Ben Millwood

Karma: 2,626

The illusion of consensus about EA celebrities

Ben Millwood17 Mar 2023 21:16 UTC

130 points

12 comments2 min readEA link

Ben Millwood 8 Oct 2021 19:44 UTC
89 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Cost of Rejection
It’s a little aside from your point, but good feedback is not only useful for emotionally managing the rejection—it’s also incredibly valuable information! Consider especially that someone who is applying for a job at your organization may well apply for jobs at other organizations. Telling them what is good or bad with their application will help them improve that process, and make them more likely to find something that is the right fit for them. It could be vital in helping them understand what they need to do to position themselves to be more useful to the community, or at least it could save the time and effort of them applying for more jobs that have the same requirements you did, that they didn’t meet—and save the time and effort of the hiring team there rejecting them.

A unique characteristic of EA hiring is that it’s often good for your goals to help candidates who didn’t succeed at your process succeed at something else nearby. I often think we don’t realize how significantly this shifts our incentives in cases like these.

Ben Millwood 21 May 2022 15:41 UTC
70 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Bad Omens in Current Community Building
I feel a desire to lower some expectations:
- I don’t think any social movement of real size or influence has ever avoided drawing some skepticism, mockery, or even suspicion,
- I think community builders should have a solid and detailed enough understanding of EA received wisdom to be able to lay out the case for our recommendations in a reasonably credible way, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to be domain experts in every domain, and that means that sometimes they aren’t going to be able to seem impressive to every domain expert that comes to us.
- To be frank, it isn’t realistic to be able to capture the imagination of everyone who seems promising even if we make the best possible versions of our arguments. Some people will inevitably come away thinking we “just don’t get it”, that we haven’t addressed their objections, that we’re not serious about [specific concern X] and therefore our point of view is uninteresting. Communication channels just aren’t high-fidelity enough, and people’s engagement heuristics aren’t precise enough, to avoid this happening from time to time.
- When some people are weirded out by the way we behave or try to attract new members, it seems to me like sometimes this is just reasonable self-protective heuristics that they have, working exactly as intended. People are creeped out by us giving them free books or telling them to change their careers or telling them that the future of humanity is at stake, because they reason “these people are putting a lot into me because they want a lot out of me”. They’re basically correct about that! While we value contributions from people at a wide range of levels of engagement and dedication, the “top end” is pretty extreme, as it should be, and some people are going to notice that and be worried about it. We can work to reduce that tension, but I don’t think it’s going away.
Obviously we should try our best on all of these dimensions, progress can be made, we can be more impressive and more appealing and less threatening and more welcoming. But I can’t imagine a realistic version of the EA community that honestly communicates about everything we believe and want to do and doesn’t alienate anyone by doing that.

Ben Millwood 6 Feb 2023 1:54 UTC
64 points
28 ∶ 1
on: EA’s weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior
This post presents as the only counterargument to expelling weirdness from our community that we might have less good ideas about how to make the world better. Obviously a big and serious concern! Seems important to include it. But I didn’t hear two other important reasons (in my view) to tolerate weirdness:
- Dialling down weirdness is often difficult and stressful, and in some cases effectively amounts to excluding people entirely (whether intentionally or not),
- Cultural designation of harmless lifestyles, or beliefs, or neurodivergence, as weird or inappropriate is immoral, and we should not tolerate it lightly.
I agree you shouldn’t do weird bad things, but you shouldn’t do ordinary bad things either. A general campaign against weirdness will hurt people who do not deserve to be hurt, and that’s wrong regardless of whether it will overall be better or worse for the prospects of the movement as a whole.

When the culture you live in is (e.g.) homophobic, or transphobic, or stigmatizes autism, being counter-cultural is a moral obligation.

Ben Millwood 14 Feb 2022 1:13 UTC
57 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Simplify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk”
My main criticism of this post is that it seems to implicitly suggest that “the core action relevant points of EA” are “work on AI or bio”, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge that a lot of people don’t have that as their bottom line. I think it’s reasonable to believe that they’re wrong and you’re right, but:
- I think there’s a lot that goes into deciding which people are correct on this, and only saying “AI x-risk and bio x-risk are really important” is missing a bunch of stuff that feels pretty essential to my beliefs that x-risk is the best thing to work on,
- this post seems to frame your pitch as “the new EA pitch”, and it’s weird to me to omit from your framing that lots of people that I consider EAs are kind of left out in the cold by it.

