I agree Will’s made a bunch of mistakes (like yes CEA was messed up), but I find it hard to sign up to a narrative where status seeking is the key reason.
My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community leadership stuff, media, talk to VIPs etc. He often seems to do it out of a sense of duty (i.e. belief that it’s the most impactful thing). His ideal lifestyle would be more like being an academic.
Maybe there’s some kind of internal conflict going on, but it seems more complicated than this makes out.
My hot take is that a bunch of the disagreement is about how much to prioritise something like the instrumental values of conventional status / broader appeal vs. proactively saying what you think even if it looks bad / being a highly able niche community.
My impression is that you’re relatively extreme in how much you rate the latter, so it makes sense to me you’d disagree with a bunch of Will’s decisions based on that.
I agree Will’s made a bunch of mistakes (like yes CEA was messed up), but I find it hard to sign up to a narrative where status seeking is the key reason.
My guess is you know Will better, so I would trust your judgement here a decent amount, though I have talked to other people who have worked with Will a decent amount who thought that status-seeking was pretty core to what was going on (for the sake of EA, of course, though it’s hard to disentangle these kinds of things).
My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community leadership stuff, media, talk to VIPs etc. He often seems to do it out of a sense of duty (i.e. belief that it’s the most impactful thing). His ideal lifestyle would be more like being an academic.
I think this is a common misunderstanding in things that I am trying to communicate. I think people can optimize for status and prestige for many different reasons, and indeed I think “personal enjoyment of those things” is a decent fraction of the motivations for people who behave that way, but at least from my experiences and the books I’ve tried to read on adjacent topics, substantially less than the majority.
“This seems instrumentally useful” is I think the most common reason why people pursue prestige-optimizing strategies (and then having some kind of decision-theory or theory of ethics that doesn’t substantially push-back against somewhat deceptive/adversarial/zero-sum like things like prestige-optimization).
People do things for instrumental reason. Someone doesn’t need to enjoy doing bad things in order for them to do bad things. I don’t know why Will is pursuing the strategies I see him pursue, I mostly just see the consequences, which seem pretty bad to me.
I think this is a common misunderstanding in things that I am trying to communicate.
Thank you for clarifying. I do really appreciate this and I’m sure others do too.
But as it sounds like this isn’t the first time this has been miscommunicated, one idea going forward might be to ask someone else to check your writing for tone before posting.
For example if you’d asked me, I would have told you that your comment reads to me like “Will is so selfish” rather than “Will and I have major disagreements on the strategies he should pursue but I believe he’s well-intentioned” because of things like:
The large majority of the time when people say that someone harmed others for the sake of their own popularity, they’re accusing them of being selfish (so you should probably clarify if that’s not what you mean).
You choose status-related words (with the negative connotations I just mentioned) when you could have used others e.g. “being on book tours and talking to lots of high net-worth and high-status people” rather than “promoting EA books and fundraising” (for orgs like yours incidentally, although of course that ended badly).
It’s a long comment entirely composed of negative comments about Will—you’d forgive a reader for thinking that you don’t think there’s anything good about him. (I don’t think the context of being asked “What’s your issue with Will Mckaskill as a public intellectual?” would make readers think “Oh, I guess that’s the reason Habryka is only mentioning negative things.” This is not how professionals tend to talk about each other—especially in public—unless they really don’t think there’s anything positive about someone.)
Similarly, certain word choices and the absence of steel-manning give the impression that you don’t think Will has any decent reasons in favour of making the decisions he does (e.g. calling Doing Good Better “misleading” rather than “simplified” or talking about its emphasis on certain things or what have you, saying “He never comments on the EA Forum” even though that seems to be generally considered a good thing and of course he does a decent amount in any case, and in fact even now saying “I don’t know why Will is pursuing the strategies I see him pursue” rather than “I can see that he might think...”).
Similarly, you claim that he “didn’t do anything about” CEA’s problems for the “very long period of time” he was there (nothing? really?).
The use of accusatory language like “This feels to me very much like trying to get the benefits of being a leader without actually doing the job of leadership”—it’s hard to read this as anything other than an accusation of selfishness.
