CEO of Fairer Fields. I have a blog about nonprofit ops and strategy.
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, was the COO of Rethink Priorities, and was the Director of Operations at GovAI.
abrahamrowe
Karma: 7,020
Yeah, that’s fair — I guess I think that while posts shouldn’t be filtered on content ~at all, they should be moderated on stylistic things, and part of the reason I like rate limiting is that it helps people get used to what I view as good community norms (e.g. reasoning transparency, etc). So maybe that’s why I am more sympathetic than others to heavy-handed moderation.
I also found how they worked / what they were really ambiguous for a long time, so had happened to look into it at some point.
I agree!
I believe Renaissance Philanthropy isn’t exactly itself a funder or funded by any one donor, but is instead a collection of Funds, each of which have their own donors (and many of which are multi-donor), while RenPhil provides operational infrastructure. They have more information on the model here. So the question might be better targeted at the specific funds than RenPhil itself, and some of the funds do report their donors (e.g. see the bottom of this page).
I’m excited to see more diversification in the EA animal welfare funding space. Thanks for doing this!
(this is at −1 karma when I left this comment). I’m interested in why folks downvoted this? I understand disagree voting, but was surprised by the downvote, so would be helpful to hear your perspective.
This is not really directly relevant, but I feel somewhat confused by considering statements made during a trial as strong evidence of someone taking seriously the harm they caused (to be clear, you didn’t express this directly, but I’ve seen other supporters of this decision say this, and Caroline’s message suggests I should take her statements in the legal proceedings as evidence). Caroline was directly incentivized to both cooperate to make creditors whole, and to express regret and wrongdoing, because she would spend more time in prison if she did not do these things. I think it would be far more meaningful evidence if she had, for example, come forward and admitted to wrongdoing and helped right things when she did not have an incentive to do so (e.g. whistleblown before things blew up).
I don’t really think individual organizations have an obligation to protect the brand of EA as a whole, and ideally they just improve the brand of EA by doing good things themselves. But I’m a utilitarian, and I aggregate. I hope that you’re right that she’s an incredible hire, and the marginal value Manifund produces by doing this offsets the obviously very large costs the ecosystem will bear due to your decision.
Yeah, I agree with this. I do think the EA Forum still has decent posts, but the frequency is just declining a lot. I definitely think a huge part of this is that lots of former power users mostly do AI stuff now, and the Forum doesn’t seem great for AI discussion.
I agree this is playing a role—I think I feel a bit negative about this:
Substack posts seem on average lower quality than good EA Forum posts, and the Substack posts cross-posted here (mine included) seem worse than great EA Forum posts.
I think this is partially that Substack has worse incentives for quality (e.g. to post more).
Substack comments are lower quality by a large degree.
It’s harder to track ~all the conversation on a topic, which the Forum was nice for.
Maybe bringing back the EA Forum Prizes, to incentivize people to post (e.g. in the same way that building an audience on Substack theoretically could earn you money) would help?
I personally think rate limiting new users would be a good way to help with quality of new posts generally (e.g. maybe you can only comment, at some limited frequency, when you first create an account, and only make top-level posts either via mod approval, or if you hit some reasonable threshhold of comment karma from other people, demonstrating you write things others find valuable to read).
I’ve had a vague sense that the EA Forum is declining in quality posts/conversation despite having lots of posts, so had an AI tool (Astra) do a bunch of random analyses to look at various measures of activity level, and I think these vaguely confirm my sense. In particular, there has been a decline in commenting from higher karma users, and fewer posts are getting lots of upvotes, despite lots of people still posting. As a lover of the Forum, this seems bad and sad.
I’ve really stopped engaging with the EA Forum as much since the change, if helpful feedback. I’m not sure what to do about this, but I’ve found I no longer have a clear sense of “where conversation is actively happening”, and while I guess I can tell from the tab names if I’m in New or Featured, in reality I don’t pay enough attention and miss a lot of things. E.g. today I realized there was a post that didn’t get much attention that I never noticed that was relevant to me a week ago, and generally, I have a sense of “I can’t really tell what’s recent conversation” anymore, so I’ve stopped looking at the Forum as much because I don’t have a clear sense that I’ll see new and interesting things.
I see the upside of the change, but personally have found it hard to navigate the site since the change in a way that’s decreased my engagement.
Thanks for all you do to experiment and try to make it better! Appreciate how much you all do here to make the Forum useful!
Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level
I generally find AI writing just a bit annoying — I think I found this harder to read than it would have been even if written by a not-super-skilled writer, because it triggered a “Ah, AI writing” negative reaction I’ve developed (though I did push through it and found the critique interesting). I’m not sure what triggers this, but I think a big part of it is being verbose while not being super clear. And then it also stylistically just sounds like a lot of other writing that I see these days.
