It is admirably honest of you to highlight and address this, rather than hoping no-one notices.
I don’t think any grants we’ve made have been to anyone who has ever been romantically involved with any of the fund members
Perhaps you could get the other judges to join you in a joint explicit declaration that you’ve never had any romantic or sexual relationships with any of the recipients? Would be good to put this at the bottom of the writeups.
edit: surprised people have downvoted this. To be clear, I was genuinely impressed that OP directly addressed this, even at the cost of drawing attention to it.
I haven’t voted on this post, but if I had to guess I’d expect it got downvoted because it strikes me that it would seem strange to have at the bottom of write-ups ‘none of us have romantic/sexual relationships with the recipients’. I wouldn’t expect that to be the kind of thing that ordinary grant makers would put on their write ups. I’d have thought it would have the following problems:
Personally, I’d find it intrusive to have to make repeated specific comments about people I was not romantically or sexually involved with (despite, in fact, being longtime married and monogamous and therefore always being trivially able to do so)
This would seem to either rule out a class of people for grants for whom it might be unfair to do so or force even more intrusive specific public comments (‘none of the judges have had relationships with any of the recipients except that judge A once slept with recipient B’). A better alternative seems to be to ask people to declare internally their conflicts of interest and have the person with the conflict of interest step out of the decision on that particular grant. (Incidentally, this harm would presumably disproportionately affect women, since the majority of the grant makers are men.)
I would expect the usual way to handle this would be to have a clear conflict of interest policy, stating in advance what constituted conflicts of interest (presumably family members, for example, would also be included) and what should be done in those cases.
You’re definitely right that most grant-making organisations do not make much use of such disclaimers. However, I think this mainly because it just doesn’t come up—most grantmaking occurs between people who do not know each other much socially, and are often older and married anyway.
In contrast the EA community, especially in the bay area, is extremely tight socially, and also exhibits a high level of promiscuity. As such the risk for decisions being unduly influenced by personal relationships is significantly higher. For example, back in 2016 OpenPhil revealed that they had advisors living with people they were evaluating, and evaluatees in relationships with OpenPhil staff (source). OpenPhil no longer seem to publish their conflicts of interest, but I suspect similar issues still occur. Separately, I have been told that some people in the bay area community explicitly use sexual relationships to make connections and influence the flow of funds from donors to workers and projects, which seems to raise severe concerns about objectivity and bias, as well as the potential for abuse (in both directions). I would be very concerned by either of these in the private sector, and see little reason to hold EAs to a lower standard.
Donors in general are subject to a significant information asymmetry and have few defenses against improper behaviour from organisations, especially in areas where concrete outputs are scarce. Explicit declarations that specific suspect conduct has not taken place represents a minimum level of such protection.
With regard your bullet points, I think a good analogy would be disclaimers in financial research. Every piece of financial research comes with multiple pages of disclaimers at the end, including a promise from the authors that the piece represents their true opinions and various sections about financial conflicts of interest. Perhaps the first analysts subject to these requirements found them intrusive—however by now they are a totally automated and unremarked-upon part of the process. I would expect the same to apply here, partly because every disclosure should ideally say the same thing: “None of the judges were in a relationship with anyone they evaluated.”
Indeed, the disclosure requirements in the financial sector cover cases like these quite directly. For example the CFA’s Ethical and Professional Standards (2016):
″… requires members and candidates to fully disclose to clients, potential clients and employers all actual and potential conflicts of interest”
and from 2014:
“Members and Candidates must make full and fair disclosure of all matters that could reasonably be expected to impair their independence and objectivity or interfere with respective duties to their clients, prospective clients, and employer. Members and Candidates must ensure that such disclosures are prominent, are delivered in plain language, and communicate the relevant information effectively.
In this case, donors and potential donors to an EA organisation are the equivalent of clients and potential clients of an investment firm, and I think a personal relationship with a grantee could reasonably be expected to impair judgement.
A case I personally came across involved two flatmates who both worked for different divisions in the same bank (Research and Sales&Trading). Because the bank (rightfully) took the separation of these two functions very seriously, HR applied a lot of pressure to them and they found alternative living arrangements.