Ben Millwood 18 Feb 2023 18:28 UTC
51 points
16 ∶ 3
on: EA, 30 + 14 Rapes, and My Not-So-Good Experience with EA.
Hi there,

I have been a funder of both CEA and Rethink Priorities in the past, to the tune of low 5-digit sums per year. I’m personally acquainted with Julia, Chana and Peter, and I trust their judgement to an extent, so I tend to believe that they have good reasons for their actions, even if I don’t know what they are yet.

Despite this, if the basic claims you’re making (as I understand them) are true:
- you’ve been instrumental in getting a double-digit number of abusers excluded from the community over the last 6 years or so,
- this is a relatively uncontroversial claim that Julia et al would straightforwardly agree with,
then I’d be willing to fund you to continue this work, even if CEA didn’t want to pay you themselves. Given your credentials and background, I don’t know if I could afford you by myself, but if not I imagine there might be other people interested in contributing too.

I don’t want to sound like I’m promising anything. I’m generally nervous of being over-eager to fund things without fully understanding the situation and all perspectives on it. I think there’s a reasonable chance that when I ask the CH team about this they have very good reasons for why they haven’t had a better relationship with you, and perhaps there could be some reason that funding you to continue this work would be counterproductive somehow.

I also understand that the fact you’re not paid to do this work is not your only complaint, and maybe not even in your top three complaints. But it is the complaint that seems easiest to address, especially as a comparative outsider.

Ben Millwood 28 Mar 2024 18:54 UTC
48 points
13 ∶ 3
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Repost: SBF sentenced to 25 years jail
While I see what you’re saying here, I prefer evil to be done inconsistently rather than consistently, and every time someone merely gets what they deserve instead of what some unhinged penal system (whether in the US or elsewhere) thinks they deserve seems like a good thing to me.

(I don’t personally have an opinion on what SBF actually deserves.)

Can the AI afford to wait?

Ben Millwood20 Mar 2024 19:45 UTC

47 points

11 comments7 min readEA link

Ben Millwood 17 Dec 2023 13:08 UTC
43 points
14 ∶ 2
on: BenMillwood’s Shortform
People often propose HR departments as antidotes to some of the harm that’s done by inappropriate working practices in EA. The usual response is that small organisations often have quite informal HR arrangements even outside of EA, which does seem kinda true.

Another response is that it sometimes seems like people have an overly rosy picture of HR departments. If your corporate culture sucks then your HR department will defend and uphold your sucky corporate culture. Abusive employers will use their HR departments as an instrument of their abuse.

Perhaps the idea is to bring more mainstream HR practices or expertise into EA employers, rather than merely going through the motions of creating the department. But I think mainstream HR comes primarily from the private sector and is primarily about protecting the employer, often against the employee. They often cast themselves in a role of being there to help you, but a common piece of folk wisdom is “HR is not your friend”. I think frankly that a lot of mainstream HR culture is at worst dishonest and manipulative, and I’d be really sad to see us uncritically importing more of that.

Ben Millwood 27 Aug 2019 11:52 UTC
42 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Movement Collapse Scenarios
This is a question I consider crucial in evaluating the work of organizations, so it’s sort of embarrassing I’ve never really tried to apply it to the community as a whole. Thanks for bringing that to light.
I think one thing uniting all your collapse scenarios is that they’re gradual. I wonder how much damage could be done to EA by a relatively sudden catastrophe, or perhaps a short-ish series of catastrophes. A collapse in community trust could be a big deal: say there was a fraud or embezzlement scandal at CEA, OPP, or GiveWell. I’m not sure that would be catastrophic by itself, but perhaps if several of the organizations were damaged at once it would make people skeptical about the wisdom of reforming around any new centre, which would make it much harder to co-ordinate.
Another thing that I see as a potential risk is high-level institutions having a pattern of low-key misbehaviour that people start to see (wrongly, I hope) as an inevitable consequence of the underlying ideas. Suppose the popular perception starts to be “thinking about effectiveness in charity is all well and good, but it inevitably leads down a road of voluntary extinction / techno-utopianism / eugenics / something else low-status or bad”. Depending on how bad the thing is, smart thoughtful people might start self-selecting out of the movement, and the remainder might mismanage perceptions of them even worse.

