Doctor from NZ, independent researcher (grand futures / macrostrategy) collaborating with FHI / Anders Sandberg. Previously: Global Health & Development research @ Rethink Priorities.
Feel free to reach out if you think there’s anything I can do to help you or your work, or if you have any Qs about Rethink Priorities! If you’re a medical student / junior doctor reconsidering your clinical future, or if you’re quite new to EA / feel uncertain about how you fit in the EA space, have an especially low bar for reaching out.
Outside of EA, I do a bit of end of life care research and climate change advocacy, and outside of work I enjoy some casual basketball, board games and good indie films. (Very) washed up classical violinist and Oly-lifter.
All comments in personal capacity unless otherwise stated.
bruce
This is a conversation I have a fair amount when I talk to non-EA + non-medical friends about work, some quick thoughts:
If someone asks me Qs around DALYs at all (i.e. “why measure”), I would point to general cases where this happens fairly uncontroversially, e.g.:-If you were in charge of the health system, how would you choose to distribute the resources you get?
-If you were building a hospital, how would you go about choosing how to allocate your wards to different specialties?
-If you were in an emergency waiting room and you had 10 people in the waiting room, how would you choose who to see first?
These kinds of questions entail some kind of “diverting resources from one person to another” in a way that is pretty understandable (though they also point to reasonable considerations for why you might not only use DALYs in those contexts)
If someone is challenging me over using DALYs in context of it being a measurement system that is potentially ableist, then I generally just agree—it is indeed ableist by some framings![1]
Though, often in these conversations the underlying theme isn’t necessarily a “I have a problem with healthcare prioritisation” but a general sense that disabled folk aren’t receiving enough resources for their needs—so when having these conversations it’s important to acknowledge that disabled folk do just face a lot more challenges navigating the healthcare system (and society generally) through no fault of their own, and that we haven’t worked out the answers to prioritising accordingly or for solving the barriers that disabled folk face.
If the claim goes further and is explicitly saying interventions for disabilities are more cost effective than current DALYs approach give them credit for, then that’s also worth considering—though the standard would correspondingly increase if they are suggesting a new approach to resource allocation—as Larks’ comment illustrates, it is difficult to find an singular approach / measure that doesn’t push against intuitions or have something problematic at the policy level.[2]
On how you’re feeling when talking about prioritising:But then I feel like I’m implicitly saying something about valuing some people’s lives less than others, or saying that I would ultimately choose to divert resources from one person’s suffering to another’s.
This makes sense, though I do think there is a decent difference between the claim of “some people’s lives are worth more than others” and the claim of “some healthcare resources go further in one context than others (and thus justify the diversion)”. For example, I think if you never actively deprioritised anyone you would end up implicitly/passively prioritising based on things like [who can afford to go to the hospital / who lives closer / other access constraints]. But these are going to be much less correlated to what people care about when they say “all lives are equal”.
But if we have data on what the status quo is, then “not prioritising” / “letting the status quo happen” is still a choice we are making! And so we try to improve on the status quo and save more lives, precisely because we don’t think the 1000 patients on diabetes medication is worth less than the one cancer patient on a third-line immunotherapy.
- ^
E.g., for DALYs, the disability weight of 1 person with (condition A+B) is mathematically forced to be lower than the combined disability weight of two separate individuals with condition A and condition B respectively. That means for any cure of condition A, those who have only condition A would theoretically be prioritised under the DALY framework than those who have other health issues (e.g. have a disability). While I don’t have a good sense of when/if this specific part of the DALY framework has impacted resource allocation in practice, it is important to acknowledge the (many!) limitations the measures we use have.
- ^
Also, different folks within the disability community also have a wide range of views around what it means to live with a disability / be a disabled person (e.g. functional VS social models of disability), so it’s not actually clear that e.g., WELLBYs would necessarily lead to more healthcare resources in that direction, depending on which groups you were talking to.
- ^
Thanks for writing this! RE: We would advise against working at Conjecture
We think there are many more impactful places to work, including non-profits such as Redwood, CAIS and FAR; alignment teams at Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind; or working with academics such as Stuart Russell, Sam Bowman, Jacob Steinhardt or David Krueger. Note we would not in general recommend working at capabilities-oriented teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind or other AGI-focused companies.
Additionally, Conjecture seems relatively weak for skill building [...] We expect most ML engineering or research roles at prominent AI labs to offer better mentorship than Conjecture. Although we would hesitate to recommend taking a position at a capabilities-focused lab purely for skill building, we find it plausible that Conjecture could end up being net-negative, and so do not view Conjecture as a safer option in this regard than most competing firms.
