AGB 🔸

Karma: 3,739

AGB 🔸Oct 18, 2024, 9:58 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
For the record, I have a few places I think EA is burning >$30m per year, not that AW is actually one of them. Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears? Though unsurprisingly they don’t agree about where the money is getting burned..

So from where I stand I don’t recognise your guess of how people respond to that situation. A few things I believe that might help explain the difference:
1. Most of the money is directed by people who don’t read or otherwise have a fairly low opinion of the forum.
2. Posting on the forum is ‘not for the faint of heart’.
3. On the occasion that I have dug into past forum prioritisation posts that were well-received, I generally find them seriously flawed or otherwise uncompelling. I have no particular reason to be sad about (1).
4. People are often aware that there’s an ‘other side’ that strongly disagrees with their disagreement and will push back hard, so they correctly choose not to waste our collective resources in a mud-slinging match.
I don’t expect to have capacity to engage further here, but if further discussion suggests that one of the above is a particularly surprising claim, I may consider writing it up in more detail in future.

AGB 🔸Oct 18, 2024, 9:45 PM
11 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
If you weigh desires/preferences by attention or their effects on attention (e.g. motivational salience), then the fact that intense suffering is so disruptive and would take priority over attention to other things in your life means it would matter a lot.
Recently I failed to complete a dental procedure because I kept flinching whenever the dentist hit a particularly sensitive spot. They needed me to stay still. I promise you I would have preferred to stay still, not least because what ended up happening was I had to have it redone and endured more pain overall. My forebrain understood this, my hindbrain is dumb.
(FWIW the dentist was very understanding, and apologetic that the anesthetic didn’t do its job. I did not get the impression that my failure was unusual given that.)
When I talk about suffering disrupting enjoyment of non-hedonic goods I mean something like that flinch; a forced ‘eliminate the pain!’ response that likely made good sense back in the ancestral environment, but not a choice or preference in the usual sense of that term. This is particularly easy to see in cases like my flinch where the hindbrain’s ‘preference’ is self-defeating, but I would make similar observations in some other cases, e.g. addiction.
If you don’t weigh desires by attention or their effects on attention, I don’t see how you can ground interpersonal utility comparisons at all
I don’t quite see what you’re driving at with this line of argument.
I can see how being able to firmly ‘ground’ things is a nice/helpful property for an theory of ‘what is good?’ to have. I like being able to quantify things too. But to imply that measuring good must be this way seems like a case of succumbing to the Streetlight Effect, or perhaps even the McNamara fallacy if you then downgrade other conceptions of good in the style of below quote.
Put another way, it seems like you prefer to weight by attention because it makes answers easier to find, but what if such answers are just difficult to find?
The fact that ‘what is good?’ has been debated for literally millenia with no resolution in sight suggests to me that it just is difficult to find, in the same way that after some amount of time you should acknowledge your keys just aren’t under the streetlight.
But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist.
To avoid the above pitfall, which I think all STEM types should keep in mind, when I suspect my numbers are failing to capture the (morally) important things my default response is to revert in the direction of Common sense (morality). I think STEM people who fail to check themselves this way often end up causing serious harm^[1]. In this case that would make me less inclined to trade human lives for aminal welfare, not more.
I’ll probably leave this post at this point unless I see a pressing need for further clarification of my views. I do appreciate you taking the time to engage politely.
1. ^
  SBF is the obvious example here, but really I’ve seen this so often in EA. Big fan of Warren Buffet’s quote here:
  It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.

AGB 🔸Oct 17, 2024, 8:40 AM
43 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
Hi Michael,
Sorry for putting off responding to this. I wrote this post quickly on a Sunday night, so naturally work got in the way of spending the time to put this together. Also, I just expect people to get very upset with me here regardless of what I say, which I understand—from their point of view I’m potentially causing a lot of harm—but naturally causes procrastination.
I still don’t have a comprehensive response, but I think there are now a few things I can flag for where I’m diverging here. I found titotal’s post helpful for establishing the starting point under hedonism:
For the intervention of cage free campaigns, using RP’s moral weights, the intervention saves 1996 DALY’s per thousand dollars, about a 100 times as effective as AMF.
However, even before we get into moral uncertainty I think this still overstates the case:
1. Animal welfare (AW) interventions are much less robust than the Global Health and Development (GHD) interventions animal welfare advocates tend to compare them to. Most of them are fundamentally advocacy interventions, which I think advocates tend to overrate heavily.
  