Ben Millwood 6 Mar 2023 13:01 UTC
37 points
14 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Nick Bostrom should step down as Director of FHI
Given the problems that FHI has run into here, do you think it’s likely to continue to do good work? My guess is that being able to hire is crucial to that work. Given that, we have to ask ourselves: how long should we wait for Nick to find a resolution to these problems before we conclude that he’s unable to solve them? My guess is that two years into a hiring freeze is long enough.

I agree with you that we should update somewhat in the direction of cooperating with universities being difficult and costly. But we should also entertain the hypothesis that it’s good to collaborate with universities, but it’s not good to ask Nick to be the one who does it.

Ben Millwood 3 Dec 2022 14:06 UTC
37 points
11 ∶ 0
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.
(some of) Kathy’s accusations were false

just to draw some attention to the “(some of)”, Kathy claimed in her suicide note that her actions had led to one person being banned from EA events. My understanding is that she made a mixture of accusations that were corroborated and ones that weren’t, including the ones you refer to. I think this is interesting because it means both:
- Kathy was not just a liar who made everything up to cause trouble. I would guess she really was hurt, and directed responsibility for that hurt to a mixture of the right and wrong places. (Maybe no-one thought this, but I just want to make clear that we don’t have to choose between “she was right about everything” and “she was wrong about everything”.)
- Kathy was not ignored by the community. Her accusations were taken seriously enough to be investigated, and some of those investigations led to people being banned from events or groups. Reddit may talk shit about her, but the people in a position to do something listened.
(I should say that what I’m saying is mostly based on what Kathy said in her public writings combined with second-or-third hand accounts, and despite talking a little to Kathy at the time I’m missing almost all the details of what actually happened. Feel free to contradict me if something I said seems untrue.)

(edit 2023-10-09: revised “more than one” to “one” because I’m sure that’s true and am not sure the “more than” is true)
What links here?
- pseudonym's comment on Silicon Valley’s Rabbit Hole Problem by Mandelbrot (9 Oct 2023 3:27 UTC; 8 points)

Ben Millwood 13 Feb 2023 21:01 UTC
33 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: BenMillwood’s Shortform
Edit: This is now The illusion of consensus about EA celebrities

Something to try to dispel the notion that every EA thinker is respected/ thought highly of by every EA community member. Like, you tend to hear strong positive feedback, weak positive feedback, and strong negative feedback, but weak negative feedback is kind of awkward and only comes out sometimes

Ben Millwood 9 Sep 2023 14:59 UTC
32 points
13 ∶ 1
in reply to: Bob Jacobs’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Concerns about “bosses raking in profits” seem pretty weird to raise in a thread about a nonprofit, in a community largely comprised of nonprofits. There might be something in your proposal in general, but it doesn’t seem relevant here.

Ben Millwood 9 Feb 2023 10:05 UTC
32 points
6 ∶ 7
on: An update to our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum
I’m unenthusiastic about a policy of suppressing unverified rumours. I think the FTX scandal and the recent concerns about sexual harassment are both cases where we could honestly have benefited from more rumours. I know that false accusations can be damaging but I think currently instances of harm from false rumours are outweighed by harm that has gone unaddressed because people feel anxious about speaking up about it.

Any policy in this area should take into account the fact that many bad stories are unverifiable by nature.

Ben Millwood 10 Jun 2022 23:22 UTC
32 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why the EA aversion to local altruistic action?
A brief response to one point: if you are including second-order and third-order effects in your analysis, you should include them on both sides. Yes, donating to a local cause fosters connections in the community and ultimately state capacity and so on. But saving people from malaria does that stuff too, and intuitively when the first order effects are more dramatic, one expects the second order effects to be correspondingly more dramatic: you meet a new friend at your local animal shelter, and meanwhile the child that didn’t die of malaria meets a whole life’s worth of people, their family has less grief and trauma, their community has greater certainty and security. Of course, it’s really hard to be sure of the whole story, but I don’t see any reason to suppose that going one step deeper in the analysis will totally invert the conclusion of the first-level analysis.

