Thanks for this update! Two questions…
When all the sponsored projects have been spun out, will EV continue to exist? If so, what will it do?
“I plan to share other non-privileged information on lessons learned in the aftermath of FTX and encourage others to share their reflections as well.” Do you have an estimated timeline for this?
Thanks for raising this question about EA’s growth, though I fully agree it would have been better to frame that question more like: “Given that we’re pouring a substantial amount of money into EA community growth, why doesn’t it show up in some of these metrics?” To that end, while I may refer to “growing” or “not growing” below for brevity I mean those terms relative to expectations rather than in an absolute sense. With that caveat out of the way…
There’s a very telling commonality about almost all the possible explanations that have been offered so far. Aside from a fraction of one comment, none of the explanations in the OP or this followup post even entertain the possibility that any mistakes by people/organizations in the EA community inhibited growth. That seems worthy of a closer look. We expect an influx of new funding (ca. ~2016-7) to translate into growth (with some degree of lag), but only if it is deployed in effective strategies that are executed well. If we see funding but not growth, why not look at which strategies were funded and how well they were executed?
CEA is probably the most straightforward example to look at, as an organization that has run a lot of community building projects and that received much of Open Phil’s initial “EA focus area” funding. Let’s look only at projects from 2015-2019, as more recent projects might not be reflected in growth statistics yet. In rough chronological order, here are some projects where mistakes could have plausibly impacted EA’s growth trajectory.
GWWC grew quickly in its early years (2009-2014), but starting in 2016 CEA made the mistake (their wording) of “underinvesting in GWWC” (the main person responsible for the project had other full-time responsibilities), leading growth to suffer until GWWC was spun off as an independent organization in late 2020.
EA Ventures was publicly launched in early 2015 and used significant amounts of staff and applicant time, but seems to have made only 2 small grants in its entire history. This project was shut down in 2016.
EA Global 2015 elicited prominent negative publicity and complaints from the community about cause representation.
Pareto Fellowship attracted hundreds of applicants, many of whom could have been alienated because “the interview process was unprofessional and made them deeply uncomfortable.” This project was shut down in 2016.
EA Funds received little attention after it launched in 2017, leading to confusion about whether the platform was even operational during its first giving season and repeated complaints about a lack of transparency and infrequent grantmaking.
EA Grants was piloted at small scale in 2017 before announcing plans to grant ~$2.6 million in 2018. Less than half that amount was actually granted, and the majority of money given was via a referral program rather than the open applications that were originally intended. The program was plagued by operational issues, many of them quite basic (“We did not maintain well-organized records of individuals applying for grants, grant applications under evaluation, and records of approved or rejected applications”). This project was shut down in April 2020.
Community Building Grants launched in early 2018, taking resources away from other important community building efforts in a way that probably inhibited growth. Since its inception the CBG program has consistently failed to meet its goals for accepting open applications (including at time of writing). In 2019, CEA had a combined budget for EA Grants and CBGs of $3.7 million, but together they ended up only granting ~$1.1 million due to operational limitations.
Shouldn’t we consider the possibility that one or more of these issues contributed to EA’s underwhelming growth trajectory? The GWWC case seems pretty clear cut. CEA realized they had made a “mistake” (CEA’s word) by under-prioritizing GWWC, and spun the project off. Now that GWWC is getting proper attention, growth has very rapidly picked back up. If GWWC had been prioritized all along, wouldn’t we be seeing better growth metrics than we see now? To his credit, Aaron Gertler (who works at CEA) flagged GWWC’s growth rate as “solid evidence of weaknesses in community building strategy”, though nobody else engaged with this observation.
If we use Occam’s Razor to try and understand a lack of growth, isn’t “we deprioritized a major growth vehicle” a simpler explanation than “there was a shift in which rationalist blogs were popular”, “Google Trends data is wrong”, or “EA is innate, you can’t convert people”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about EA Grants/CBGs granting ~$4 million less than planned (~$2m granted vs. ~$6m planned) in 2018-19? Or the Pareto Fellowship putting “nearly 500” applicants (all people so eager to deepen their engagement with EA that they applied for an intensive fellowship) and “several hundred” semi-finalists through what one interviewee described as: “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had over several years of being involved in EA. I’m posting this from notes I took right after the call, so I am confident that I remember this accurately… It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology. It was the sort of thing you’d expect from a New Age group or Scientology… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.”