  How to deal with such uncertainty has been the topic of much debate, which I can’t do justice to here. But one thing I try to do is compare apples-to-apples for robustness where possible; if I relax my standards for robustness and look at advocacy, how much more estimated cost-effectiveness do I get in the GHD space? Conveniently, I currently donate to Giving What We Can as ‘Effective Giving Advocacy’ and have looked into their forward-looking marginal multiplier a fair bit; I think it’s about 10x. Joel Tan looked and concluded 13x. I’ve checked with others who have looked at GWWC in detail; they’re also around there. I’ve also seen 5x-20x claims for things like lead elimination advocacy, but I haven’t looked into those claims in nearly as much detail.
  
  Overall I think that if you’re comfortable donating to animal welfare interventions, comparing to AMF/Givewell ‘Top Charities’ is just a mistake; you should be comparing to the actual best GHD interventions under your tolerance for shaky evidence, which will have estimated cost-effectiveness 10x higher or possibly even more.
  Also, I subjectively feel like AW is quite a bit less robust than even GHD advocacy; there’s a robustness issue from advocacy in both cases, but AW also really struggles with a lack of feedback loops—we can’t ask the animals how they feel—and so I think is much more likely to end up causing harm on its own terms. I don’t know how to quantify this issue, and it doesn’t seem like a huge issue for cage-free specifically, so will set this aside. Back when AW interventions were more about trying to end factory farming rather than improving conditions on factory farms it did worry me quite a bit.
2. As I noted in my comment under that post, Open Phil thinks the marginal FAW opportunity going forward is around 20% of Saulius, not 60% of Saulius; I haven’t seen anything that would cause me to argue with them on this, and this cuts the gap by 3x.
3. Another issue is around ‘pay it forward’ or ‘ripple’ effects, where helping someone enables them to help others, which seem to only apply to humans not animals. I’m not looking at the long-term future here, just the next generation or so; after that I tend to think the ripples fade out. But even over that short time, the amount of follow-on good a life saved can do seems significant, and probably moves my sense of things by small amount. Still, it’s hard to quantify and I’ll set this aside as well.
After the two issues I am willing to quantify we’re down to around 3.3x, and we’re still assuming hedonism.
On the other hand, I have the impression that RP made an admirable effort to tend towards conservatism in some empirical assumptions, if not moral ones. I think Open Phil also tends this way sometimes. So I’m not as sure as I usually would what happens if somebody looks more deeply; overwhelmingly I would say EA has found that interventions get worse the more you look at them, which is a lot of why I penalise non-robustness in the first place, but perhaps Open Phil + RP have been conservative enough that this isn’t the case?
***
Still, my overall guess is that if you assume hedonism AW comes out ahead. I am not a moral realist; if people want to go all-in on hedonism and donate to AW on those grounds, I don’t see that I have any grounds to argue with them. But as my OP alluded to, I tend to think there is more at stake / humans are ‘worth more’ in the non-hedonic worlds. So when I work through this I end up underwhelmed by the overall case.
***
This brings us to the much thornier territory of moral uncertainty. While continuing to observe that I’m out of my depth philosophically, and am correspondingly uncertain how best to approach this, some notes on how I think about this and where I seem to be differing:
I find experience machine thought experiments, and people’s lack of enthusiasm for them, much more compelling than ‘tortured Tim’ thought experiements for trying to get a handle on how much of what matters is pleasure/suffering. The issue I see with modelling extreme suffering is that it tends to heavily disrupt non-hedonic goods, and so it’s hard to figure out how much of the badness is the suffering versus the disruption. We can get a sense of how much people care about this disruption from their refusal to enter the experience machine; a lot of the rejections I see and personally feel boil down to “I’m maxing out pleasure but losing everything that ‘actually matters’”.
RP did mention this but I found their handling unconvincing; they seem to have very different intuitions to me for how much torture compromises human ability to experience what ‘actually matters’. Empirical evidence from people with chronic nerve damage is similarly tainted by the fact that e.g. friends often abandon you when you’re chronically in pain, you may have to drop hobbies that meant a lot to you, and so on.
I’ve been lucky enough never to experience anything that severe, but if I look at the worst periods of my life it certainly seemed like a lot more impact came from these ‘secondary’ effects—interference with non-hedonic goods—than from the primary suffering. My heart goes out to people who are dealing with worse conditions and very likely taking larger ‘secondary’ hits.
I also just felt like the Tortured Tim thought experiment didn’t ‘land’ even on its own terms for me, similar to the sentiments expressed in this comment and this comment.