Another example is lotteries, where the family members of employees are not allowed to participate at all, because their winning would risk bringing the lottery into disrepute:
In most cases the employee’s immediate family and employees of lottery suppliers are also not allowed to play. In practice, there is no way that employees could alter the outcome of a game in their favor, but lottery officials generally believe that public confidence would be damaged should an employee win a large prize. (source)
This is perhaps slightly unfair, as they did not choose the employment of their family members, but this seems to be a small cost. The number of lottery family members is very small compared to the lottery-ticket-buying public, and there are other forms of gambling open to them. And the costs here should be smaller still, as all I am suggesting is disclosure, a much milder policy than prohibition.
I did appreciate that the fund’s most recent write-up does take note of potential conflicts of interest, along with a wealth of other details. I could not find the sort of conflict of interest policy you suggested on their website however.
At the level of generality where the disclaimer you’re asking for is more like ‘this represents our true views and we followed our conflict of interest policy on it’, I agree that sounds very reasonable.
I’m not convinced that the conflict of interest policy should be modelled on large financial institutions and lotteries though, given their huge sizes. As a small intellectual community, it seems that it would be far more limiting to simply rule anyone with any kind of relationship to any judge out of receiving a grant. I imagine this is more analogous to academic procedures around sub-disciplines. For example, in deciding who to invite to a normative ethics conference on contractualism, it seems unwise to say that no views can be given on people you have a personal relationship with, since there are few people doing tonnes of work on contractualism, and they would naturally often interact with each other and so are likely to friends in some form. It seems better to have some clear idea of when you have to declare what relationships and what measures should be taken in cases of which relationships.
I’m not sure what I think of this particular suggestion yet. I want to mention that I have principles that pull in two opposite directions—the large part of me that is strongly pro transparency, honesty and openness, and also the smaller (but still important!) part of me that is against disclaimers.
I think Stefan is basically correct, and perhaps we should distinguish between Disclaimers (where I largely agree with Robin’s critique) and Disclosure (which I think is very important). For example, suppose a doctor were writing an article about how Amigdelogen can treat infection.
Disclaimers:
Obviously, I’m not saying Amigdelogen is the only drug that can treat infection. Also, I’m not saying it can treat cancer. And infection is not the only problem; world hunger is bad too. Also you shouldn’t spend 100% of your money on Amigdelogen. And just because we have Amigdelogen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful about washing your hands.
This is unnecessary because no reasonable person would assume you were making any of these claims. Additionally, as Robin points out, by making these disclosures you add pressure for others to make them too.
Disclosure:
I received a $5,000 payment from the manufacturer of Amigdelogen for writing this article, and hope to impress their hot sales rep.
This is useful information, because readers would reasonably assume you were unbiased, and this lets them more accurately evaluate how much weight to put on your claim, given that as non-experts they do not have the expertise to directly evaluate the evidence.
My current read is that the Fund is currently abiding by such disclosure norms, but that you were asking for repeated disclaimers. Like, it might make more sense in one place on the EA LTF Fund page for it to say what the disclosure policy is, and then for the Fund to continue to abide by that disclosure policy. This is different to repeatedly saying at the end of the writeups (4 times per year) “not only is it our public policy to disclose such info, but I want to repeat that we definitely disclosed all the things above and didn’t hide anything”. Which is a request that I think is important to have a schelling fence to not simply make every time people request it. Pretty sure the potential list of disclaimers it could be reasonable to make is longer than this round’s writeup, which is already 19k words.
I’m not sure Robin Hanson’s argument against disclaimers is relevant here. It seems to have more to do with disclaimers (whose purpose is to defeat possible implicatures) being stylistically objectionable and communicationally inefficient in blog posts and similar contexts (cf. his support of Classic style of writing). The grant writeup context seems quite different. (As a side-note, I’m not sure Hanson is right; he frequently argues people misattribute views to him, and I think that could in part be avoided if he included more disclaimers.)
Note that these considerations are not relevant to Michelle’s comment above; her arguments are quite different.
