some points are likely due to an incomplete understanding of the top-level post
I’m not sure if you mean this question to be covered in the rest of your reply? If not, could you say concretely what you think I misunderstood? If so, I respectfully disagree that I misunderstood it:
The concretization of these principles is laid out in much more detail in resources that both of us are familiar with. There is no need for Zachary to have gone into more detail here
Maybe I’m less familiar with the resources than you think? I know huge amounts have been written on these notions, but I know of nothing that would fix my problem of ‘I don’t see how stating these principles gives me any meaningful information about CEA’s future behaviour’.
The mission is obviously more important than us. That should be uncontroversial.
I think that’s entirely consistent with what I’ve said. An organisation that aims to effect Y via X cannot afford to relegate X to an afterthought, or largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with X.
the importance of transparency is significantly complicated by the concept of infohazards in areas like biohazards or AI safety
I’m concerned that ‘infohazards’ get invoked far too often, especially to deflect concerns about (non)transparency. In CEA’s case in particular, it doesn’t seem like they deal with biohazards or AI safety at a level necessitating high security, and even if they do have some kind of black ops program dealing with those things that they’re not telling us about, that isn’t the transparency I’m concerned about. Just a general commitment to sharing info guiding key decisions about the community with the community, such as
sharing forum changes they’re considering, and the case for/against them
making all their hires open, or giving clear reasons why when they don’t
describing what their prioritisation process actually is, inasmuch as it can be formalised, between e.g. longtermism and animal welfare/other considerations
when they’re considering buying mansions in the Oxford countryside/other controversial multimillion dollar calculations, publishing the cost-benefit calculation rather than merely asserting its existence
giving the breakdown of their funding sources
publishing the breakdown of their budget for EAGs
open-sourcing forum data (IIRC they might technically have done this? But with no documentation, and an API that you have to direct-link to)
avoiding behind-the-scenes work that they’d be embarrassed to have publicised (e.g. PELTIV scores)
generally cultivating a culture of directly engaging in discussion with the community more—eg. regular office hours, rather than highly intermittent AMAs, and in threads like this, sticking around for a discussion rather than posting a top-down announcement and then entirely ignoring the comments.
I work on the Forum team, but this comment only represents my personal views and not those of CEA. Also, I am responding to this comment in particular because it mentions the Forum by name. I may respond to other comments if I have time but no promises.
First off, I want to say thank you for your comment. I think the Forum serves as an important space for organizations to get feedback from the community and I’m happy that it’s doing so here. I will also say that I think writing clearly is hard, and I am not a particularly good writer, so I am happy to clarify if anything I say is unclear.
‘I view the community as CEA’s team, not its customers’ sounds like a way of avoiding ever answering criticisms from the EA community, and really doesn’t gel with the actual focuses of CEA… you’re supposed to empower us to work for/fundraise for or otherwise support charities
An organisation that aims to effect Y via X cannot afford to relegate X to an afterthought, or largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with X.
My understanding of the phrase “I view the community as CEA’s team, not its customers” is that CEA’s ultimate goal is to improve the world, and increasing the satisfaction of the EA community (or alternatively, satisfying any particular request an individual might have) is not the ultimate goal. I believe the purpose of laying this out is to be transparent and help readers understand and predict how CEA will act. My guess is that very often we will be improving the world by doing things that satisfy the EA community.
For the Forum in particular, user feedback is a vital input into how we prioritize our work. We gather this information via user interviews (such as at events, reaching out to specific groups of people while developing features, and broadly offering to do user interview calls with people like in my Forum profile), by including links to feedback forms when testing things out and launching new features, publishing posts and quick takes about our work, running various surveys including the annual Forum user survey, and even directly messaging users via the Forum to ask them questions. I genuinely believe that feedback is a gift, and I’m so grateful for people who take the time to provide it to us.
If you take one thing away from my comment, please remember that we love feedback—there are multiple ways to contact us listed here, including an anonymous option. You’re welcome to contact us with suggestions, questions, bug reports, feedback[1], etc. (I can only really speak for the Forum team, but I would guess other teams feel similarly.)
Earlier this year we implemented the ability to import Google Docs to the Forum and people gave us lots of positive feedback about that. I think most of the work on the Forum will be somewhere between “making the community happy” and “the community is mostly neutral, maybe a small subset are happy”—if you look at the features in our latest update post, I think basically all of them have been either requested by users or people have given us purely positive feedback on them[2]. One example of a change to the Forum that the EA community might have voted against is the big Forum redesign in 2023 - as you can see, we mostly got negative feedback about it. However, when I’ve interviewed users new to the site, I overwhelmingly get positive feedback about the design. It’s clear to me that having a skilled designer improve the site’s usability was the right choice.
This reflects how I view my own work—to do good by supporting the EA community, which does not always mean that we should do what they would vote for[3].
