aarongertler

• aarongertler 19 Jul 2019 12:14 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Why isn’t GV psychedelics grant­mak­ing housed un­der Open Phil?

  I can imag­ine a cou­ple of sce­nar­ios:

  a) GV asked Open Phil if they had the ca­pac­ity to look into psychedelics/​Alzheimer’s, and Open Phil said “no”

  b) GV asked Open Phil for shal­low in­ves­ti­ga­tions of those ar­eas, and the re­sults weren’t promis­ing enough for Open Phil to want to con­tinue, but weren’t so un-promis­ing that GV gave up

  c) GV has some re­search ca­pac­ity in­de­pen­dent of Open Phil, and de­cided to use it on these causes (maybe be­cause Dustin/​Cari see them as per­son­ally mo­ti­vat­ing/​”warm fuzzies”, even if they are po­ten­tially high-im­pact)

  ...there are plenty of other pos­si­bil­ities I haven’t had time to think of, but some com­bi­na­tion of (a) and (c) feels pretty likely to me. (This is en­tirely spec­u­la­tive; I have no spe­cial in­sight into the re­la­tion­ship be­tween GV and Open Phil.)

• aarongertler 19 Jul 2019 12:09 UTC

  3 points

  on: De­brief: “cash prizes for the best ar­gu­ments against psychedelics”

  After watch­ing the vot­ing un­fold, I think the iden­tity-poli­tics con­cern is real. Many com­ments were heav­ily up­voted soon af­ter be­ing posted.

  I’m not sure what timescale “soon af­ter be­ing posted” rep­re­sents here. Is your con­cern more along the lines of:

  (a) Peo­ple seem to have been up­vot­ing com­ments with­out hav­ing had time to read/​think about them,

  (b) Peo­ple seem to have been up­vot­ing com­ments with­out hav­ing had time to read/​think about your post and how it in­ter­acted with those com­ments, or

  (c) Peo­ple seem to have been up­vot­ing com­ments with­out hav­ing had time to read/​think about all the other com­ments up to that point?

  (Or some mix of those, of course.)

  I re­mem­ber tak­ing 5-10 min­utes to read some of the shorter ar­gu­ments, then up­vot­ing them be­cause they made an in­ter­est­ing point or linked me to an ar­ti­cle I found use­ful.

  It feels like peo­ple aren’t likely to spend more than 10 min­utes read­ing/​think­ing about a Fo­rum com­ment other than in ex­cep­tional cases, but per­haps there are ways you can en­courage the right kind of slow think­ing in con­test posts?

• aarongertler 18 Jul 2019 5:40 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla's comment on: Needed EA-re­lated Ar­ti­cles on the English Wikipedia

  From the edit logs: “al­most no unique, well-sourced con­tent here. Merged what was unique to GiveWell”

  This is the fi­nal note from an ed­i­tor who deleted the page. This was in early 2017; I’d ex­pect an in­de­pen­dent Open Phil page to make a lot more sense now (if they want one to ex­ist).

• aarongertler 18 Jul 2019 5:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ishaan's comment on: There’s Lots More To Do

  Drop­ping in late to note that I re­ally like the meta-point here: It’s easy to get caught up in ar­gu­ing with the “im­pli­ca­tions” sec­tion of a post or ar­ti­cle be­fore you’ve even checked the “re­sults” sec­tion. Many coun­ter­in­tu­itive ar­gu­ments fall apart when you care­fully check the au­thor’s data or ba­sic logic.

  (None of the points I make here are meant to ap­ply to Ben’s points—these are just my gen­eral thoughts on eval­u­at­ing ideas.)

  Put an­other way, ar­gu­ments of­ten take the form:

  • If A, then B

  • A

  • There­fore, B

  It’s tempt­ing to at­tack “There­fore, B” with anti-B ar­gu­ments C, D, and E, but I find that it’s usu­ally more pro­duc­tive to start by check­ing the first two points. Some­times, you’ll find is­sues that ren­der “There­fore, B” moot; other times, you’ll see that the au­thor’s facts check out and find your­self mov­ing closer to agree­ment with “There­fore, B”. Both re­sults are valuable.

• aarongertler 18 Jul 2019 5:07 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: avturchin's comment on: Cor­po­rate Global Catas­trophic Risks (C-GCRs)

  For those who haven’t read the Med­i­ta­tion, it’s a dis­cus­sion of ways in which com­pet­i­tive pres­sures push civ­i­liza­tions into situ­a­tions where al­most all of our en­ergy and hap­piness are eaten up by the scram­ble for scarce re­sources.