Describing things in an insulting way (contrasting WWOTF with a “sane way to think about the future”, calling CEA a “massive shitshow”, “expelling him as a leader” etc.).
Not specifying that you mean “intellectual respect” when you say “as far as I can tell he is actually just not very respected among almost any of the other intellectual leaders of the community, at least here in the Bay” (with at least one person responding with what seemed like a very broad interpretation of your comments).
I know a lot of people are hurting right now and I know that EA and especially rationalist culture is unusually public and brutal when it comes to feedback. But my sense is that the kinds of things I’ve mentioned above resulted in a comment that came across as shockingly unprofessional and unconstructive to many people (popular, clearly, but I don’t think people’s upvotes/likes correlate particularly well with what they deem constructive) - especially given the context of one EA leader publicly kicking another while they’re down—and I’d like to see us do better.
[Edit: There are also many things I disagree with in your comment. My lack of disagreement should not be taken as an endorsement of the concrete claims, I just thought it’d be better to focus this comment on the kinds of framings that may be regularly leading to miscommunication (although I’m not sure if I’ll ever get round to addressing the disagreements).]
For example if you’d asked me, I would have told you that your comment reads to me like “Will is so selfish” rather than “Will and I have major disagreements on the strategies he should pursue but I believe he’s well-intentioned” because of things like:
I am actively trying to avoid relying on concepts like “well-intentioned”, and I don’t know whether he is well-intentioned, and as such saying “but I believe he’s well-intentioned” would be inaccurate (and also actively distract from my central point).
Like, I think it’s quite plausible Sam Bankman Fried was also well-intentioned. I do honestly feel confused enough about how people treat “well-intentionedness” that I don’t really know how to communicate around this topic.
I don’t think whether SBF was well-intentioned changes how the community should relate to him that much (though it is of course a cognitively relevant fact about him that might help you predict the details of a bunch of his behavior, but I don’t think that should be super relevant given what a more outside-view perspective says about the benefits of engaging with him).
A few times now, I have been part of a community reeling from apparent bad behavior from one of its own. In the two most dramatic cases, the communities seemed pretty split on the question of whether the actor had ill intent.
A recent and very public case was the one of Sam Bankman-Fried, where many seem interested in the question of Sam’s mental state vis-a-vis EA. (I recall seeing this in the responses to Kelsey’s interview, but haven’t done the virtuous thing of digging up links.)
It seems to me that local theories of Sam’s mental state cluster along lines very roughly like (these are phrased somewhat hyperbolically):
Sam was explicitly malicious. He was intentionally using the EA movement for the purpose of status and reputation-laundering, while personally enriching himself. If you could read his mind, you would see him making conscious plans to extract resources from people he thought of as ignorant fools, in terminology that would clearly relinquish all his claims to sympathy from the audience. If there were a camera, he would have turned to it and said “I’m going to exploit these EAs for everything they’re worth.”
Sam was committed to doing good. He may have been ruthless and exploitative towards various individuals in pursuit of his utilitarian goals, but he did not intentionally set out to commit fraud. He didn’t conceptualize his actions as exploitative. He tried to make money while providing risky financial assets to the masses, and foolishly disregarded regulations, and may have committed technical crimes, but he was trying to do good, and to put the resources he earned thereby towards doing even more good.
One hypothesis I have for why people care so much about some distinction like this is that humans have social/mental modes for dealing with people who are explicitly malicious towards them, who are explicitly faking cordiality in attempts to extract some resource. And these are pretty different from their modes of dealing with someone who’s merely being reckless or foolish. So they care a lot about the mental state behind the act.
(As an example, various crimes legally require mens rea, lit. “guilty mind”, in order to be criminal. Humans care about this stuff enough to bake it into their legal codes.)
A third theory of Sam’s mental state that I have—that I credit in part to Oliver Habryka—is that reality just doesn’t cleanly classify into either maliciousness or negligence.