I don’t work in AI safety and am not well-informed on the orgs here, but did want to comment on this as this recommendation might benefit from some clarity about who the target audience is.
As written, the claims sound something like:
CAIS et al., alignment teams at Anthropic et al., and working with Stuart Russel et al., are better places to work than Conjecture
Though not necessarily recommended, capabilities research at prominent AI labs is likely to be better than working at Conjecture for skill building, since Conjecture is not necessarily safer.
However:
The suggested alternatives don’t seem like they would be able to absorb a significant amount of additional talent, especially given the increase in interest in AI.
I have spoken to a few people working in AI / AI field building who perceive mentoring to be a bottleneck in AI safety at the moment.
If both of the above are true, what would your recommendation be to someone who had an offer from Conjecture, but not your recommended alternatives? E.g., choosing between independent research funded by LTFF VS working for Conjecture?
Just seeking a bit more clarity about whether this recommendation is mainly targeted at people who might have a choice between Conjecture and your alternatives, or whether this is a blanket recommendation that one should reject offers from Conjecture, regardless of seniority and what their alternatives are, or somewhere in between.
Thanks again!
Some very quick thoughts from EY’s TIME piece from the perspective of someone ~outside of the AI safety work. I have no technical background and don’t follow the field closely, so likely to be missing some context and nuance; happy to hear pushback!
Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.
Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.
My immediate reaction when reading this was something like “wow, is this representative of AI safety folks? Are they willing to go to any lengths to stop AI development?”. I’ve heard anecdotes of people outside of all this stuff saying this piece reads like a terrorist organisation, for example, which I think is a stronger term than I’d describe, but I think suggestions like this does unfortunately play into potential comparisons to ecofascists.
As someone seen publicly to be a thought leader and widely regarded as a founder of the field, there are some risks to this kind of messaging. It’s hard to evaluate how this trades off, but I definitely know communities and groups that would be pretty put off by this, and it’s unclear how much value the sentences around willingness to escalate nuclear war are actually adding.
It’s an empirical Q about how to tradeoff between risks from nuclear war and risks from AI, but the claim of “preventing AI extinction is a priority above a nuclear exchange” is ~trivially true; the reverse is also true: “preventing extinction from nuclear war is a priority above preventing AI training runs”. Given the difficulty of illustrating and defending a position that the risks of AI training runs is substantially higher than that of a nuclear exchange to the general public, I would have erred on the side of caution when saying things that are as politically charged as advocating for nuclear escalation (or at least something can be interpreted as such).
I wonder which superpower EY trusts to properly identify a hypothetical “rogue datacentre” that’s worthy of a military strike for the good of humanity, or whether this will just end up with parallels to other failed excursions abroad ‘for the greater good’ or to advance individual national interests.
If nuclear weapons are a reasonable comparison, we might expect limitations to end up with a few competing global powers to have access to AI developments, and countries that do not. It seems plausible that criticism around these treaties being used to maintain the status quo in the nuclear nonproliferation / disarmament debate may be applicable here too.
Unlike nuclear weapons (though nuclear power may weaken this somewhat), developments in AI has the potential to help immensely with development and economic growth.
Thus the conversation may eventually bump something that looks like:
Richer countries / first movers that have obtained significant benefits of AI take steps to prevent other countries from catching up.[1]
Rich countries using the excuse of preventing AI extinction as a guise to further national interests
Development opportunities from AI for LMICs are similarly hindered, or only allowed in a way that is approved by the first movers in AI.
Given the above, and that conversations around and tangential to AI risk already receive some pushback from the Global South community for distracting and taking resources away from existing commitments to UN Development Goals, my sense is that folks working in AI governance / policy would likely strongly benefit from scoping out how these developments are affecting Global South stakeholders, and how to get their buy-in for such measures.
(disclaimer: one thing this gestures at is something like—“global health / development efforts can be instrumentally useful towards achieving longtermist goals”[2], which is something I’m clearly interested in as someone working in global health. While it seems rather unlikely that doing so is the best way of achieving longtermist goals on the margin[3], it doesn’t exclude some aspect of this in being part of a necessary condition for important wins like an international treaty, if that’s what is currently being advocated for. It is also worth mentioning because I think this is likely to be a gap / weakness in existing EA approaches).
In our new report, The Elephant in the Bednet, we show that the relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make. This issue is usually glossed over and there is no simple answer.
We conclude that the Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions. We expect this conclusion will similarly apply to the other life-extending charities recommended by GiveWell.
In suggesting James quote these together, it sounds like you’re saying something like “this is a clear caveat to the strength of recommendation behind StrongMinds, HLI doesn’t recommend StrongMinds as strongly as the individual bullet implies, it’s misleading for you to not include this”.