Let me pause here to say: There’s plenty of merit in some of the other explanations for lower than expected growth that people have raised, like a pivot in emphasis from donations to careers. My list above is also clearly cherry-picked to illustrate a point. CEA has obviously also done a lot of things to help the EA community. And CEA has recognized and taken steps to address many of the problems I mentioned, like spinning off GWWC and EA Funds, changing management teams and strategies, shutting down problematic projects like EA Ventures, the Pareto Fellowship, and EA Grants, etc. And it should be obvious that any organization will make mistakes and that plenty of people beyond CEA have made mistakes since 2015 (I know I have!) Indeed, it could be useful to invite people and organizations to submit mistakes they’ve made over the years so that we can collectively learn from them. Even if these mistakes were reasonable decisions at the time, hindsight is a wonderful teacher if you use it.
But here’s the critical point: even if you don’t think “mistakes were made” is the main explanation for why growth has been slow, it should scare the hell out of you that only one person thought to mention it in passing because clearly some mistakes were made. Recognizing these problems is how you begin to fix them. CEA recognized that GWWC wasn’t getting enough attention and spun it off to remedy that. Lo and behold, in the new Executive Director’s “first three months, the rate of new pledges tripled.”
This refusal to look inward is a blind spot, and a particularly troubling one for a community that prides itself on unbiased thinking, openness to uncomfortable ideas, and strong epistemics. Here’s a (crucial?) consideration: if GWWC had been reasonably staffed and compounding at a higher growth rate for the last five years, if the Pareto Fellowship put ~500 extremely enthusiastic EAs through a normal rather than alienating interview process in 2016, if EA Grants/CBGs had granted an additional ~$4 million into the community as planned (tripling the amount actually granted), if the time and money invested in projects that didn’t get off the ground had gone toward sustainable projects paying ongoing dividends, and if other people and organizations hadn’t made countless other mistakes over the years, what would our community growth metrics look like today? Are we confident all the necessary lessons have been learned from these mistakes, and that we’re not at risk of repeating those mistakes?
I’d also like to see “the board be more diverse and representative of the wider EA community.” In addition to adding more members without ties to OpenPhil, I’d favor more diversity in the cause preferences of board members. Many of the members of the EV US and EV UK board have clear preferences for longtermism, while none are clearly neartermist. The same can said of the projects EV runs. This raises the question of whether EV sees its role as “a central hub for the effective altruism community, [balancing] the interests of different stakeholders” or if EV is instead trying to steer the community in specific directions. I hope EV offers more transparency around this going forward.
Hopefully, EV will be expanding its boards, which would be an opportunity to address these issues. Expanding the US board seems particularly important, since two of the four board members (Zach and Nicole) are staff members of EV (a pretty unusual structure) and as such would need to recuse themselves from some votes. This dynamic, combined with Nick (in the US and UK) and Will (in the UK) recusing themselves from FTX related issues, means the effective board sizes will be quite small for some important decisions.
This is a terrific post, thank you! And it’s generated some excellent discussion too. I particularly agree with Ivy’s thoughts about the effects of focusing on recruiting young people (I’ve discussed some similar things here and here) and Tobyj’s comment about how “more work needs to be done on governance at the ecosystem level” vs. the level of specific organizations.
In my opinion, the case for increased attention to governance is even stronger because your list of examples omits some of the community’s largest historical and ongoing instances of weak/unprioritized governance:
The board of Effective Ventures currently has an oversight mandate that seems on its face to be completely unrealistic. This five person board is responsible for overseeing CEA, 80k, Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, GWWC, Centre for the Governance of AI, Longview Philanthropy, Asterisk, Non-Trivial, and BlueDot Impact. I’m not sure what is meant by “The Board is responsible for overall management and oversight of the charity, and where appropriate it delegates some of its functions to sub-committees and directors within the charity”; it sounds like some of the organizations that make up EV might be responsible for their own oversight (which would raise other governance questions).
Effective Ventures has not communicated its thinking with respect to cause prioritization (though perhaps tellingly all five EV board members appear to hold a longtermist world view) and how (if at all) that thinking affects which organizations are allowed to operate under the EV umbrella. EV also hasn’t communicated anything about whether/how EV is accountable to the broader EA community in any way.
Community-level governance institutions are limited, and arguably non-existent. CEA’s community health team could possibly fit this bill, but it seems important that (as far as I know) there are no mechanisms in place to make that team accountable to the broader community or to independently assess instances where CEA itself (or individuals closely affiliated with CEA) could be causing a community health problem.
