I started writing a comment, but the length got out of hand and life happened. So I’m just going to state the summary for now, but may develop into a full post (or series of quick takes) later.
It is likely that funder perspective has both the identified a direct influence on CEA’s cause prio as well as various less direct effects. For instance, what CEA can get funded for likely has some effect on who is interested in working at CEA. Therefore, the views of CEA staff is less-than-independent from funder views, which in turn influences which cause prio experts they are inclined to defer to.
Because of CEA’s outsize role with groups, EAGs, and other activities, there’s a risk that its incentives could bias[1] the community’s cause prio. X-risk didn’t become more important in an abstract sense because SBF started handing out money (or less important when he was exposed), and GHD wouldn’t become more important if some other billionaire did so. And although differences across cause areas in willingness to pay for talent development make sense, we should be careful not to let the effects of that differential willingness affect our perceptions of the abstract importance of cause areas or how to allocate non-talent resources (e.g., money, influence). Suggested mitigations would be stuff like: Provide more explicit communication of practical and tactical reasons that influence CEA’s relative focus on cause area, especially early on in a new community member’s interactions with CEA.
What steps should be taken to safeguard principles-first EA from the potential biasing effects of funder decisions? I didn’t get too far into this part, but would likely conclude that this task calls for (1) identifying core community infrastructure, and (2) publishing legible guardrails to enshrine and protect the principles-first approach. For instance, I view it as inconsistent with principles-first EA for community builders to be evaluated on the basis of what cause areas the people they influence ultimately choose to engage with. If funders want to focus on (say) x-risk community building, that’s fine . . . but they should call it that and not present it as being “general EA” so to speak. That way, the target audience understands that they are getting a specific, influenced perspective that is based on EA, and does not walk away with an imbalanced understanding of EA itself.
I started writing a comment, but the length got out of hand and life happened. So I’m just going to state the summary for now, but may develop into a full post (or series of quick takes) later.
It is likely that funder perspective has both the identified a direct influence on CEA’s cause prio as well as various less direct effects. For instance, what CEA can get funded for likely has some effect on who is interested in working at CEA. Therefore, the views of CEA staff is less-than-independent from funder views, which in turn influences which cause prio experts they are inclined to defer to.
Because of CEA’s outsize role with groups, EAGs, and other activities, there’s a risk that its incentives could bias[1] the community’s cause prio. X-risk didn’t become more important in an abstract sense because SBF started handing out money (or less important when he was exposed), and GHD wouldn’t become more important if some other billionaire did so. And although differences across cause areas in willingness to pay for talent development make sense, we should be careful not to let the effects of that differential willingness affect our perceptions of the abstract importance of cause areas or how to allocate non-talent resources (e.g., money, influence). Suggested mitigations would be stuff like: Provide more explicit communication of practical and tactical reasons that influence CEA’s relative focus on cause area, especially early on in a new community member’s interactions with CEA.
What steps should be taken to safeguard principles-first EA from the potential biasing effects of funder decisions? I didn’t get too far into this part, but would likely conclude that this task calls for (1) identifying core community infrastructure, and (2) publishing legible guardrails to enshrine and protect the principles-first approach. For instance, I view it as inconsistent with principles-first EA for community builders to be evaluated on the basis of what cause areas the people they influence ultimately choose to engage with. If funders want to focus on (say) x-risk community building, that’s fine . . . but they should call it that and not present it as being “general EA” so to speak. That way, the target audience understands that they are getting a specific, influenced perspective that is based on EA, and does not walk away with an imbalanced understanding of EA itself.
I use bias in the sense of to cause distortion, without any sinister or untoward implication.