I’m the CTO of Wave. We build financial infrastructure for unbanked people in sub-Saharan Africa.
Personal site (incl various non-EA-related essays): https://www.benkuhn.net/
Email: ben dot s dot kuhn at the most common email address suffix
Ben Kuhn
Karma: 3,058
There is now an EA Managers Slack
Why do you think people think it’s unimportant (rather than, e.g., important but very difficult to achieve due to the age skew issue mentioned in the post)?
I agree that it’s downstream of this, but strongly agree with ideopunk that mission alignment is a reasonable requirement to have.* A (perhaps the) major cause of organizations becoming dysfunctional as they grow is that people within the organization act in ways that are good for them, but bad for the organization overall—for example, fudging numbers to make themselves look more successful, ask for more headcount when they don’t really need it, doing things that are short-term good but long-term bad (with the assumption that they’ll have moved on before the bad stuff kicks in), etc. (cf. the book Moral Mazes.) Hiring mission-aligned people is one of the best ways to provide a check on that type of behavior.
*I think some orgs maybe should be more open to hiring people who are aligned with the org’s particular mission but not part of the EA community—eg that’s Wave’s main hiring demographic—but for orgs with more “hardcore EA” missions, it’s not clear how much that expands their applicant pool.
Whoops! Fixed, it was just supposed to point to the same advice-offer post as the first paragraph, to add context :)
Some notes on common challenges building EA orgs
In addition to having a lot more on the line, other reasons to expect better of ourselves:
EA had (at least potential) access to a lot of information that investors may not have, in particular about Alameda’s early exodus in 2018.
EA had much more time to investigate and vet SBF—there’s typically a very large premium for investors to move fast during fundraising, to minimize distraction for the CEO/team.
Because of the second point, many professional investors do surprisingly little vetting. For example, SoftBank is pretty widely reputed to be “dumb money;” IIRC they shook hands on huge investments in Uber and WeWork on the basis of a single meeting, and their flagship Vision Fund lost 8% (~$8b) this past quarter alone. I don’t know about OTPP but I imagine they could be similarly diligence-light given their relatively short history as a venture investor. Sequoia is less famously dumb than those two, but still may not have done much vetting if FTX was perceived to be a “hot” deal with lots of time pressure.
Is it likely that FTX/Alameda currently have >50% voting power over Anthropic?
Extremely unlikely. While Anthropic didn’t disclose the valuation, it would be highly unusual for a company to take >50% dilution in a single funding round.
Definitely! In this case I appear to have your email so reached out that way, but for anyone else who’s reading this comment thread, Forum messages or the email address in the post both work as ways to get in touch!
Want advice on management/organization-building?
In the “a case for hope” section, it looks like your example analysis assumes that the “AGI timeline” and “AI safety timeline” are independent random variables, since your equation describes sampling from them independently. Isn’t that really unlikely to be true?
Can someone clarify whether I’m interpreting this paragraph correctly?
Effective Ventures (EV) is a federation of organisations and projects working to have a large positive impact in the world. EV was previously known as the Centre for Effective Altruism but the board decided to change the name to avoid confusion with the organisation within EV that goes by the same name.
I think what this means is that the CEA board is drawing a distinction between the CEA legal entity / umbrella organization (which is becoming EV) and the public-facing CEA brand (which is staying CEA). AFAIK this change wasn’t announced anywhere separately, only in passing at the beginning of this post which sounds like it’s mostly intended to be about something else?
(As a minor point of feedback on why I was confused: the first sentence of the paragraph makes it sound like EV is a new organization; then the first half of the second sentence makes it sound like EV is a full rebrand of CEA; and only at the end of the paragraph does it make clear that there is intended to be a sharp distinction between CEA-the-legal-entity and CEA-the-project, which I wasn’t previously aware of.)
Sorry that was confusing! I was attempting to distinguish:
Direct epistemic problems: money causes well-intentioned people to have motivated cognition etc. (the downside flagged by the “optics and epistemics” post)
Indirect epistemic problems as a result of the system’s info processing being blocked by not-well-intentioned people
I will try to think of a better title!
Since someone just commented privately to me with this confusion, I will state for the record that this commenter seems likely to be impersonating Matt Yglesias, who already has an EA Forum account with the username “Matthew Yglesias.”(EDIT: apparently it actually is the same Matt with a different account!)(Object-level response: I endorse Larks’ reply.)
The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or motivated cognition, but grift
Please note that the Twitter thread linked in the first paragraph starts with a highly factually inaccurate claim. In reality, at EAGxBoston this year there were five talks on global health, six on animal welfare, and four talks and one panel on AI (alignment plus policy). Methodology: I collected these numbers by filtering the official conference app agenda by topic and event type.
I think it’s unfortunate that the original tweet got a lot of retweets / quote-tweets and Jeff hasn’t made a correction. (There is a reply saying “I should add, friend is not 100% sure about the number of talks by subject at EAGx Boston,” but that’s not an actual correction, and it was posted as a separate comment so it’s buried under the “show more replies” button.)
This is not an argument for or against Jeff’s broader point, just an attempt to combat the spread of specific false claims.
Tips for asking people for things
This must be somewhat true but FWIW, I think it’s probably less true than most outsiders would expect—I don’t spend very much personal time on in-country stuff (because I have coworkers who are local to those countries who will do a much better job than I could) and so end up having pretty limited (and random/biased) context on what’s going on!
IIRC a lot of people liked this post at the time, but I don’t think the critiques stood up well. Looking back 7 years later, I think the critique that Jacob Steinhardt wrote in response (which is not on the EA forum for some reason?) did a much better job of identifying more real and persistent problems:
Over-focus on “tried and true” and “default” options, which may both reduce actual impact and decrease exploration of new potentially high-value opportunities.
Over-confident claims coupled with insufficient background research.
Over-reliance on a small set of tools for assessing opportunities, which lead many to underestimate the value of things such as “flow-through” effects.
I’m glad I wrote this because it played a part in inspiring Jacob to write up his better version, and I think it was a useful exercise for me and an interesting historical artifact from the early days of EA, but I don’t think the ideas in it ultimately mattered that much.
Don’t forget Zenefits!
Zenefits was valued at $4.5b in 2015 and was all downhill after the incident; they did three rounds of layoffs in four years and were eventually acquired by a no-name company for an undisclosed price in 2022. It’s unclear how much of that decline was directly a result of the fraud, vs. the founder’s departure, vs. them always having had poor fundamentals and being overvalued at $4.5b due to hype.