DMMF—I share your first concern, that many young EAs seem to have quite a bit of ageism, distrust of legacy systems, contempt for tradition, arrogance about being able to reinvent complex systems from first principles, and wariness of welcoming mid-career and senior experts into the EA community.
This youthful arrogance is partly merited. Traditional charity circa 2000 (before GiveWell) was an unaccountable, unempirical grift that was better suited to virtue signaling, status seeking, and wealthy in-group power games, than to actually helping people or animals. EA challenging this legacy system was entirely right, proper, and helpful. Consequentialist moral philosophy, sentientism (eg about animal welfare), randomized trials, cost-benefit reasoning, scope-sensitivity, etc were crucial and revolutionary developments at the foundation of EA.
However, applied to other domains, subcultures, professions, legacy systems, and cultural traditions, that youthful arrogance can be quite misguided. Especially in the domain of financial accounting, corporate management, and business ethics. SBF seemed to think that he could ignore all the accumulated wisdom of the past few centuries about how to run a company, and protect users and investors. The result was, from the perspective of experienced business managers, risk managers, and accountants, and highly predictable catastrophe (for anyone who actually knew the inner workings of Alameda/FTX).
So, one takeaway from this whole FTX debacle is that maybe EAs should be a little more selective about when to challenge tradition and try to reinvent things from first principles, versus when to respect tradition, expertise, and domain knowledge.
This is a tricky and delicate balancing act, but I think science provides an example of how to get that balance roughly right. Young scientists in grad school quickly learn that almost every new idea that they think is earth-shaking and ground-breaking was already thought about by the late 1800s, or 1950s, or whenever. With great scholarship comes great humility. Only after they’ve mastered a fair amount of the literature in some domain are they equipped to make even modest contributions at the cutting edge of thinking. And only in the rarest cases can a true genius overturn a major established paradigm.
The early EA geniuses managed to overturn the existing charity paradigm, and that was great. But with that initial success, we must be wary of developing a generalized hubris about overturning every tradition we see, and challenging every expert we meet.
This comment by Geoffrey Miller is one of the most insightful things I’ve read. I had a lot of these feelings, but lack the STEM background to say it as you have. EA did a great very specific thing, but then it went to their head and they saw themselves as able to do all things better. Hopefully this crisis will be the pivot where they see the difference and re-gather past collective wisdom where it’s still important.
And the fastest route to that is to bring in more seasoned veterans, just import the data straight in through their bodies in EA org’s.
DMMF—I share your first concern, that many young EAs seem to have quite a bit of ageism, distrust of legacy systems, contempt for tradition, arrogance about being able to reinvent complex systems from first principles, and wariness of welcoming mid-career and senior experts into the EA community.
This youthful arrogance is partly merited. Traditional charity circa 2000 (before GiveWell) was an unaccountable, unempirical grift that was better suited to virtue signaling, status seeking, and wealthy in-group power games, than to actually helping people or animals. EA challenging this legacy system was entirely right, proper, and helpful. Consequentialist moral philosophy, sentientism (eg about animal welfare), randomized trials, cost-benefit reasoning, scope-sensitivity, etc were crucial and revolutionary developments at the foundation of EA.
However, applied to other domains, subcultures, professions, legacy systems, and cultural traditions, that youthful arrogance can be quite misguided. Especially in the domain of financial accounting, corporate management, and business ethics. SBF seemed to think that he could ignore all the accumulated wisdom of the past few centuries about how to run a company, and protect users and investors. The result was, from the perspective of experienced business managers, risk managers, and accountants, and highly predictable catastrophe (for anyone who actually knew the inner workings of Alameda/FTX).
So, one takeaway from this whole FTX debacle is that maybe EAs should be a little more selective about when to challenge tradition and try to reinvent things from first principles, versus when to respect tradition, expertise, and domain knowledge.
This is a tricky and delicate balancing act, but I think science provides an example of how to get that balance roughly right. Young scientists in grad school quickly learn that almost every new idea that they think is earth-shaking and ground-breaking was already thought about by the late 1800s, or 1950s, or whenever. With great scholarship comes great humility. Only after they’ve mastered a fair amount of the literature in some domain are they equipped to make even modest contributions at the cutting edge of thinking. And only in the rarest cases can a true genius overturn a major established paradigm.
The early EA geniuses managed to overturn the existing charity paradigm, and that was great. But with that initial success, we must be wary of developing a generalized hubris about overturning every tradition we see, and challenging every expert we meet.
This comment by Geoffrey Miller is one of the most insightful things I’ve read. I had a lot of these feelings, but lack the STEM background to say it as you have. EA did a great very specific thing, but then it went to their head and they saw themselves as able to do all things better. Hopefully this crisis will be the pivot where they see the difference and re-gather past collective wisdom where it’s still important.
And the fastest route to that is to bring in more seasoned veterans, just import the data straight in through their bodies in EA org’s.
Jeffrey—thanks for your kind comment! Appreciate it.