But in other places HLI’s communication around this takes on a framing of something closer to “The cost effectiveness of AMF, (but not StrongMinds) varies greatly under these assumptions. But the vast majority of this large range falls below the cost effectiveness of StrongMinds”. (extracted quotes in footnote)[1]
As a result of this framing, despite the caveat that HLI “[does] not advocate for any particular view”, I think it’s reasonable to interpret this as being strongly supportive of StrongMinds, which can be true even if HLI does not have a formed view on the exact philosophical view to take.[2]
If you did mean the former (that the bullet about philosophical assumptions is primarily included as a caveat to the strength of recommendation behind StrongMinds), then there is probably some tension here between (emphasis added):
-”the relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make...there is no simple answer”, and
-”We conclude StrongMinds > AMF under almost all assumptions”
Additionally I think some weak evidence to suggest that HLI is not as well-caveated as it could be is that many people (mistakenly) viewed HLI as an advocacy organisation for mental health interventions. I do think this is a reasonable outside interpretation based on HLI’s communications, even though this is not HLI’s stated intent. For example, I don’t think it would be unreasonable for an outsider to read your current pinned thread and come away with conclusions like:
“StrongMinds is the best place to donate”,
“StrongMinds is better than AMF”,
“Mental health is a very good place to donate if you want to do the most good”,
“Happiness is what ultimately matters for wellbeing and what should be measured”.
If these are not what you want people to take away, then I think pointing to this bullet point caveat doesn’t really meaningfully address this concern—the response kind of feels something like “you should have read the fine print”. While I don’t think it’s not necessary for HLI to take a stance on specific philosophical views, I do think it becomes an issue if people are (mis)interpreting HLI’s stance based on its published statements.
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
- ^
-We show how much cost-effectiveness changes by shifting from one extreme of (reasonable) opinion to the other. At one end, AMF is 1.3x better than StrongMinds. At the other, StrongMinds is 12x better than AMF.
-StrongMinds and GiveDirectly are represented with flat, dashed lines because their cost-effectiveness does not change under the different assumptions.
-As you can see, AMF’s cost-effectiveness changes a lot. It is only more cost-effective than StrongMinds if you adopt deprivationism and place the neutral point below 1.
- ^
As you’ve acknowledged, comments like “We’re now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money.” perhaps add to the confusion.
- Jul 10, 2023, 10:22 PM; 45 points) 's comment on The Happier Lives Institute is funding constrained and needs you! by (
- Jul 11, 2023, 8:48 AM; 1 point) 's comment on The Happier Lives Institute is funding constrained and needs you! by (
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying!
If I understand correctly, the updated figures should then be:
For 1 person being treated by StrongMinds (excluding all household spillover effects) to be worth the WELLBYs gained for a year of life[1] with HLI’s methodology, the neutral point needs to be at least 4.95-3.77 = 1.18.
If we include spillover effects of StrongMinds (and use the updated / lower figures), then the benefit of 1 person going through StrongMinds is 10.7 WELLBYs.[2] Under HLI’s estimates, this is equivalent to more than two years of wellbeing benefits from the average life, even if we set the neutral point at zero. Using your personal neutral point of 2 would suggest the intervention for 1 person including spillovers is equivalent to >3.5 years of wellbeing benefits. Is this correct or am I missing something here?
1.18 as the neutral point seems pretty reasonable, though the idea that 12 hours of therapy for an individual is worth the wellbeing benefits of 1 year of an average life when only considering impacts to them, and anywhere between 2~3.5 years of life when including spillovers does seem rather unintuitive to me, despite my view that we should probably do more work on subjective wellbeing measures on the margin. I’m not sure if this means:
WELLBYs as a measure can’t capturing what I care about in a year of healthy life, so we should not use solely WELLBYs when measuring wellbeing;
HLI isn’t applying WELLBYs in a way that captures the benefits of a healthy life;
The existing way of estimating 1 year of life via WELLBYs is wrong in some other way (e.g. the 4.95 assumption is wrong, the 0-10 scale is wrong, the ~1.18 neutral point is wrong);
HLI have overestimated the benefits of StrongMinds;
I have a very poorly calibrated view of how good / bad 12 hours of therapy / a year of life is worth, though this seems less likely.
Would be interested in your thoughts on this / let me know if I’ve misinterpreted anything!