I’d be in favor of something like “>15 karma + many curated new posts by the moderation team” as Caleb suggested below as a filtering option to try to resolve the issue of people just filtering out 100% of new posts and new posts never rising. E.g. I imagine you all could often whitelist certain users or just glance at a post and tell that it is worth pushing through without reading it (and generally I feel pro-heavier moderation on the Forum especially if it is focused on maintaining quality).
I’m excited to see this happen! Some welfare tech ideas seem really promising, and I think this is clearly a promising project — it’s great that it’s happening.
My biggest areas of uncertainty about welfare tech (which overlap with some you flagged and some of which apply to only some technologies):
I think that these kinds of projects risk distracting donors because of the double appeal of impact + returns on investment.
I think cultivated meat and alternative proteins did this for the last decade, and a lot of money that might otherwise have been more effectively deployed was invested in unpromising companies and on an unpromising theory of change (and I think I am on record saying this at the time so am not just trying to claim retrospective credit!).
I think this was doubly true because if these companies were especially promising, they would (and did, at first) attract non-counterfactually valuable funding (e.g. non-EA venture capital, etc). I’d be very excited about welfare tech funded by non-EA money, and am moderately less excited about it when funded by EAs (though given that there is plausibly more funding coming online than can be spent effectively, this is less of an issue).
Jevons paradox just does seem challenging for this work — I think there are probably many technologies where it will be less relevant, but it seems plausible that most things impacting pre-slaughter mortality on farms will face it enough that it could be a significant concern for many interventions. Unfortunately, these might often be the best targets for welfare tech on fisheries and farms. I’m much more excited about slaughter-focused welfare tech for this reason, and am excited projects in this space are on your radar. But, slaughter tech seems less ripe for for-profits because there is less reason for producers to pay for it.
Animal welfare science is advancing at a pace far behind what we might need to make lots of welfare improvements. E.g. shrimp stunning evidence is incredibly thin, and the best, most recent evidence suggests that correct implementation really matters for whether or not we’re stunning or just electrocuting shrimp. I worry that accelerating tech before the science is settled in many cases risks just cementing further bad practices, and we’ll realize it too late. The companies being for-profits, because they can’t be reined in by funders if they are making a mistake, could make this worse (and I’m not sure of ways to design for-profits with strong mission-lock, outside of having their ownership run through a non-profit (which sometimes fails), and benefit corporations don’t really seem to work).
The best examples we have of welfare tech so far (shrimp stunning and in-ovo sexing) seem like they were driven by advocacy (or direct delivery), not for-profits. E.g. shrimp stunner deployment seems mostly driven via SWP just buying them for farms and then ICAW, etc. getting corporate commitments, not farms buying them themselves (even if later advocacy pressure started shifting that). Similarly, it seems like retailer commitments and policy were the initial major drivers in getting in-ovo sexing off the ground. I could imagine much of this work will be most effective when paired with appropriate advocacy to advance it.
Thanks so much for doing this! Seems like a great thing to try, and exciting to see the technology that will come out of it!
Thanks Michael!
I definitely agree—I have this sense of “am I complaining about something real, or is this just nostalgia for an inevitable change that comes with more funding?”
I also don’t really have good answers here on what to do about it. A slightly hesitant/low-confidence thought (because I’m recommending Continental philosophy on the EA Forum) is that I think Distinction is the best book for thinking about EA-as-a-social-scene, and think Distinction-y/Spheres of Justice-style interventions are probably going to be the best ones (reduce the number of spheres of power individuals have — i.e. try to not give people who have lots of financial resources greater cultural/social power, try to not give people who have cultural/social power lots of financial resources, don’t reinforce norms of “cultural elite” within EA in the pipelines for new people, etc). But I think this is quite hard to do, especially from the bottom up.
Hey! Apologies for the delay. You can support our work here. Thank you!
Thanks James! I liked the old piece. I have no idea how to handle the pay questions: I think my default answer is something like “pay people reasonably well such that they can save for retirement, have families, etc” but that view just collapses when you’re competing with the market in many ways. And I think the AI space feels it especially hard — they have to compete directly with labs for talent.
But yeah, I think I don’t really know how to sit with all of this. I think maybe it’s just a set of feelings I don’t want to be unsaid. But I also worry that things that have pushed the community to find really interesting, unusual opportunities have come from the community being narrow, high-trust, and high-truth seeking, which might change with the growth.
I definitely agree to some extent about FTX, though money did flow into some other spaces as well. But agree that I’m painting with too broad a brush there.
And definitely — I think I meant this post partially as a lamentation of what feels inevitable with funding. Our ability to make the world better might massively grow, but at the same time, it feels like something essential to EA’s past success (or at least, the culture and community that pushed it to do weird, fringe-y things that I think hold much of EA’s greatest promise) might be lost.
I think my main goal with this isn’t necessarily about restricting users, but having new users show that the understand community norms (e.g. about how to be clear about reasoning, etc) prior to posting. I agree filters might help too! (I left the downvote comment because I want to encourage people on the forum to be transparent about why they downvote, myself included).