Ben Millwood 19 Jul 2020 14:34 UTC
32 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Objections to Value-Alignment between Effective Altruists
Here are a couple of interpretations of value alignment:
- A pretty tame interpretation of “value-aligned” is “also wants to do good using reason and evidence”. In this sense, distinguishing between value-aligned and non-aligned hires is basically distinguishing between people who are motivated by the cause and people who are motivated by the salary or the prestige or similar. It seems relatively uncontroversial that you’d want to care about this kind of alignment, and I don’t think it reduces our capacity for dissent: indeed people are only really motivated to tell you what’s wrong with your plan to do good if they care about doing good in the first place. I think your claim is not that “all value-alignment is bad” but rather “when EAs talk about value-alignment, they’re talking about something much more specific and constraining than this tame interpretation”. I’d be interested in whether you agree.
- Another (potentially very specific and constraining) interpretation of “value alignment” that I understand people to be talking about when they’re hiring for EA roles is “I can give this person a lot of autonomy and they’ll still produce results that I think are good”. This recommends people who essentially have the same goals and methods as you right down to the way they affect decisions about how to do your job. Hiring people like that means that you tax your management capacity comparatively less and don’t need to worry so much about incentive design. To the extent that this is a big focus in EA hiring it could be because we have a deficit of management capacity and/or it’s difficult to effectively manage EA work. It certainly seems like EA research is often comparatively exploratory / preliminary and therefore underspecified, and so it’s very difficult to delegate work on it except to people who are already in a similar place to you on the matter.

Ben Millwood 25 Mar 2019 14:04 UTC
32 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Apology
And this is a clear case in which I would have first-person authority on whether I did anything wrong.
I think this is the main point of disagreement here. Generally when you make sexual or romantic advances on someone and those advances make them uncomfortable, you’re often not aware of the effect that you’re having (and they may not feel safe telling you), so you’re not the authority on whether you did something wrong.
Which is not to say that you’re guilty because they accused you! It’s possible to behave perfectly reasonably and for people around you to get upset, even to blame you for it. In that scenario you would not be guilty of doing anything wrong necessarily. But more often it looks like this:
- someone does something inappropriate without realizing it,
- impartial observers agree, having heard the facts, that it was inappropriate,
- it seems clearly-enough inappropriate that the offender had a moral duty to identify it as such in advance and not do it.
Then they need to apologize and do what’s necessary to prevent it happening again, including withdrawing from the community if necessary.

Ben Millwood 17 Mar 2021 21:13 UTC
30 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Toby Ord @ EA Global: Reconnect
You’ve previously spoken about the need to reach “existential security”—in order to believe the future is long and large, we need to believe that existential risk per year will eventually drop very close to zero. What are the best reasons for believing this can happen, and how convincing do they seem to you? Do you think that working on existential risk reduction or longtermist ideas would still be worthwhile for someone who believed existential security was very unlikely?
What links here?
- Denise_Melchin's comment on Why I am probably not a longtermist by Denise_Melchin (25 Sep 2021 8:47 UTC; 17 points)

Ben Millwood 24 Dec 2023 11:22 UTC
29 points
10 ∶ 1
on: BenMillwood’s Shortform
Something I’m trying to do in my comments recently is “hedge only once”; e.g. instead of “I think X seems like it’s Y”, you pick either one of “I think X is Y” or “X seems like it’s Y”. There is a difference in meaning, but often one of the latter feels sufficient to convey what I wanted to say anyway.

This is part of a broader sense I have that hedging serves an important purpose but is also obstructive to good writing, especially concision, and the fact that it’s a particular feature of EA/rat writing can be alienating to other audiences, even though I think it comes from a self-awareness / self-critical instinct that I think is a positive feature of the community.

Ben Millwood

The illu­sion of con­sen­sus about EA celebrities

Can the AI af­ford to wait?

The illusion of consensus about EA celebrities

Can the AI afford to wait?