- ^
More precisely, the average wellbeing benefits from 1 year of life from an adult in 6 African countries
- ^
Thanks Joel.
this comparison, as it stands, doesn’t immediately strike me as absurd. Grief has an odd counterfactual. We can only extend lives. People who’re saved will still die and the people who love them will still grieve. The question is how much worse the total grief is for a very young child (the typical beneficiary of e.g., AMF) than the grief for the adolescent, or a young adult, or an adult, or elder they’d become
My intuition, which is shared by many, is that the badness of a child’s death is not merely due to the grief of those around them. So presumably the question should not be comparing just the counterfactual grief of losing a very young child VS an [older adult], but also “lost wellbeing” from living a net-positive-wellbeing life in expectation?
I also just saw that Alex claims HLI “estimates that StrongMinds causes a gain of 13 WELLBYs”. Is this for 1 person going through StrongMinds (i.e. ~12 hours of group therapy), or something else? Where does the 13 WELLBYs come from?
I ask because if we are using HLI’s estimates of WELLBYs per death averted, and use your preferred estimate for the neutral point, then 13 / (4.95-2) is >4 years of life. Even if we put the neutral point at zero, this suggests 13 WELLBYs is worth >2.5 years of life.[1]
I think I’m misunderstanding something here, because GiveWell claims “HLI’s estimates imply that receiving IPT-G is roughly 40% as valuable as an additional year of life per year of benefit or 80% of the value of an additional year of life total.”
Can you help me disambiguate this? Apologies for the confusion.
- ^
13 / 4.95
- ^
To be a little more precise:
HLI’s estimates imply, for example, that a donor would pick offering StrongMinds’ intervention to 20 individuals over averting the death of a child, and that receiving StrongMinds’ program is 80% as good for the recipient as an additional year of healthy life.
I.e., is it your view that 4-8 weeks of group therapy (~12 hours) for 20 people is preferable to averting the death of a child?
it seems low cost and potentially quite valuable to put up a title and perhaps just a one-para abstract of all the projects you have done/are doing
This is a great suggestion, thanks!
Thanks for this! Yeah, the research going out of date is definitely a relevant concern in some faster-moving areas. RE: easiest to put it up ~immediately—I think if our reports for clients could just be copy pasted to a public facing version for a general audience this would be true, but in practice this is often not the case, e.g. because the client has some underlying background knowledge that would be unreasonable to expect the public to have, running quotes by interviewees to see if they’re happy with being quoted publicly etc.
There’s a direct tradeoff here between spending time on turning a client-facing report to a public-facing version and just starting the next client-facing report. In most cases we’ve just prioritised the next client-facing report, but it is definitely something we want to think more about going forward, and I think our most recent round of hires has definitely helped with this.
In an ideal world the global health team just has a lot of unrestricted funding to use so we can push these things out in parallel etc, in part because it is one way (among many others we’d like to explore) of helping us increase the impact of research we’ve already done, and also because this would provide extra feedback loops that can improve our own process + work.
Thanks for engaging! I’ll speak for myself here, though others might chime in or have different thoughts.
How do you determine if you’re asking the right questions?
Generally we ask our clients at the start something along the lines of “what question is this report trying to help answer for you?”. Often this is fairly straightforward, like “is this worth funding”, or “is this worth more researcher hours in exploring”. And we will often push back or add things to the brief to make sure we include what is most decision-relevant within the timeframe we are allocated. An example of this is when we were asked to look into the landscape of the philanthropy spending for cause area X, but it turns out that excluding the non-philanthropic spending might end up being pretty decision relevant, so we suggested incorporating that into the report.
We have multiple check-ins with our client to make sure the information we get is the kind of information they want, and to have opportunities to pivot if new questions come up as a result of what we find that might be more decision-relevant.
What is your process for judging information quality?
I don’t think we have a formalised organisational-level process around this; and I think this is just fairly general research appraisal stuff that we do independently. There’s a tradeoff between following a thorough process and speed; it might be clear on skimming that this study is much less updating because of its recruitment or allocation etc, but if we needed to e.g. MMAT every study we read this would be pretty time consuming. In general we try to transparently communicate what we’ve done in check-ins with each other, with our client, and in our reports, so they’re aware of limitations in the search and our conclusions.
Do you employ any audits or tools to identify/correct biases (e.g. what studies you select, whom you decide to interview, etc.)?
Can you give me an example of a tool to identify biases in the above? I assume you aren’t referring to tools that we can use to appraise individual studies/reviews but one level above that?
RE: interviews, one approach we frequently take is to look for key papers or reports in the field that are most likely to be decision-relevant and reach out to its author. Sometimes we will intentionally aim to find views that push us in opposing sides of the potential decision. Other times we just need technical expertise in an area that our team doesn’t have. Generally we will reach out to the client with the list to make sure they’re happy with the choices we’ve made, which is intended to reduce doubling up on the same expert, but also serves as a checkpoint I guess.
