conflictaverse

Karma: 186

conflictaverse Apr 10, 2025, 11:43 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Anthropic is not being consistently candid about their connection to EA
I kind of wish we could do a reader poll as to community opinion on (1) whether these things are lies and (2) why they think they said these things. I can’t tell if I’m really poorly calibrated when I read some of the comments here or if the commenters are a non-representative sample.

conflictaverse Apr 10, 2025, 11:40 PM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robi Rahman’s comment on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
Cool, I adjusted my vote, thanks for addressing.
I think there’s something to what you’re saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I’d argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors^[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.

Let’s say for arguments sake that I’m totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn’t that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It’s that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant—it’s still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that’s something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I’d argue it’s because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it’s because I’m totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I’m having is still useful to begin the conversation.
1. ^
  Obviously, I don’t think my opinion is based on factual errors, but that’s neither here nor there.

conflictaverse Apr 10, 2025, 10:14 PM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robi Rahman’s comment on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
I downvoted this comment because it’s not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn’t take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn’t relevant to my point.

conflictaverse Apr 9, 2025, 7:34 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Angelina Li’s comment on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
I think a lot of the folks whose opinion I’m interested are definitely on the EA forum, at least as lurkers—the folks who are active in EA (and so likely to read stuff here) but still call themselves EA adjacent in polite company :)

conflictaverse Apr 9, 2025, 7:30 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David T’s comment on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
Personally, I think disagreements like this fit under the definition of brand confusion, at least as I intended it—if everyone understood that there were EAs who are debating AGI is safe, and others who have already made a decision on that, then someone who spent a lot of time reading about EA/talking about EA/being married to EA leadership wouldn’t feel as bad saying “Yeah, I’m EA” just because they disagreed with some other EAs.

conflictaverse Apr 9, 2025, 7:28 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
Is that a separate reason from the one OP names and the ones in my comment? If EA had an excellent brand, tactical incentives would encourage naming yourself as an EA, not discourage it. It’s the intersection of bad brand and/or brand confusion with tactics that leads to this result, not tactics alone, right?

conflictaverse Apr 9, 2025, 7:25 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
I have mixed feelings about this but since the point isn’t critical to the intention of my comment I’m happy to strike it.

conflictaverse Apr 8, 2025, 9:50 PM
32 points
13 ∶ 4
on: EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma
Can I suggest that anyone who wants to dig into whether Amanda/Daniela were lying here head over to this related post, and that comments on this post stay focused on the general idea of EA Adjacency as FTX trauma?

Fully endorse that I think EA is getting a lot of bad comms advice. I think a good comms person would have prepared Antrhopic folks way better, assuming those quotes weren’t taken agressively out of context or something.

That said, I am not sure I agree that EA adjacency is mostly ascribable to FTX trauma in the personal PR “project will fail” sense, because I think there are two other explanations of EA adjacency. One, which could be related to FTX trauma, is leadership betrayal. The other is brand confusion.
Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became “EA Adjacent” when Scott Alexander’s followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little—that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values. I then talked to a bunch of EA insiders about it and found the response extremely weak (“I know Scott personally and he’s a nice guy,” as though people who are nice to their friends can’t also be racists ~~and weirdly into monarchy~~^[1]).

Whether you love Scott Alexander or not, what I’m trying to point out is that there is another cause of “EA Adjacency” besides personal brand protection, and it might be leadership betrayal. I had been EA since 2012 in a low-key way when I found out about Scott, and I actively told people I was into EA, and even referenced it in career-related things I was doing as something that was shaping my goals and career choices. I wasn’t working in the space, but I hoped to eventually, and I was pretty passionate about it! I tried to promote it to a lot of people! I stopped doing this after talking to CEA’s community health team and several other prominent EAs, because of feeling like EA leadership was massively not walking the walk and that this thing I thought was the only community whose values I had ever trusted had sort of betrayed my trust. I went through some serious soul searching after this; it was very emotionally taxing, and I decoupled EA from my identity pretty substantially as a result. Probably healthy, tbh.
I am not sure the extent to which the post-FTX adjacency might be attributed to brand protection and what percent is toward leadership betrayal, but I suspect both could be at play, because many people could have felt betrayed by the fact that EA leadership was well aware of FTX sketchiness and didn’t say anything (or weren’t aware, but then maybe you’d be betrayed by their incompetence).
Brand confusion: After brand embarrassment and leadership betrayal, I think a 3rd potential explanation for EA adjacency is a sort of brand confusion problem. Here, I think EA is sort of like Christianity—there’s an underlying set of beliefs that almost everyone in the general Christian community agrees with, but different factions can be WILDLY different culturally and ideologically. Unfortunately, only EA insiders are familiar with these distinctions. So right now, acknowledging being an EA is like acknowledging you’re a Christian to someone who only knows about Mormons. If you’re actually a liberal Episcopalian and don’t want to be seen as being a Mormon, maybe you don’t have time to get into the fact that yes, technically you are a Christian but not that kind of Christian. I wonder if EA-adjacent folks would be more comfortable acknowledging EA connection if they could identify a connection with only one part or faction of EA, and there was greater clarity in the public eye about the fact that EA is not a monolith.
In terms of what behavior I’d like to see from other EAs and EA-adjacents: If I’m talking to an EA insider, I still say I have issues with parts of EA while acknowledging that I have a ton of shared values and work in the space. If someone is mocking EA as an outsider, I am actually MORE likely to admit connection and shared values with EA, because I usually think they are focusing on the wrong problems.
1. ^
  struck for accuracy, see comments

