Maybe I’m just unable to find this information, but it seems the website doesn’t give any information on what and who Antrhopoda actually is: No information on what kind of legal entity they are if any, no information on who works there or who is responsible for making grants. This wouldn’t make me comfortable at all to make donation.
Aleks_K
Karma: 628
Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!
A few comments:
I think many organisations do use their network and things like the HIP database to find candidates. People are still often hired directly without public hiring rounds, and semi-private hiring rounds (reaching out directly to people identified in these ways and only inviting those to apply) are also quite common, but still can be very elaborate (significant lower number of applicants so lower effort for the hiring organisation, but still a similar effort for applicants.)
Many organisations believe that hiring the right people is extremely important, and that it is worth the effort to conduct elaborate public hiring rounds, particularly for senior roles, presumably because they think there is a chance of finding a better candidate this way. (Sometimes, even if they have an internal candidate they could promote to the job, they still prefer to do a public hiring round to see if there is someone better out there.) Also, EA orgs have often very high expectations for their roles and sometimes have to readvertise roles even if the first round received lots of applications—so it seems they still feel they are talent-constrained (at least for the level of talent they are looking for).
If was very confused by the sentence “Once someone has beaten the substantial odds and passed the rigorous testing to get in to the movement...” (as their is really not a very high bar to get ’into the movement), but based on the example you mention, I think you more mean something like “once someone has been hired for a permanent full-time role at a top EA organisation” in which case I agree with the problem you are describing. I don’t really see a good solution for this, though. Organisations want to hire the best people they can, whether they are already in the movement or not. However, I think people who are attracted to the movement should be made aware of these cases and that there is no employment guarantee in EA.
I don’t really understand the question here: If an organisation contracts someone to do work for them, they usually agree on a specific amount, either a fixed price or an hourly/daily rate. What are the specifics of your scenario here? Should the amount be conditional on how much funding the organisation receives for that specific work? That seems a quite strange approach to me. Or are you expecting that the contractor commits to doing the work but might not get paid if a grant application is unsuccessful? I don’t really think anyone would or should agree to that. The right approach should be to wait with actually hiring the contractor until the organisation has the money to pay for them.
I’m not sure whether it’s good or not, but the main reason that it should be allowed is that it is impossible to detect. How will you know what someone’s real preferences are?
I don’t think you can post ‘anonymously’ in the sense that there is no account related to your post, you’ll always have to create an account, but you can of course use a one-off username and even email address if you want to. However, you can delete your account and then apparently all ‘your’ posts appear as “[anonymous]” whether you intended this or not. (And in this case, it seems the original poster just created this post with their usual, non-anonymous account, but then deleted their account.)
Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it’s fine to take the donation.
The answer to 1) is very likely yes as this was the case at previous EAG events in the UK. Whatever rules there are for newbuilds obviously a) don’t apply to existing buildings (and the venue is not a new built) b) don’t have any influence on how you use or label bathrooms at private events (unless you are discriminating or something which I assume CEA isn’t planning to do).
While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn’t really $20mn expenditure as they’ll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).
In the UK, doing this would probably be counted as ‘trading’ and be subject to corporation tax, there is a common workaround, though, by creating a trading subsidiary that donates to the charity (allowing them to reduce their corporate tax burden). This setup might or might not be suitable for this specific occasion, and there are of course additional efforts involved in creating such a setup that might or might not be worth it.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the main conclusion of this is: You can run an event much cheaper of you find an organisation that has a good event space and collaborates with you, so they charge the ‘internal’ rather than the commercial rate.
Is this just a guess or do you have information on the actual costs of the event? (Just from their website, they seem to have various sponsors who are likely covering a substantial amount of the costs, and yes, their venue costs might be very low (or even close to zero) because Harvard/MIT are likely not charging them commercial rates, but that doesn’t give any info of the actual costs and why they would be lower than EAG costs.)