I think it would be helpful to establish a norm that people would remove themselves from investigations involving people they have a personal or professional relationship with (which to me means from being on first-name terms upwards or where there is a conflict of interest). Where that is not possible (eg because there would not be enough competent people to do the work) then it ought to be stated what personal or professional relationships exist—but I don’t think we need to know whether that relationship is going for the occasional drink or co-hosting weekly orgies...
It is admirably honest of you to highlight and address this, rather than hoping no-one notices.
Perhaps you could get the other judges to join you in a joint explicit declaration that you’ve never had any romantic or sexual relationships with any of the recipients? Would be good to put this at the bottom of the writeups.
edit: surprised people have downvoted this. To be clear, I was genuinely impressed that OP directly addressed this, even at the cost of drawing attention to it.
I haven’t voted on this post, but if I had to guess I’d expect it got downvoted because it strikes me that it would seem strange to have at the bottom of write-ups ‘none of us have romantic/sexual relationships with the recipients’. I wouldn’t expect that to be the kind of thing that ordinary grant makers would put on their write ups. I’d have thought it would have the following problems:
Personally, I’d find it intrusive to have to make repeated specific comments about people I was not romantically or sexually involved with (despite, in fact, being longtime married and monogamous and therefore always being trivially able to do so)
This would seem to either rule out a class of people for grants for whom it might be unfair to do so or force even more intrusive specific public comments (‘none of the judges have had relationships with any of the recipients except that judge A once slept with recipient B’). A better alternative seems to be to ask people to declare internally their conflicts of interest and have the person with the conflict of interest step out of the decision on that particular grant. (Incidentally, this harm would presumably disproportionately affect women, since the majority of the grant makers are men.)
I would expect the usual way to handle this would be to have a clear conflict of interest policy, stating in advance what constituted conflicts of interest (presumably family members, for example, would also be included) and what should be done in those cases.
You’re definitely right that most grant-making organisations do not make much use of such disclaimers. However, I think this mainly because it just doesn’t come up—most grantmaking occurs between people who do not know each other much socially, and are often older and married anyway.
In contrast the EA community, especially in the bay area, is extremely tight socially, and also exhibits a high level of promiscuity. As such the risk for decisions being unduly influenced by personal relationships is significantly higher. For example, back in 2016 OpenPhil revealed that they had advisors living with people they were evaluating, and evaluatees in relationships with OpenPhil staff (source). OpenPhil no longer seem to publish their conflicts of interest, but I suspect similar issues still occur. Separately, I have been told that some people in the bay area community explicitly use sexual relationships to make connections and influence the flow of funds from donors to workers and projects, which seems to raise severe concerns about objectivity and bias, as well as the potential for abuse (in both directions). I would be very concerned by either of these in the private sector, and see little reason to hold EAs to a lower standard.
Donors in general are subject to a significant information asymmetry and have few defenses against improper behaviour from organisations, especially in areas where concrete outputs are scarce. Explicit declarations that specific suspect conduct has not taken place represents a minimum level of such protection.
With regard your bullet points, I think a good analogy would be disclaimers in financial research. Every piece of financial research comes with multiple pages of disclaimers at the end, including a promise from the authors that the piece represents their true opinions and various sections about financial conflicts of interest. Perhaps the first analysts subject to these requirements found them intrusive—however by now they are a totally automated and unremarked-upon part of the process. I would expect the same to apply here, partly because every disclosure should ideally say the same thing: “None of the judges were in a relationship with anyone they evaluated.”
Indeed, the disclosure requirements in the financial sector cover cases like these quite directly. For example the CFA’s Ethical and Professional Standards (2016):
and from 2014:
In this case, donors and potential donors to an EA organisation are the equivalent of clients and potential clients of an investment firm, and I think a personal relationship with a grantee could reasonably be expected to impair judgement.
A case I personally came across involved two flatmates who both worked for different divisions in the same bank (Research and Sales&Trading). Because the bank (rightfully) took the separation of these two functions very seriously, HR applied a lot of pressure to them and they found alternative living arrangements.
