Hi, I’m Max :)
working in AI governance (strategy, expert surveys, research infrastructure, EU tech policy fellow)
background in cognitive science & biology (did research on metacognition and confidence judgements)
most worried about AI going badly for technical & coordination reasons
vegan for the animals
doing my own forecasts: https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/110500/
Parents in EA ➔ Raising for Effective Giving
Skimming the comments so far, I’d appreciate if people would keep the “Be kind” part of the forum norm trifecta more in front of their minds:
Be kind.
Stay civil, at the minimum. Don’t sneer or be snarky. In general, assume good faith. We may delete unnecessary rudeness and issue warnings or bans for it.
Substantive disagreements are fine and expected. Disagreements help us find the truth and are part of healthy communication.
This post touches on topics that are very emotionally difficult and controversial for many. I tentatively recommend that if you’re very angry or upset, it might be sufficiently difficult to be civil and charitable such that you might want to hold off on immediately engaging a lot in the comments here. Maybe first:
share your thoughts and feelings with friends,
write down your thoughts and what you want to share in this forum privatly, and
wait at least a couple hours until you feel less urgently angry and indignant and only then share your thoughts here.
(I downvoted a few comments because I think they failed to be charitable and/or civil. But as I think this specific topic is very difficult to deal with, I hope the downvotes will not generally discourage people from engaging in this forum as I believe they generally come with good intentions.)
Hi Benjamin! I think it’s great that you want to support more people to work on the most pressing problems, and that you shared your plan about your project here for feedback. Thanks!
I have a lot of reservations after skimming this article, here three major and two somewhat less major ones:
I think leading a large effort of introducing and teaching EA principles requires deep familiarity with the EA philosophy. It worries me that you don’t mention your background with EA much in the reasons you’d be qualified, except your involvement with the Transhumane Partei Deutschlands, which (from my experience as a German community builder) doesn’t seem particularly involved with the German EA community.
Relatedly, as Yi-Yang mentions, it worries me that you didn’t immidiately consider reputational risks to the EA movement in your “What could go wrong” section. Advertising this project as “The first EA-University” (as you’ve done in the German EA Slack) will likely catch attention and be taken as representative of the EA movement. This is a consideration that I think would be very salient to people who have spend sufficient time engaging with the EA movement to be well-equiped to lead such an effort.
The four initial courses seem relatively odd choices to what I would expect from an effort to make people in their ~30s familiar with effective altruism: “Foundations of AI, How to manage the digital transformation, How to work in the world of “work 4.0 / new work” and How to manage innovation in times of emerging technologies”
This sounds more like a selection of courses for tech entrepreneurs. I suppose these are topics you are more familiar with / interested in, but I think it would be misleading to call something based on this “EA university”.
It’s weird to me that you call this a university, as you mention in the comments that it’s only supposed to last up to 16 weeks.
You write “As I own my own consulting company for ~ 2 years now, I know how to build a company.” I looked you up on LinkedIn and it seems like the company is only you and one relative, who started working at your company 4 months ago and immidiately went on a sabbatical. This made your statement feel misleading and overconfident to me, as I expect people to expect more than that level of experience and success when reading “I know how to build a company”.
What do you think of the idea to do a broad anonymous survey of women in EA regarding their experiences related to romantic and sexual behaviour in EA settings?
I imagine it could provide some useful information like
In what EA sub-communities it’s more or less prevalent (which would help with prioritizing interventions and potentially learning from sub-communities that might do a good job preventing issues)
If women have more or fewer bad experiences related to sexual and romantic advances in EA settings compared to similar non-EA settings
If women know who they can reach out to, and feel comfortable reaching out to those places
Potential difficulties
Identifying and reaching all women with relevant experiences might be difficult?
I assume there are some online groups for women in EA, and maybe orgs like Magnify Mentoring have a good network to share something like this?
Maybe one could ask respondents to share the survey with other women who they think have had relevant experiences?
Meal replacement companies were there for us, through thick and slightly less thick.
Thanks for writing this, I think this topic is worthy of more discussion.
Of course, this does not consider important tradeoffs, such as the potential for alienating other audiences. This will therefore be most useful to people whose primary audience is progressives.
I wonder how much we should even recommend leaning into the progressive/social justice framing when the audience primarily comes from this ideological bent.
I often find talk about privilege unproductive and used in a hostile/shaming kind of way and feel mixed about suggesting that this is part of the motivation of EA (which I prefer seeing as sth. like „we share the desire to help others and improve the world as much as possible“) and bringing more people with that mindset into EA
people that are not from the social justice bent might be especially worthy to attract in situations where progressives are the main audience, in order to gain intellectual diversity
If I’d read this testimonial on the local EA website, there’d be a solid chance I‘d have been significantly less interested because it doesn’t connect to my altruistic motivations and (in my head) strongly signals a political ideology.
For me, taking the Giving What We Can pledge was an expression of my commitment to using my class privilege to contributed to a movement towards a more equitable world for current and future generations
I think some points you mention, like highlighting more that aid recipients’ feedback is strongly taken into account, don’t risk turning off non-social justice people while still connecting to their motivation and worries, so maybe I’d wish to see more of that kind.