conflictaverse Mar 5, 2025, 12:53 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: VettedCauses’s comment on: Should every strategy be publicly intelligible?
To be clear, I think my post could apply to your review, as my post reflects a general concern that when doing charity evaluations people often don’t have sufficient context to know if they’re accurately assessing cost effectiveness or general purpose. But I haven’t followed Sinergia closely so I have no idea the extent to which it is in fact applicable to Sinergia—I’d need to be an insider to know that.
So what I meant when I said Vetted Causes’ review could be an example of this pattern is that it appears you are doing reviews of strategies and organizations without being either extremely experienced at that strategy or extremely familiar with the organization’s potentially private intentions. I have no idea if in fact Sinergia or the other organizations you have reviewed have private intentions that are different from their publicly stated goals—I’m raising that as a possibility for any charity, as a factor that makes evaluating strategy difficult. Of course, if you in fact have an enormous amount of campaigning experience and access to Sinergia’s private strategy documents, please do correct my misapprehension!
While I think you’re last question is reasonable due to the direction of the conversation, I’m nevertheless not going to answer it, because it takes us off the topic of this post and into criticism/discussion of the content of your review in particular (as opposed to the general principle I am trying to focus on with this post: that sometimes organizations have non-publicly shareable strategies, and that makes accurately evaluating them challenging or impossible).

conflictaverse Mar 3, 2025, 9:07 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: Should every strategy be publicly intelligible?
Yeah that’s a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this.
That said, it doesn’t really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise—I’m pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don’t know how I’d advise other people who aren’t in that position.
In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I’m not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns…
I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn’t be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn’t really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness.

conflictaverse Mar 3, 2025, 9:02 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: VettedCauses’s comment on: Should every strategy be publicly intelligible?
Sorry if it came across like this post was intended to be feedback for you specifically—your post was just one of the most recent examples that came to mind of charity evaluation being done publicly. I meant to find more examples but decided doing so would lead me to procrastinate on posting. I have no idea if anything I’m saying here applies in the case of Sinergia.
If you think it is always unacceptable to provide false information to the public, even if that’s a part of an organization’s theory of change, I do disagree. Using the example of corporate campaigns the commenter above shared, if a nonprofit was trying to target a specific company to change their welfare standards, communicating at least slightly inaccurate information to the public might in some cases be extremely effective (I have no idea if this is true or not, I’m not a campaigner—I just share it to illustrate my point).
In the context of not-otherwise-strategic self-promotion, it was 100% certain that shared information was false and solely put forward on the website because they wanted to drum up donations and for no reason of strategy, I wouldn’t think that was good. Although I also presume that sort of thing is relatively common (depending on the scale of the falsehood) and not necessarily correlated one way or the other with effectiveness.
But given that I don’t actually know what Sinergia’s full strategy is, and the fact that Sinergia has several types of programs where I could easily imagine there being value in certain kinds of false statements, I’d need to do a lot more research to come to even a low-confidence opinion. And even then, I’d still want to be conscious of the possibility that (1) I’m not an insider to Sinergia, so there could be relevant info I don’t have access to or they can’t share and (2) I’m not an insider on farmed animal welfare in general, so there could be broad strategic considerations I don’t understand.
What would that mean for my actions? IDK! I’m not a charity evaluator. But for me personally that consciousness would widen the error bars on my opinion of Sinergia, certainly. I think charity evaluation is extremely difficult, for reasons like this.

conflictaverse Mar 3, 2025, 4:26 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The catastrophic situation with USAID just got worse—why the EA community should care
If someone has already called a representative about this, is it effective to keep calling? Or do they sort of count calls by individual and it doesn’t matter if you repeat?