On this theory, most people who are in effect trying to exploit resources from your community, won’t be explicitly malicious, not even in the privacy of their own minds. (Perhaps because the content of one’s own mind is just not all that private; humans are in fact pretty good at inferring intent from a bunch of subtle signals.) Someone who could be exploiting your community, will often act so as to exploit your community, while internally telling themselves lots of stories where what they’re doing is justified and fine.
Those stories might include significant cognitive distortion, delusion, recklessness, and/or negligence, and some perfectly reasonable explanations that just don’t quite fit together with the other perfectly reasonable explanations they have in other contexts. They might be aware of some of their flaws, and explicitly acknowledge those flaws as things they have to work on. They might be legitimately internally motivated by good intent, even as they wander down the incentive landscape towards the resources you can provide them. They can sub- or semi-consciously mold their inner workings in ways that avoid tripping your malice-detectors, while still managing to exploit you.
And, well, there’s mild versions of the above paragraph that apply to almost everyone, and I’m not sure how to sharpen it. (Who among us doesn’t subconsciously follow incentives, and live under the influence of some self-serving blind spots?)
I personally have found that focusing the conversation on whether someone was “well-intentioned” is usually pretty counterproductive. Almost no one is fully ill-intentioned towards other people. People have a story in their head for why what they are doing is good and fair. It’s not like it never happens, but I have never encountered a case within the EA or Rationality community, of someone who has caused harm and also didn’t have a compelling inner-narrative for why they were actually well-intentioned.
I don’t know what is going on inside of Will. I think he has many good qualities. He seems pretty smart, he is a good conversationalist and he has done many things that I do think are good for the world. I also think he isn’t a good central figurehead for the EA community and think a bunch of his actions in-relation to the EA community have been pretty bad for the world.
This is not how professionals tend to talk about each other—especially in public—unless they really don’t think there’s anything positive about someone.
I don’t think you are the arbiter of what “professionals” do. I am a “professional”, as far as I can tell, and I talk this way. Many professionals I work with daily also communicate more like this. My guess is you are overgeneralizing from a specific culture you are familiar with, and I feel like your comment is trying to create some kind of implicit social consensus against my communication norms by invoking some greater “professionalism” authority, which doesn’t seem great to me.
I am happy to argue the benefits of being careful about communicating negative takes, and the benefits of carefully worded and non-adversarial language, but I am not particularly interested in doing so from a starting-point of you trying to invoke some set of vaguely-defined “professionalism” norms that I didn’t opt-into.
But my sense is that the kinds of things I’ve mentioned above resulted in a comment that came across as shockingly unprofessional and unconstructive to many people (popular, clearly, but I don’t think people’s upvotes/likes correlate particularly well with what they deem constructive) - especially given the context of one EA leader publicly kicking another while they’re down—and I’d like to see us do better.
The incentives against saying things like this are already pretty strong (indeed, I am far from the only person having roughly this set of opinions, though I do appear to be the only person who has communicated them at all to the broader EA community, despite this seeming of really quite high relevance to a lot of the community that has less access to the details of what is happening in EA than the leadership).
I do think there are bad incentives in this vicinity which result in everyone shit-talking each other all the time as well, but I think on the margin we could really use more people voicing the criticism they have of others, especially ones that are indeed not their hot-takes but are opinions that they have extensively discussed and shared with others already, and seem to have not encountered any obvious and direct refutations, as is the case with my takes above.
Personally I have found that getting too attached the supposed goodness of my intentions as a guide to my moral character has been a distraction, in times when my behavior has not actually been that good.
I’ve not looked into it in great detail, but I think of it as a classically Christian idea to try to evaluate if someone is a good or a bad person internally, and give reward/punishment based on that. In contrast, I believe it’s mostly better to punish people based on their behavior, often regardless of whether you judge them to internally be ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’. If MacAskill has repeatedly executed a lot of damaging prestige-seeking strategies and behaved in selfish ways, I think it’s worthwhile to punish the behavior. And in that case I think it’s worthwhile to punish the behavior regardless of whether he is open to change, regardless of whether the behavior is due to fundamental personality traits, and regardless of whether he reflectively endorses the decisions.