AGB 🔸Oct 16, 2024, 8:50 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
Ah, gotcha, I guess that works. No, I don’t have anything I would consider strong evidence, I just know it’s come up more than anything else in my few dozen conversations over the years. I suppose I assumed it was coming up for others as well.
they should definitely post these and potentially redirect a great deal of altruistic funding towards global health
FWIW this seems wrong, not least because as was correctly pointed out many times there just isn’t a lot of money in the AW space. I’m pretty sure GHD has far better places to fundraise from.
To the extent I have spoken to people (not Jeff, and not that much) about why they don’t engage more on this, I thought the two comments I linked to in my last comment had a lot of overlap with the responses.

AGB 🔸Oct 16, 2024, 8:06 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
I think there has been very little argument for animals not counting at the post level because, quite simply, the argument that (in expectation) they do count is just far stronger.
I’m confused how this works, could you elaborate?
My usual causal chain linking these would be ‘argument is weak’ → ‘~nobody believes it’ → ‘nobody posts it’.
The middle step fails here. Do you have something else in mind?
FWIW, I thought these two comments were reasonable guesses at what may be going on here.

AGB 🔸Oct 16, 2024, 6:38 PM
16 points
2 ∶ 4
in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
First, want to flag that what I said was at the post level and then defined stronger as:
the points I’m most likely to hear and give most weight to when discussing this with longtime EAs in person
You said:
I haven’t heard any arguments I’d consider strong for prioritizing global health which weren’t mentioned during Debate Week
So I can give examples of what I was referring to, but to be clear we’re talking somewhat at cross purposes here:
- I would not expect you to consider them strong.
  - You are not alone here of course, and I suspect this fact also helps to answer Nathan’s confusion for why nobody wrote them up.
    Even my post, which has been decently-received all things considered, I don’t consider an actual good use of time, I more did it in order to sleep better at night.
- They often were mentioned at comment-level.
With that in mind, I would say that the most common argument I hear from longtime EAs is variants of ‘animals don’t count at all’. Sometimes it’s framed as ‘almost certainly aren’t sentient’ or ‘count as ~nothing compared to a child’s life’. You can see this from Jeff Kaufman, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and it’s one I hear a decent amount from EAs closer to me as well.
If you’ve discussed this a ton I assume you have heard this too, and just aren’t thinking of the things people say here as strong arguments? Which is fine and all, I’m not trying to argue from authority, at least not at this time. My intended observation was ‘lots of EAs think a thing that is highly relevant to the debate week, none of them wrote it up for the debate week’.
I think that observation holds, though if you still disagree I’m curious why.