Should every strategy be publicly intelligible?

conflictaverseMar 3, 2025, 4:12 PM

20 points

6 comments2 min readEA link

conflictaverse Jan 20, 2025, 3:41 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: James-Hartree-Law’s comment on: How big of a problem is abortion?
On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made?

You might be interested in this series of posts by Rethink Priorities about moral weights, which targets precisely the question of how different kinds of lives can be weighed against each other. Many utilitarians (which many people in EA are) believe that lives can be compared like this.

conflictaverse Sep 29, 2024, 9:32 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Announcing Equal Hands — an experiment in democratizing effective giving.
Second point within this comment I’m interested in discussing: If I’m summarizing you correctly, you think standard methods of addressing the problem (“cause allocation in EA is controlled by a few rich people who might not make good decisions”) makes Equal Hands an unnecessary project.
First: I agree with you that the current donation pooling/voting process is not optimal. Hopefully in the six months of the trial a more streamlined option will be found. A fund seems good; knowing the annoying-ness of setting up an appropriate 501c3 and considering the international nature of EA I understand why Abraham didn’t go that route before determining whether there was any interest in the project, but I think if it succeeds creating a fund would be good.
If a fund is created, the main difference between the Equal Hands concept and EA funds is that typical EA funds don’t address at all the issue of larger donors having more influence. Yes, experts decide where the amounts within the buckets go. But if one billionaire likes GCR and no billionaires like animal welfare, there will be no mechanism to democratize the distribution between pools. It may be that you don’t care about that, but assuming you did, do you see EA funds as addressing that issue in some way that I am missing?
Second: I agree that a certain amount of donor 3 hiring donor 1 as a consultant or being convinced by a persuasive argument or similar goes on in EA (at least, much more than outside of EA). But the examples you give are such small levels of decision-making sharing. If you endorse the general rule that more decision makers tend to make better decisions than small groups, even when the small groups are composed of experts (which I think there is quite a bit of evidence for?) then a much more robust democratization seems good.

conflictaverse Sep 29, 2024, 9:19 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Announcing Equal Hands — an experiment in democratizing effective giving.
There’s a lot to discuss in this comment so it might be worth unpacking responses into sections. For myself, I’m most interested in your assertion that money is well-correlated with having more accurate views about the world.
I think you’re correct that there is some connection between “accurate views in a domain” to “success in that domain” on average. But I think the main driver of that connection is a correlation at the low end (e.g., people with really faulty pictures of reality are not successful) but no low correlation outside of that range.
In the case of wealth, while we might expect that being well-attuned to reality is helpful, being “well-attuned to reality” is not a real trait (or if it is, it’s extremely rare) -- most people are well-attuned to parts of reality and not others. Furthermore, wealth is in most societies highly driven by being lucky to be born into a particular family. So at the end of the day, we shouldn’t expect donors with the most money to generally have the best views on what to do with it.
In particular, I think that the dynamics in charity make this lack of correlation even more problematic, because the wealthiest folks have disproportionately more control over what happens in charity than the just-relatively-well-off folks, and we particularly shouldn’t expect that being wildly wealthy is a good predictor of “being good at figuring out which charities are most impactful.” Being insanely wealthy is probably even more luck driven than being successful in a normal way, and the more insanely wealthy you are, the more likely you are to have charities trying to sell themselves to you, and the worse your access to information about them will be.
Just to reality-test my mental model here against my own experience: you suggest looking at the major donors in EA. By and large, my experience in EA is that there is not really a correlation between wealth and having good ideas about charity. I meet a lot of wealthy people in my job, and they are often shockingly out of touch. Maybe they were better calibrated before they got wealthy, but becoming insanely wealthy reduces how much people are honest to you and makes your life look so different from normal I expect you forget what normal is. Often, the people in EA I think make the best calls are sort of mid-tier employees of EA orgs, who are both thoughtful and have great insider info.
Even beyond that, EA major donors are a small selection of rich people in general, who by and large I think make absolutely terrible decisions about charity (and I expect you think that also, since you’re on the EA forum). So even if I wanted to grant you that these rich people might have accurate views within their domain, I wouldn’t grant that that makes them better at choosing charities.
Basically, my overall point is that (1) really wealthy people are probably mostly really wealthy by chance of circumstance; (2) if not chance, and it is domain expertise in the area of their success, that doesn’t largely transfer to success in choosing charities, and (3) based on my experience of EA, wealthy EAs are no more likely to make good decisions than non-wealthy EAs. So I’m comfortable endorsing the idea that having more money is not generally a good predictor of having great ideas about charity.
I don’t really want to get into an argument here about whether extreme wealth is largely luck-driven, or how much success in one domain translates to success in others, since I believe people tend to be firmly entrenched in one view or another on those topics and it could distract from the main topic of the Equal Hands experiment. My intention is merely to illustrate why someone might endorse the original statement.

