-1 on this comment. In particular, being at CEA for 4 years seems like something which makes criticism more plausible. And it’s not surprising that EA has distanced itself from groups critical of us (while I have some concerns about Leverage, I think there are a bunch of ways that they’ve been treated unfairly).
Hard disagree on Leverage. They’ve absorbed a tonne of philanthropic funding over the years to produce nothing but pseudoscience and multiple allegations of emotional abuse.
I’m not saying Kerry wouldn’t know about this stuff—I think he likely does. I’m saying a) that he was one of the ‘top leaders’ he refers to, so had ample chance to do something about this himself, b) he has a track record of questionable integrity, and c) he has potential motive to undermine the people he’s criticising.
I think this comment is a pretty clear example of one way in which Leverage has been treated unfairly, which is that people lump “not very productive” and “abusive” into a single criticism. The latter is much more serious, but the former is much easier to quickly verify, and so the former ends up lending credibility to the latter even though I personally think we probably have too few groups taking philanthropic funding to do crazy research that may end up looking like pseudoscience.
To be very clear, I’m not claiming that Leverage was not an abusive environment, and I take the allegations you mention very seriously. I’ve just also seen people piling onto Leverage in not-very-careful ways that I’m not very happy about.
I’m not a fan of Leverage, but I agree with Richard here. I think Kerry is better modeled as “normal philosophy-friendly EA” with the modifications “less conflict-averse than the average EA” and “mad at EA (for plenty of good reasons and also plenty of bad reasons, IMO) and therefore pretty axe-grindy”. If you model him with a schema closer to “crazy cultist” than to “bitter ex-EA”, I expect you to make worse predictions.
I’m guessing I have a lower opinion of Leverage than you based on your tone, but +1 on Kerry being at CEA for 4 years making it more important to pay serious attention to what he has to say even if it ultimately doesn’t check out. We need to be very careful to minimize tribalism hurting our epistemics.
For what it’s worth, these different considerations can be true at the same time:
“He may have his own axe to grind.”: that’s probably true, given that he’s been fired by CEA.
“Kerry being at CEA for four years makes it more important to pay serious attention to what he has to say even if it ultimately doesn’t check out.”: it also seems like he may have particularly useful information and contexts.
“He’s now the program manager at a known cult that the EA movement has actively distanced itself from”: it does seem like Leverage is shady and doesn’t have a very good culture and epistemic, which doesn’t reflect greatly on Kerry.
So I would personally be inclined to pay close attention to his criticisms of CEA. At the same time, I would need more “positive” contexts from others to be able to trust what he says.
I agree that these can technically all be true at the same time, but I think the tone/vibe of comments is very important in addition to what they literally say, and the vibe of Arepo’s comment was too tribalistic.
I’d also guess re: (3) that I have less trust in CEA’s epistemics to necessarily be that much better than Leverage’s , though I’m uncertain here (edited to add: tbc my best guess is it’s better, but I’m not sure what my prior should be if there’s a “he said / she said” situation, on who’s telling the truth. My guess is closer to 50⁄50 than 95⁄5 in log odds at least).
I agree that the tone was too tribalistic, but the content is correct.
(Seems a bit like a side-topic, but you can read more about Leverage on this EA Forum post and, even more importantly, in the comments. I hope that’s useful for you! The comments definitely changed my views—negatively—about the utility of Leverage’s outputs and some cultural issues.)
I’ve read it. I’d guess we have similar views on Leverage, but different views on CEA. I think it’s very easy for well-intentioned, generally reasonable people’s epistemics to be corrupted via tribalism, motivated reasoning, etc.
But as I said above I’m unsure.
Edited to add: Either way, might be a distraction to debate this sort of thing further. I’d guess that we both agree in practice that the allegations should be taken seriously and investigated carefully, ideally by independent parties.
Mea culpa for not being clear enough. I don’t think handwavey statements from someone whose credibility I doubt have much evidential value, but I strongly think CEA’s epistemics and involvement should be investigated—possibly including Vaughan’s.
I find it bleakly humourous to be interpreted as tribalistically defending CEA when I’ve written gradually more public criticismsofthem and their lack of focus -and honestly, while I don’t understand thinking they’re as bad as Leverage, I think they’ve historically probably been a counterfactual negative for the movement, and don’t have a good sense of whether things have improved.
Thanks for clarifying. To be clear, I didn’t say I thought they were as bad as Leverage. I said “I have less trust in CEA’s epistemics to necessarily be that much better than Leverage’s , though I’m uncertain here”
As I understood it, CEA was originally just a legal entity to save 80k and GWWC from having to both individually get charitable status, though GWWC had been around in some form since maybe 2007ish, and 80k for a year or two (and Givewell, which had started about the same time as CEA and arguably has as good a claim to having started it had no formal association with any of these orgs). The emerging movement might have taken its name from the new org, or maybe just started using the phrase in response to the poll result.