I think some of the disagreement is that people interpret the terms “team” and “customers” differently. In some ways we do treat Forum users as customers—for example, our engineers rotate being on-call to respond to customer service requests. We think this is worth their time because we feel that our users provide significant value for the world, not because our end goal is a high customer satisfaction score, but the result is basically the same. As I referenced earlier, our team functions similarly to other tech teams. So for example, when we are building a feature for group organizers, we will do many user interviews with group organizers. Thinking about my own experience as a customer, oftentimes websites will use dark patterns, compromise UX, prioritize engagement/addictiveness, and literally outright lie, all in order to maximize their profit. I am happy that we do not treat our users as customers in any of these ways. One slightly different way of thinking about “customer” is more like “customer service”, where an organization should strive to satisfy any individual who files a complaint. Honestly I think the Forum team is pretty good at this given our small size, but I would like us to be able to prioritize issues that users report relative to the value of our other potential work and not automatically file customer service reports in the highest priority bucket.
I like the term “team” because that emphasizes that we all broadly have the same goal (improving the world) and I am happy for Forum users to act in service of that goal (even if they criticize my work), in the same way that I appreciate when users give me feedback about the Forum in a way that reflects understanding of that shared goal (like, “I have this suggestion for you, though I’m guessing that this wouldn’t affect many people so it’s probably low priority”). In practice, much of the way that the Forum makes progress on that goal is by “empowering [people] to work for/fundraise for or otherwise support charities.” Another aspect of “team” I like is that this implies collaboration and transparency, since we have shared goals (so it would be against my interests to lie), whereas I think it’s entirely normal/expected for a company to mislead its customers[4]. “Team” means that we respect your time more than other websites (that treat you like customers) do, because we believe your time is valuable (for the world) and we want you to use it well, because we have shared goals. When someone answers my inactive user feedback form saying that they use the Forum less now because they are focused on doing good directly via their job, I don’t feel like I have “lost a customer”. I feel happy that they are presumably correctly valuing their time and doing more good (although I hope they still occasionally return to contribute back to the community).
A point that multiple commenters reference is about how CEA handles criticism. In my opinion, someone who is on the same team as you is much more likely to take your criticism seriously than any entity to which you are a customer. For example, if I complain to a company about their shady business practices, I expect them to completely ignore me or possibly lie to me, but certainly not to actually consider my point. If you complain to the Forum team about something we are doing that you consider morally dubious, we actually engage with it (at least internally—we have not always done as well as I would like at responding publicly, and I hope we improve on this in the future.)
Given this, I personally disagree that we “relegate the EA community to an afterthought” and that we “largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with EA”, and I disagree that we implied that we plan to do these things in the future. In my opinion, viewing the EA community as CEA’s “team” does not preclude us from caring about our effect on the community, nor does it mean that we no longer want to nurture and support the community, nor does it imply that we will ignore criticism, nor does it mean that we don’t care about people’s opinion of our work. I would go so far as to say those are more important for a teammate to care about than a company to care about.
…that isn’t the transparency I’m concerned about. Just a general commitment to sharing info guiding key decisions about the community with the community…
I believe the purpose of Zach’s post was to explain that CEA will focus on EA principles rather than specific cause areas, and that it was not meant to communicate anything about CEA’s principles as an organization. Personally I am quite pro-transparency and hope to post more about my work than has been the case in the past.
To respond to some specific points:
sharing forum changes they’re considering, and the case for/against them
I’m happy to do more of this myself. Some reasons that I do not prioritize this:
Lack of demand (I appreciate you sharing what you would like to see from us! It’s hard to know what is worth us writing about otherwise. For example, it’s not clear to me if anyone got any value out of this data-sharing post and it took me a fair amount of time to put it all together.)
I believe that I have a bias towards thinking that the Forum is valuable/important, and so I try to counter that in various ways. In this case, because I care a lot about the Forum respecting people’s time, I want to push back on assuming that Forum-related questions are valuable/important enough to be worth their attention. We just ran a Forum user survey which was quite long—I spent a long time iterating on the text/questions and cutting things down, and in the end I was still pretty worried about asking for too much time. As a tech team we already prioritize work based on user feedback, so additional feedback gathered from a public post will also have diminishing returns.
Smaller things, like the fact that I’m quite busy and am a slow writer, and I find publishing things on the Forum pretty scary.
We shared a public version of our half-quarter OKR planning doc in our Forum update post. That doc gets updated right after we finalize our OKRs, and is currently the closest thing to this that exists.
open-sourcing forum data (IIRC they might technically have done this? But with no documentation, and an API that you have to direct-link to)
Our codebase is open source, and I personally think the documentation is quite good. We use GraphQL which is a commonly used technology. If you have questions about accessing data, feel free to contact us.
generally cultivating a culture of directly engaging in discussion with the community more
To this end, I will publicly suggest that if you have any questions for CEA, you should feel free to contact us.
Including critical feedback! Every time I talk to a user I emphasize that critical feedback is especially useful for us, because people are biased towards saying nice things to us (at least to our face—I think this is less the case online).
I actually don’t know of any particular requests or feedback after the fact that we got about site performance improvements, but I am confident that it was worth doing. Improving site speed is one of the most evidence-based ways for a site to decrease their bounce rate and improve their SEO ranking. This type of issue, which either minorly inconveniences many people or disproportionately impacts people who are not Forum users but would have been, is hard to justify working on purely based on the goal of “community satisfaction”, but makes more sense under the goal of “improving the world”.