  (This is a very brief sum­mary that leaves out a lot of im­por­tant ideas, and I recom­mend read­ing the en­tire thing, de­spite its formidable length.)

• aarongertler 18 Jul 2019 4:51 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Ex­tin­guish­ing or pre­vent­ing coal seam fires is a po­ten­tial cause area

  I es­pe­cially ap­pre­ci­ate the “causal story” sec­tion of the post! I’m not sure I fully be­lieve the ex­pla­na­tion*, but it’s always good to pro­pose one, rather than hand­wav­ing away the rea­sons that a good cause would be so ne­glected (an er­ror I fre­quently see out­side of EA, and oc­ca­sion­ally in EA-al­igned work on other new cause ar­eas).

  *The part that rings truest to me is “no ready chan­nels for dona­tion”. Ig­no­rance seems more likely than de­liber­ate ne­glect; I can pic­ture many large en­vi­ron­men­tal donors be­ing asked about coal seam fires and re­act­ing with “huh, never thought about it” or “is that ac­tu­ally a prob­lem?”

• aarongertler 18 Jul 2019 4:49 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Liam_Donovan's comment on: Ex­tin­guish­ing or pre­vent­ing coal seam fires is a po­ten­tial cause area

  My im­pres­sion is that few peo­ple are re­search­ing new in­ter­ven­tions in gen­eral, whether in cli­mate change or other ar­eas (I could name many promis­ing ideas in global de­vel­op­ment that haven’t been writ­ten up by any­one with a strong con­nec­tion to EA).

  I can’t speak for peo­ple who in­di­vi­d­u­ally choose to work on top­ics like AI, an­i­mal welfare, or nu­clear policy, and what their im­pres­sions of marginal im­pact may be, but it seems like EA is just… small, with­out enough re­search-hours available to de­vote to ev­ery­thing worth ex­plor­ing.

  (Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the spe­cial­iza­tion that of­ten oc­curs be­fore re­search top­ics are cho­sen; some­one who dis­cov­ers EA in the first year of their ma­chine-learn­ing PhD, af­ter they’ve earned an un­der­grad CS de­gree, has a strong rea­son to re­search AI risk rather than other top­ics.)

  Per­haps we should be do­ing more to reach out to tal­ented re­searchers in fields more closely re­lated to cli­mate change, or stu­dents who might some­day be­come those re­searchers? (As is of­ten the case, “EAs should do more X” means some­thing like “these spe­cific peo­ple and or­ga­ni­za­tions should do more X and less Y”, un­less we grow the pool of available peo­ple/​or­ga­ni­za­tions.)

• aarongertler 18 Jul 2019 4:09 UTC

  3 points

  on: Please vote for AMF in Tab for a Cause.

  Thanks for shar­ing this re­source!

  In fu­ture posts like this, I’d recom­mend in­clud­ing a lit­tle more in­for­ma­tion about the vot­ing sys­tem. Does AMF need to win a ma­jor­ity of the votes to re­ceive any money? If so, how close is it to do­ing so? If not, how much money is a vote likely to be worth?

  (There’s a differ­ence be­tween tak­ing time to in­stall a new ex­ten­sion in or­der to give $50 in ex­pec­ta­tion vs. giv­ing $0.50 or $0.00 in ex­pec­ta­tion—the “zero” num­ber is pos­si­ble if AMF needs a thou­sand votes to win, given the small size of the EA com­mu­nity.)

• aarongertler 17 Jul 2019 1:11 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for May 2019

  After Ju­lia de­cided to step down, I pro­posed a list of six Fo­rum users who I thought might be good can­di­dates. She and I dis­cussed the op­tions and de­cided to be­gin by reach­ing out to Larks and Khor­ton, who both ac­cepted; if they hadn’t, I’d have ap­proached other can­di­dates who I be­lieve would also be solid judges.

  (There are many more than six con­trib­u­tors who I’d by open to con­sid­er­ing; the origi­nal short­list was just six peo­ple who quickly came to mind, among whom I ex­pected we’d get at least two “yes” re­sponses.)
  
  I wanted to start with a rel­a­tively small ad­di­tion, but there’s a good chance that the ros­ter will ex­pand later on. I can imag­ine get­ting up to a group of 8-10 peo­ple with­out the Prize be­com­ing too difficult to co­or­di­nate, and I also wouldn’t be sur­prised if peo­ple some­times joined up for a cou­ple of months and then stepped down, based on their available time.