At some stage IIRC, CEA started taking on more responsibilities and distanced itself, and eventually split from its child orgs. From that point on, I feel like they have generally not been well run—the staff seem to have been hired for enthusiasm and allegiance to the cause, and sometimes apparent nepotism (they seem to have hired internally for quite a few positions) rather than competence. As far as I can tell, staff have neither a carrot to motivate them or a stick: I know of only two examples of CEA employees being pushed out, one of who was CEO, and those were, as I understand it, for behaviour that was unambiguously termination-worthy (CEA may not want to disclose details of specific individuals being let go, and if that has happened those individuals might understandably not want to talk about it either, but the org doesn’t eg have a clear policy for expecting high standards). Meanwhile they run multiple programs, the nature of which is constantly changing and lacks meaningful outcome metrics, meaning both that it’s hard to gauge how well they do what they do, and hard for alternative organisations to offer them high fidelity competition.
(excuse all the self-citations—I don’t know anyone else who’s been publicly writing anything highly critical of CEA since the funds criticism, though I’ve had a number of conversations with people who’re also cynical about the org. I’ve been fairly reluctant go on record with these views myself, and suspect I’m harming myself in expectation by doing so, since I’m interested in doing future EA-funded work)
To be clear a) I don’t think all CEA staff have been bad—some I think highly of, the vast majority I have no specific opinion of, just that the overall org has generally functioned ineffectively, b) most of the specific actions I have in mind date back at least a couple of years, before Max Dalton became ED, and c) I had a recent conversation with him and gave him these concerns, which he seemed somewhat open to. So it may be that they’re in a much better state under him. But I’m also wary of under-new-management-itis, under which a nonprofit org can’t be criticised for a couple or years after a change—which potentially puts the org beyond reproach if it cycles EDs often enough.
But good on you for being brave enough to publicly criticise your funding sources (“I have received EA funding in multiple capacities, and feel quite constrained in my ability to criticise CEA publicly”) or people you like (“I like everyone I’ve interacted with from CEA”).
-1 on this comment. In particular, being at CEA for 4 years seems like something which makes criticism more plausible. And it’s not surprising that EA has distanced itself from groups critical of us (while I have some concerns about Leverage, I think there are a bunch of ways that they’ve been treated unfairly).
Hard disagree on Leverage. They’ve absorbed a tonne of philanthropic funding over the years to produce nothing but pseudoscience and multiple allegations of emotional abuse.
I’m not saying Kerry wouldn’t know about this stuff—I think he likely does. I’m saying a) that he was one of the ‘top leaders’ he refers to, so had ample chance to do something about this himself, b) he has a track record of questionable integrity, and c) he has potential motive to undermine the people he’s criticising.
I think this comment is a pretty clear example of one way in which Leverage has been treated unfairly, which is that people lump “not very productive” and “abusive” into a single criticism. The latter is much more serious, but the former is much easier to quickly verify, and so the former ends up lending credibility to the latter even though I personally think we probably have too few groups taking philanthropic funding to do crazy research that may end up looking like pseudoscience.
To be very clear, I’m not claiming that Leverage was not an abusive environment, and I take the allegations you mention very seriously. I’ve just also seen people piling onto Leverage in not-very-careful ways that I’m not very happy about.
I’m not a fan of Leverage, but I agree with Richard here. I think Kerry is better modeled as “normal philosophy-friendly EA” with the modifications “less conflict-averse than the average EA” and “mad at EA (for plenty of good reasons and also plenty of bad reasons, IMO) and therefore pretty axe-grindy”. If you model him with a schema closer to “crazy cultist” than to “bitter ex-EA”, I expect you to make worse predictions.
I’m guessing I have a lower opinion of Leverage than you based on your tone, but +1 on Kerry being at CEA for 4 years making it more important to pay serious attention to what he has to say even if it ultimately doesn’t check out. We need to be very careful to minimize tribalism hurting our epistemics.
For what it’s worth, these different considerations can be true at the same time:
“He may have his own axe to grind.”: that’s probably true, given that he’s been fired by CEA.
“Kerry being at CEA for four years makes it more important to pay serious attention to what he has to say even if it ultimately doesn’t check out.”: it also seems like he may have particularly useful information and contexts.
“He’s now the program manager at a known cult that the EA movement has actively distanced itself from”: it does seem like Leverage is shady and doesn’t have a very good culture and epistemic, which doesn’t reflect greatly on Kerry.