To be clear, I think any organization has incentives against being 100% transparent, and I don’t think CEA is at the ideal level of transparency. But when I compare my time working in for-profit companies to my time working at CEA, it’s pretty stark how much more the people at CEA care about communicating honestly. For example, in a previous for-profit company, I was asked to obfuscate payment-related changes to prevent customers from unsubscribing, and no one around me had any objection to this.
Thanks for sharing your experience of working on the Forum Sarah. It’s good to hear that your internal experience of the Forum team is that it sees feedback as vital.
I hope the below can help with understanding the type of thing which can contribute to an opposing external impression. Perhaps some types of feedback get more response than others?
If you take one thing away from my comment, please remember that we love feedback—there are multiple ways to contact us listed here, including an anonymous option.
AFAICT I have done this twice, once asking a yes/no question about unclear forum policy and once about a Forum team post I considered mildly misleading. The first got no response, the other got a response which was inaccurate, which was unfortunate, though I certainly assume it was unintentionally so.
I want to be clear that I do not think I am entitled to get a response. I think the Forum team is entitled to decide it should focus on analytics not individuals, for example. I basically thought it had, and so mentally wrote off those pathways. But your comment paints a surprisingly different picture and repeatedly pushes these options, so it didn’t feel right to say that I disagree without disclosing a big part of why I disagree.
Looking to public, and frankly far more important, examples of this, the top comment on CEA’s last fundraising attempt is highly critical of the Forum / Online team’s direction and spend. At time of writing the comment has 23⁄2 agree/disagree votes and more karma than the top level post it’s under. This seems like the kind of thing one prioritises responding to if trying to engage, and 10 months ago Ben West responded “I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum”. That post never came out[1]. So again my takeaway was that the Forum team didn’t value such engagement.
Given this, I personally disagree that we “relegate the EA community to an afterthought” and that we “largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with EA”, and I disagree that we implied that we plan to do these things in the future.
As someone who directionally agrees with the quoted sentiments, this was helpful in clarifying part of what’s going on here. I personally think that CEA has been opaque for the last few years, for better or for worse[2]. Others I have heard from think the same[3]. So I naturally interpret a post which is essentially a statement of continuinty as a plan to continue down this road. Arepo makes a similar point in the 2nd paragraph of their first comment. But if you think CEA, or at least your team, has been responsive in the past, the same statement of continuity is not naturally interpreted that way.
To the best of my knowledge. If it did, please link to it as a response to the comment! This type of thing is hard to search for, but I did spend ~5 minutes trying.
Since I’ve pushed CEA to be more responsive here and elsewhere, I want to note that distance is helpful in some contexts. I am unsurprised to hear that the Forum redesign in 2023 got negative feedback from entrenched users but positive feedback from new users, for example; seems a common pattern with design changes.
I think that OP / CEA board members haven’t particularly focused on / cared about being open and transparent with the EA community....Remember that OP staff members are mainly accountable to their managers, not the EA community or others. CEA is mostly funded by OP, so is basically similarly accountable to high-level OP people.
(Again: only speaking for myself, and here in particular I will avoid speaking about or for other people at CEA when possible.)
I hope the below can help with understanding the type of thing which can contribute to an opposing external impression.
Yup, I think it’s very reasonable for people outside of CEA to have a different impression than I do. I certainly don’t fault anyone for that. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful.
The first got no response, the other got a response which was inaccurate
I’m really sorry that our team didn’t properly respond to your messages. There are many factors that could affect whether or not any particular message got a response. We currently have a team assistant who has significantly improved how we manage incoming messages, so if you sent yours before she joined, I would guess someone dropped it by accident. As an engineer I know I have not always lived up to my own standards in terms of responding in a timely manner and I do feel bad about that. While I still think we do pretty good for our small size, I’m guessing that overall we are not at where I would personally like for us to be.
Looking to public, and frankly far more important, examples of this, the top comment on CEA’s last fundraising attempt is highly critical of the Forum / Online team’s direction and spend. At time of writing the comment has 23⁄2 agree/disagree votes and more karma than the top level post it’s under. This seems like the kind of thing one prioritises responding to if trying to engage, and 10 months ago Ben West responded “I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum”. That post never came out[1]. So again my takeaway was that the Forum team didn’t value such engagement.
Hmm I currently don’t recall any post about Forum fundraising. I think we considered fundraising for the Forum, but I don’t remember if any significant progress was made in developing that idea. In my opinion, Ben and Oscar wrote multiple detailed replies to that comment, though I am sympathetic to the take that they did not quite respond to Nuno’s central point. I think this is just a case of, things sometimes fall through the cracks, especially during times of high uncertainty as was the case in this example. I feel optimistic that, with more stability and the ability to plan for longer futures, CEA will do better.
I also want to differentiate between public and internal engagement. I read Nuno’s writing and discussed it with my colleagues. At the time I didn’t necessarily think I would have better answers than Ben so I didn’t feel the need to join the public conversation, but at this point I probably do have better answers. I’ll just broadly say that, I agree that marginal value is what matters, as do others on my team. We do analyze the marginal impact of our Forum work. I would be excited to write more about it publicly but it will take a fair amount of work to make it clear and comprehensible for the Forum audience (up to my personal standards). Interestingly, Nuno’s points push me against taking the time to communicate publicly / be more open. Every hour I spend on writing a comment (and it can take me hours—I am not particularly good at writing, my training is in software engineering) is an hour that I don’t know how to value in the marginal impact analysis, so it defaults to being worth $0[1]. I strongly feel responsible for using EA/charitable money well, so using my work time to do something that I ultimately won’t put any value on is difficult.