AGB 🔸Oct 15, 2024, 8:20 AM
17 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Explaining the discrepancies in cost effectiveness ratings: A replication and breakdown of RP’s animal welfare cost effectiveness calculations
Thanks for this post, I was also struggling with how scattered the numbers seemed to be despite many shared assumptions. One thing I would add:
Another thing I want to emphasise: this is an estimate of past performance of the entire animal rights movement. It is not an estimate of the future cost effectiveness of campaigns done by EA in particular. They are not accounting for tractableness, neglectedness, etc of future donations....
In the RP report, they accounted for this probable drop in effectiveness by dropping the effectiveness by a range of 20%-60%. This number is not backed up by any source: it appears to be a guesstimate based on the pros and cons listed by Saulius. Hence there is signifcant room for disagreement here.

If we take Sallius’s estimate of 42 chickens affected per dollar, and discount it by 40%, we get a median of 42*0.6 = 25.2 chickens affected per dollar.
Last year Open Phil stated that their forward-looking estimate was 5x lower than Saulius’ backward-looking estimate. This is the type of ‘narrow’ question I default defer to Open Phil on, and so I would drop your final figures by a factor of 3, going from 60% of Saulius to 20% of Saulius.
What links here?
- AGB 🔸's comment on Multiplier Arguments are often flawed by AGB 🔸 (Oct 17, 2024, 8:40 AM; 43 points)

AGB 🔸Oct 14, 2024, 8:07 PM
30 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: CB🔸’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
I agree-voted this. This post was much more ‘This argument in favour of X doesn’t work^[1]’ rather than ‘X is wrong’, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think otherwise.
1. ^
  Or more precisely, doesn’t work without more background assumptions.

AGB 🔸Oct 14, 2024, 7:51 PM
8 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
Yeah I think there’s something to this, and I did redraft this particular point a few times as I was writing it for reasons in this vicinity. I was reluctant to remove it entirely, but it was close and I won’t be surprised if I feel like it was the wrong call in hindsight. It’s the type of thing I expect I would have found a kinder framing for given more time.
Having failed to find a kinder framing, one reason I went ahead anyway is that I mostly expect the other post-level pro-GH people to feel similarly.

AGB 🔸Oct 14, 2024, 6:39 PM
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
I’ll leave this thread here, except to clarify that what you say I ‘seem to think’ is a far stronger claim than I intended to make or in fact believe.