Fwiw, I’m active in the broader EA community for a couple years now (mostly in Germany & online) and your examples felt fairly foreign to me, and like I’d cringe if I heard somebody say them.
“You’re not really an EA unless you live frugally so you can donate a lot”
“I don’t think we should weigh people’s opinions too heavily unless they actually understand Bayesian reasoning”
“Real EAs are vegan”
Thanks for working on this, Holly, I really appreciate more people thinking through these issues and found this interesting and a good overview over considerations I previously learned about.
I’m possibly much more concerned than you about politicization and a general vague feeling of downside risks. You write:
[Politization] is a real risk that any cause runs when it seeks public attention, and unfortunately I don’t think there’s much we can do to avoid it. Unfortunately, though, AI is going to become politicized whether we get involved in it or not. (I would argue that many of the predominant positions on AI in the community are already markers of grey tribe membership.)
I spontaneously feel like I’d want you to spend more time thinking about politicization risks than this cursory treatment here indicates.
E.g. politization is probably not a binary, and I’d be plausibly very grateful for work that on the margin reduces the intensity of politicization.
E.g. politicization can probably take in thousands of different shapes, some of which are much more conducive for policymakers to still have reasonably sane discussions on issues relevant to existential risks.
More generally, I’m pretty positively surprised with how things are going on the political side of AI, and I’m a bit protective of it. While I don’t have any insider knowledge and haven’t thought much about all of this, I see bipartisan and sensible sounding stuff from Congress, I see Ursula von der Leyen saying AI is a potential x-risks in front of the EU parliament, I see the UK AI Safety Summit, I see the Frontier Model Forum, the UN says things about existential risks. As a consequence, I’d spontaneously rather see more reasonable voices being supportive and encouraging and protective of the current momentum, rather than potentially increasing the adversarial tone and “politicization noise”, making things more hot-button, less open and transparent, etc.
One random concrete way public protests could affect things negatively: If AI pause protests would have started half a year ago ealier, would e.g. Microsoft chief executives still have signed the CAIS open letter?
The recent discussions of harms caused by EAs vaguely reminded me of controversies around misbehaviour committed by leaders of Amnesty International. Very horribly, these apparently only came to light due to two suicides that were as I understand partially caused by workplace bullying at AI offices.
2019 report on workplace bullying
In February 2019, Amnesty International’s management team offered to resign after an independent report found what it called a “toxic culture” of workplace bullying. Evidence of bullying, harassment, sexism and racism was uncovered after two 2018 suicides were investigated: that of 30-year Amnesty veteran Gaëtan Mootoo in Paris in May 2018 (who left a note citing work pressures); and that of 28-year-old intern Rosalind McGregor in Geneva in July 2018.[91] An internal survey by the Konterra group with a team of psychologists was conducted in January 2019, after the 2 employees had killed themselves in 2018. The report stated that Amnesty had a toxic work culture and that workers frequently cited mental and physical health issues as a result of their work for the organization. The report found that: “39 per cent of Amnesty International staff reported that they developed mental or physical health issues as the direct result of working at Amnesty”. The report concluded, “organisational culture and management failures are the root cause of most staff wellbeing issues.”[172]
Elaborating on this the report mentioned that bullying, public humiliation and other abuses of power are commonplace and routine practice by the management. It also claimed the us versus them culture among employees and the severe lack of trust in the senior management at Amnesty.[173][174] By October 2019 five of the seven members of the senior leadership team at Amnesty’s international secretariat left the organization with “generous” redundancy packages.[175] Among them, Anna Neistat, who was Gaëtan Mootoo’s senior manager directly implicated in the independent report on Mootoo’s death. According to Mootoo’s former collaborator, Salvatore Saguès, “Gaëtan’s case is merely the tip of the iceberg at Amnesty. A huge amount of suffering is caused to employees. Since the days of Salil Shetty, when top management were being paid fabulous salaries, Amnesty has become a multinational where the staff are seen as dispensable. Human resources management is a disaster and nobody is prepared to stand up and be counted. The level of impunity granted to Amnesty’s bosses is simply unacceptable.”[176] After none of the managers responsible of bullying at Amnesty were held accountable a group of workers petitioned for Amnesty’s chief Kumi Naidoo to resign. On 5 December 2019 Naidoo resigned from his post of Amnesty’s Secretary General citing ill health[100] and appointing Julie Verhaar as an interim Secretary General. In their petition, workers demanded her immediate resignation as well.
(I likely won’t find time to do more here. :/ )
Amnesty hired the Konterra Group which subsequently wrote the “AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Staff Wellbeing Review”, which seems generally insightful and potentially applicable to EA on a very very quick skim.
Skim the report and extract useful lessons for EA.