I personally think that CEA has been opaque for the last few years
I don’t disagree with this. I personally would prefer that we had communicated publicly more in the past, and I think ideally CEA would be more open about our work.
So I naturally interpret a post which is essentially a statement of continuinty as a plan to continue down this road.
I’ll just note that the point of this post was not to lay out all of CEA’s upcoming plans, nor explain how CEA will change, nor even to talk about CEA’s organizational values or principles. I believe Zach has more posts planned, but he is also very busy.
But if you think CEA, or at least your team, has been responsive in the past, the same statement of continuity is not naturally interpreted that way.
Apologies—to clarify, I don’t think I said that CEA or my team has been responsive in the past. I’m guessing that on average CEA and my team have been below my personal bar. I feel that the Forum team aims to be responsive, and it is good to continue to have that goal, and to continue to do better relative to that goal (such as by getting help from our team assistant). My dissertation about “team”, similarly, doesn’t mean that we have been great about following through on all the ideals that “team” implies. I just think that it is an accurate description of our goals, and what I personally aspire to do. Based on Zach’s comment, I’m optimistic that CEA will do better.
I’m open to suggestions here. Perhaps transparency can be modeled as worth a fraction of the overall value CEA (or the Online Team, or the Forum) produces? But surely there are diminishing returns at some point—I would be surprised if I should be spending 50% of my work time on activities that are primarily valued via “transparency”. I’m worried that this is so subjective that I would just use it to justify spending as much time as I would like on these activities. If I was allowed to ignore cost effectiveness I would naturally be more open.
I think we’re pretty close to agreement, so I’ll leave it here except to clarify that when I’ve talked about engaging/engagement I mean something close to ‘public engagement’; responses that the person who raised the issue sees or could reasonably be expected to see. So what you’re doing here, Zach elsewhere in the comments, etc.
CEA discussing internally is also valuable of course, and is a type of engagement, but is not what I was trying to point at. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks for differentiating.
when they’re considering buying mansions in the Oxford countryside/other controversial multimillion dollar calculations, publishing the cost-benefit calculation rather than merely asserting its existence
Huh? That wasn’t CEAs decision, they just fiscally sponsored Wytham
IIRC it was done under the name ‘CEA’ when that name covered both the current org and what is now ‘Effective Ventures’. It was done at the impetus of a trustee of CEA-EV who, since they were the same legal entity, was also a trustee of CEA-CEA (I believe it’s still true that they’re currently the same organisation, CEA-CEA’s plans to spin off notwithstanding). I can’t find the initial announcement from CEA, but the justification was to host EA events and conferences there. Since by far the primary EA-event-and-conference-hosting organisation is CEA-CEA, it seems likely they were the primary beneficiary of the purchase.
I’m not really sure whether this technically qualifies as ‘only fiscally sponsoring Wytham’ (I doubt there’s a simple yes-no answer to the question), but there’s clearly a lot of entanglement with the organisation and people who a) are supposed to represent the EA community and b) benefited from the project. Even/especally if this entanglement is all perfectly innocent and well thought through, greater transparency would have made that more obvious and prevented much of the consequent muckraking of the movement by its critics.
I think it’s super reasonable for people to be confused about this. EV is a ridiculously confusing entity (or rather, set of entities), even without the name change and overlapping names.
I wouldn’t consider Wytham to have ever been a part of the project that’s currently known as CEA. A potential litmus test I’d use is “Was Wytham ever under the control of CEA’s Executive Director?” To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no, though there’s a chance I’m missing some historical context.
This comment also discusses this distinction further.
I’m nigh-certain that Wytham was never under the control of CEA’s Executive Director.
I think that this litmus test is pretty weak, though, as a response to Arepo’s suggestion that CEA was the primary beneficiary of Wytham. However, I also think that this suggestion is mistaken. I believe that CEA hosted <10% of the events at Wytham (maybe significantly less; I don’t know precisely, and am giving 10% as a round threshold that I’m relatively confident using as an upper bound).
In CEA’s case in particular, it doesn’t seem like they deal with biohazards or AI safety at a level necessitating high security
Agreed.
Regarding some of the specific points you’ve made:
• I agree that it would be great to get the community more involved in thinking through what the forum should look like. • Wytham Abbey was an independently run project that they just fiscally sponsored. • I agree that funding sources should be public (although perhaps not individual donations below a certain amount). • Unsurprised PELTIV backfired. • I would love to see regular community office hours, though if these end up seeing low demand, or it’s just the same folks over and over, I think it would be reasonable for them to decide to discontinue this.
Regarding some of the other things, I honestly don’t see them as the highest priority, especially right now.
I wouldn’t say they’re all top priority right now either fwiw. What I’d like is some kind of public commitment to stuff like this as at least nice-to-haves, rather than something they seem to feel no obligation about at all. That’s all any of these ‘principles’ can be—a directional statement about culture. But CEA has been around for over a decade, with an average annual budget that must be well into the millions, so even ‘not top priority’ concerns could easily have been long since addressed if they’d had a historical interest in doing so.