• aarongertler 16 Jul 2019 22:59 UTC

  3 points

  on: In what ways and in what ar­eas might it make sense for EA to adopt more a more bot­toms-up ap­proach?

  What gives you the sense that there’s a lot of causal/​top-down plan­ning in EA? It may make more sense to ask: “a lot of causal/​top-down plan­ning com­pared to what?”

  On the one hand, the move­ment’s largest or­ga­ni­za­tions some­times recom­mend spe­cific courses of ac­tion; on the other hand, they also some­times recom­mend “keep­ing your op­tions open” and “stay­ing flex­ible”.

  Also, EA en­com­passes a huge range of char­i­ties that work on a lot of differ­ent things, and new or­ga­ni­za­tions spring up all the time. Over­all, even the largest/​old­est EA or­ga­ni­za­tions are still prac­ti­cally star­tups com­pared with most ma­jor Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions; they fre­quently make large changes to their mis­sion/​strat­egy on a year-to-year ba­sis, as the re­sult of new data or changes in the re­sources available to them. (CEA has done many differ­ent things over the last five years, GiveWell is un­der­go­ing mas­sive change, etc.)

• aarongertler 16 Jul 2019 22:50 UTC

  4 points

  on: Some solu­tions to util­i­tar­ian problems

  I en­joy posts like these, but it seems difficult to adapt to us­ing them when I’m ac­tu­ally mak­ing a char­i­ta­ble dona­tion (or tak­ing other sub­stan­tive ac­tion).

  An idea along those lines: Ex­am­ine the work of an EA or­ga­ni­za­tion that has pub­lic anal­y­sis of the benefits of var­i­ous in­ter­ven­tions (e.g. GiveWell) from the per­spec­tive of vari­able crit­i­cal-level util­i­tar­i­anism, and com­ment on how you’d per­son­ally change the way they calcu­late benefits if you had the chance.

  (This may not ac­tu­ally be ap­pli­ca­ble to GiveWell; if no orgs fit the bill, you could also ex­am­ine how dona­tions to a par­tic­u­lar char­ity might look through var­i­ous util­i­tar­ian lenses. In gen­eral, I’d love to see more con­crete ap­pli­ca­tions of this kind of anal­y­sis.)

• aarongertler 16 Jul 2019 22:41 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: RYC's comment on: Char­ity Vouch­ers [pub­lic policy idea]

  In­for­ma­tion that makes me lean to­ward “most giv­ing is lo­cal”:

  • In 2017, roughly 31% of all Amer­i­can dona­tions went to re­li­gious in­sti­tu­tions, and I’d guess that al­most all of that money was for lo­cal churches and mis­sions. Only 6% of giv­ing was in­ter­na­tional.

  • More than half of all an­i­mal-re­lated giv­ing goes to an­i­mal shelters (again, I as­sume these are mostly lo­cal shelters).

  • Many pop­u­lar giv­ing cat­e­gories are al­most ex­clu­sively lo­cal: Com­mu­nity cen­ters, food banks, mu­se­ums, char­ity hos­pi­tals...

• aarongertler 16 Jul 2019 22:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Char­ity Vouch­ers [pub­lic policy idea]

  I’d also pre­dict similar effects, though with a smaller mag­ni­tude, since some of the fund­ing will be chewed up by mar­ket­ing and pro­cess­ing costs for char­i­ties.

• aarongertler 16 Jul 2019 22:32 UTC

  3 points

  on: Philan­thropy Vouch­ers as Sys­temic Change

  Within EA, I’ve seen a cou­ple of ex­am­ples of limited voucher sys­tems (or sys­tems with some similar prop­er­ties):

  • Giv­ing Games give peo­ple the chance to al­lo­cate fund­ing to one char­ity out of a small group (usu­ally 2-5)

  • I’ve per­son­ally run a limited “dona­tion voucher” sys­tem on Face­book be­fore, offer­ing to donate a small amount ($50, IIRC) to any GiveWell char­ity on be­half of the first X peo­ple who took the offer (I think X = 5, but only three peo­ple ac­tu­ally asked)

  I’d worry about what the ex­is­tence of a voucher sys­tem might mean for char­i­ties that take more risks; if it were suffi­ciently well-funded, it could in­crease the at­ten­tion paid to the philan­thropic sec­tor and lead to many more fights over con­tro­ver­sial or­ga­ni­za­tions like Planned Par­ent­hood (or even some­place like MIRI).