conflictaverse Jun 17, 2024, 10:16 PM
19 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dustin Moskovitz’s comment on: [Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures
Just chiming in to have more than Habryka’s view represented here. I think it’s not unreasonable in principle to think that OP and GV could create PR distance between themselves. I think it will just take time, and Habryka is being moderately too pessimistic (or, accurately pessimistic in the short term but not considering reasonable long-term potential). I’d guess many think-tank type organizations have launched on the strength of a single funder and come to advise many funders, having a distinct reputation from them—OP seems to be pursuing this more strongly now than in the past, and while it will take time to work, it seems like a reasonable theory of change.
I have updated, based on this exchange, that OP is more open to investment in non-GV-supported activities than previously came through. I’m happy to hear that.
I don’t want to wake up anymore to somebody I personally loathe getting platformed only to discover I paid for the platform. That fact matters to me.
This is eminently reasonable. Any opposition to these changes I’ve aired here is more about disappointment in some of the specific cause areas being dropped and the sense that OP couldn’t continue on them without GV; I’m definitely not intending to complain about GV’s decision, and overall I think OP attempting to diversify funding sources (and EA trying to do so at well) is very, very healthy and needed.

conflictaverse Jun 17, 2024, 6:04 PM
16 points
2 ∶ 4
in reply to: Alexander_Berger’s comment on: [Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures
To clarify, I did see the invitations to other funders. However, my perception was that those are invitations to find people to hand things off to, rather than to be a continuing partner like with GV. Perhaps I misunderstood.
I also want to be clear that the status quo you’re articulating here does not match what I’ve heard from former grantees about how able OP staff are to participate in efforts to attract additional funding. Perhaps there has been quite a serious miscommunication.

conflictaverse Jun 17, 2024, 5:59 PM
15 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Dustin Moskovitz’s comment on: [Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures
I feel incapable of being heard correctly at this point, so I guess it was a mistake to speak up at all and I’m going to stop now.
Sorry to hear that, several people I’ve spoken to about this offline also feel that you are being open and agreeable and the discussion reads from the outside as fairly civil, so except perhaps with the potential heat of this exchange with Ollie, I’d say most people get it and are happy you participated, particularly given that you didn’t need to. For myself, the bulk of my concern is with how I perceive OP to have handled this given their place in the EA community, rather than my personal and irrelevant partial disagreement with your personal funding decisions.
[edited to add “partial” in the last sentence]

conflictaverse Jun 17, 2024, 5:22 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 6
in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: [Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures
Speculating on your point 4: The messaging so far has been framed as “Good Ventures is pulling out of XYZ areas; since OP is primarily funded by GV, they are also pulling out.” But perhaps, if the sweet spot here is “Cari and Dustin aren’t controlling EA but also are obviously allowed not to fund things they don’t buy/want to” one solution would be to leave OP open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so. This would, to me, seem to allow GV and OP to overtime develop more PR and bandwidth breathing room between the two orgs.
My sense is that this is not what’s happening now. As in my other comment on this thread, I don’t want to reveal my sources because I like this account being anonymous, but I’m reasonably confident that OP staff have been told “we are not doing XYZ anymore” not “Cari and Dustin don’t want to fund XYZ anymore, so if you want to work on it, we need to find more funding.”
My suspicion (from some conversations with people who interact directly with OP leadership) is that it isn’t only Cari and Dustin who don’t want to support the dropped areas, but also at least some leadership at OP. If that’s right, it explains why they haven’t taken the approach I’m suggesting here, but not why they didn’t say so (perhaps connecting this back to your point 2).

conflictaverse

Should ev­ery strat­egy be pub­li­cly in­tel­ligible?

Should every strategy be publicly intelligible?