I’m not sure I agree with that characterisation of Wytham Abbey. It was orchestrated by one of the trustees of the org on behalf of the org, with intended beneficiaries being more or less a subset of the org’s proxy beneficiaries. And this was done under their current moniker, which per agb/Jason’s comment elsewhere in this discussion, is highly misleading—especially when they’re involved in projects like this. Consequently, when Wytham Abbey became a PR disaster, it helped bring the whole movement into disrepute. Arguably the main lesson was just ‘don’t use the public face of EA for black box projects’, but I think the backup lesson was ‘if you do, at least show enough of your working to prove to reasonable critical observers that it isn’t a backdoor way of giving the trustees a summer home.’
I guess I want CEA to focus very heavily on figuring out their overall strategy, including community engagement and then communicating their overall decisions.
Conference cost breakdowns feels like an unnecessary distraction at this point, so long as they satisfy the auditor.
Hey Chris :)
I’m not sure if you mean this question to be covered in the rest of your reply? If not, could you say concretely what you think I misunderstood? If so, I respectfully disagree that I misunderstood it:
Maybe I’m less familiar with the resources than you think? I know huge amounts have been written on these notions, but I know of nothing that would fix my problem of ‘I don’t see how stating these principles gives me any meaningful information about CEA’s future behaviour’.
I think that’s entirely consistent with what I’ve said. An organisation that aims to effect Y via X cannot afford to relegate X to an afterthought, or largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with X.
I’m concerned that ‘infohazards’ get invoked far too often, especially to deflect concerns about (non)transparency. In CEA’s case in particular, it doesn’t seem like they deal with biohazards or AI safety at a level necessitating high security, and even if they do have some kind of black ops program dealing with those things that they’re not telling us about, that isn’t the transparency I’m concerned about. Just a general commitment to sharing info guiding key decisions about the community with the community, such as
sharing forum changes they’re considering, and the case for/against them
making all their hires open, or giving clear reasons why when they don’t
describing what their prioritisation process actually is, inasmuch as it can be formalised, between e.g. longtermism and animal welfare/other considerations
when they’re considering buying mansions in the Oxford countryside/other controversial multimillion dollar calculations, publishing the cost-benefit calculation rather than merely asserting its existence
giving the breakdown of their funding sources
publishing the breakdown of their budget for EAGs
open-sourcing forum data (IIRC they might technically have done this? But with no documentation, and an API that you have to direct-link to)
avoiding behind-the-scenes work that they’d be embarrassed to have publicised (e.g. PELTIV scores)
generally cultivating a culture of directly engaging in discussion with the community more—eg. regular office hours, rather than highly intermittent AMAs, and in threads like this, sticking around for a discussion rather than posting a top-down announcement and then entirely ignoring the comments.
I work on the Forum team, but this comment only represents my personal views and not those of CEA. Also, I am responding to this comment in particular because it mentions the Forum by name. I may respond to other comments if I have time but no promises.
First off, I want to say thank you for your comment. I think the Forum serves as an important space for organizations to get feedback from the community and I’m happy that it’s doing so here. I will also say that I think writing clearly is hard, and I am not a particularly good writer, so I am happy to clarify if anything I say is unclear.
My understanding of the phrase “I view the community as CEA’s team, not its customers” is that CEA’s ultimate goal is to improve the world, and increasing the satisfaction of the EA community (or alternatively, satisfying any particular request an individual might have) is not the ultimate goal. I believe the purpose of laying this out is to be transparent and help readers understand and predict how CEA will act. My guess is that very often we will be improving the world by doing things that satisfy the EA community.
For the Forum in particular, user feedback is a vital input into how we prioritize our work. We gather this information via user interviews (such as at events, reaching out to specific groups of people while developing features, and broadly offering to do user interview calls with people like in my Forum profile), by including links to feedback forms when testing things out and launching new features, publishing posts and quick takes about our work, running various surveys including the annual Forum user survey, and even directly messaging users via the Forum to ask them questions. I genuinely believe that feedback is a gift, and I’m so grateful for people who take the time to provide it to us.
If you take one thing away from my comment, please remember that we love feedback—there are multiple ways to contact us listed here, including an anonymous option. You’re welcome to contact us with suggestions, questions, bug reports, feedback[1], etc. (I can only really speak for the Forum team, but I would guess other teams feel similarly.)
Earlier this year we implemented the ability to import Google Docs to the Forum and people gave us lots of positive feedback about that. I think most of the work on the Forum will be somewhere between “making the community happy” and “the community is mostly neutral, maybe a small subset are happy”—if you look at the features in our latest update post, I think basically all of them have been either requested by users or people have given us purely positive feedback on them[2]. One example of a change to the Forum that the EA community might have voted against is the big Forum redesign in 2023 - as you can see, we mostly got negative feedback about it. However, when I’ve interviewed users new to the site, I overwhelmingly get positive feedback about the design. It’s clear to me that having a skilled designer improve the site’s usability was the right choice.
