I ran the Forum for three years. I’m no longer an active moderator, but I still provide advice to the team in some cases.
I’m a Communications Officer at Open Philanthropy. Before that, I worked at CEA, on the Forum and other projects. I also started Yale’s student EA group, and I spend a few hours a month advising a small, un-Googleable private foundation that makes EA-adjacent donations.
Outside of EA, I play Magic: the Gathering on a semi-professional level and donate half my winnings (more than $50k in 2020) to charity.
Before my first job in EA, I was a tutor, a freelance writer, a tech support agent, and a music journalist. I blog, and keep a public list of my donations, at aarongertler.net.
Note: I discuss Open Phil to some degree in this comment. I also start work there on January 3rd. These are my personal views, and do not represent my employer.
Epistemic status: Written late at night, in a rush, I’ll probably regret some of this in the morning but (a) if I don’t publish now, it won’t happen, and (b) I did promise extra spice after I retired.
It seems valuable to separate “support for the action of writing the paper” from “support for the arguments in the paper”. My read is that the authors had a lot of the former, but less of the latter.
From the original post:
While “invalid” seems like too strong a word for a critic to use (and I’d be disappointed in any critic who did use it), this sounds like people were asked to review/critique the paper and then offered reviews and critiques of the paper.
Still, to the degree that there was any opposition for the action of writing the paper, that’s a problem. To address something more concerning:
I’m not sure what “prevent this paper from being published” means, but in the absence of other points, I assume it refers to the next point of discussion (the concern around access to funding).
I’m glad the authors point out that the concerns may not be warranted. But I’ve seen many people (not necessarily the authors) make arguments like “these concerns could be real, therefore they are real”. There’s a pervasive belief that Open Philanthropy must have a specific agenda they try to fund where X-risk is concerned, and that entire orgs might be blacklisted because individual authors within those orgs criticize that agenda.
The Future of Humanity Institute (one author’s org) has dozens of researchers and has received a consistent flow of new grants from Open Phil. Based on everything I’ve ever seen Open Phil publish, and my knowledge of FHI’s place in the X-risk world, it seems inconceivable that they’d have funding cut because of a single paper that presents a particular point of view.
The same point applies beyond FHI, to other Open Phil grants. They’ve funded dozens of organizations in the AI field, with (I assume) hundreds of total scholars/thinkers in their employ; could it really be the case that at the time those grants were made, none of the people so funded had written things that ran counter to Open Phil’s agenda (for example, calls for greater academic diversity within X-risk)?
Meanwhile, CSER (the other author’s org) doesn’t appear in Open Phil’s grants database at all, and I can’t find anything that looks like funding to CSER online at any point after 2015. If you assume this is related to ideological differences between Open Phil and CSER (I have no idea), this particular paper seems like it wouldn’t change much. Open Phil can’t cut funding it doesn’t provide.
That is to say, if senior scholars expressed these concerns, I think they were unwarranted.
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Of course, I’m not a senior scholar myself. But I am someone who worked at CEA for three years, attended two Leaders Forums, and heard many internal/”backroom” conversations between senior leaders and/or big funders.
I’m also someone who doesn’t rely on the EA world for funding (I have marketable skills and ample savings), is willing to criticize popular people even when it costs time and energy, and cares a lot about getting incentives and funding dynamics right. I created several of the Forum’s criticism tags and helped to populate them. I put Zvi’s recent critical post in the EA Forum Digest.
I think there are things we don’t do well. I’ve seen important people present weak counterarguments to good criticism without giving the questions as much thought as seemed warranted. I’ve seen interesting opportunities get lost because people were (in my view) too worried about the criticism that might follow. I’ve seen the kinds of things Ozzie Gooen talks about here (humans making human mistakes in prioritization, communication, etc.) I think that Ben Hoffman and Zvi have made a number of good points about problems with centralized funding and bad incentives.
But despite all that, I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that the major EA figures I’ve known would see a solid, well-thought-through critique and decide, as a result, to stop funding the people or organizations involved. It seems counter to who they are as people, and counter to the vast effort they expend on reading criticism, asking for criticism, re-evaluating their own work and each other’s work with a critical eye, etc.
I do think that I’m more trusting of people than the average person. It’s possible that things are happening in backrooms that would appall me, and I just haven’t seen them. But whenever one of these conversations comes up, it always seems to end in vague accusations without names attached or supporting documentation, even in cases where someone straight-up left the community. If things were anywhere near as bad as they’ve been represented, I would expect at least one smoking gun, beyond complaints about biased syllabi or “A was concerned that B would be mad”.
For example: Phil Torres claims to have spent months gathering reports of censorship from people all over EA, but the resulting article was remarkably insubstantial. The single actual incident he mentions in the “canceled” section is a Facebook post being deleted by an unknown moderator in 2013. I know more detail about this case than Phil shares, and he left out some critical points:
The post being from 2013, when EA as a whole was much younger/less professional
The CEA employee who called the poster being a personal friend of theirs who wanted to talk about the post’s ideas
The person who took down the post seeing this as a mistake, and something they wouldn’t do today (did Phil try to find them, so he could ask them about the incident?)
If this was Phil’s best example, where’s the rest?
I’d be sad to see a smoking gun because of what it would mean for my relationship with a community I value. But I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find one anyway, because if my work is built on sand I want to know sooner rather than later. I’ve yet to find what I seek.
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There was one line that really concerned me:
“Lacking in rigor” sounds like a critique of the type the authors solicited (albeit one that I can imagine being presented unhelpfully).
“Harboring bad intentions” is a serious accusation to throw around, and one I’m actively angry to hear reviewers using in a case like this, where people are trying to present (somewhat) reasonable criticism and doing so with no clear incentive (rather than e.g. writing critical articles in outside publications to build a portfolio, as others have).
I’d rather have meta-discussion of the paper’s support be centered on this point, rather than the “hypothetical loss of funding” point, at least until we have evidence that the concerns of the senior scholars are based on actual decisions or conversations.