I try to take my moral obligations seriously.
Please chat with me about donation opportunities.
I try to take my moral obligations seriously.
Please chat with me about donation opportunities.
I don’t really agree with your second and third point. Seeing this problem and responding by trying to create more ‘capital letter EA jobs’ strikes me as continuing to pursue a failing strategy.
What (in my opinion) the EA Community needs is to get away from this idea of channelling all committed people to a few organisations—the community is growing faster* than the organisations, and those numbers are unlikely to add up in the mid term.
Committing all our people to a few organisations seriously limits our impact in the long run. There are plenty of opportunities to have a large impact out there—we just need to appreciate them and pursue them. One thing I would like to see is stronger profession-specific networks in EA.
It’s catastrophic that new and long-term EAs now consider their main EA activity to be to apply for the same few jobs instead of trying to increase their donations or investing in non-‘capital letter EA’ promising careers.
But this is hardly surprising given past messaging. The only reason EA organisations can get away with having very expensive hiring rounds for the applicants is because there are a lot of strongly committed people out there willing to take on that cost. Organisations cannot get away with this in most of the for-profit sector.
*Though this might be slowing down somewhat, perhaps because of this ‘being an EA is applying unsuccessfully for the same few jobs’ phenomena.
(Funding manager of the EA Meta Fund here)
We have run an application round for our last distribution for the first time. I conducted the very initial investigation which I communicated to the committee. Previous grantees came all through our personal network.
Things we learnt during our application round:
i) We got significantly fewer applications than we expected and would have been able to spend more time vetting projects. This was not a bottleneck. After some investigation through personal outreach I have the impression there are not many projects being started in the Meta space (this is different for other funding spaces).
ii) We were able to fund a decent fraction of the applications we received (25%?). For about half of the applications I was reasonably confident that they did not meet the bar so I did not investigate further. The remaining quarter felt borderline to me, I often still investigated but the results confirmed my initial impression.
My current impression for the Meta space is that we are not vetting constrained, but more mentoring/pro-active outreach constrained. One thing we want to do in the future is to run a request for proposals process.
Thinking about this further, one concern I have with this post as well as Ollie’s comment is that I think people could unduly underrate the amount of good the average Westerner can actually do after reading it.
If you have a reasonably high salary or donate more than 10% (and assuming donations don’t become much less cost-effective) to AMF or similarly effective charities, you can save hundreds of lives over your lifetime. Saving one life via AMF is currently estimated to cost around only £2,500. If you only earn the average graduate salary forever and only donate 10%, you can still save dozens of lives.
For reference, Oskar Schindler saved 1200 lives and is now famous for it worldwide.
My words at someone’s funeral who saved dozens or even hundreds of lives would be a lot more laudatory than what was said about Dorothea.
We end up seeming more deferential and hero-worshipping than we really are.
I feel like this post is missing something. I would expect one of the strongest predictors of the aforementioned behaviors to be age. Are there any people in their thirties you know who are prone to hero-worshipping?
I don’t consider hero-worshipping an EA problem as such, but a young people problem. Of course EA is full of young people!
Make sure people incoming to the community, or at the periphery of the community, are inoculated against this bias, if you spot it. Point out that people usually have a mix of good and bad ideas. Have some go-to examples of respected people’s blind spots or mistakes, at least as they appear to you.
This seems like good advice to me, but I expect it to benefit from being aware that you need to talk about these things to a young person because they are young.
The assumption I had is we defer a lot of power, both intellectual, social and financial, to a small group of broadly unaccountable, non-transparent people on the assumption they are uniquely good at making decisions, noticing risks to the EA enterprise and combatting them, and that this unique competence is what justifies the power structures we have in EA.
Is this actually true right now? People donating to EA Funds seem like an example of deferring financial decisions, but I don’t have data how EAs donate to the Funds vs. decide themselves where to donate. Or do you mean decisions like relying on GiveWell recommendations as an example of ‘deferring financial power’?
I am also not sure how the EA Community compares to other movements. Is your claim that EA is worse at this than comparable movements or that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard?
I have mixed feelings about your post overall. If people defer decision-making power to “the leadership” then it’s good to ask these questions. But mostly I see individuals making decisions for themselves. If others think the decisions are bad, they don’t have to admire “the leadership” for it.
Something I want to add here:
I am not sure whether my error was how much I was deferring in itself. But the decision to defer or not should be made on well defined questions and clearly defined ‘experts’ you might be deferring to. This is not what I was doing. I was deferring on a nebulous question (‘what should I be doing?‘) to an even more nebulous expert audience (a vague sense of what ‘the community’ wanted).
What I should have been doing instead first is to define the question better: Which roles should I be pursuing right now?
This can then be broken down further into subquestions on cause prioritisation, which roles are promising avenues within causes I might be interested in, which roles I might be well suited for, etc, whose information I need to aggregate in a sensible fashion to answer the question which roles I should be pursuing right now.