This reflects how I view my own work—to do good by supporting the EA community, which does not always mean that we should do what they would vote for[3].
I think some of the disagreement is that people interpret the terms “team” and “customers” differently. In some ways we do treat Forum users as customers—for example, our engineers rotate being on-call to respond to customer service requests. We think this is worth their time because we feel that our users provide significant value for the world, not because our end goal is a high customer satisfaction score, but the result is basically the same. As I referenced earlier, our team functions similarly to other tech teams. So for example, when we are building a feature for group organizers, we will do many user interviews with group organizers. Thinking about my own experience as a customer, oftentimes websites will use dark patterns, compromise UX, prioritize engagement/addictiveness, and literally outright lie, all in order to maximize their profit. I am happy that we do not treat our users as customers in any of these ways. One slightly different way of thinking about “customer” is more like “customer service”, where an organization should strive to satisfy any individual who files a complaint. Honestly I think the Forum team is pretty good at this given our small size, but I would like us to be able to prioritize issues that users report relative to the value of our other potential work and not automatically file customer service reports in the highest priority bucket.
I like the term “team” because that emphasizes that we all broadly have the same goal (improving the world) and I am happy for Forum users to act in service of that goal (even if they criticize my work), in the same way that I appreciate when users give me feedback about the Forum in a way that reflects understanding of that shared goal (like, “I have this suggestion for you, though I’m guessing that this wouldn’t affect many people so it’s probably low priority”). In practice, much of the way that the Forum makes progress on that goal is by “empowering [people] to work for/fundraise for or otherwise support charities.” Another aspect of “team” I like is that this implies collaboration and transparency, since we have shared goals (so it would be against my interests to lie), whereas I think it’s entirely normal/expected for a company to mislead its customers[4]. “Team” means that we respect your time more than other websites (that treat you like customers) do, because we believe your time is valuable (for the world) and we want you to use it well, because we have shared goals. When someone answers my inactive user feedback form saying that they use the Forum less now because they are focused on doing good directly via their job, I don’t feel like I have “lost a customer”. I feel happy that they are presumably correctly valuing their time and doing more good (although I hope they still occasionally return to contribute back to the community).
A point that multiple commenters reference is about how CEA handles criticism. In my opinion, someone who is on the same team as you is much more likely to take your criticism seriously than any entity to which you are a customer. For example, if I complain to a company about their shady business practices, I expect them to completely ignore me or possibly lie to me, but certainly not to actually consider my point. If you complain to the Forum team about something we are doing that you consider morally dubious, we actually engage with it (at least internally—we have not always done as well as I would like at responding publicly, and I hope we improve on this in the future.)
Given this, I personally disagree that we “relegate the EA community to an afterthought” and that we “largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with EA”, and I disagree that we implied that we plan to do these things in the future. In my opinion, viewing the EA community as CEA’s “team” does not preclude us from caring about our effect on the community, nor does it mean that we no longer want to nurture and support the community, nor does it imply that we will ignore criticism, nor does it mean that we don’t care about people’s opinion of our work. I would go so far as to say those are more important for a teammate to care about than a company to care about.
I believe the purpose of Zach’s post was to explain that CEA will focus on EA principles rather than specific cause areas, and that it was not meant to communicate anything about CEA’s principles as an organization. Personally I am quite pro-transparency and hope to post more about my work than has been the case in the past.
To respond to some specific points:
sharing forum changes they’re considering, and the case for/against them
We have done this for some projects in the past, such as when adding emoji reactions.
I’m happy to do more of this myself. Some reasons that I do not prioritize this:
Lack of demand (I appreciate you sharing what you would like to see from us! It’s hard to know what is worth us writing about otherwise. For example, it’s not clear to me if anyone got any value out of this data-sharing post and it took me a fair amount of time to put it all together.)
I believe that I have a bias towards thinking that the Forum is valuable/important, and so I try to counter that in various ways. In this case, because I care a lot about the Forum respecting people’s time, I want to push back on assuming that Forum-related questions are valuable/important enough to be worth their attention. We just ran a Forum user survey which was quite long—I spent a long time iterating on the text/questions and cutting things down, and in the end I was still pretty worried about asking for too much time. As a tech team we already prioritize work based on user feedback, so additional feedback gathered from a public post will also have diminishing returns.
Smaller things, like the fact that I’m quite busy and am a slow writer, and I find publishing things on the Forum pretty scary.
We shared a public version of our half-quarter OKR planning doc in our Forum update post. That doc gets updated right after we finalize our OKRs, and is currently the closest thing to this that exists.
open-sourcing forum data (IIRC they might technically have done this? But with no documentation, and an API that you have to direct-link to)
Our codebase is open source, and I personally think the documentation is quite good. We use GraphQL which is a commonly used technology. If you have questions about accessing data, feel free to contact us.
generally cultivating a culture of directly engaging in discussion with the community more
To this end, I will publicly suggest that if you have any questions for CEA, you should feel free to contact us.
Including critical feedback! Every time I talk to a user I emphasize that critical feedback is especially useful for us, because people are biased towards saying nice things to us (at least to our face—I think this is less the case online).