  I also sus­pect that much of the best philan­thropy hap­pens through large dona­tions to lesser-known or­ga­ni­za­tions from peo­ple who have the time and money to con­duct re­search (e.g. the kind of work Open Phil does), and that peo­ple with less knowl­edge mak­ing smaller dona­tions might not make high-im­pact choices. (I think it’s very likely that a voucher sys­tem would in­crease the cor­re­la­tion be­tween char­i­ties’ spend­ing on mar­ket­ing and their dona­tion rev­enue.)

  That said, if some­one were to pro­pose a bill in the House that re­dis­tributed $25 billion in the form of $100 vouch­ers to ev­ery Amer­i­can adult for char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, I might sup­port it, as­sum­ing that the costs of the re­dis­tri­bu­tion/​voucher­ing pro­cess weren’t too high. The av­er­age char­ity peo­ple chose to sup­port (e.g. “buy­ing food for hun­gry peo­ple”) might still have more im­pact on to­tal welfare than the av­er­age use of gov­ern­ment funds.

• aarongertler 12 Jul 2019 8:50 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: beth​'s comment on: EA Fo­rum 2.0 Ini­tial Announcement

  Are there par­tic­u­lar in­stances of com­plaints re­lated to vot­ing be­hav­ior that you can re­call?

  I re­mem­ber see­ing a cou­ple of cases over the last ~8 months where users were con­cerned about low-in­for­ma­tion down­votes (peo­ple down­vot­ing with­out ex­plain­ing what they didn’t like). I don’t re­mem­ber see­ing any in­stances of con­cern around other as­pects of the cur­rent sys­tem (for ex­am­ple, com­plaints about high-karma users dom­i­nat­ing the per­cep­tion of posts by strong-vot­ing too fre­quently). How­ever, I could eas­ily be for­get­ting or miss­ing com­ments along those lines.

  Cur­rently, you can see the num­ber of votes a post or com­ment has re­ceived by hov­er­ing over its karma count. This does let you dis­t­in­guish be­tween “many up­votes and many down­votes” and “no votes”. Ad­ding a count of up­votes and down­votes would provide more in­for­ma­tion about the dis­tri­bu­tion of strong votes (e.g. one strong up­vote vs. sev­eral weak down­votes, or vice-versa). I can see how that could be use­ful, and I’ll bring it up with the Fo­rum’s tech team to hear their thoughts. Thank you for the sug­ges­tion!

• aarongertler 12 Jul 2019 8:39 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: RomeoStevens's comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, EA and be­ing a movement

  I didn’t in­tend it as a dodge, though I un­der­stand why this in­for­ma­tion is difficult to provide. I just think that talk­ing about prob­lems in a case where one party is anony­mous may be in­her­ently difficult when ex­am­ples can’t eas­ily come into play.

  I could try harder to come up with my own ex­am­ples for the claims, but that seems like an odd way to han­dle dis­cus­sion; it al­lows al­most any crit­i­cism to be lev­ied in hopes that the in­ter­locu­tor will find some fit­ting anec­dote. (Again, this isn’t the fault of the crit­ics; it’s just a difficult fea­ture of the situ­a­tion.)

  What are some EA pro­jects you con­sider “sta­tus quo”, and how is fol­low­ing the sta­tus quo rele­vant to the wor­thi­ness of the pro­jects? (Maybe your con­cern comes from the idea that pro­jects which could be han­dled by non-con­trar­i­ans are in­stead tak­ing up time/​en­ergy that could be spent on some­thing more cre­ative/​novel?)

• aarongertler 12 Jul 2019 8:34 UTC

  3 points

  on: Seek­ing EAs to In­ter­view on Ca­reer Change Resources

  Could you say more about yours and Vaidehi’s his­tory in the EA move­ment? What ex­pe­rience are you both bring­ing to this pro­ject that will help you make these con­nec­tions?

  (If you an­swer here, you may also want to up­date your Fo­rum bio!)

• aarongertler 12 Jul 2019 1:58 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: casebash's comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, EA and be­ing a movement

  Not a prob­lem—I posted the re­ply long af­ter the post went up, so I wouldn’t ex­pect you to re­call too many de­tails. No need to send a PM, though I would love to read the ar­ti­cle for point four (your link is cur­rently bro­ken). Thanks for com­ing back to re­ply!

EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for May 2019

• aarongertler 11 Jul 2019 2:43 UTC

  23 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity, EA and be­ing a movement

  I work for CEA, but these views are my own—though they are, nat­u­rally, in­formed by my work ex­pe­rience.

  ----

  First, and most im­por­tant: Thank you for tak­ing the time to write this up. It’s not easy to sum­ma­rize con­ver­sa­tions like this, es­pe­cially when they touch on con­tro­ver­sial top­ics, but it’s good to have this kind of thing out in pub­lic (even anonymized).

  ----

  I found the con­crete point about Open Phil re­search hires to be in­ter­est­ing, though the claimed num­bers for CFAR seem higher than I’d ex­pect, and I strongly ex­pect that some of the most re­cent re­search hires came to Open Phil through the EA move­ment:

  • Open Phil re­cruited for these roles by di­rectly con­tact­ing many peo­ple (I’d es­ti­mate well over a hun­dred, per­haps 300-400) us­ing a va­ri­ety of EA net­works. For ex­am­ple, I re­ceived an email with the fol­low­ing state­ment: “I don’t know you per­son­ally, but from your tech­ni­cal ex­pe­rience and your ex­pe­rience as an EA stu­dent group founder and leader, I won­der if you might be a fit for an RA po­si­tion at Open Philan­thropy.”

  • Luke Muehlhauser’s writeup of the hiring round noted that there were a lot of very strong ap­pli­cants, in­clud­ing mul­ti­ple can­di­dates who weren’t hired but might ex­cel in a re­search role in the fu­ture. I can’t guaran­tee that many of the strong ap­pli­cants ap­plied be­cause of their EA in­volve­ment, but it seems likely.

  • While I wasn’t hired as an RA, I was a fi­nal­ist for the role. Bas­tian Stern, one of the new re­searchers men­tioned in this post, founded a chap­ter of Giv­ing What We Can in col­lege, and new re­searcher Ja­cob Trefethen was also a mem­ber of that chap­ter. If there hadn’t been an EA move­ment for them to join, would they have heard about the role? Sev­eral other Open Phil re­searchers (whose work in­cludes the long-term fu­ture) also have back­grounds in EA com­mu­nity-build­ing.

  I’ll be cu­ri­ous to see whether, if Open Phil makes an­other grant to CFAR, they will note CFAR’s use­ful­ness as a re­cruit­ing pipeline (they didn’t in Jan­uary 2018, but this was be­fore their ma­jor 2018 hiring round hap­pened).

  Also, re­gard­ing claims about 80,000 Hours speci­fi­cally:

  • Get­ting good ops hires is still very im­por­tant, and I don’t think it makes sense to down­play that.

  • Even as­sum­ing that none of the re­search hires were coached by 80K (I as­sume it’s true, but I don’t have in­de­pen­dent knowl­edge of that):

    • We don’t know how many of the very close can­di­dates came through 80,000 Hours…

    • ...or how many ac­tual hires were helped by 80K’s other re­sources…

    • ...or how many re­searchers at other or­ga­ni­za­tions re­ceived ca­reer coach­ing.

  • Open Phil’s enor­mous fol­low-on grant to 80K in early 2019 seems to in­di­cate their con­tinued be­lief that 80K’s work is valuable in at least some of the ways Open Phil cares about.

  ----

  As for the state­ments about “com­pro­mis­ing on a com­mit­ment to truth”… there aren’t enough ex­am­ples or de­tailed ar­gu­ments to say much.

  I’ve at­tended a CFAR work­shop, a mini-work­shop, and a re­union, and I’ve also run op­er­a­tions for two sep­a­rate CFAR work­shops (over a span of four years, alongside peo­ple from mul­ti­ple “eras” of CFAR/​ra­tio­nal­ity). I’ve also spent nearly a year work­ing at CEA, be­fore which I founded two EA groups and worked loosely with var­i­ous di­rect and meta or­ga­ni­za­tions in the move­ment.

  Some be­liefs I’ve come to have, as a re­sult of this ex­pe­rience (cor­re­spond­ing to each point):

  1. “Pro­tect­ing rep­u­ta­tion” and “gain­ing so­cial sta­tus” are not limited to EA or ra­tio­nal­ity. Both move­ments care about this to vary­ing de­grees—some­times too much (in my view), and some­times not enough. Some­times, it is good to have a good rep­u­ta­tion and high sta­tus, be­cause these things both make your work eas­ier and sig­nify ac­tual virtues of your move­ment/​or­ga­ni­za­tion.

