Davidmanheim 18 May 2022 6:36 UTC
85 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid
I think that these are good lessons learned, but regarding the last point, I want to highlight a comment by Oliver Habryka;
It seems obvious to me that anyone saying anything bad right now about Carrick would be pretty severely socially punished by various community leaders, and I expected the community leadership to avoid saying so many effusively positive things in a context where it’s really hard for people to provide counterevidence, especially when it comes with an ask for substantial career shifts and funding.
This seems really important, and while I’m not sure that politics is the mind-killer, I think that the forum and EA in general needs to be really, really careful about the community dynamics. I think that the principal problem pointed out by the recent “Bad Omens” post was peer pressure towards conformity in ways that lead to people acting like jerks, and I think that we’re seeing that play out here as well, but involving central people in EA orgs pushing the dynamics, rather than local EA groups. And that seems far more worrying.

So yes, I think there are lots of important lessons learned about politics, but those matter narrowly. And I think that the biggest risk of failing to tread carefully here isn’t about wasting money on political campaigns, it’s undermining the ability to make trustworthy claims far more generally. We need to do our best to exhibit epistemic standards that are not just better than anyone else in politics—a bar too low to be worth noticing, much less aiming for—but ones that actually should engender trust among both EAs, and the rapidly growing set of people who are watching. And because politics operates at high simulacra levels, I’m concerned that in our rush to focus on various legitimate concerns and lessons while “doing politics” at the object level, we aren’t learning those lessons.

Deconfusion Part 3 - EA Community and Social Structure

Davidmanheim9 Feb 2023 8:19 UTC

83 points

4 comments8 min readEA link

When To Find More Information: A Short Explanation

Davidmanheim28 Dec 2019 18:00 UTC

76 points

14 comments3 min readEA link

The Folly of “EAs Should”

Davidmanheim6 Jan 2021 7:04 UTC

75 points

47 comments4 min readEA link

Davidmanheim 3 Jan 2023 18:29 UTC
74 points
26 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows?
3) Critics (eg @CarlaZoeC @LukaKemp) warned that EA should decentralize funding so it doesn’t become a closed validation loop where the people in SBF’s inner circle get millions to promote his & their vision for EA while others don’t. But EA funding remained overcentralized
I think the FTX regranting program was the single biggest push to decentralize funding EA has ever seen, and it’s crazy to me that anyone could look at what FTX Foundation was doing and say that the key problem is that the funding decisions were getting more, rather than less, centralized. (I would be interested in hearing from those who had some insight into the program whether this seems incorrect or overstated.)
That said, first, I was a regrantor, so I am biased, and even aside from the tremendous damage caused by the foundation needing to back out and the possibility of clawbacks, the fact that at least some of the money which was being regranted was stolen makes the whole thing completely unacceptable. However, it was unacceptable in ways that have nothing to do with being overly centralized.

What’s in a Pause?

Davidmanheim16 Sep 2023 10:13 UTC

73 points

11 comments9 min readEA link

Noticing the skulls, longtermism edition

Davidmanheim5 Oct 2021 7:08 UTC

72 points

75 comments2 min readEA link

Davidmanheim 17 Sep 2023 17:24 UTC
71 points
21 ∶ 5
on: AI Pause Will Likely Backfire
There’s a giant straw man in this post, and I think it’s entirely unreasonable to ignore. It’s the assertion, or assumption, that the “pause” would be a temporary measure imposed by some countries, as opposed to a stop-gap solution and regulation imposed to enable stronger international regulation, which Nora says she supports. (I’m primarily frustrated by this because it ignores the other two essays, which Nora had access to a week ago, that spelled this out in detail.)
What links here?

Davidmanheim 10 Jan 2023 18:59 UTC
70 points
20 ∶ 3
on: Reflections on Wytham Abbey
I understand that it’s been at most 9 months since this purchase occurred.

As I’ve said in other contexts, requiring immediate public disclosure of decisions is a standard not applied anywhere else—banks and public companies have to report some things quarterly, as the linked comment suggests CEA should do, but that’s not a reasonable standard anywhere else, given the amount of extra accounting and other work needed. The charitable groups that score highly on transparency report yearly, and all of the groups involved in this do, in fact, regularly report their grants. I’d be shocked if any charity issued quarterly reconciliations publicly. It’s incredibly expensive in terms of personnel and time to report things immediately, and both CEA and OpenPhil are actually amazingly transparent—both formally, with their reports, and informally, with many senior people responding to questions and criticism on the forum, on facebook, and on twitter.
Given that, I think it’s especially weird to say EVF hasn’t said anything while linking to an explanation by the board member who was most involved. (If you want to criticize CEA for failing on transparency, people could ask why they haven’t done an annual review post in 2 years, as I did in earlier discussions. But it seems they just fixed that.)

I am still concerned that EVF seems to have lots of less transparent pieces, and it’s unclear what gets reported where, since this isn’t part of CEA, so it wasn’t reported by them—but in the case of Wytham Abbey, I think OpenPhil, as the actual donor, is the one that needs to talk about why it made that decision—and no, it still isn’t on their grants page.

Introduction: A Primer for Politics, Policy and International Relations

Davidmanheim31 Dec 2019 19:27 UTC

69 points

2 comments5 min readEA link

ALTER Israel—Mid-year 2022 Update

Davidmanheim12 Jun 2022 9:22 UTC

63 points

0 comments2 min readEA link

Baby Cause Areas, Existential Risk, and Longtermism

Davidmanheim25 May 2022 13:13 UTC

60 points

6 comments5 min readEA link

Davidmanheim 10 Jan 2022 15:53 UTC
60 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Bioethicists are (Mostly) Alright
I think that there is a difference which is being elided here between “bioethicists have bad opinions” (they mostly don’t,) and “bioethics as a field is bad for the world $^{1}$ .” I’m going to try to make at least part of the case for the second, which I don’t think you addressed clearly.
In my view, one key problem is that bioethics functions almost entirely as a veto, as it relates to medicine, public health, and policy $^{2}$ . Even when individuals argue for something, the field doesn’t have the ability to push something forward. And checks and balances are important, but they can be take too far. I think it’s very obvious that this is the case, where abuses are rare, or not addressed by where bioethics actually focuses. Bioethics informs IRBs, which slow research—sometimes for good reason, but at a very high implicit cost. And because there are legal requirements and potential legal threats that come from failing to fully address bioethical concerns, the shadow of bioethics looms larger than the field itself. So even when ethicists wouldn’t oppose anything, the existence of the field is a barrier to research which imposes huge costs in research or treatments not pursued $^{3}$ .
So it’s not the fault of bioethics as field, necessarily, that there are such huge systemic barriers and institutional barriers—but the barriers emerge from the field, so pleading that the institutional dynamics are the real problem just means blaming immoral mazes rather than the participants who are building and reinforcing them, instead of fighting it.
1. And if so, people should fight back, or at least not participate.
2. The field does other things. They just don’t intersect with what EA cares about, in general.
3. To counter this criticism, you’d need to find something the field does that contributes positively to a greater extent than it contributes to slowing down medical research and the practice of medicine that saves lives.