In my detailed Red Teaming analysis of CEA’s community building work, I found that (particularly prior to 2019) CEA routinely underdelivered on commitments, rarely performed meaningful project evaluations, and understated the frequency, degree, and duration of mistakes when publicly discussing them, often leading to negative externalities borne by the broader community. Some of the problems, such as favoring CEA’s cause priorities over the community’s in contexts like EA Global, effectivealtruism.org, and the EA Handbook, directly relate to community governance issues. (One of my conclusions from this analysis was “the EA community should seriously engage with governance questions.”)
When GiveWell changed the composition of its board in early 2019 three board members resigned, two of whom publicly described concerns they had with the board’s composition and role.
Brigid Slipka: “I am unsettled by the decision to reduce the Board down to a hand-picked group of five, two of whom are the co-founders and another of whom is the primary funder (in addition to also funding Holden at Open Philanthropy). This feels regressive. It represents a tightening of control at a moment when the focus should be on increased accountability to the public GiveWell serves.”
Rob Reich: “I have continuing concerns that the board’s important governance role is not taken seriously enough by GiveWell leadership. Board meetings are too frequently nothing more than the performance of meeting legal obligations. For an organization as large and as important as GiveWell, the oversight of GiveWell operations should be much greater, and welcomed by GiveWell leadership as an opportunity for diversifying input on GiveWell strategy. Recent decisions by GiveWell to shrink board membership are in my view a mistake, making it less likely that the board will play any serious role in steering the organization into the future.”
OpenPhil has a small board populated almost entirely by insiders who have been part of the organization since its founding. “The Open Philanthropy 501(c)(3) is governed by a Board of Directors currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz (Chair), Cari Tuna, Divesh Makan, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger. Open Philanthropy LLC is governed by a Board of Managers currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger.”
CEA, both historically and currently, has deprioritized public program evaluations that would add accountability to community members and outside stakeholders. Instead, CEA has prioritized accountability to board members and major funders. Notably there is significant overlap between those constituencies, with three of CEA’s five board members being employed by either Open Phil or FTX Foundation (until the latter’s team resigned due to the scandal).
Can you please elaborate on Owen’s role with CEA (and other constituent projects of EVF) prior to his joining the board in 2020?
CEA’s website suggests Owen had a fairly significant role prior to joining the board, including during the period when some of his problematic behavior (like the incident described in Time) occurred. For instance, Owen was listed on the earliest version of CEA’s Team webpage (circa early 2014) as Director of Research. He seems to have continued to work (or volunteer?) in research roles for several years. In 2018, he began being listed as an “advisor”; on the org chart he and the Executive Director were next to each other, above the rest of the organization. In 2019, CEA had a new ED, but Owen occupied the same place on the org chart. His bio on the team page noted: “Owen provides strategic and research advice for CEA, and also works with the Events, Groups, and Grants teams” (in 2018, he apparently worked more with the “individual outreach team”.)
I recognize that sometimes team webpages are not the most accurate representations of an organization’s actual structure and responsibilities. But I think it is important to establish whether Owen was a CEA employee (or highly influential volunteer) rather than just an influential member of the EA community at the time of his infractions and whether Owen’s roles at CEA materially contributed to his perceived influence in the community (see, for example, this comment thread describing the extensive discretion and influence of the individual outreach team.) This seems like important context when evaluating:
Julia’s decision making after receiving the 2021 complaint about Owen (and Toby and Nicole’s decisions after Julia informed them)
The adequacy of CEA’s policies (past and present) around acceptable employee behavior, particularly with respect to power dynamics
The degree of forthcomingness of this statement from the board and Owen’s apology
My colleague Shakeel Hashim at CEA is focused on communications for all of EA, not CEA in particular.
Are there any mechanisms in place to ensure that Shakeel’s work prioritizes the interests of “all of EA, not CEA in particular”? I think these interests will generally, but not always, be aligned. The recent allegations that multiple CEA board members were aware of SBF behaving unethically at Alameda in 2018 (as well as community requests for comments on those allegations) seem like an important area of potential misalignment.
Has CEA ever solicited funding from Open Phil’s Global Health and Wellbeing team and/or does CEA have plans to do so? If not, why not?