Ubuntu writes that they read Habryka as saying “Will is so selfish” rather than “Will and I have major disagreements on the strategies he should pursue but I believe he’s well-intentioned”. But I don’t Habryka’s comment to be saying either of these. I read the comment to simply be saying “Will has repeatedly behaved in ways that trade off integrity for popularity and prestige”. This is also my read of multiple behaviors of Will, and cost him a great deal of respect from me for his personal integrity and as a leader, and this is true regardless of the intentions.
Edit: So this has got a very negative reaction, including (I think) multiple strong disagreevotes. I notice I’m a bit confused why, I don’t recognise anything in the post that is beyond the pale? Maybe people think I’m piling on or trying to persuade rather than inform, though I may well have got the balance wrong. Minds are changed through discussion, disagreement, and debate—so I’d like to encourage the downvoters to reply (or DM me privately, if you prefer), as I’m not sure why people disagree, it’s not clear where I made a mistake (if any) and how much I ought to update my beliefs.
My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community leadership stuff, media, talk to VIPs etc. He often seems to do it out of a sense of duty (i.e. belief that it’s the most impactful thing). His ideal lifestyle would be more like being an academic.
This makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, and I’d be pretty confident that Will would probably be most effective while being happy, unstressed, and doing what he likes and is good at—academic philosophy! It seems very reminiscent to me of stories of rank-and-file EAs who end up doing things that they aren’t especially motivated by, or especially exceptional at, because of a sense of duty that seems counterproductive.
I guess the update I think ought to happen is that Will trading off academic work to do community building / organisational leadership may not have been correct? Of course, hindsight is 20-20 and all that. But it seems plausible, and I’d be interested to hear the community’s opinion.
In any case, it seems that a good next step would be to find people in the community who are good at running organisations and willing to the do the community-leadership/public facing stuff, so we can remove the stress from Will and let him contribute in the academic sphere? The EA Good Governance Project seems like a promising thing to track in this area.
I didn’t vote either way on your comment, but I take the disagreement to be people thinking (a) Will’s community building work was the right choice given what he and others knew then and/or (b) finding people “who are good at running organisations and willing to the do the community-leadership/public facing stuff” is really hard.
I agree Will’s made a bunch of mistakes (like yes CEA was messed up), but I find it hard to sign up to a narrative where status seeking is the key reason.
My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community leadership stuff, media, talk to VIPs etc. He often seems to do it out of a sense of duty (i.e. belief that it’s the most impactful thing). His ideal lifestyle would be more like being an academic.
Maybe there’s some kind of internal conflict going on, but it seems more complicated than this makes out.
My hot take is that a bunch of the disagreement is about how much to prioritise something like the instrumental values of conventional status / broader appeal vs. proactively saying what you think even if it looks bad / being a highly able niche community.
My impression is that you’re relatively extreme in how much you rate the latter, so it makes sense to me you’d disagree with a bunch of Will’s decisions based on that.
My guess is you know Will better, so I would trust your judgement here a decent amount, though I have talked to other people who have worked with Will a decent amount who thought that status-seeking was pretty core to what was going on (for the sake of EA, of course, though it’s hard to disentangle these kinds of things).
I think this is a common misunderstanding in things that I am trying to communicate. I think people can optimize for status and prestige for many different reasons, and indeed I think “personal enjoyment of those things” is a decent fraction of the motivations for people who behave that way, but at least from my experiences and the books I’ve tried to read on adjacent topics, substantially less than the majority.
“This seems instrumentally useful” is I think the most common reason why people pursue prestige-optimizing strategies (and then having some kind of decision-theory or theory of ethics that doesn’t substantially push-back against somewhat deceptive/adversarial/zero-sum like things like prestige-optimization).
People do things for instrumental reason. Someone doesn’t need to enjoy doing bad things in order for them to do bad things. I don’t know why Will is pursuing the strategies I see him pursue, I mostly just see the consequences, which seem pretty bad to me.
Thank you for clarifying. I do really appreciate this and I’m sure others do too.
But as it sounds like this isn’t the first time this has been miscommunicated, one idea going forward might be to ask someone else to check your writing for tone before posting.