For each of these subquestions I need to make a separate judgement. For some it makes more sense to defer, for others, less so. Disappointingly, there is no independent expert panel investigating what kind of jobs I might excel at.
But then who to defer to, if I think this is a sensible choice for a particular subquestion, also needs to be clearly defined: for example, I might decide that it makes sense to take 80k at their word about which roles in a particular cause area are particularly promising right now, after reading what they actually say on their website on the subject, perhaps double-checking by asking them via email and polling another couple of people in the field.
‘The community’ is not a well defined expert panel, while the careful aggregation of individual opinions can be, who again, need to be asked well defined questions. Note that this can true even if I gave equal weight to every EA’s opinion: sometimes it can seem like ‘the community’ has an opinion that only few individual EAs hold if actually asked, if any. This is especially true if messaging is distorted and I am not actually asking a well defined question.
Thank you Lizka. You are making a good point and I have edited the comment above to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.
I would not want anyone to get the impression that Owen’s poor behaviour is merely a strong negative update on men. It is a strong negative update on the decency of everybody.
(Though I would expect women to show a lack of decency in slightly different ways than men.)
I still expect some decent people to exist. I just now think there are even more rare than I previously thought.
I really appreciate you writing this. You are not the first person to consider doing so and I applaud you for actually doing it.
I want to use the opportunity to point out that you can pledge more than 10%! This hasn’t always been in my conscious awareness as much as it possibly should have been.
I pledged 10% in 2013, but changed my pledge to 20% a few months ago. :-)
Strong upvoted. I think a post like this is extremely useful as a resource to clarify 80,000 hours role for the community. I appreciate 80,000 hours has previously been putting effort into communicating how they see their role in the community in comments on this Forum, but communicating this clearly in one place so people can easily point to it seems very valuable to me.
I certainly agree that it would be great if the debate was thoughtful on all sides. But I am reluctant to punish emotional responses in these contexts.
When I look at this thread, I see a lack of women participating. Exceptions: Khorton, and Julia clarifying a CEA position. There were also a couple of people whose gender I could not quickly identify.
There are various explanations for this. I am not sure the gender imbalance on this thread is actually worse than on other threads. It could be noise. But I know why I said nothing: I found writing a thoughtful, non-emotional response too hard. I expect to fail because the subject is too upsetting.
This systematically biases the debate in favour of people who bear no emotional cost in participating.
And applying for jobs in EA orgs also doesn’t have to come at great personal expense
I want to push back against this point a bit. Although I completely agree that you shouldn’t treat working at non-EA orgs as a failure!
In my experience, applying for jobs in EA orgs has been very expensive compared to applying to other jobs, even completely ignoring any mental costs. There was a discussion about this topic here as well, and my view on the matter has not changed much—except I now have some experience applying to jobs outside EA orgs, backing up what I previously thought.
To get to the last stage of a process in the application processes I went through at EA orgs routinely took a dozen hours, and often dozens. This did not happen once when I applied to jobs outside of EA orgs. Application processes were just much shorter. I don’t think applying to EA jobs as I did in 2018 would have been compatible with having a full-time job, or only with great difficulty.
Something I also encountered only in EA org application processes were them taking several months or being very mismanaged—going back and forth on where someone was in the application process, or having an applicant invest dozens of hours only to inform them that the org was actually unable to provide visas.
Thank you so much for laying out this view. I completely agree, including every single subpoint (except the ones about the male perspective which I don’t have much of an opinion on). CEA has a pretty high bar for banning people. I’m in favour of lowering this bar as well as communicating more clearly that the bar is really high and therefore someone being part of the community certainly isn’t evidence they are safe.
Thank you in particular for point D. I’ve never been quite sure how to express the same point and I haven’t seen it written up elsewhere.
It’s a bit unfortunate that we don’t seem to have agreevote on shortforms.
I agree with the gist of this comment, but just a brief note that you do not need to do direct work to be “part of the EA community”. Donating is good as well. :-)
Sure. I am pretty baffled by the response to my comments. I agree the first was insufficiently careful about the fact that Mark is a new user, but even the second got downvotes.
In the past, users of the forum have said many times that posting on the EA Forum gives them anxiety as they are afraid of hostile criticism. So I think it is good to be on the lookout for posts and comments that might have this effect. Being ‘kind’ and ‘approaching disagreements with curiosity’ should protect against this risk. But I ask the question: Is Tristan going to feel comfortable engaging in the Forum, in particular as a response to this post? I don’t think so.
Quotes I thought were problematic in that I think they would upset Tristan or put him off responding (or others who might work with him or agree with him):
I have a mini Nassim Taleb inside me that I let out for special occasions 😠. I’m sometimes rude to Tristan, Kevin Roose and others.
I read this as Mark proudly announcing that he likes to violate good discourse norms.