IMO a world where CEA got e.g. 50% of its funding from OpenPhil’s GCR team and 35% of its funding from OpenPhil’s GHW team would be vastly preferable (due to incentives being better aligned with the broader community) to CEA getting 80% of its funding from OpenPhil GCR.
Some miscellaneous takeaways from this article…
New (to me) information included:
The specificity of Naia’s allegations (the part about “Will basically threatened Tara” seems particularly important/bad)
The quotes from the planning document for the meeting between SBF and other Alameda execs. These give important specifics, and seem highly credible (since the four other members of the management team all agreed with them).
Holden being one of the people who was told about concerns with Sam (not shocking to me, and I think Holden was in a worse position to act on this info than e.g. Will, but still an update)
CEA doing “an internal investigation relating to CEA and Alameda” sometime in 2019. I’d love to know more about this, e.g. did the full board review the findings? Who besides Will conducted the investigation?
Thoughts after reading the article and comments:
I agree with Nathan that “The 80k interview feels even worse researched/too soft than I previously thought”
I think EA dodged a bullet in that FTX collapsed relatively soon after CEA had shored up a deficiency in PR expertise (which was done largely in anticipation of Will’s book release as I understand it). I imagine that CEA’s response, while imperfect, would have been significantly worse if that PR capacity were not in place. I also think it’s fair to wonder whether CEA leadership should have added PR expertise sooner given what they apparently knew about SBF (even if you think getting in bed with a possibly sketchy billionaire is the right move, giving yourself more protection if he does turn out to be really sketchy seems reasonable way to hedge risk.)
I’m really glad Ben West is planning to write something in the relatively near future as I think some sort communication from CEA/EVF leadership is overdue.
Thank you, Nicole, for compiling and sharing this writeup. It sounds like you inherited a program with a lot of significant problems, and have been working hard to rectify them. I agree with many of the points you raise, and this post is a welcome improvement in transparency around EA Grants.
However, I’d like to push back against the idea that there was a “Lack of clarification about the role EA Grants played in the funding ecosystem”. I’d argue that your predecessors clearly articulated a vision of EA Grants as a major funder in the ecosystem.
See, for instance, CEA’s 2017 Annual Report:
We are planning to run EA Grants throughout 2018, with an anticipated budget of around £2m… We plan to accept applications year-round with quick reviews and responses for urgent applications and quarterly reviews for less urgent applications.
And the former head of EA Grants commenting on that report:
My thinking in choosing £2m was that we would want to fund more projects than we had money to fund last year, but that we would have picked much of the low-hanging fruit, so there’d be less to fund. In any case, I’m not taking that number too seriously. We should fund all the projects worth funding and raise more money if we need it.
And CEA’s end of 2018 fundraising appeal (which solicited donations to fund EA Grants):
We also have a regranting budget of $3.7M for EA Grants and EA Community Building Grants, which we use to fund other organizations, projects, individuals, and groups.
Throughout 2018, CEA also repeatedly communicated that a large, open round of EA Grants would be starting soon, which turned out to be overly optimistic. (See updates in mid-February, April, and mid-August.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure EA Grants has granted significantly less money than the public communications would suggest. Your writeup explains several reasons why that would be the case. But that doesn’t change the fact that CEA’s communications have likely led potential grantees and potential funders to overestimate how much funding was available for early stage projects. My strong intuition is that these dynamics have contributed to a funding shortage for this type of project, and that addressing this shortage should be a priority for the EA community.
I think Hauke is asking a critical question: “Would shutting down EA grants significantly reduce the overall quantity of meta funding in the community or would the freed up resources be routed into the Meta-fund?” Even if the money gets routed into the Meta Fund (and/or other funds), some of it will likely be granted to established organizations leaving less money for individuals and early stage projects.
I also wonder whether shuttering EA Grants now risks wasting the progress that’s been made in developing operational capacity (“CEA is now in a place where we are able to disburse EA Grants with correct bank information routinely within a month, sometimes quicker, putting us solidly within the norm of the grant making industry.”) Would EA Funds be able to leverage those improvements?
I hope this doesn’t come across as overly critical. I know EA Grants, and CEA as a whole, has changed leadership since most of these issues occurred. But to fix things going forward, I think it’s important to have an accurate understanding of how they worked in the past. With respect to EA Grants, the past has involved a lot of overpromising and underdelivering, which seems to be a recurring theme in feedback.
Re: CEA should consider creating a public dashboard of its commitments to others
It’s not currently a priority to maintain a public or private dashboard of such commitments, partly because we generally try to avoid making public commitments about our plans.