  2. I’ve met some of the most rigor­ous thinkers I’ve ever known in the ra­tio­nal­ity move­ment—and in the EA move­ment, in­clud­ing EA-al­igned peo­ple who aren’t in­volved with the ra­tio­nal­ity side very much or at all. On the other hand, I’ve seen bad ar­gu­ments and in­tel­lec­tual con­fu­sion pop up in both move­ments from time to time (usu­ally quashed af­ter a while). On the whole, I’ve been im­pressed by the rigor of the peo­ple who run var­i­ous ma­jor EA orgs, and I don’t think that the less-rigor­ous peo­ple who speak at con­fer­ences have much of an in­fluence over what the ma­jor orgs do. (I’d be re­ally in­ter­ested to hear coun­ter­ar­gu­ments to this, of course!)

  3. There are cer­tainly peo­ple from whom var­i­ous EA orgs have wanted to dis­so­ci­ate (some­times suc­cess­fully, some­times not). My im­pres­sion is that high-pro­file dis­so­ci­a­tion gen­er­ally hap­pens for good rea­sons (the high­est-pro­file case I can think of is Gleb Tsipursky, who had some in­ter­est­ing ideas but on the whole ex­em­plified what the ra­tio­nal­ists quoted in your post were afraid of—and was pub­li­cly crit­i­cized in ex­act­ing de­tail).

  I’d love to hear spe­cific ex­am­ples of “low-sta­tus” peo­ple whose ideas have been ig­nored to the detri­ment of EA, but no one comes to mind; Fo­rum posts at­tack­ing main­stream EA orgs are some of the most pop­u­lar on the en­tire site, and typ­i­cally pro­duce lots of dis­cus­sion/​heat (though per­haps less light).

  I’ve heard from many peo­ple who are re­luc­tant to voice their views in pub­lic around EA top­ics—but as of­ten as not, these are high-pro­file mem­bers of the com­mu­nity, or at least peo­ple whose ideas aren’t very con­tro­ver­sial.

  They aren’t re­luc­tant to speak be­cause they don’t have sta­tus — it’s of­ten the op­po­site, be­cause hav­ing sta­tus gives you some­thing to lose, and be­ing pop­u­lar and widely-read of­ten means get­ting more crit­i­cism over even minor points than an un­known per­son would. I’ve heard similar com­plaints about LessWrong from both well-known and “un­known” writ­ers; many re­sponses in EA/​ra­tio­nal­ist spaces take a lot of time to ad­dress and aren’t es­pe­cially helpful. (This isn’t unique to us, of course — it’s a symp­tom of the in­ter­net — but it’s not some­thing that nec­es­sar­ily in­di­cates the sup­pres­sion of un­pop­u­lar ideas.)

  That said, I am an em­ployee of CEA, so peo­ple with con­tro­ver­sial views may not want to speak to me at all—but I can’t com­ment on what I haven’t heard.

  4. Again, I’d be happy to hear spe­cific cases, but oth­er­wise it’s hard to figure out which peo­ple are “in­ter­ested in EA’s re­sources, in­stead of the mis­sion”, or which “truth-find­ing pro­cesses” have been cor­rupted. I don’t agree with ev­ery grant EA orgs have ever made, but on the whole, I don’t see ev­i­dence of sys­temic epistemic dam­age.

  ----

  The same difficul­ties ap­ply to much of the rest of the con­ver­sa­tion—there’s not enough con­tent to al­low for a thor­ough coun­ter­ar­gu­ment. Part of the difficulty is that the ques­tion “who is do­ing the best AI safety re­search?” is con­tro­ver­sial, not es­pe­cially ob­jec­tive, and tinged by one’s per­spec­tive on the best “di­rec­tion” for safety re­search (some di­rec­tions are more as­so­ci­ated with the ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity than oth­ers). I can point to peo­ple in the EA com­mu­nity whose longter­mist work has been im­pres­sive to me, but I’m not an AI ex­pert, so my opinion means very lit­tle here.

  As a fi­nal thought: I won­der what the most promi­nent thinkers/​pub­lic faces of the ra­tio­nal­ity move­ment would think about the claims here? My im­pres­sion from work­ing in both move­ments is that there’s a lot of mu­tual re­spect be­tween the peo­ple most in­volved in each one, but it’s pos­si­ble that re­spect for EA’s lead­ers wouldn’t ex­tend to re­spect for its growth strat­egy/​over­all epistemics.