We don’t have audits but we do have internal reviews, though admittedly I think our current process is unlikely to pick up issues around interviewee selection unless the reviewer is well connected in this space, and it will similarly likely only pick up issues in study selection if the reviewer knows specific papers or have some strong priors around the existence of stronger evidence on this topic. My guess is that the likelihood of the audits making meaningful changes to our report is sufficiently low that if it takes more than a few days it just wouldn’t be worth the time for most of the reports we are doing. That being said, it might be a reasonable thing to consider as part of a separate retrospective review of previous reports etc! Do you have any suggestions here or are there good approaches you know about / have seen?
My concern is that if we sexually neuter all EA groups, meetings, and interactions, and sever the deep human motivational links between our mating effort and our intellectual and moral work, we’ll be taking the wind out of EA’s sails. We’ll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love.
These are some pretty strong claims that don’t seem particularly well substantiated.
Is trying to be romantically attractive the “wrong reason” for doing excellent intellectual work, displaying genuine moral virtues, and being friendly at meetings?
I also feel a bit confused about this. I think if someone is taking a particular action, or “investing in difficult, challenging behaviors to attract mates”, it does seem clear there are contexts where the added intention of “to attract mates” changes how the interaction feels to me, and contexts where that added intention makes the interaction feel inappropriate. For example, if I’m at work and I think someone is friendly at the meeting because they primarily want to attract a mate vs if they are following professional norms vs if they’re a kind person who cares about fostering a welcoming space for discussion, I do consider some reasons better than others.
While I don’t think it’s wrong to try to attract mates at a general level, I think this can happen in ways that are deceitful, and ways that leverage power dynamics in a way that’s unfair and unpleasant (or worse) for the receiving party. In a similar vein, I particularly appreciated Dustin’s tweet here.
I do think International Women’s Day is a timely prompt for EA folks to celebrate and acknowledge the women in EA who are drawn to EA because they want to help find the best ways to help others, or to put them into practice. I appreciate (and am happy for you & Diana!) that there will be folks who benefit from finding like-minded mates in EA. I also agree that often there are overt actions that come with obvious social costs, and “going too far” in the other direction seems bad by definition. But I also want to recognise that sometimes there are likely actions that are not “overtly” costly, or may even be beneficial for those who are primarily motivated to attract mates, but may be costly in expectation for those who are primarily interested in EA as a professional space, or as a place where they can collaborate with people who also care about tackling some of the most important issues we face today. And I think this is a tradeoff that’s important to consider—ultimately the EA I want to see and be part of is one that optimises for doing good, and while that’s not mutually exclusive to trying to attract mates within EA, I’d be surprised if doing so as the primary goal also happened to be the best approach for doing good.
If you’re saying it’s not, can you give an example of an issue on which you disagree with the progressive/feminist/woke viewpoint?
I’ve downvoted this comment. It’s not explicitly against the forum norms (maybe this?), but my personal view is that comments like these feel like you’re asking someone to prove their tribe, and are divisive without being meaningfully useful.
I think if you are making a claim that this reads like progressive / feminist / woke advocacy, the burden of proof is on you to support your claim (i.e. it’s more helpful to provide excerpts from the post that you think are poorly worded or read like they seem like an advocacy piece). Otherwise someone else can come along and just say “Ok sure, I don’t think this reads like progressive / feminist / woke advocacy”.
I think a charitable interpretation of your question is that you want to know if the author is “non-progressive / nonfeminist / nonwoke” in order to help you decide whether this post is in fact advocacy that advances those political aims. But I don’t think asking this question is even helpful for that? Perhaps they share some views on the pay gap or minimum wage or intersectionality. How do the author’s position on these reliably show whether this post is “progressive / feminist / woke advocacy”? It just also risks going down a completely unrelated discussion. In any case, given this is a pseudonym, they could literally just lie about a position.
Hey Ollie! Hope you’re well.
I think there’s a tricky trade-off between clarity and scope here....if we state guidelines that are very specific (e.g. a list of things you mustn’t do in specific contexts), we might fail to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list.
I want to gently push back on this a bit—I don’t think this is necessarily a tradeoff. It’s not clear to me that the guidelines have to be all-inclusive or nothing. As an example, just because the guidelines say you can’t use the swapcard app for dating purposes, it would be pretty unreasonable for people to interpret that as “oh, the guidelines don’t say I can’t use the swapcard app to scam people, that must mean this is endorsed by CEA”.