AGB 🔸Oct 14, 2024, 5:44 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
I can try, but honestly I don’t know where to start; I’m well-aware that I’m out of my depth philosophically, and this section just doesn’t chime with my own experience at all. I sense a lot of inferential distance here.
Trying anyway: That section felt closer to empirical claim that ‘we’ already do things a certain way than an argument for why we should do things that way, and I don’t seem to be part of the ‘we’. I can pull out some specific quotes that anti-resonate and try to explain why, with the caveat that these explanations are much closer to ‘why I don’t buy this’ than ‘why I think you’re wrong’.
***
The strengths of our reasons to reduce human suffering or satisfy human belief-like preferences, say, don’t typically seem to depend on our understanding of their empirical or descriptive nature. This is not how we actually do ethics.
I am most sympathetic to this if I read it as a cynical take on human morality, i.e. I suspect this is more true than I sometimes care to admit. I don’t think you’re aiming for that? Regardless, it’s not how I try to do ethics. I at least try to have my mind change when relevant facts change.
An example issue is that memory is fallible; you say that I have directly experienced human suffering, but for anything I am not experiencing right this second all I can access is the memory of it. I have seen firsthand that memory often edits experiences after the fact to make them substantially more or less severe than they seemed at the time. So if strong evidence showed me that somthing I remember as very painful was actually painless, the ‘strength of my reason’ to reduce that suffering would fall^[1].
You use some other examples to illustrate how the empirical nature does not matter, such as discovering seratonin is not what we think it is. I agree with that specific case. I think the difference is that your example of an empirical discovery doesn’t really say anything about the experience, while mine above does?
Instead, we directly value our experiences, not our knowledge of what exactly generates them...how suffering feels to us and how bad it feels to us...do not change with our understanding of its nature
Knowing what is going on during an experience seems like a major contributor to how I relate to that experience, e.g. I care about how long it’s going to last. Looking outward for whether others feel similarly, It Gets Better and the phrase ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ come to mind.
You could try to fold this in and say that the pain of the dental drill is itself less bad because I know it’ll only last a few seconds, or conversely that (incorrectly) believing a short-lived pain will last a long time makes the pain itself greater, but that type of modification seems very artificial to me and is not how I typically understand the words ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’.
...But to use this as another example of how I might respond to new evidence: if you showed me that the brain does in fact respond less strongly to a painful stimulus when the person has been told it’ll be short, that could make me much more comfortable describing it as less painful in the ordinary sense.
There are other knowledge-based factors that feel like they directly alter my ‘scoring’ of pain’s importance as well, e.g. a sense of whether it’s for worthwhile reasons.
And it could end up being the case — i.e. with nonzero probability — that chickens don’t matter at all, not even infinitesimally...And because of the possible division by 0 moral weight, the expected moral weights of humans and all other animals will be infinite or undefined. It seems such a view wouldn’t be useful for guiding action.
I’m with your footnote here; it seems entirely conceivable to me that my own suffering does not matter, so trying to build ratios with it as the base has the same infinity issue, as you say:
However, in principle, humans in general or each proposed type of wellbeing could not matter with nonzero probability, so we could get a similar problem normalizing by human welfare or moral weights.
Per my OP, I roughly think you have to work with differences not ratios.
***
Overall, I was left with a sense from below quote and the overall piece that you perceive your direct experience as a way to ground your values, a clear beacon telling you what matters, and then we just need to pick up a torch and shine a light into other areas and see how much more of what matters is out there. For me, everything is much more ‘fog of war’, very much including my own experiences, values and value. So—and this may be unfair—I feel like you’re asking me ‘why isn’t this clear to you?’ and I’m like ‘I don’t know what to tell you, it just doesn’t look that simple from where I’m sitting’.
Uncertainty about animal moral weights is about the nature of our experiences and to what extent other animals have capacities similar to those that ground our value, and so empirical uncertainty, not moral uncertainty.
1. ^
  Though perhaps not quite to zero; it seems I would need to think about how much of the total suffering is the memory of suffering.
What links here?
- AGB 🔸's comment on Multiplier Arguments are often flawed by AGB 🔸 (Oct 17, 2024, 8:40 AM; 43 points)

AGB 🔸Oct 14, 2024, 5:24 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
For you this works in favor of global health, for others it may not.
In theory I of course agree this can go either way; the maths doesn’t care which base you use.
In practice, Animal Welfare interventions get evaluated with a Global Health base far more than vice-versa; see the rest of Debate Week. So I expect my primary conclusion/TL;DR^[1] to mostly push one way, and didn’t want to pretend that I was being ‘neutral’ here.
For starters I have a feeling that many in the EA community place higher credence on moral theories that would lead to prioritizing animal welfare (most prominent of which is hedonism)...So the “50/50” in the toy example might be a bit misleading, but I would be interested in polling the EA community to understand their moral views.
Ah, interesting that you think many people put >50% on hedonism and similarly-animal-friendly theories. 50% was intended to be generous; the last animal-welfare-friendly person I asked about this was 20-40% IIRC. Pretty sure I am even lower. So yes I’d also be interested in polling here, more of wider groups (population? philosophers?) than of EA but I’d take either.
1. ^
  Copying to save people searching for it:
  Multiplier Arguments are incredibly biased in favour of switching, and they get more biased the more uncertainty you have. Used naively in cases of high uncertainty, they will overwhelmingly suggest you switch intervention from whatever you use as your base.

AGB 🔸Oct 14, 2024, 7:43 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
Hi Michael, just quickly: I’m sorry if I misinterpreted your post. For concreteness, the specific claim I was noting was:
I argue that we should fix and normalize relative to the moral value of human welfare, because our understanding of the value of welfare is based on our own experiences of welfare, which we directly value.
In particular, the bolded section seems straightforwardly false for me, and I don’t believe it’s something you argued for directly?