As I demonstrated several places in my analysis, the main problem with CEA missing public commitments is that it makes it difficult for other community members to make good plans. CEA avoiding making public commitments doesn’t really solve this problem, and could make it worse. Similarly, it doesn’t help much if CEA says “we hope to do X by Y date, but don’t consider this a commitment” because people are still likely to use that info in their plans for lack of a better option.
A far better outcome would be for CEA to make more accurate public commitments (by adding conservatism and/or providing wide ranges around dates/deliverables to incorporate uncertainty) and then providing timely updates when not on track to meet those commitments. CEA is too important an organization for other EAs not to be able to plan around.
Catherine, you and Nicole are both CH team members who advise the EAIF and the LTFF. Given that CH “heard about many of the concerns mentioned in [Ben’s] post” in mid-2022, did either of you share those concerns with the EAIF team prior to that fund granting $73k to Nonlinear in 4Q22?
You’ve previously written that “meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions.” Since the grant was for work of that type (“6-12 months of salary for 3 experienced EAs to set up an EA recruiting/hiring agency”), I would think the case for raising the concerns you’d heard about with the EAIF management team would be particularly strong. If you did not share those concerns, what was the rationale?
I agree with your takes on CEA as an organization and as individuals (including Max).
Personally, I’d have a more positive view of CEA the organization if it were more transparent about its strategy around cause prioritization and representativeness (even if I disagree with the strategy) vs. trying to make it look like they are more representative than they are. E.g. Max has made it pretty clear in these comments that poverty and animal welfare aren’t high priorities, but you wouldn’t know that from reading CEA’s strategy page where the very first sentence states: “CEA’s overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow.”
I’m glad CEA is sharing this data, but I wish the post focused more on the important question posed in the title: Is it still hard to get a job in EA? I think the data suggests quite strongly that the answer is “yes”, but the authors don’t seem to take an explicit stance on the issue and the Summary of the post arguably suggests the opposite conclusion.
Here’s why I think the data implies EA jobs are still hard to get:
Only a (very?) small percentage of applications led to a job. The report describes a 2.4% hiring rate for Core jobs (itself a low figure), but I think a more accurate number would be 1.85% = (7 hires/ (54 applications per role * 7 roles)). The 2.4% figure is “Weighted by the number of applicants in each stage” but I’m not actually sure what that means, and in any case the raw number of hires/applicants makes the most sense to me. I also think it’s important to include the EOI numbers; these roles received just as many applicants as Core jobs, but led to no hires. (For the same reason, I’d find it valuable to include data from Operations and other roles that were excluded from this analysis, as they all help inform the question of whether EA jobs are hard to get.) Including EOI applications, we get a hiring rate of 1.1% of total applications.
If “Ashby hires 4% of applicants, compared to 2% at CEA”, it seems like quite a stretch for the Summary to say “the probability of an applicant receiving an offer was similar to industry averages.” At the very least, I’d like to see the figures included in the Summary so readers could draw their own conclusion. Also, while Ashby hired 4% of applicants they gave job offers to 8% of applicants; the latter figure is more relevant to the question at hand. CEA’s analysis implies that their offer rate and hire rate were the same (please correct me if I’m misinterpreting), which itself is a suggestion that EA jobs are hard to get. If the offer rate in the Ashby survey is 4x CEA’s offer rate (8% vs 2%), that’s a very sizeable difference.
The Product Manager jobs included in the Ashby survey were all jobs at “high-growth tech companies”, which are probably more competitive than the same role at “all tech companies” or “all industries”. So I’d interpret the benchmarking data as saying that CEA’s Product Manager role was more competitive (much more competitive if CEA’s offer rate equals its hire rate) than an unusually competitive subset of private sector Product Manager jobs.
I agree with the comments from Vaidehi and Denkenberger about why this analysis may understate the availability of EA jobs.
This is a very good point, and something I probably should have addressed in the OP.
I agree it’s totally possible for non-FTX factors to be causing the deterioration in metrics I describe. However, I think the evidence points to FTX being the dominant factor for two main reasons:
The timing of the downturn in metrics aligns almost perfectly with FTX’s collapse. That’s not really the case with alternative explanations. Using your examples, Bitcoin (as a proxy for cryptocurrency) lost ~2/3 of its value from November 2021 to October 2022 (prior to FTX collapse) and inflation in the US started spiking in Spring 2021 and has remained elevated since. Given that longer-term situation, FTX seems much more likely to be the catalyst of changes in donation behavior we saw specifically in November 2022.