Others which I think will make feel Tristan accused and unwelcome (not ‘kind’ and not ‘approaching disagreements with curiosity’):
It is because he has been one of the most influential people in building a white hot moral panic, and frequently bends truth for the cause.
Tristan’s hyperbole sets the stage for drastic action.
Generally hostile:
To play by gentlemans rules is to their advantage—curtailing the tools in at my disposal to makes bullshit as costly as possible.
If the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section had not been written, I would not have downvoted, as it seems to add little to the content, while making Tristan likely feel very unwelcome.
There was a post which was similar in style to Mark’s post arguing against Will here and the response to that was pretty negative, so I am surprised that Mark’s post is being perceived so differently.
I only rarely downvote. There have been frequent requests in the past that it would be good if users generally explained why they downvoted. This has not come up before, but I took from that that the next time I downvote, it would be good if I explained why. So I did. And then got heavily downvoted myself for it. I am not sure what to make of this—are the people requesting for downvoters to generally explain themselves just different people than the ones who downvoted my comment (apparently so, otherwise they would have explained themselves)? Whatever is the reason, I doubt I will explain my downvotes again in the future.
I do agree with you that silence can hurt community epistemics.
In the past I also thought people worried about missing out on job and grant opportunities if they voiced criticisms on the EA Forum overestimated the risks. I am ashamed to say that I thought this was a mere result of their social anxiety and pretty irrational.
Then last year I applied to an explicitly identified longtermist (central) EA org. They rejected me straight away with the reason that I wasn’t bought into longtermism (as written up here which is now featured in the EA Handbook as the critical piece on longtermism...). This was perfectly fine by me, my interactions with the org were kind and professional and I had applied on a whim anyway.
But only later I realised that this meant that the people who say they are afraid to be critical of longtermism and potentially other bits of EA because they are worried about losing out on opportunities were more correct than I previously thought.
I still think it’s harmful not to voice disagreements. But evidently there is a more of a cost to individuals than I thought, especially to ones who are financially reliant on EA funding or EA jobs, and I was unreasonably dismissive of this possibility.
I am a bit reluctant to write this. I very much appreciated being told the reason for the rejection and I think it’s great that the org invested time and effort to do so. I hope they’ll continue doing this in the future, even if insufficient buy-in to longtermism is the reason for rejection.
Something I have been wondering about is how social/‘fluffy’ the EA Forum should be. Most posts just make various claims and then the comments are mostly about disagreement with those claims. (There have been various threads about how to handle disagreements, but this is not what I am getting at here.) Of course not all posts fall in this category: AMAs are a good example, and they encourage people to indulge in their curiosity about others and their views. This seems like a good idea to me.
For example, I wonder whether I should write more comments pointing out what I liked in a post even if I don’t have anything to criticise instead of just silently upvoting. This would clutter the comment section more, but it might be worth it by people feeling more connected to the community if they hear more specific positive feedback.
I feel like Facebook groups used to do more online community fostering within EA than they do now, and the EA Forum hasn’t quite assumed the role they used to play. I don’t know whether it should. It is valuable to have a space dedicated to ‘serious discussions’. Although having an online community space might be more important than usual while we are all stuck at home.
This might be a slightly silly suggestion and I’m not sure how best to implement it, but I think it might be useful to remind potential attendees that attending EAG is not obligatory just because you are part of the EA Community and/or care a lot about doing good well. I heard from a few people who weren’t particularly excited about attending EAG, but still did it because that’s ‘what you do as an EA’. It seems sad that these people take up spots from people who are actually keen on EAG itself.
It only occurred to me fairly late last year that attending EAG is actually entirely optional. On a side note, rising ticket prices did help me come to the realisation that I did not actually want to go (and therefore didn’t take up a spot from someone who was more keen on going).
A non-trivial fraction of the responses seem to me like widely-held beliefs (‘popular unpopular opinions’), at least in my particular EA cluster (UK, mostly London). Some of them and other perhaps less widely-held ones I have expressed to other people, and there at least weren’t any immediate obvious social repercussions.
Of course there are also many responses I completely disagree with.
“We should evaluate reducing abortions as an EA cause.”
I once even wrote a research proposal on this for the CEA Summer Research Fellowship 2017. I was then invited to the programme.
Thank you for looking into the numbers! While I don’t have a strong view on how representative the EA Leaders forum is, taking the survey results about engagement at face value doesn’t seem right to me.
On the issue of long-termism, I would expect that people who don’t identify as long-termists to now report to be less engaged with the EA Community (especially with the ‘core’) and identify as EA less. Long-termism has become a dominant orientation in the EA Community which might put people off the EA Community, even if their personal views and actions related to doing good haven’t changed, e.g. their donations amounts and career plans. The same goes for looking at how long people have been involved with EA—people who aren’t compelled by long-termism might have dropped out of identifying as EA without actually changing their actions.