And even if it’s the case that the current guidelines don’t explicitly comment against using swapcard to scam other attendees, and this contributes to some degree of “failing to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list”, that seems like a bad reason to choose to not state “don’t use swapcard for sexual purposes”.
RE: guidelines that include helpful examples, here’s one that I found from 10secs of googling.
First it defines harrassment and sexual harrassment fairly broadly. Of course, what exactly counts as “reasonably be expected or be perceived to cause offence or humiliation” can differ between people, but this is a marginal improvement compared to current EAG guidelines that simply state “unwanted sexual attention or sexual harrassment”.
It then gives a non-exhaustive list of fairly uncontroversial actions for its context—CEA can adopt its own standard! But I think it’s fair to say that just because this list doesn’t cover every possibility it doesn’t necessarily mean the list is not worth including.
Notably, it also outlines a complaint process and details possible actions that may reasonably occur in response to a complaint.
As I responded to Julia’s comment that you linked, I think these lists can be helpful because most reported cases are likely not from people intentionally wishing to cause harm, but differences in norms or communication or expectations around what might be considered harmful. Having a explicit list of actions helps get around these differences by being more precise about actions that are likely to be considered net negative in expectation. If it’s the case that there are a lot of examples that are in a grey area, then this may be an argument to exclude those examples, but it isn’t really an argument against having a list that contains less ambiguous examples.
Ditto RE: different settings—this is an argument to have narrower scope for the guidelines, and to not write a single guideline that is intended to cover both the career fair and the afterparty, but not an argument against expressing what’s unacceptable under one specific setting (especially when that setting is something as crucial as “EAG conference time”)
Lastly, RE: “Responses should be shaped by the wishes of the person who experienced the problem”—of course it should be! But a list of possible actions that might be taken can be helpful without committing the team to a set response, but the inclusion of potential actions that can be taken is still reassuring and helpful for people to know what can be possible.
Again, this was just the first link I clicked, I don’t think it’s perfect, but I think there are multiple aspects of this that CEA could use to help with further iterations of its guidelines.
Another challenge is that CEA is the host of some events but not the host of some others associated with the conferences. We can’t force an afterparty host or a bar manager to agree to follow our guidelines though we sometimes collaborate on setting norms or encourage certain practices.
I think it’s fine to start from CEA’s circle of influence and have good guidelines + norms for CEA events—if things go well this may incentivise other organisers to adopt these practices (or perhaps they won’t adopt it, because the context is sufficiently different, which is fine too!) But even if other organisers don’t adopt better guidelines, this doesn’t seem like a particularly strong argument against adopting clearer guidelines for CEA events. The UNFCCC presumably aren’t using “oh, we can’t control what happens in UN Youth events globally, and we can’t force them to agree to follow our guidelines” as an excuse to not have guidelines. But because they have their own guidelines, and many UN Youth events try to emulate what the UN event proper looks like, they will (at least try to) adopt a similar level of formality.
One last reason to err on the side of more precise guidelines echoes point 3 in what lilly shared above—if guidelines are vague and more open to interpretation by the Community Health team, this requires a higher level of trust in the CH team’s track record and decision-making and management of CoIs, etc. To whatever extent recent events may reflect actual gaps in this process or even just a change in the perception here, erring on the side of clearer guidelines can help with accountability and trust building.
Second: As a poly EA, I’m more likely to bother to show up for things if I think I might get laid. It increases engagement and community cohesion.
[emphasis added]
I just want to flag that this makes me pretty uncomfortable. Not all engagement is good, and if a change in policy / culture increases engagement on the margin because it attracts people who want to show up to get laid (who otherwise wouldn’t have been there), I think I’m personally okay with not having this engagement.
It’s also not clear that if EA changes the dynamics of events or the movement such that there are now an extra group of people who are engaging now that there are opportunities to get laid, that this wouldn’t lead to other people disengaging, so I think the extent to which this actually leads to positive engagement and community cohesion is an open question.
The impact on the global portfolio of charitable action is much less clear, because people like me will coalesce elsewhere in communities that try to be actively cringe and have a bit of a right wing reputation to avoid new comers who want to drive us out. But we’ll probably still be worrying about ai, utilitarianism, and trying to make ethical concerns into real world changes.
...changes to the culture should be judged in utilitarian terms by how they influence the global portfolio of action, not by how they change the level of useful work directly done through EA.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding you correctly. Your two claims sound like:
“If people like me are driven out of the EA community, they will coalesce elsewhere, have a cringe + right wing reputation, and continue to do work on AI / try to make ethical concerns into real world changes.”
“Changes to EA culture should take into account all impacts and not just the direct impact done through EA.”