The downturn is evident in a very broad set of metrics, which are unlikely to be driven by the same alternative factor. Using your examples again, crypto declines are a plausible explanation for changes in donation behavior, but can’t really explain changes in forum engagement metrics.
In tandem, I think 1 + 2 provide extremely strong evidence that FTX is the major culprit here (though I wouldn’t be shocked if alternative explanations also turned out to be significant for a couple of metrics). Especially when ~40% of EA Community members who were surveyed on the issue “reported that they were less likely to associate with EA due to [the FTX] crisis.”
Some specific examples of EA leaders putting SBF on a pedestal that I found with a bit of brief digging:
At the time FTX blew up, SBF was featured on 80k’s homepage. Also, if you clicked “start here” on that homepage (the first link aside from a subscription form) you were brought to an article that featured SBF as one of three individual profiles.
Both of these mentions linked to a more in depth profile of SBF that had been created in 2014 and regularly updated, and clearly “puts him on a pedestal” (“This approach — where he donates a significant proportion of his income to organisations aiming to make the world a better place as effectively as possible — is allowing Sam to have a pretty staggering impact.”)
When Will wrote about how the EA Funding situation had changed, he praised SBF not just for his donations but also his personal virtue “I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call.”
In Will’s appearance on the 80k podcast, he uses SBF as the exemplar of earning to give, and says convincing SBF to pursue ETG was “really the important impact.” He also uses SBF to illustrate “fat tails” of impact. On another 80k podcast, 80k staff talks about SBF to illustrate the impact of their 1:1 team.
In a talk at EAG London 2021, Ben Todd argues “that the recent success of Sam Bankman-Fried is an additional reason to aim high.” (Ben also mentions SBF in a variety of posts discussing EA’s funding levels, but that seems to me like an unavoidable part of discussing that issue and less like putting him on a pedestal.)
All those examples come from the period after concerns about SBF had been raised to EA leaders. Prior to that, there are plenty more examples especially for 80k (e.g. SBF was on the 80k homepage from late 2014 to late 2017.)
As far as I can tell, EA leaders started promoting SBF in 2014 or so, seeing him as a great example of altruistic career choice in general, and of ETG (a counterintuitive model of altruistic career choice that originated in EA) specifically. Then leaders kept promoting SBF despite the warnings they got from Alameda co-founders, and continued to do so until FTX blew up.
Bostrom’s apology letter references another apology he made immediately after his original use of the racial slur:
I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
It’s non-trivial to find his original apology, so I’ve shared it here for anyone who is interested.
>---collateral damage to Extropianism as a whole
Yes, that’s what I’m concerned about. Transhumanism is weird
enough anyway; perhaps we should not make it even stranger
by adopting an offensive jargon.
Now, I am saddened by the reception of my message by some of
the other people on this list. It’s my fault. In order to
make my point I thought that I should pick an example that
really was offensive. Well, it seems I succeeded only too
well. Let me say again, just to make sure that there be no
misunderstandings: I am NOT a racist. And I do not think we
should discuss the topic further. My apologies to “Damaged
Justice”, Howard Julien, Pat Hardy and anybody else whom I
may have misled by my original reply to David Musick.
Personally, I found the original apology (and, FWIW, Bostrom’s most recent one too) disappointing. While I appreciate that he acknowledges culpability (“it’s my fault”), it seems like the things he’s most concerned about are potential harm to transhumanism and people thinking he’s a racist. It would have been a MUCH stronger apology in my opinion if he had straightforwardly said it’s wrong to use racial slurs and apologized for having done so.
To be clear, I don’t think bad ideas expressed decades ago warrant automatic cancellation. I’m not sure what, if any, repercussions Bostrom should face now. But since he did cite his original apology as exculpatory evidence, I thought I should share that content so people can draw their own conclusions.
Thank you for all your efforts in this endeavor Ben, you’ve performed a very valuable service to the community.
Your comments about CEA’s Community Health team in this post seem particularly important to me. If CEA’s CH team had in depth knowledge of how Alice and Chloe described their experiences, had found no reason to doubt those accounts, and still declined to make any kind of public statement, that’s incredibly damning. I’m open to hearing CH’s take on things, but if that’s actually the case I agree with your view that “the world would probably be better if the CEA Community Health team was disbanded and it was transparent that there is little-to-no institutional protection from bullies in the EA ecosystem.” That’s definitely a new position for me; while I’ve criticized CH work before my prior assumption was that the team could be fixed.
