. I was just trying to express my doubts out loud the way other people seem to, but I knew I’d make some mistakes and I really did fuck up.
Don’t worry, I’ve given up on the idea. I’ll shut down my account if I can (struggling to find the option right now), and I don’t plan on starting any more.
I’ve only skimmed this so far, but lots of good ideas, very timely (I was almost waiting for someone to post something like this with all the similar discussion that’s been happening recently, and I’m thinking mostly in conversation), and you’ve gone up in my estimations. Thank you. Upvoted.
However, I also want to say that I still think of you as being wildly overconfident in general. This is partly based on previous interactions with you, partly based on a fellow EA with a great deal more investment experience than me being initially excited by Antigravity Investments and then thinking there wasn’t much of substance there when he dug a bit deeper, partly because of the time you spent with Leverage Research (who I’ve also found to be generally wildly overconfident).
There’s probably not much more I feel I can say at this point, even psuedoanonymised, and I apologise to everyone for that (and also for not expressing concern to a large group of people when I saw that Antigravity had appeared to have taken over the EA Peer Funding Facebook group). Take this as it is: A vague, unsubstantiated claim from an anonymous-for-now member of the community.
But if people do start considering supporting Brendon to have control of such a grantmaking entity—distributed or otherwise—I’d encourage you to DM me and I’ll think about what further details I’m able to give. I’d also encourage more people at that point to give their impressions of Brendon’s level of epistemic humility (e.g. perhaps it has dramatically improved in recent years). He is no doubt an impressive, altruistic individual, but I personally would feel uncomfortable having him decide who gets to be an EA grantmaker.
Hi byanyothername,
I’m not sure who you are, but I appreciate the candid feedback. I would like to point out, however, that giving anonymous, discrediting feedback in a public setting is discouraging to the receiver and quite possibly harmful. I am not sure if anonymous, discrediting feedback is a useful community norm or not; I haven’t thought about this in much detail. Prior examples in the community appear to have individuals give public and non-anonymous feedback in very extreme cases with a tremendous amount of supporting information. Perhaps you can share additional thoughts about your choice to provide anonymous discrediting feedback with minimal information, as opposed to pursuing another course of action, such as privately discussing your concerns with me and updating your opinion of me based on what I share privately before offering to go around offering to share negative opinions about me without my say in the matter and as someone who barely knows me.
Your post makes me feel obligated to defend myself in order to prevent possible misconceptions from spreading. I get the sense that you are judging me based on a highly limited number of data points, and that you do not have a good sense of me as a person or what I’ve done. I believe judging people too quickly is generally considered a bad practice.
I will respond to your examples individually.
I have attempted to launch many early stage projects before. In order to make sure projects are useful, a large amount of feedback must be obtained, and projects must be presented in their worst possible state, without much validation and with shoddy, minimum viable product execution, by virtue of being early stage. Additionally, entrepreneurs have to express both high optimism to the public and themselves, while simultaneously trying to poke holes in the idea from every possible direction, for the purpose of maintaining self motivation and the motivation of team members, funders, etc while ensuring that what is being built is actually of value. Interactions with people working on early stage ventures could induce an impression of overconfidence, incompetence, or other potentially negative traits when viewed without any additional data points (for instance, “risks” are not part of standard pitch decks to VCs, and founders are instructed to generally act highly optimistic, but not to the point of deception of course).
You mention that you have found me wildly overconfident, but I do not think most/all the people who know me think that, so perhaps you are basing this off of one datapoint, maybe by hearing me speak about an early stage project in a promotional context. I have expressed very high uncertainty about cause areas, donating now vs later, the value of projects I’m working on, the value of projects other people are working on, AI timelines, and many other EA topics as well as pretty much every belief like “the value of taking alpha lipoic acid daily” to provide completely random examples I have thought of recently. My very limited experiments with self calibration in both casual and formal settings (like using PredictionBook.com) don’t indicate anything amiss to me. However, there is a probability that I may be overconfident in some ways, or appearing like that in certain contexts, so I can definitely get additional feedback regarding that from other EAs that know me well.