For example if you’d asked me, I would have told you that your comment reads to me like “Will is so selfish” rather than “Will and I have major disagreements on the strategies he should pursue but I believe he’s well-intentioned” because of things like:
The large majority of the time when people say that someone harmed others for the sake of their own popularity, they’re accusing them of being selfish (so you should probably clarify if that’s not what you mean).
You choose status-related words (with the negative connotations I just mentioned) when you could have used others e.g. “being on book tours and talking to lots of high net-worth and high-status people” rather than “promoting EA books and fundraising” (for orgs like yours incidentally, although of course that ended badly).
It’s a long comment entirely composed of negative comments about Will—you’d forgive a reader for thinking that you don’t think there’s anything good about him. (I don’t think the context of being asked “What’s your issue with Will Mckaskill as a public intellectual?” would make readers think “Oh, I guess that’s the reason Habryka is only mentioning negative things.” This is not how professionals tend to talk about each other—especially in public—unless they really don’t think there’s anything positive about someone.)
Similarly, certain word choices and the absence of steel-manning give the impression that you don’t think Will has any decent reasons in favour of making the decisions he does (e.g. calling Doing Good Better “misleading” rather than “simplified” or talking about its emphasis on certain things or what have you, saying “He never comments on the EA Forum” even though that seems to be generally considered a good thing and of course he does a decent amount in any case, and in fact even now saying “I don’t know why Will is pursuing the strategies I see him pursue” rather than “I can see that he might think...”).
Similarly, you claim that he “didn’t do anything about” CEA’s problems for the “very long period of time” he was there (nothing? really?).
The use of accusatory language like “This feels to me very much like trying to get the benefits of being a leader without actually doing the job of leadership”—it’s hard to read this as anything other than an accusation of selfishness.
Describing things in an insulting way (contrasting WWOTF with a “sane way to think about the future”, calling CEA a “massive shitshow”, “expelling him as a leader” etc.).
Not specifying that you mean “intellectual respect” when you say “as far as I can tell he is actually just not very respected among almost any of the other intellectual leaders of the community, at least here in the Bay” (with at least one person responding with what seemed like a very broad interpretation of your comments).
I know a lot of people are hurting right now and I know that EA and especially rationalist culture is unusually public and brutal when it comes to feedback. But my sense is that the kinds of things I’ve mentioned above resulted in a comment that came across as shockingly unprofessional and unconstructive to many people (popular, clearly, but I don’t think people’s upvotes/likes correlate particularly well with what they deem constructive) - especially given the context of one EA leader publicly kicking another while they’re down—and I’d like to see us do better.
[Edit: There are also many things I disagree with in your comment. My lack of disagreement should not be taken as an endorsement of the concrete claims, I just thought it’d be better to focus this comment on the kinds of framings that may be regularly leading to miscommunication (although I’m not sure if I’ll ever get round to addressing the disagreements).]
I am actively trying to avoid relying on concepts like “well-intentioned”, and I don’t know whether he is well-intentioned, and as such saying “but I believe he’s well-intentioned” would be inaccurate (and also actively distract from my central point).
Like, I think it’s quite plausible Sam Bankman Fried was also well-intentioned. I do honestly feel confused enough about how people treat “well-intentionedness” that I don’t really know how to communicate around this topic.
I don’t think whether SBF was well-intentioned changes how the community should relate to him that much (though it is of course a cognitively relevant fact about him that might help you predict the details of a bunch of his behavior, but I don’t think that should be super relevant given what a more outside-view perspective says about the benefits of engaging with him).
The best resource I know on this is Nate’s most recent post: “Enemies vs. Malefactors”:
I personally have found that focusing the conversation on whether someone was “well-intentioned” is usually pretty counterproductive. Almost no one is fully ill-intentioned towards other people. People have a story in their head for why what they are doing is good and fair. It’s not like it never happens, but I have never encountered a case within the EA or Rationality community, of someone who has caused harm and also didn’t have a compelling inner-narrative for why they were actually well-intentioned.
I don’t know what is going on inside of Will. I think he has many good qualities. He seems pretty smart, he is a good conversationalist and he has done many things that I do think are good for the world. I also think he isn’t a good central figurehead for the EA community and think a bunch of his actions in-relation to the EA community have been pretty bad for the world.