If you assume that more normie / left-leaning EAs[1] won’t continue to do the “EA-equivalent” to the same extent (e.g. they go off and become a campaign coordinator for the median social justice movement), doesn’t this imply EA should actively move away from “cringe + right wing reputation” by your own argument?[2]
i.e. if “cringe right wing” EAs are going to work on AI safety regardless of their involvement in EA, and “normie left wing” EAs will be more impactful in EA than outside of it, this implies the counterfactual loss in impact is asymmetrical, and if you suggest taking into account all impacts and not just the direct impact through EA, then presumably this supports moving in the normie left wing direction.
- ^
Fwiw, I’m not the biggest fan of these labels, and I think they risk being more tribal than adding clarity to the conversation. Like I think folks on a wide range on the political spectrum can have meaningful and useful things to contribute to the EA movement. But I am using it just as antonyms to the examples you gave.
- ^
Again, just using your words, not necessarily reflective of any personal views of what you might refer to as “weird aspie” / “libertarian anti-woke” EAs. I’m also not necessarily advocating that EA should actually move away from this group, just trying to understand your argument.
I’ve continued to work hard to see things from the perspective of women like you over the last couple days
Upvoted!
Not being able to have as many fun, edgy (to me) conversations like that anymore will decrease my quality of life. However, the pain that people are experiencing seems a lot more intense than the joy I get from edgy conversations.
I can see why this feels like a tradeoff, but I do think it’s worth thinking about these conversations in the context that they happened—I don’t think people are (or should be!) advocating for EAs to never talk about sex ever again. But clearly there are contexts where personal topics can be discussed safely, and contexts in which these discussions are inappropriate.
For example, is it important to you that you are able to have these conversations with anyone, in any context, or just that you are able to have these conversations when you feel comfortable to?
Some personal thoughts about the the polls generally—apologies in advance if this comes across confrontational, as I know you are well-intentioned! Also to be clear, I enjoyed and appreciated what you did with the cluster poll, as they provided new information RE: clusters—I’m referring mainly to comment polls like this.[1]
I understand your desire and goals RE: polling, but I personally find many of the polls to be of unclear value, and it often clogs up the comment sections (even if they are downvoted to the bottom, as this is, I often stay updated by looking at “recent discussion” on the front page).
I hear that you are interested in what we all think and feel—I am too! But I don’t know if the polls actually answer this, or at least I find it difficult to meaningfully update on them.
Perhaps, though by that argument maybe we shouldn’t have long and complex arguments either.
I’d much rather just see more discussion on the actual question being polled, because then people provide their reasoning. In this case, even if those who aren’t on the forum or aren’t in a position to comment or engage, I can see if I agree with the reasoning myself, and update more strongly on reasoning I find more compelling, etc. On the other hand, if all I see is “7 agreement karma 22 votes”, that doesn’t give me a lot of information other than something like “ok seems like people voted both ways on this”.
I also worry that it may even be counterproductive and give the wrong impression of what the community’s views are.
One recent example that comes to mind:
Apparently, the majority opinion is that what Owen did was not “wrong and very serious”.
If this is actually representative of the EA community’s opinion, then many people I know who have been dismayed / distressed about recent events will be doing a fair amount of updating about how this community sees sexual harassment, abuse of power, navigating professional / personal boundaries, etc.[2]
It’s also a little draining in some sense—I feel like I want to ignore most of these polls, but I also want to signal to people in this community who are more personally affected by these that there are others who care about the things they care about. This isn’t your fault though, just raising how these are real considerations when I’m reading your polls, and imagining how my friends who might see these polls may react. And on topics where those most deeply affected have strong reasons to not engage with the poll, this is going to be a larger issue.
I also agree with earlier comments about the potential for trolls (contra your earlier claim, there is recent evidence to support this), and the negative incentives that this may contribute to if these polls end up being action guiding (or even just perceived to be action guiding) in some way.
- ^
This has like 6 different claims. Are people agreeing with all 6? the general vibe? just three? Is the 19 voters to 35 karma indicative of 19 people saying weakly yes, or a bimodal distribution from people who feel very strongly?
- ^
I can also already see the quote in the next hit piece: “In an internal poll, a majority of EAs believe that [OCB’s actions] were not wrong/very serious”.
Based on this comment and this excerpt from the UK EV board above, my interpretation is that the board as a whole did not know about this until Feb 2023.
I do think the comment doesn’t fully clarify between whether she considered telling the board but opted against this versus this option did not cross her mind back in 2021, but I suspect this is something that will also be part of the investigation, which is why I didn’t follow up on this.
