EA Meta for 7 years!
COO of Ambitious Impact (previously Charity Entrepreneurship).
Co-Founder of High Impact Professionals. We enable working professionals to maximize their positive impact by supporting them in donating their time, skills and resources effectively.
Ex-CTO and MD of Germany for Founders Pledge. Big on promoting Effective Giving.
Originally from New York, living in Berlin.
Great initiative Rebecca!
Awesome, Hauke. Really excited to see this.
Excited to see another impactful set of charities get founded!
I agree that is the other way out of the puzzle. I wonder whom to even trust if everyone is susceptible to this problem...
Yeah I suppose we just disagree then. I think such a big error and hit to the community should downgrade any rational personâs belief in the output of what EA has to offer and also downgrade the trust they are getting it right.
Another side point: Many EAs like Cowen and think he is right most of the time. I think it is suspicious that when Cowen says something about EA that is negative he is labeled stuff like âdaftâ.
The difference in that example is that Scholtz is one person so the analogy doesnât hold. EA is a movement comprised of many, many people with different strengths, roles, motives, etc and CERTAINLY there are some people in the movement whose job it was (or at a minimum there are some people who thought long and hard) to mitigate PR/âlongterm risks to the movement.
I picture the criticism more like EA being a pyramid set in the ground, but upside down. At the top of the upside-down pyramid, where things are wide, there are people working to ensure the longterm future goes well on the object level, and perhaps would include Scholtz in your example.
At the bottom of the pyramid things come to a point, and that represents people on the lookout for x-risks to the endeavour itself, which is so small that it turned out to be the reason why things toppled, at least with respect to FTX. And that was indeed a problem. It says nothing about the value of doing x-risk work.
I think that is a charitable interpretation of Cowenâs statement: âHardly anyone associated with Future Fund saw the existential risk toâŚFuture Fund, even though they were as close to it as one could possibly be.â
I think charitably, he isnât saying that any given x-risk researcher should have seen an x-risk to the FTX project coming. Do you?
I agree with most of your points, but strongly disagree with number 1 and surprised to have heard over time that so many people thought this point was daft.
I donât disagree that âexistential riskâ is being employed in a very different sense, so we agree there, in the two instances, but the broader point, which I think is valid, is this:
There is a certain hubris in claiming you are going to âbuild a flourishing futureâ and âsupport ambitious projects to improve humanityâs long-term prospectsâ (as the FFF did on its website) only to not exist 6 months later and for reasons of fraud to boot.
Of course, the people who sank untold hours into existential risk research arenât to blame, and it isnât an argument against x-risk/âlongtermist work, but it does show that EA, as a community missed something dire and critical and importantly something that couldnât be closer to home for the community. And in my opinion that does shed light on how successful one should expect the longer term endeavours of the community to be.
I am having a hard time here and speckled throughout the rest of this post with people writing that we are doing the âgood thingâ and we should do that and not just what looks good with the âgood thingâ in question being buying a castle and not say, caring about wild animal suffering.
I am for more debate, but donât like this suggestion due to specific names, like Timnit, who just seems so hostile I canât imagine a fruitful conversation.
I think what we really need are more funding pillars in addition to EA Funds and Open Phil. And continue to let EA Funds deploy as they see fit, but have other streams that do the same and maybe take a different position on risk appetite, methodology, etc.
Iâm curious to hear the perceived downsides about this. All I can think of is logistical overhead, which doesnât seem like that much.
If something is called the âCoordination Forumâ and previously called the âLeaders Forumâ and there is a âleadersâ slack where further coordination that affects the community takes place, it seems fair that people should at least know who is attending them. The community prides itself on transparency and knowing the leaders of your movement seems like one of the obvious first steps of transparency.
Thanks for doing this, Spencer. Excited to listen to it.
Hey Vasco, thanks for the well thought out response. I love the compromiseâI think having more grantmakers (with different, but still strong EA perspectives) is a great way to go.
Iâve heard grantmakers in the LT space say that âeverything that is above the bar is getting funded and what we need are more talented people filling roles or new orgs to start up.â So it seems that any marginal donation going to the EA Funds LTFF is currently being underutilized/ânot used at all and doesnât even funge well. So that makes me lean more neartermist, even if you accept that LT interventions are ultimately more impactful.