Regarding your comments about Antigravity Investments, I would imagine this person’s opinion was rather old, perhaps from over a year ago when I solicited some very early feedback from various EAs. Many of them thought some parts of the idea were not useful. This is a normal part of validating whether an idea and various features are a good idea; I would be shocked if 100% of people expressed high enthusiasm about 100% of the idea. There is pretty much always very high variance in feedback on any sort of idea, startup or not, although curing cancer at $1 per treatment will probably get pretty much universal enthusiasm. I hope that you are not implying or thinking that I ignore feedback and pursue projects blindly. As someone who has personally shut down a lot of things I’ve started myself, I take outside feedback very seriously. As entrepreneurs know, market feedback and market traction is everything, not the theoretical optimality of an idea. In fact, I terminated an idea similar to EA Funds solely based on one EA’s opinion that a web-based donor advised fund would experience nearly zero traction due to a lack of broad market demand and was thus not worth pursuing. There are now many startups and projects doing something very similar now, maybe over 5 separate teams in the EA community alone. The balance between weighing an internal model versus weighing external feedback on parts of that model can be challenging to balance in both directions.
Finally, I spent literally one week at Leverage Research many years ago as a 13–14 year old high school freshman doing an “internship” learning about creating strategic plans using the yEd graphing software. I have not had any contact with Leverage since then, have not worked on any Leverage Research projects at any point in my life, etc. Hopefully this is obvious, but I think claiming an association between a one week internship spent learning yEd as a young teenager and my current level of confidence is a little bit of a stretch.
No offense, but I would personally feel uncomfortable having you in the community warning about others in the community based on the quality of your analysis and your judgement in posting this, although I am again open to changing my opinion if people have thought about this and think this sort of thing is a good norm. And my opinion about you is also based on a very limited data point, which may not indicate much about your interpersonal demeanor, personality traits, overall judgement, etc.
Ah this is awesome. Thank you. And sorry.
The anonymous thing is mostly me realising that I hardly ever criticise people, wanting to practice, but knowing I’m going to make a ton of mistakes as I’m kinda new to this! I refrain from criticising people out of fear, so I thought I’d hide a bit under a cloak of anonymity until I get more skilled at this (also criticism is a particularly emotional thing so I don’t want to unfairly tarnish my reputation after a few early mistakes).
Sorry again for the initial upset this probably caused. Fortunately, I’m pretty sure the community’s on your side (I mean, I am, for starters!)
I found this baffling. Rough analogy: “I hard ever punch people, so I thought I’d practise on you”. You should criticise people if and when they merit criticism, not because you want to practise. I would have expected you caused a great deal of upset to Brendon (this would have upset me greatly), which, for the question benefit of ‘practising criticism’ does not seem justified. I urge you to refrain from this sort of thing in future. If you want to improve in a safer way, I suggest you write up your criticisms and then show them to someone else to collect feedback before deciding whether or not to post them.
Oh man, that’s not what I meant, sorry! I wasn’t deliberately overdoing it for practice (and I’ve generally been much more critical on here than I am in person, I haven’t singled out Brendon). I have doubts about people’s reasoning in my mind all the time, but it’s very rare that I say them out loud, and thereby give others the chance to learn from them, present evidence to the contrary or say how they think I’m being irrational. I was just trying to express my doubts out loud the way other people seem to, but I knew I’d make some mistakes and I really did fuck up.
Don’t worry, I’ve given up on the idea. I’ll shut down my account if I can (struggling to find the option right now), and I don’t plan on starting any more.
Sorry again.
Maybe just send the feedback privately next time?
FYI I spent five karma points to say this to you, so you better take it seriously.
Update: I’ve now read your post more thoroughly. I love the proposal.