Another example is lotteries, where the family members of employees are not allowed to participate at all, because their winning would risk bringing the lottery into disrepute:
This is perhaps slightly unfair, as they did not choose the employment of their family members, but this seems to be a small cost. The number of lottery family members is very small compared to the lottery-ticket-buying public, and there are other forms of gambling open to them. And the costs here should be smaller still, as all I am suggesting is disclosure, a much milder policy than prohibition.
I did appreciate that the fund’s most recent write-up does take note of potential conflicts of interest, along with a wealth of other details. I could not find the sort of conflict of interest policy you suggested on their website however.
At the level of generality where the disclaimer you’re asking for is more like ‘this represents our true views and we followed our conflict of interest policy on it’, I agree that sounds very reasonable.
I’m not convinced that the conflict of interest policy should be modelled on large financial institutions and lotteries though, given their huge sizes. As a small intellectual community, it seems that it would be far more limiting to simply rule anyone with any kind of relationship to any judge out of receiving a grant. I imagine this is more analogous to academic procedures around sub-disciplines. For example, in deciding who to invite to a normative ethics conference on contractualism, it seems unwise to say that no views can be given on people you have a personal relationship with, since there are few people doing tonnes of work on contractualism, and they would naturally often interact with each other and so are likely to friends in some form. It seems better to have some clear idea of when you have to declare what relationships and what measures should be taken in cases of which relationships.
I’m not sure what I think of this particular suggestion yet. I want to mention that I have principles that pull in two opposite directions—the large part of me that is strongly pro transparency, honesty and openness, and also the smaller (but still important!) part of me that is against disclaimers.
I think Stefan is basically correct, and perhaps we should distinguish between Disclaimers (where I largely agree with Robin’s critique) and Disclosure (which I think is very important). For example, suppose a doctor were writing an article about how Amigdelogen can treat infection.
Disclaimers:
Obviously, I’m not saying Amigdelogen is the only drug that can treat infection. Also, I’m not saying it can treat cancer. And infection is not the only problem; world hunger is bad too. Also you shouldn’t spend 100% of your money on Amigdelogen. And just because we have Amigdelogen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful about washing your hands.
This is unnecessary because no reasonable person would assume you were making any of these claims. Additionally, as Robin points out, by making these disclosures you add pressure for others to make them too.
Disclosure:
I received a $5,000 payment from the manufacturer of Amigdelogen for writing this article, and hope to impress their hot sales rep.
This is useful information, because readers would reasonably assume you were unbiased, and this lets them more accurately evaluate how much weight to put on your claim, given that as non-experts they do not have the expertise to directly evaluate the evidence.
My current read is that the Fund is currently abiding by such disclosure norms, but that you were asking for repeated disclaimers. Like, it might make more sense in one place on the EA LTF Fund page for it to say what the disclosure policy is, and then for the Fund to continue to abide by that disclosure policy. This is different to repeatedly saying at the end of the writeups (4 times per year) “not only is it our public policy to disclose such info, but I want to repeat that we definitely disclosed all the things above and didn’t hide anything”. Which is a request that I think is important to have a schelling fence to not simply make every time people request it. Pretty sure the potential list of disclaimers it could be reasonable to make is longer than this round’s writeup, which is already 19k words.
I’m not sure Robin Hanson’s argument against disclaimers is relevant here. It seems to have more to do with disclaimers (whose purpose is to defeat possible implicatures) being stylistically objectionable and communicationally inefficient in blog posts and similar contexts (cf. his support of Classic style of writing). The grant writeup context seems quite different. (As a side-note, I’m not sure Hanson is right; he frequently argues people misattribute views to him, and I think that could in part be avoided if he included more disclaimers.)
Note that these considerations are not relevant to Michelle’s comment above; her arguments are quite different.
I think it would be helpful to establish a norm that people would remove themselves from investigations involving people they have a personal or professional relationship with (which to me means from being on first-name terms upwards or where there is a conflict of interest). Where that is not possible (eg because there would not be enough competent people to do the work) then it ought to be stated what personal or professional relationships exist—but I don’t think we need to know whether that relationship is going for the occasional drink or co-hosting weekly orgies...
I downvoted the post for the reason Michelle specified, though I will second that I’m glad Oli took the time to point out the comment.