So I would personally be inclined to pay close attention to his criticisms of CEA. At the same time, I would need more “positive” contexts from others to be able to trust what he says.
I agree that these can technically all be true at the same time, but I think the tone/vibe of comments is very important in addition to what they literally say, and the vibe of Arepo’s comment was too tribalistic.
I’d also guess re: (3) that I have less trust in CEA’s epistemics to necessarily be that much better than Leverage’s , though I’m uncertain here (edited to add: tbc my best guess is it’s better, but I’m not sure what my prior should be if there’s a “he said / she said” situation, on who’s telling the truth. My guess is closer to 50⁄50 than 95⁄5 in log odds at least).
I agree that the tone was too tribalistic, but the content is correct.
(Seems a bit like a side-topic, but you can read more about Leverage on this EA Forum post and, even more importantly, in the comments. I hope that’s useful for you! The comments definitely changed my views—negatively—about the utility of Leverage’s outputs and some cultural issues.)
I’ve read it. I’d guess we have similar views on Leverage, but different views on CEA. I think it’s very easy for well-intentioned, generally reasonable people’s epistemics to be corrupted via tribalism, motivated reasoning, etc.
But as I said above I’m unsure.
Edited to add: Either way, might be a distraction to debate this sort of thing further. I’d guess that we both agree in practice that the allegations should be taken seriously and investigated carefully, ideally by independent parties.
Mea culpa for not being clear enough. I don’t think handwavey statements from someone whose credibility I doubt have much evidential value, but I strongly think CEA’s epistemics and involvement should be investigated—possibly including Vaughan’s.
I find it bleakly humourous to be interpreted as tribalistically defending CEA when I’ve written gradually more public criticisms of them and their lack of focus -and honestly, while I don’t understand thinking they’re as bad as Leverage, I think they’ve historically probably been a counterfactual negative for the movement, and don’t have a good sense of whether things have improved.
Thanks for clarifying. To be clear, I didn’t say I thought they were as bad as Leverage. I said “I have less trust in CEA’s epistemics to necessarily be that much better than Leverage’s , though I’m uncertain here”
I thought CEA started the movement?
As I understood it, CEA was originally just a legal entity to save 80k and GWWC from having to both individually get charitable status, though GWWC had been around in some form since maybe 2007ish, and 80k for a year or two (and Givewell, which had started about the same time as CEA and arguably has as good a claim to having started it had no formal association with any of these orgs). The emerging movement might have taken its name from the new org, or maybe just started using the phrase in response to the poll result.
At some stage IIRC, CEA started taking on more responsibilities and distanced itself, and eventually split from its child orgs. From that point on, I feel like they have generally not been well run—the staff seem to have been hired for enthusiasm and allegiance to the cause, and sometimes apparent nepotism (they seem to have hired internally for quite a few positions) rather than competence. As far as I can tell, staff have neither a carrot to motivate them or a stick: I know of only two examples of CEA employees being pushed out, one of who was CEO, and those were, as I understand it, for behaviour that was unambiguously termination-worthy (CEA may not want to disclose details of specific individuals being let go, and if that has happened those individuals might understandably not want to talk about it either, but the org doesn’t eg have a clear policy for expecting high standards). Meanwhile they run multiple programs, the nature of which is constantly changing and lacks meaningful outcome metrics, meaning both that it’s hard to gauge how well they do what they do, and hard for alternative organisations to offer them high fidelity competition.
(excuse all the self-citations—I don’t know anyone else who’s been publicly writing anything highly critical of CEA since the funds criticism, though I’ve had a number of conversations with people who’re also cynical about the org. I’ve been fairly reluctant go on record with these views myself, and suspect I’m harming myself in expectation by doing so, since I’m interested in doing future EA-funded work)
To be clear a) I don’t think all CEA staff have been bad—some I think highly of, the vast majority I have no specific opinion of, just that the overall org has generally functioned ineffectively, b) most of the specific actions I have in mind date back at least a couple of years, before Max Dalton became ED, and c) I had a recent conversation with him and gave him these concerns, which he seemed somewhat open to. So it may be that they’re in a much better state under him. But I’m also wary of under-new-management-itis, under which a nonprofit org can’t be criticised for a couple or years after a change—which potentially puts the org beyond reproach if it cycles EDs often enough.
But good on you for being brave enough to publicly criticise your funding sources (“I have received EA funding in multiple capacities, and feel quite constrained in my ability to criticise CEA publicly”) or people you like (“I like everyone I’ve interacted with from CEA”).
I really like this comment, and I agree with it.