I actually don’t know of any particular requests or feedback after the fact that we got about site performance improvements, but I am confident that it was worth doing. Improving site speed is one of the most evidence-based ways for a site to decrease their bounce rate and improve their SEO ranking. This type of issue, which either minorly inconveniences many people or disproportionately impacts people who are not Forum users but would have been, is hard to justify working on purely based on the goal of “community satisfaction”, but makes more sense under the goal of “improving the world”.
Not that customers normally get to unilaterally decide on what a company does via a vote.
To be clear, I think any organization has incentives against being 100% transparent, and I don’t think CEA is at the ideal level of transparency. But when I compare my time working in for-profit companies to my time working at CEA, it’s pretty stark how much more the people at CEA care about communicating honestly. For example, in a previous for-profit company, I was asked to obfuscate payment-related changes to prevent customers from unsubscribing, and no one around me had any objection to this.
Thanks for sharing your experience of working on the Forum Sarah. It’s good to hear that your internal experience of the Forum team is that it sees feedback as vital.
I hope the below can help with understanding the type of thing which can contribute to an opposing external impression. Perhaps some types of feedback get more response than others?
AFAICT I have done this twice, once asking a yes/no question about unclear forum policy and once about a Forum team post I considered mildly misleading. The first got no response, the other got a response which was inaccurate, which was unfortunate, though I certainly assume it was unintentionally so.
I want to be clear that I do not think I am entitled to get a response. I think the Forum team is entitled to decide it should focus on analytics not individuals, for example. I basically thought it had, and so mentally wrote off those pathways. But your comment paints a surprisingly different picture and repeatedly pushes these options, so it didn’t feel right to say that I disagree without disclosing a big part of why I disagree.
Looking to public, and frankly far more important, examples of this, the top comment on CEA’s last fundraising attempt is highly critical of the Forum / Online team’s direction and spend. At time of writing the comment has 23⁄2 agree/disagree votes and more karma than the top level post it’s under. This seems like the kind of thing one prioritises responding to if trying to engage, and 10 months ago Ben West responded “I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum”. That post never came out[1]. So again my takeaway was that the Forum team didn’t value such engagement.
As someone who directionally agrees with the quoted sentiments, this was helpful in clarifying part of what’s going on here. I personally think that CEA has been opaque for the last few years, for better or for worse[2]. Others I have heard from think the same [3]. So I naturally interpret a post which is essentially a statement of continuinty as a plan to continue down this road. Arepo makes a similar point in the 2nd paragraph of their first comment. But if you think CEA, or at least your team, has been responsive in the past, the same statement of continuity is not naturally interpreted that way.
To the best of my knowledge. If it did, please link to it as a response to the comment! This type of thing is hard to search for, but I did spend ~5 minutes trying.
Since I’ve pushed CEA to be more responsive here and elsewhere, I want to note that distance is helpful in some contexts. I am unsurprised to hear that the Forum redesign in 2023 got negative feedback from entrenched users but positive feedback from new users, for example; seems a common pattern with design changes.
Long comment, so pulling out the relevant quote:
(Again: only speaking for myself, and here in particular I will avoid speaking about or for other people at CEA when possible.)
Yup, I think it’s very reasonable for people outside of CEA to have a different impression than I do. I certainly don’t fault anyone for that. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful.
I’m really sorry that our team didn’t properly respond to your messages. There are many factors that could affect whether or not any particular message got a response. We currently have a team assistant who has significantly improved how we manage incoming messages, so if you sent yours before she joined, I would guess someone dropped it by accident. As an engineer I know I have not always lived up to my own standards in terms of responding in a timely manner and I do feel bad about that. While I still think we do pretty good for our small size, I’m guessing that overall we are not at where I would personally like for us to be.
Hmm I currently don’t recall any post about Forum fundraising. I think we considered fundraising for the Forum, but I don’t remember if any significant progress was made in developing that idea. In my opinion, Ben and Oscar wrote multiple detailed replies to that comment, though I am sympathetic to the take that they did not quite respond to Nuno’s central point. I think this is just a case of, things sometimes fall through the cracks, especially during times of high uncertainty as was the case in this example. I feel optimistic that, with more stability and the ability to plan for longer futures, CEA will do better.
I also want to differentiate between public and internal engagement. I read Nuno’s writing and discussed it with my colleagues. At the time I didn’t necessarily think I would have better answers than Ben so I didn’t feel the need to join the public conversation, but at this point I probably do have better answers. I’ll just broadly say that, I agree that marginal value is what matters, as do others on my team. We do analyze the marginal impact of our Forum work. I would be excited to write more about it publicly but it will take a fair amount of work to make it clear and comprehensible for the Forum audience (up to my personal standards). Interestingly, Nuno’s points push me against taking the time to communicate publicly / be more open. Every hour I spend on writing a comment (and it can take me hours—I am not particularly good at writing, my training is in software engineering) is an hour that I don’t know how to value in the marginal impact analysis, so it defaults to being worth $0[1]. I strongly feel responsible for using EA/charitable money well, so using my work time to do something that I ultimately won’t put any value on is difficult.
I don’t disagree with this. I personally would prefer that we had communicated publicly more in the past, and I think ideally CEA would be more open about our work.
