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: 3,028
Some notes on common challenges building EA orgs
The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or motivated cognition, but grift
“Why Nations Fail” and the long-termist view of global poverty
Want advice on management/organization-building?
Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets
Tips for asking people for things
Around 2015-2019 I felt like the main message I got from the EA community was that my judgement was not to be trusted and I should defer, but without explicit instructions how and who to defer to.
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My interpretation was that my judgement generally was not to be trusted, and if it was not good enough to start new projects myself, I should not make generic career decisions myself, even where the possible downsides were very limited.I also get a lot of this vibe from (parts of) the EA community, and it drives me a little nuts. Examples:
Moral uncertainty, giving other moral systems weight “because other smart people believe them” rather than because they seem object-level reasonable
Lots of emphasis on avoiding accidentally doing harm by being uninformed
People bring up “intelligent people disagree with this” as a reason against something rather than going through the object-level arguments
Being epistemically modest by, say, replacing your own opinions with the average opinion of everyone around you, might improve the epistemics of the majority of people (in fact it almost must by definition), but it is a terrible idea on a group level: it’s a recipe for information cascades, groupthink and herding.
In retrospect, it’s not surprising that this has ended up with numerous people being scarred and seriously demoralized by applying for massively oversubscribed EA jobs.
I guess it’s ironic that 80,000 Hours—one of the most frequent repeaters of the “don’t accidentally cause harm” meme—seems to have accidentally caused you quite a bit of harm with this advice (and/or its misinterpretations being repeated by others)!
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.
We’re Lincoln Quirk & Ben Kuhn from Wave, AMA!
I don’t have research management experience in particular, but I have a lot of knowledge work (in particular software engineering) management experience.
IMO, giving insufficient positive feedback is a common, and damaging, blind spot for managers, especially those (like you and me) who expect their reports to derive most of their motivation from being intrinsically excited about their end goal. If unaddressed, it can easily lead to your reports feeling demotivated and like their work is pointless/terrible even when it’s mostly good.
People use feedback not just to determine what to improve at, but also as an overall assessment of whether they’re doing a good job. If you only give negative feedback, you’re effectively biasing this process towards people inferring that they’re doing a bad job. You can try to fight it by explicitly saying “you’re doing a good job” or something, but in my experience this doesn’t really land on an emotional level.
Positive feedback in the form “you are good at X, do more of it” can also be an extremely useful type of feedback! Helping people lean into their strengths more often yields as much or more improvement as helping them shore up their weaknesses.
I’m not particularly good at this myself, but every time I’ve improved at it I’ve had multiple reports say things to the effect of “hey, I noticed you improved at this and it’s awesome and very helpful.”
That said, I agree with you that shit sandwiches are silly and make it obvious that the positive feedback isn’t organic, so they usually backfire. The correct way to give positive feedback is to resist your default to be negatively biased by calling out specific things that are good when you see them.
I’m looking forward to CEA having a great 2020 under hopefully much more stable and certain leadership!
I’d welcome feedback on these plans via this form or in the comments, especially if you think there’s something that we’re missing or could be doing better.
This is weakly held since I don’t have any context on what’s going on internally with CEA right now.
That said: of the items listed in your summary of goals, it looks like about 80% of them involve inward-facing initiatives (hiring, spinoffs, process improvements, strategy), and 20% (3.3, 4.1-5) involve achieving concrete outcomes that affect things outside of CEA. The report on progress from last year also emphasized internal process improvements rather than external outcomes.
Of course, it makes sense that after a period of rapid leadership churn, it’s necessary to devote some time to rebuilding and improving the organization. And if you don’t have a strategy yet, I suppose it makes sense to put “develop a strategy” as your top goal and not to have very many other concrete action items.
As a bystander, though, I’ll be way more excited to read about whatever you end up deciding your strategy is, than about the management improvements that currently seems to be absorbing the bulk of CEA’s focus.
What I learned from working at GiveWell
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.)
I’m very interested in hearing from grantmakers about their take on this problem (especially those at or associated with CEA, which it seems like has been involved in most of the biggest initiatives to scale out EA’s vetting, through EA Grants and EA Funds).
What % of grant applicants are in the “definitely good enough” vs “definitely (or reasonably confidently) not good enough” vs “uncertain + not enough time/expertise to evaluate” buckets?
(Are these the right buckets to be looking at?)
What do you feel your biggest constraints are to improving the impact of your grants? Funding, application quality, vetting capacity, something else?
Do you have any upcoming plans to address them?
Note also that the EA Meta and Long-Term Future Funds seem to have gone slightly in the direction of “less established” organizations since their management transition, and it seems like their previous conventionality might have been mostly a reflection of one specific person (Nick Beckstead) not having enough bandwidth.
While climate change doesn’t immediately appear to be neglected, it seems possible that many people/orgs “working on climate change” aren’t doing so particularly effectively.
Historically, it seems like the environmental movement has an extremely poor track record at applying an “optimizing mindset” to problems and has tended to advocate solutions based on mood affiliation rather than reasoning about efficiency. A recent example would be the reactions to the California drought which blame almost anyone except the actual biggest problem (agriculture).
Of course, I have no idea how much this consideration increases the “effective neglectedness” of climate change. I expect that there are still enough people applying an optimizing mindset to make it reasonably non-neglected, but maybe only par with global health rather than massively less neglected like you might guess from news coverage?
There is now an EA Managers Slack
Making large donation decisions as a person focused on direct work
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.
I suspect that straightforwardly taking specific EA ideas and putting them into fiction is going to be very hard to do in a non-cringeworthy way (as pointed out by elle in another comment). I’d be more interested in attempts to write fiction that conveys an EA mindset without being overly conceptual.
For instance, a lot of today’s fiction seems cynical and pessimistic about human nature; the characters frequently don’t seem to have goals related to anything other than their immediate social environment; and they often don’t pursue those goals effectively (apparently for the sake of dramatic tension). Fiction demonstrating people working effectively on ambitious, broadly beneficial goals, perhaps with dramatic tension caused by something other than humans being terrible to each other, could help propagate EA mindset.
I think we should think carefully about the norm being set by the comments here.
This is an exceptionally transparent and useful grant report (especially Oliver Habryka’s). It’s helped me learn a lot about how the fund thinks about things, what kind of donation opportunities are available, and what kind of things I could (hypothetically if I were interested) pitch the LTF fund on in the future. To compare it to a common benchmark, I found it more transparent and informative than a typical GiveWell report.
But the fact that Habryka now must defend all 14 of his detailed write-ups against bikeshedding, uncharitable, and sometimes downright rude commenters seems like a strong disincentive against producing such reports in the future, especially given that the LTF fund is so time constrained.
If you value transparency in EA and want to see more of it (and you’re not a donor to the LTF fund), it seems to me like you should chill out here. That doesn’t mean don’t question the grants, but it does mean you should:
Apply even more principle of charity than usual
Take time to phrase your question in the way that’s easiest to answer
Apply some filter and don’t ask unimportant questions
Use a tone that minimizes stress for the person you’re questioning