I do want to note that all of the things you list took place around 2017-2018, and our work and plans have changed since then.
My observations about 80k, GPI, and CFAR are all ongoing (though they originated earlier). I also think there are plenty of post-2018 examples related to CEA’s work, such as the Introductory Fellowship content Michael noted (not to mention the unexplained downvoting he got for doing so), Domassoglia’s observations about the most recent EAG and EAGx (James hits on similar themes), and the late 2019 event that was framed as a “Leader’s Forum” but was actually “some people who CEA staff think it would be useful to get together for a few days” (your words) with those people skewing heavily longtermist. I think all of these things “contribute to the view that EA essentially is longtermism/AI Safety?”(though of course longtermism could be “right” in which case these would all be positive developments.)
Where we have to decide a content split (e.g. for EA Global or the Handbook), I want CEA to represent the range of expert views on cause prioritization. I still don’t think we have amazing data on this, but my best guess is that this skews towards longtermist-motivated or X-risk work (like maybe 70-80%).
I would love someone to do a proper survey of everyone (trying to avoid one’s own personal networks) who has spent >1 year thinking about cause prioritization with a scope-sensitive and open-minded lens. I’ve tried to commission someone to do this a couple of times but it hasn’t worked out. If someone did this, it would help to shape our content, so I’d be happy to offer some advice and could likely find funding. If anyone is interested, let me know!
I agree with Linch’s concern about the selection bias this might entail: “a core problem with the “neutrality”/expert-views framing of this comment is selection bias. We would naively expect people who spend a lot of time on cause prioritization to systematically overrate (relative to the broader community) both the non-obviousness of the most important causes, and their esotericism.”
Also related to selection bias: most of the opportunities and incentives to work on cause prioritization have been at places like GPI or Forethought Foundation that use a longtermist lens, making it difficult to find an unbiased set of experts. I’m not sure how to get around this issue. Even trying to capture the views of the EA community as a whole (at the expense of deferring to experts) would be problematic to the extent “mistakes” have shaped the composition of the community by making EA more attractive to longtermists and less attractive to neartermists.
I appreciate that CEA is looking to “outsource” cause prioritization in some way. I just have concerns about how this will work in practice, as it strikes me as a very difficult thing to do well.
Agree! This decision has huge implications for the entire community, and should be made explicitly and transparently.
For me, it’s been stuff like:
People (generally those who prioritize AI) describing global poverty as “rounding error”.
From late 2017 to early 2021, effectivealtruism.org (the de facto landing page for EA) had at least 3 articles on longtermist/AI causes (all listed above the single animal welfare article), but none on global poverty.
The EA Grants program granted ~16x more money to longtermist projects as global poverty and animal welfare projects combined. [Edit: this statistic only refers to the first round of EA Grants, the only round for which grant data has been published. ]
The EA Handbook 2.0 heavily emphasized AI relative to global poverty and animal welfare. As one EA commented: “By page count, AI is 45.7% of the entire causes sections. And as Catherine Low pointed out, in both the animal and the global poverty articles (which I didn’t count toward the page count), more than half the article was dedicated to why we might not choose this cause area, with much of that space also focused on far-future of humanity. I’d find it hard for anyone to read this and not take away that the community consensus is that AI risk is clearly the most important thing to focus on.” When changes to the handbook were promised in response to this type of criticism, those changes were then deprioritized and the Handbook wasn’t updated for years.
80k’s “top recommended problems” skew heavily longtermist; global health and poverty and factory farming don’t make the cut and are instead listed as “other pressing problems”
For the Community Building Grants program, “The primary metric used to assess grants at the end of the first year is the number of group members who apply for internships or graduate programs in priority areas and reach at least the interview stage… We used the 80,000 Hours list of priority paths as the basis for our list of accredited roles, but expanded it to be somewhat broader.” Since 80k’s priority paths are predominantly longtermist, groups were in large part evaluated by how many members they steered into longtermist jobs or studies.
GPI’s research agenda focuses on, and essentially assumes, longtermism
CFAR’s website went from emphasizing things like “turning cognitive science into cognitive practice”, to things like “we are focused on the existential win… we see AI safety as especially key here”
Etc.