Hi Chana,
Thanks for this—I imagine this has been a difficult few months for you as the interim head of the community health team.
I just wanted to bring Q4 from this comment to your attention, (specifically, lilly’s set of questions here) as you seem better placed to answer about the general case (as opposed to the specifics around OCB, which might be better suited for Julia)
Separately, I’m wondering what from the investigation if any, would you be happy to pre-commit to sharing publicly? I’d also love to get a sense of how you and the team hope to ensure the CH team has processes and systems in place to manage these kinds of cases going forward, and what you’d be happy to pre-commit to sharing in terms of internal investigations and reflections. Non-exhaustive categories of information I would be interested in would be:
Methodology for investigations
Conflicts of Interests identified
Problems identified
Changes considered / explored
Changes made + reasoning
My sense is that rebuilding trust in the CH team will be important going forward, and such a precommitment combined with transparent and appropriately timely follow-up may be useful here.
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
Thanks for the apology Julia.
I’m mindful that there’s an external investigation that is ongoing at present, but I had a few questions that I think would be useful transparency for the EA community, even if it may be detrimental to the CEA / the community health team. I’m sorry if this comes across as piling on in what I’m sure is a very stressful time for you and the team, and I want to emphasise and echo Kirsten’s comment above about this ultimately being a “lack of adequate systems” issue, and not a responsibility that should be fully borne by you as an individual.
Shortly after the article came out, Julia Wise (CEA’s community liaison) informed the EV UK board that this concerned behaviour of Owen Cotton-Barratt; the incident occurred more than 5 years ago and was reported to her in 2021. (Owen became a board member in 2020.)
From the EV UK board’s statement, it sounds like the board did not know about this until Feb this year. Can you clarify the extent to which not informing the EV UK board was a result of the victim explicitly requesting something along these lines, and if so, whether you spoke to the victim before informing the EV UK board when the article came out?
What actions did you take to reduce the risks associated with these events (whether to individual / potential victims in the EA community, to CEA, or the EA movement more broadly)? It sounds like the actions consisted of the following, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important:[1]
Conversations with Owen Cotton-Barratt (OCB) and his colleagues
Some clarity here would be useful also—what’s the role of OCB’s colleagues here? Were they complicit, or was this for harm-mitigating reasons?
A written post about power dynamics
An update to Nicole when she became your manager in 2021
Are you also happy to comment on whether your CoI with OCB was disclosed with Nicole when you informed her of this situation, or with anyone else in the CH team at any stage? What details did you share with Nicole in 2021, when she became your manager?
Given OCB’s status and position in the community, the seemingly direct access to potential victims via mentoring / “picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs” / his role as Director for FHI’s Research Scholars Programme, and your COIs with him (both from a friendship and EV / CEA organisational perspective), this seems to clearly tick many important boxes of where I’d expect to err on the side of full disclosure. Were there extenuating circumstances at the time that meant you didn’t feel comfortable sharing more than you did?
Did the complaints from the woman in the Time article come before or after other feedback you heard about OCB? The timeline sounds something like:
TIME magazine case, reported to you in 2021
Learnt about other situations (in the cases not from OCB, were these as a result of your investigation, or spontaneous reports by other community members?)
OCB raised concerns to you that he had made another woman uncomfortable—reported a few months ago.
Accordingly, I also just want to flag this set of questions as important, and has been raised in the past as a potential cause for insufficient action. When the TIME article came out, you clarified that one cause for confusion was that this consideration didn’t apply to sexual assault but to things like “someone has made some inappropriate comments and gotten feedback about it”. To what extent do you think these considerations played a role in the decisions you made around managing risk?
You mentioned that you had been “taking a renewed look at possible steps to take here”. When did this start? I’m mainly interested in clarifying whether this was something ongoing, (e.g., prompted by finding out about other situations or hearing from OCB himself about making another woman uncomfortable a few months ago), or was this prompted by knowledge of the existence (or possible existence) of the TIME article.
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
- ^
For example:
-notifying the EV board
-a discussion with other CH colleagues around reducing his exposure to possible victims or level of risk, given his role as Director for FHI’s Research Scholars Programme, such as considering a temporary ban to EAGs (also seems like shared responsibility around the decision made would be appropriate, and not a burden that should fall solely on your shoulders)
- Feb 20, 2023, 11:35 PM; 9 points) 's comment on EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation by (
A commonly used model in the trust literature (Mayer et al., 1995) is that trustworthiness can be broken down into three factors: ability, benevolence, and integrity.
RE: domain specific, the paper incorporates this under ‘ability’:
There are other conceptions but many of them describe something closer to trust that is domain specific rather than generalised.