I don’t think you are the arbiter of what “professionals” do. I am a “professional”, as far as I can tell, and I talk this way. Many professionals I work with daily also communicate more like this. My guess is you are overgeneralizing from a specific culture you are familiar with, and I feel like your comment is trying to create some kind of implicit social consensus against my communication norms by invoking some greater “professionalism” authority, which doesn’t seem great to me.
I am happy to argue the benefits of being careful about communicating negative takes, and the benefits of carefully worded and non-adversarial language, but I am not particularly interested in doing so from a starting-point of you trying to invoke some set of vaguely-defined “professionalism” norms that I didn’t opt-into.
The incentives against saying things like this are already pretty strong (indeed, I am far from the only person having roughly this set of opinions, though I do appear to be the only person who has communicated them at all to the broader EA community, despite this seeming of really quite high relevance to a lot of the community that has less access to the details of what is happening in EA than the leadership).
I do think there are bad incentives in this vicinity which result in everyone shit-talking each other all the time as well, but I think on the margin we could really use more people voicing the criticism they have of others, especially ones that are indeed not their hot-takes but are opinions that they have extensively discussed and shared with others already, and seem to have not encountered any obvious and direct refutations, as is the case with my takes above.
Personally I have found that getting too attached the supposed goodness of my intentions as a guide to my moral character has been a distraction, in times when my behavior has not actually been that good.
I’ve not looked into it in great detail, but I think of it as a classically Christian idea to try to evaluate if someone is a good or a bad person internally, and give reward/punishment based on that. In contrast, I believe it’s mostly better to punish people based on their behavior, often regardless of whether you judge them to internally be ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’. If MacAskill has repeatedly executed a lot of damaging prestige-seeking strategies and behaved in selfish ways, I think it’s worthwhile to punish the behavior. And in that case I think it’s worthwhile to punish the behavior regardless of whether he is open to change, regardless of whether the behavior is due to fundamental personality traits, and regardless of whether he reflectively endorses the decisions.
Ubuntu writes that they read Habryka as saying “Will is so selfish” rather than “Will and I have major disagreements on the strategies he should pursue but I believe he’s well-intentioned”. But I don’t Habryka’s comment to be saying either of these. I read the comment to simply be saying “Will has repeatedly behaved in ways that trade off integrity for popularity and prestige”. This is also my read of multiple behaviors of Will, and cost him a great deal of respect from me for his personal integrity and as a leader, and this is true regardless of the intentions.
Edit: So this has got a very negative reaction, including (I think) multiple strong disagreevotes. I notice I’m a bit confused why, I don’t recognise anything in the post that is beyond the pale? Maybe people think I’m piling on or trying to persuade rather than inform, though I may well have got the balance wrong. Minds are changed through discussion, disagreement, and debate—so I’d like to encourage the downvoters to reply (or DM me privately, if you prefer), as I’m not sure why people disagree, it’s not clear where I made a mistake (if any) and how much I ought to update my beliefs.
This makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, and I’d be pretty confident that Will would probably be most effective while being happy, unstressed, and doing what he likes and is good at—academic philosophy! It seems very reminiscent to me of stories of rank-and-file EAs who end up doing things that they aren’t especially motivated by, or especially exceptional at, because of a sense of duty that seems counterproductive.
I guess the update I think ought to happen is that Will trading off academic work to do community building / organisational leadership may not have been correct? Of course, hindsight is 20-20 and all that. But it seems plausible, and I’d be interested to hear the community’s opinion.
In any case, it seems that a good next step would be to find people in the community who are good at running organisations and willing to the do the community-leadership/public facing stuff, so we can remove the stress from Will and let him contribute in the academic sphere? The EA Good Governance Project seems like a promising thing to track in this area.
I didn’t vote either way on your comment, but I take the disagreement to be people thinking (a) Will’s community building work was the right choice given what he and others knew then and/or (b) finding people “who are good at running organisations and willing to the do the community-leadership/public facing stuff” is really hard.