These academic conferences likely take place at universities which likely won’t have any minimum spend requirements (at least for internal events).
Sure, I’m not objecting to policing language in general (there are certainly types of language that are inappropriate) or you making a specific suggestion of (gentle) language policying. (I just disagree with your specific suggestion on this—and I assume others do as well—and my point is that connecting it with you other suggestion—that I think more people will agree with—is suboptimal.)
This post somehow connects two things for (in my opinion) no good reason:
Trying to get people to actually bet (which I think is probably a good thing)
Trying to police people’s language by asking them to not use ‘I bet’ in a non-literal sense (which I think is a bad thing)
I don’t really understand why you think the latter is necessary to achieve the former.
As an affiliate, though, not as an employee. (And they seem to have lots of affiliates, so not clear what this actually means.)
While this is a data point that shows that in principle it’s currently possible to currently work with the University, GPI has quite a different strategy compared to FHI that aligns significantly more with traditional academia, so it doesn’t necessarily prove that it would be currently possible for FHI.
However, I think a stronger existence proof for it being possible to work with the University is that FHI managed to do that in some way reasonably for at least 10+ years. (They were established in 2005) - for comparison, GPI is only 5 years old.
Thanks for pointing out the FHI/GPI mistake, I’ve corrected that.
I also thought Drexler was still at FHI, but I checked and this doesn’t seem to be the case: He’s not mentioned on the team page and his website at FHI has been taken down.
It seems that your comment is mainly about successes by Bostrom in the (medium to more distant) past, while the post is about experience in the more recent past and expectations for the future. I would say that the expectations for the future are what is relevant to evaluate whether it’s a good thing or not for Bostrom to step down as Director (?)
Just mentioning some examples:
Bostrom has succeeded at this, and the group of people (especially the early FHI cast including Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Andrew Snyder Beattie, Owain Evans, and Stuart Armstrong) he has assembled under the core FHI research team have made great contributions to many really important questions that I care about, and I cannot think of any other individual who would have been able to do the same
All of the people mentioned joined a long time ago and all but Sandberg have left FHI. Is there anyone of a comparable quality that joined in the last 5 years?
For core FHI work, like “Eternity in Six Hours” (one of the papers that’s been most influential on my world view) I see what seems to me genuine interest in figuring out the truth and to answer the big questions, instead of secretly trying to trick me into supporting them, or get me to buy into their ideology, or support their favorite political cause or social movement, or to suspiciously shy away from a conclusion whenever that conclusion would be too hard to defend publicly to people who only want to spend 5 minutes on this question.
The paper you mentioned was written 10 years ago. Are there any comparable more recent examples?
I think it would be bad to let it fall in the hands of someone interested in making FHI into just another talent funnel, or another machine for producing prestige for Effective Altruism or AI Alignment or the people running FHI, while using up the credibility and intellectual integrity of Bostrom and many other core researchers who have created one of the highest integrity research institutions in the world.
It’s not clear to me why this is a point in favour of Bostrom rather than against: In the last five years (until the hiring freeze started) it seems that is roughly what FHI (minus the macro strategy group) started to become under his leadership.
Overall, it looks to me that even if one agrees with all your statements about past successes and value of Bostrom as a leader of FHI, it doesn’t really make a case for Bostrom staying on as FHI Director now . (Though I guess it still makes the case for shutting down FHI rather than having it continue under new leadership.)
EDIT: Corrected a GPI/FHI typo.
If someone attends the event as a journalist, why not have their lanyard show that they are a journalist? This seems like it’s a very easy thing to do and something like this is probably pretty standard at large events that are not fully public(?) This would probably solve some of the issues, as people know who they are talking to (and eg organisers of private afterparties could just not let journalists in if they don’t want them at their party).
Forethought are not a UK charity, they are a UK-based non-profit company (according to the footer of their website). But I agree that flagging that donations from the UK are not gift-aid eligible/tax deductible (and that US donations are) would be good as it might be surprising to many people.