Multiplier Arguments are often flawed

AGB 🔸Oct 13, 2024, 9:25 PM

189 points

64 comments4 min readEA link

AGB 🔸Sep 8, 2024, 12:08 PM
7 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA
Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I think we’re pretty close to agreement, so I’ll leave it here except to clarify that when I’ve talked about engaging/engagement I mean something close to ‘public engagement’; responses that the person who raised the issue sees or could reasonably be expected to see. So what you’re doing here, Zach elsewhere in the comments, etc.

CEA discussing internally is also valuable of course, and is a type of engagement, but is not what I was trying to point at. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks for differentiating.

AGB 🔸Sep 6, 2024, 8:27 PM
18 points
5 ∶ 3
in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA
Thanks for sharing your experience of working on the Forum Sarah. It’s good to hear that your internal experience of the Forum team is that it sees feedback as vital.
I hope the below can help with understanding the type of thing which can contribute to an opposing external impression. Perhaps some types of feedback get more response than others?
If you take one thing away from my comment, please remember that we love feedback—there are multiple ways to contact us listed here, including an anonymous option.
AFAICT I have done this twice, once asking a yes/no question about unclear forum policy and once about a Forum team post I considered mildly misleading. The first got no response, the other got a response which was inaccurate, which was unfortunate, though I certainly assume it was unintentionally so.
I want to be clear that I do not think I am entitled to get a response. I think the Forum team is entitled to decide it should focus on analytics not individuals, for example. I basically thought it had, and so mentally wrote off those pathways. But your comment paints a surprisingly different picture and repeatedly pushes these options, so it didn’t feel right to say that I disagree without disclosing a big part of why I disagree.
Looking to public, and frankly far more important, examples of this, the top comment on CEA’s last fundraising attempt is highly critical of the Forum / Online team’s direction and spend. At time of writing the comment has ²³⁄₂ agree/disagree votes and more karma than the top level post it’s under. This seems like the kind of thing one prioritises responding to if trying to engage, and 10 months ago Ben West responded “I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum”. That post never came out^[1]. So again my takeaway was that the Forum team didn’t value such engagement.
Given this, I personally disagree that we “relegate the EA community to an afterthought” and that we “largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with EA”, and I disagree that we implied that we plan to do these things in the future.
As someone who directionally agrees with the quoted sentiments, this was helpful in clarifying part of what’s going on here. I personally think that CEA has been opaque for the last few years, for better or for worse^[2]. Others I have heard from think the same ^[3]. So I naturally interpret a post which is essentially a statement of continuinty as a plan to continue down this road. Arepo makes a similar point in the 2nd paragraph of their first comment. But if you think CEA, or at least your team, has been responsive in the past, the same statement of continuity is not naturally interpreted that way.
1. ^
  To the best of my knowledge. If it did, please link to it as a response to the comment! This type of thing is hard to search for, but I did spend ~5 minutes trying.
2. ^
  Since I’ve pushed CEA to be more responsive here and elsewhere, I want to note that distance is helpful in some contexts. I am unsurprised to hear that the Forum redesign in 2023 got negative feedback from entrenched users but positive feedback from new users, for example; seems a common pattern with design changes.
3. ^
  Long comment, so pulling out the relevant quote:
  I think that OP / CEA board members haven’t particularly focused on / cared about being open and transparent with the EA community....Remember that OP staff members are mainly accountable to their managers, not the EA community or others. CEA is mostly funded by OP, so is basically similarly accountable to high-level OP people.