Make a quick evaluation whether the report’s quality and value suggests that EAs might want to work with the Konterra Group to review the EA community:
KonTerra specializes in qualitative and mixed-methods evaluations and synthesis exercises for UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes (including WFP, OCHA, PBF, UNICEF among others) as well as other humanitarian and development clients. For more than ten years KonTerra evaluation teams—drawing on a network of more than 100 professional evaluators—have conducted over fifty evaluations and related assignments. Keeping each client’s purpose and needs at the forefront, KonTerra teams develop data collection, analysis and reporting methods best suited to answering evaluation questions. Stakeholders’ insights shape the evaluation during data gathering as well as through structured commenting on evaluation deliverables.
I probably suggest clarifying what you refer to with ‘his words’ here, as I’ve seen people both criticize his writing from 26 years ago and his apology letter for being racist, while I assume you only refer to his writing from 26 years ago?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to elaborate!
Two points of feedback on how EA Global is currently presented a little bit more like an event for the EA community:
“The conference is called “EA Global” and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere
This is the headline description from https://www.eaglobal.org :
EA Global is the conference series for the effective altruism community.
Our events are designed for community members who already have a solid understanding of effective altruism but would like to make new connections, discuss ideas, develop their skills, or move into new roles.
I think from this description I personally interpret more Scott’s caricature than EAG being intended as a high bar networking event:
“for the effective altruism community” → makes it sound like it’s a community event, which I’d expect to be inclusive
“community members who already have a solid understanding” → does not sound particularly exclusive to me
“make connections, discuss ideas, develop skills” → sounds somewhat vague and general for me, and “make connections” sounds to me like “connect to your fellow EAs”
Secondly, the first picture series on the website also makes it look to me more like a community event and less like a professional networking event. Half of them are photos of large groups and speakers. Only one of the pictures seems to be a 1-to-1 conversation.
Thanks for writing about this. This incident bothered me and I really appreciate your thoughts and find them clarifying. I also tend to feel really frustrated with people finding offense in arguments (and notice this frustration right now), just to flag this here.
To the extent that I support some of Hanson’s ideas and want to see them become better-known, I am annoyed that this is less likely to happen because of Hanson’s missteps.
I found it improper that you call it “missteps”, as if he made mistakes. As you said, openly discussing sensitive topics will cause offense if you don’t censor yourself a lot. You mention that his collegues do a better job at making controversial ideas more palatable, but again, as you suggested, maybe they actually spent more time editing their work. This seems like a tradeoff to me, and I’m not convinced that Hanson is making missteps and we should encourage him to change how he runs his blog to have a more positive impact. Not saying this is true for Hanson, but for some thinkers it might be draining to worry about people taking offense at their thoughts. I’m worried about putting pressure on an important thinker to direct mental resources to other things than having smart thoughts about important topics.
Some other relevant responses:
My current impression of OpenAI’s multiple contradictory perspectives here is that they are genuinely interested in safety—but only insofar as that’s compatible with scaling up AI as fast as possible. This is far from the worst way that an AI company could be. But it’s not reassuring either.
Zvi Mowshowitz writes
Even scaling back the misunderstandings, this is what ambition looks like.
It is not what safety looks like. It is not what OpenAI’s non-profit mission looks like. It is not what it looks like to have concerns about a hardware overhang, and use that as a reason why one must build AGI soon before someone else does. The entire justification for OpenAI’s strategy is invalidated by this move.
[...]
The chip plan seems entirely inconsistent with both OpenAI’s claimed safety plans and theories, and with OpenAI’s non-profit mission. It looks like a very good way to make things riskier faster. You cannot both try to increase investment on hardware by orders of magnitude, and then say you need to push forward because of the risks of allowing there to be an overhang.
Or, well, you can, but we won’t believe you.
This is doubly true given where he plans to build the chips. The United States would be utterly insane to allow these new chip factories to get located in the UAE. At a minimum, we need to require ‘friend shoring’ here, and place any new capacity in safely friendly countries.
Also, frankly, this is not The Way in any sense and he has to know it:
Sam Altman: You can grind to help secure our collective future or you can write substacks about why we are going fail.
Good point. Maybe the forum could introduce up- and downvoting restrictions until a new account has reached a few milestones, like being active for more than a month and adding comments with overall positive upvotes. This is how I remember StackOverflow handling this.
I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice
Would be interested in hearing more, like what those interviews were about and whether the interviewed people were mostly from the Bay area and/or part of the rationality community. Could imagine that I wouldn’t want to strongly extrapolate from those experiences to potential media interviews for learning about EA in Germany, for instance.
Hmm, so from my point of view this post is written with the intention to bring a class of interventions to the attention of people who care about mental health, which seems good to me.
I agree this post is not an impartial exploration, but I tentatively would like this forum to also be welcoming to new altruistically minded people who have a new idea about helping people, even ideas that are in their infancy in terms of the question whether it’s among the most effective ways to do good.
So instead of feedback that their initial thoughts don’t belong here, I’d prefer seeing feedback how they could find out how strong the case for their idea is, or interested people can share their thoughts about it themselves. E.g. point to studies of the mental health burden, maybe sketch how you might do a cost-benefit analysis of possible interventions.
High-Impact Athletes ➔ EA Sports for obvious reasons