Apologies if that is addressed in the video aboveâdonât have time to view it now, but from your description it looks like it is more geared around general effectiveness and not on-the-current-margin giving right now.
Curious if you have any thoughts on that.
I actually strongly disagree with thisâI think too many people defer to the EA Funds on the margin. Donât get me wrong, I think they do great work, but if FTX showed us anything it is that EA needs MORE funding diversity and I think this often shakes out as lots of people making many different decisions on where to give, so that e.g. and org doesnât need to rely on its existence from whether or not its gets a grant from EA Funds/âOP.
In light of FTX, I am updating a bit away from giving to meta stuff, as some media made clear that a (legitimate) concern is EA orgs donating to each other and keeping the money internal to them. I donât think EAs do this on purpose for any bad reason, in fact I think meta is high leverage, but concern does give one pause to think about why we are doing this and also how this is perceived from the outside.
This year, I am giving $10K to Charity Entrepreneurshipâs incubated charities at their discretion as they know where it will best be placed after all counterfactuals have been calculated. I am giving here for a lot of reasons (CoI: I like them so much I am on the board):
I think there is a lot of counterfactual value in supporting new EA startups with higher risk profiles, especially within CE, where there is a good rate of growth to GW Top Charity status.
I like to fund stuff that isnât getting funded through the normal means to create more diversified funding in the EA space, which I believe is extremely important and more important than ever given the FTX situation.
It is FUN to read project proposals and be a bit more involved early stageâfeels more like venture capital than e.g. giving to AMF (although I wouldnât begrudge anyone giving to AMF by any means!)
I also gave smaller sums to other organizations this yearânumbers rough as I donât have the donation receipt yet and am too lazy to look it up: $2500 to a mix of the following charities:
Effektiv Spendenâthey have a crazy multiplier on money in â money raised so I think this is a great, leveraged way to donate.
CATF
AMF
I gave to CATF and AMF as well mostly to hedge on myself being too meta. I think there is a tough tradeoff between leverage in meta stuff and meta 1) being less clearly linked to actual impact and 2) the fear that donating to meta orgs, where Iâve been more at home over the past 6 years is more giving to my friends and keeping the money âin the familyâ than doing actual good. I think meta is still worth it, as evidenced by my donations, but I think this is a concern to take seriously.
Finally, I suppose I donate to my own org, High Impact Professionals, by taking a lower salary than I otherwise would as that makes more sense than taking a salary, getting taxed, and then donating back to my own org, at least if you think, as I do, that our org can do more good than the marginal dollar to the German/âUS government. I am a little bit biased on that one though.
Hi Simon, love the initiative and have been working on an illustrated philosophy book for kids as well (and by âworking onâ I mean âmade it 5 years ago and have to get back to it when I find the time with an outstanding promise to finish it before my daughter turns 6â).
Will definitely sign up for the beta and provide feedback. Looking forward to reading it!
There is a big difference between not wanting to work with someone because you donât like their ethics (looking at you Kerry) and thinking they are going to commit the centuryâs worst fraud.
I donât think anyone asking for more information about what people knew believes that central actors knew anything about fraud. If that is what you think, then maybe therein lies the rub. It is more that strong signs of bad ethics are important signals and your example of Kerry is perhaps a good one. Imagine if people had concerns with someone on the level of what they had with Kerry (plausible in the case of SBFâthat is what it important to find out) and despite that promoted Kerry to be one of the few faces of the movement. That would be problematic and it is important to figure out what happened. Thatâs not a witch hunt.
Also, it is very surprising to me that you donât hold the belief that many people treat e.g. Will as a central figure to defer to. Given what youâve written it sounds like you are quite central so maybe get exposed to different people who have more eye-to-eye contact with Will, but it is certainly my experience that most people confer star power on Will. You are right that that doesnât make it Willâs fault. I am just trying to claim that I donât think you claim that people donât treat him like a philosopher king hasnât been my experience at all.
Very excited for you to take on this project as you already know Fernando!