AGB 🔸Aug 31, 2024, 10:28 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA
That’s fair, I didn’t really explain that footnote. Note the original point was in the context of cause prioritisation, and I should probably have linked to this previous comment from Jason which captured my feeling as well:
A name change would be a good start.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn’t use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn’t speak for the medical community as a whole.
It seems possible, though far from obvious, that CEA’s funding base is so narrow it’s forced to focus on that target, in order to ensure the organisation’s survival from that direction. This was something I thought Zach covered nicely:
The reality is that the majority of our funding comes from Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building Team, which focuses primarily on risks from emerging technologies. While I don’t think it’s necessary for us to share the exact same priorities as our funders, I do feel there are some constraints based on donor intent, e.g. I would likely feel it is wrong for us to use the GCRCB team’s resources to focus on a conference that is purely about animal welfare. There are also practical constraints insofar as we need to demonstrate progress on the metrics our funders care about if we want to be able to successfully secure more funding in the future.
What links here?
- Arepo's comment on CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA by Zachary Robinson🔸 (Sep 2, 2024, 2:09 AM; -4 points)

AGB 🔸Aug 24, 2024, 9:28 AM
76 points
14 ∶ 5
in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA
Note: I had drafted a longer comment before Arepo’s comment, given the overlap I cut parts that they already covered and posted the rest here rather than in a new thread.
...it also presupposes that CEA exists solely to serve the EA community. I view the community as CEA’s team, not its customers. While we often strive to collaborate and to support people in their engagement with EA, our primary goal is having a positive impact on the world, not satisfying community members
I agree with Arepo that both halves of this claim seem wrong. Four of CEA’s five programs, namely Groups, Events, Online, and Community Health, have theories of change that directly route through serving the community. This is often done by quite literally providing them with services that are free, discounted, or just hard to acquire elsewhere. Sure, they are serving the community in order to have a positive impact on the wider world, but that’s like saying a business provides a service in order to make a profit; true but irrelevant to the question of whether the directly-served party is a customer.
I speculate that what’s going on here is:
1. CEA doesn’t want to coordinate the community the way any leader or manager would be expected to coordinate their team. That (a) seems like a quick path to groupthink and (b) would be hard given many members do not recognise CEA’s authority.
2. CEA also doesn’t want to feel responsible for making community members happy, because it feels the eternal critics that make up the community (hi!) will be unhappy regardless of what it does.
I’m sympathetic to both impulses, but if taken too far they leave the CEA <-> EA community relationship at an impasse and make the name ‘CEA’ a real misnomer. Regardless of preferred language, I hope that CEA will rediscover its purpose of nurturing and supporting the EA community by providing valuable services to its members^[1] - a lower bar than ‘make these eternal critics happy’ - and I believe the short descriptions of those four teams quoted below already clearly point in that direction.
For me, this makes the served members customers, in the same sense that a parishioner is a customer of their church. Most businesses can’t make all prospective customers happy either! But if that fact makes them forget that their continued existence is contingent upon their ability to serve customers, then they are truly lost.
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1. ^
  As I hope comes across, I do not think this is at all radical. But if CEA cannot or will not do this, I think it should change its name.

AGB 🔸Aug 11, 2024, 10:34 AM
9 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: FarmKind’s Illusory Offer
I’m sorry you hear it that way, but that’s not what it says; I’m making an empirical claim about how norms work / don’t work. If you think the situation I describe is tenable, feel free to disagree.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than ‘no donation matching’, such as ‘no donation matching without communication around counterfactuals’, or Open Phil / EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
I hoped pointing that out might help focus minds, since the discussion so far had focused on the weak players not the powerful ones.

AGB 🔸Aug 10, 2024, 8:35 AM
76 points
13 ∶ 3
on: FarmKind’s Illusory Offer
A question I genuinely don’t know the answer to, for the anti-donation-match people: why wasn’t any of this criticism directed at Open Phil or EA funds when they did a large donation match?

I have mixed feelings on donation matching. But I feel strongly that it is not tenable to have a general community norm against something your most influential actors are doing without pushback, and checking the comments on the linked post I’m not seeing that pushback.

Relatedly, I didn’t like the assertion that the increased number of matches comes from the ‘fundraising’ people not the ‘community-building and epistemics’ people. I really don’t know who the latter refers to if not Open Phil / EAF.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zt6MsCCDStm74HFwo/ea-funds-organisational-update-open-philanthropy-matching

AGB 🔸

Mul­ti­plier Ar­gu­ments are of­ten flawed

Multiplier Arguments are often flawed