I’ll just note that the point of this post was not to lay out all of CEA’s upcoming plans, nor explain how CEA will change, nor even to talk about CEA’s organizational values or principles. I believe Zach has more posts planned, but he is also very busy.
Apologies—to clarify, I don’t think I said that CEA or my team has been responsive in the past. I’m guessing that on average CEA and my team have been below my personal bar. I feel that the Forum team aims to be responsive, and it is good to continue to have that goal, and to continue to do better relative to that goal (such as by getting help from our team assistant). My dissertation about “team”, similarly, doesn’t mean that we have been great about following through on all the ideals that “team” implies. I just think that it is an accurate description of our goals, and what I personally aspire to do. Based on Zach’s comment, I’m optimistic that CEA will do better.
I’m open to suggestions here. Perhaps transparency can be modeled as worth a fraction of the overall value CEA (or the Online Team, or the Forum) produces? But surely there are diminishing returns at some point—I would be surprised if I should be spending 50% of my work time on activities that are primarily valued via “transparency”. I’m worried that this is so subjective that I would just use it to justify spending as much time as I would like on these activities. If I was allowed to ignore cost effectiveness I would naturally be more open.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I think we’re pretty close to agreement, so I’ll leave it here except to clarify that when I’ve talked about engaging/engagement I mean something close to ‘public engagement’; responses that the person who raised the issue sees or could reasonably be expected to see. So what you’re doing here, Zach elsewhere in the comments, etc.
CEA discussing internally is also valuable of course, and is a type of engagement, but is not what I was trying to point at. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks for differentiating.
Huh? That wasn’t CEAs decision, they just fiscally sponsored Wytham
IIRC it was done under the name ‘CEA’ when that name covered both the current org and what is now ‘Effective Ventures’. It was done at the impetus of a trustee of CEA-EV who, since they were the same legal entity, was also a trustee of CEA-CEA (I believe it’s still true that they’re currently the same organisation, CEA-CEA’s plans to spin off notwithstanding). I can’t find the initial announcement from CEA, but the justification was to host EA events and conferences there. Since by far the primary EA-event-and-conference-hosting organisation is CEA-CEA, it seems likely they were the primary beneficiary of the purchase.
I’m not really sure whether this technically qualifies as ‘only fiscally sponsoring Wytham’ (I doubt there’s a simple yes-no answer to the question), but there’s clearly a lot of entanglement with the organisation and people who a) are supposed to represent the EA community and b) benefited from the project. Even/especally if this entanglement is all perfectly innocent and well thought through, greater transparency would have made that more obvious and prevented much of the consequent muckraking of the movement by its critics.
I think it’s super reasonable for people to be confused about this. EV is a ridiculously confusing entity (or rather, set of entities), even without the name change and overlapping names.
I wouldn’t consider Wytham to have ever been a part of the project that’s currently known as CEA. A potential litmus test I’d use is “Was Wytham ever under the control of CEA’s Executive Director?” To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no, though there’s a chance I’m missing some historical context.
This comment also discusses this distinction further.
I’m nigh-certain that Wytham was never under the control of CEA’s Executive Director.
I think that this litmus test is pretty weak, though, as a response to Arepo’s suggestion that CEA was the primary beneficiary of Wytham. However, I also think that this suggestion is mistaken. I believe that CEA hosted <10% of the events at Wytham (maybe significantly less; I don’t know precisely, and am giving 10% as a round threshold that I’m relatively confident using as an upper bound).
Agreed.
Regarding some of the specific points you’ve made:
• I agree that it would be great to get the community more involved in thinking through what the forum should look like.
• Wytham Abbey was an independently run project that they just fiscally sponsored.
• I agree that funding sources should be public (although perhaps not individual donations below a certain amount).
• Unsurprised PELTIV backfired.
• I would love to see regular community office hours, though if these end up seeing low demand, or it’s just the same folks over and over, I think it would be reasonable for them to decide to discontinue this.
Regarding some of the other things, I honestly don’t see them as the highest priority, especially right now.
I wouldn’t say they’re all top priority right now either fwiw. What I’d like is some kind of public commitment to stuff like this as at least nice-to-haves, rather than something they seem to feel no obligation about at all. That’s all any of these ‘principles’ can be—a directional statement about culture. But CEA has been around for over a decade, with an average annual budget that must be well into the millions, so even ‘not top priority’ concerns could easily have been long since addressed if they’d had a historical interest in doing so.
I’m not sure I agree with that characterisation of Wytham Abbey. It was orchestrated by one of the trustees of the org on behalf of the org, with intended beneficiaries being more or less a subset of the org’s proxy beneficiaries. And this was done under their current moniker, which per agb/Jason’s comment elsewhere in this discussion, is highly misleading—especially when they’re involved in projects like this. Consequently, when Wytham Abbey became a PR disaster, it helped bring the whole movement into disrepute. Arguably the main lesson was just ‘don’t use the public face of EA for black box projects’, but I think the backup lesson was ‘if you do, at least show enough of your working to prove to reasonable critical observers that it isn’t a backdoor way of giving the trustees a summer home.’
I guess I want CEA to focus very heavily on figuring out their overall strategy, including community engagement and then communicating their overall decisions.
Conference cost breakdowns feels like an unnecessary distraction at this point, so long as they satisfy the auditor.