EA-adjacent-adjacent. opinions emphatically not those of my employer
ethai
Karma: 200
hahaha no I know, more seriously I just don’t want to vote for a marginal funding post that I wrote! feels like it’s not the point of the endeavor, I’d rather support other orgs in the community in a small way~
hmm not sure it’s fair to make claims about what “consensus EA” believes based on the donation election honestly
“consensus EA” seems like it is likely to be something other than “people who are on the Forum between Nov 18 and Dec 3″
I only pay attention to climate, but as a cause area it tends to be more prominent in “EA-wide” surveys/giving than it is among the most highly-engaged EAs (Forum readers)[1]
people are literally voting based on what OP is not funding
- ^
I didn’t even vote for GG bc I know it won’t win, but it does warm my cold dead heart that four whole people did
I think Siobhan (hi! correct me if I’m wrong!) is primarily trying to say that the assumption of a given set of resources doesn’t really hold anymore, and that acting like it does, at least from a comms perspective, can be harmful: i.e. EAs spending a lot of energy criticizing donations to food pantries is causing potential donors to be turned off from EA and therefore not give effectively or not give at all, regardless of whether the criticism is correct or not[1].
This feels to me like part of the broader growing pains of “EA in a world where people actually listen to us” (which is a phrase I’m stealing because I think it applies even though the motivation for that post is entirely different) -- EA is used to assuming a given set of resources (how should we allocate the amount of money that exists “within EA”?), but for a movement increasingly in the public eye that aims to grow, that’s actually no longer the best way to think about good strategy for the movement.
So what Brad is saying here is rightish[2] for a given set of resources, but not really relevant to the point OP is making as I understand it, which is that EA as a public movement is not just influencing a given set of resources anymore and should stop acting like it. The next marginal bednet dollar is more likely to come from your friend in tech who eats out 5 times a week than it is to come from your grandma who donates to the food pantry (or from a philosophy major doing a bunch of first-principles research on how to donate most effectively, because that audience is already spoken for).
not speaking for my employer but as someone who engages a lot with this donor segment both in my paid work and in my volunteer time: (a) I do not think such a thing exists for cause-agnostic lightweight advising (but if it does I would love to hear about it); (b) this is part of the gap Giving Green tries to fill on climate, and maybe there are parallel cause-specific advisories that have the flexibility to advise smaller donors?; (c) I think the most doable thing here for an individual small major donor is to join a community of donors giving at around the same level with the same interests—I’m excited about e.g. GWWC pledge communities, funding circles, etc for this reason. unfortunately for this segment I don’t think there’s a way around doing some legwork yourself, but at least you can share the load + sometimes pool money/time/connections to get advice or access to funding opportunities that are normally only available to larger donors (I’ve done this!).
this could be true, i don’t have a good sense of who’s most prestigious in EA aside from the obvious* - my claim is more that i’ve seen this happen in examples and that it would be bad if that was happening all the time, but i am not attuned enough to broad EA social dynamics to know if that is happening all the time
*the obvious ones are the ones who are prestigious because they Did Something a long time ago, which I think doesn’t really count as a counterexample to the critical tendency as it manifests now
an observation I’ve had recently across a few examples* is that
criticizers acquire more social capital than doers (or celebraters of the doers)
criticizers tend to not pay attention to their social capital relative to the thing they are criticizing—criticizers with social status can easily shut down small or new doers, less so for established doers
criticizers gain enough social capital that they themselves become above (meaningful) criticism*
I get the idea that all arguments should be taken on their merits in a place like this, but in practice, it’s not that hard to imagine that a community that excessively rewards criticism becomes (ironically) prone to groupthink as a failure mode
*I’ve been sitting on this thought for a year or so but I don’t want to further name the examples because the criticizers I would criticize have more social capital than me and it could easily be bad for me to do so lol
I suppose I’m skeptical that quant scores in an auto-sent email will actually give you a nuanced sense—but I do see how, e.g., if over time you realize it’s always your interview or always your quant question that scores poorly, that is a good signal
I do think being kind is an underrated part of hiring!
Quantitative scoring doesn’t really give you that, though!
(I run hiring rounds with ~100-1000 applicants) agree with Jamie here. However, if someone was close to a cutoff, I do specifically include “encourage you to apply to future roles” in my rejection email. I also always respond when somebody asks for feedback proactively.
Is revealing scores useful to candidates for some other reason not covered by that? It seems to me the primary reason (since it sounds like you aren’t asking for qualitative feedback to also be provided) would be to inform candidates as to whether applying for future similar roles is worth the effort.
James this is great! I really like your framing of donations as in line with other personal actions; I’ve seen the FP graph but never actually interpreted it in the way you have.
Semi-related ramble, I’ve been workshopping this idea of giving as a way of expressing agency—especially when it comes to climate, I think a lot of people turn to plastic bags etc. because they want to feel like they’re directly responsible for a Good Thing. People want to see and feel the impact of their actions, and donations don’t often provide that sense of “I did this, and it meant something”. I think a framing of donations as one of many possible actions actually might break that hesitation down a bit (and specifically, is related to some lefty mutual aid thoughts about money as one of many resources we offer in community). Will experiment with this, thanks for the idea :)
(disclaimer: personal hat on! I do fundraising in my non-work organizing spaces)
strong upvoted, I think it’s good to encourage non-EAs to give more effectively and I think it’s good to broaden what we think of as “evidence” and consider its pros and cons.
I work with a community in my city that gives primarily locally (leaving aside my judgment on that), and I find that many people think that they’re not giving based on any idea of effectiveness: e.g. they’ll say they’re giving based on community need, or trust in a relationship they have, or values-alignment. But usually there’s an implicit sense of “what is effective” underneath that, and it’s helpful to push people to make that explicit: if you’re giving because you trust the relationship you have with this organization, how good of a signal is that about the organization’s work? Is it a better signal than other evidence you have access to?
(Aside: Quite often with small grassroots organizations, I think a strong relationship with the right people honestly is one of the best available signals! In particular, I find that the organizations that community leaders consider important/tractable/neglected—though not using those words—are not always the ones that gain a lot of media attention, external funding, etc.)
I’ve thought a fair amount about this (Shell recruited pretty heavily at my college). I agree with previous answers and think those are probably the primary considerations. Some other thoughts, both for you personally and on the moral value of the work:
Being thoughtful (as you are doing) is half the battle, and it’s key to make sure that your own values and motivations aren’t led astray by the environment you will be in—it’s easy to have value drift when your job is on the line.
I wouldn’t underestimate the subtle ways in which being owned by a FF can change the way a company does business (and therefore what you are able to do and what you are rewarded for). An imperfect analogue is the way SBF’s funding shaped what EA orgs did over the past few years, and the resulting fallout and instability now.
There’s some research that even if you have idealistic motivations about doing good, the environment around you can shift your preferences towards whatever is externally rewarded, e.g. here re law school.
It is hard to be motivated and do your best work (and therefore get promotions, transition into a better job in the future, etc) when you don’t feel affirmed and aligned with your work.
There is utilitarian value in socially stigmatizing fossil fuel companies. If FFs (& the companies they own) can’t find talent, that’s yet another signal that they should be seriously re-evaluating their business model. I do think this consideration is less clear when it comes to acquisitions like sonnen.
If you care about what climate people think, there was a lot of discussion on Twitter recently of a similar piece in NYT’s The Ethicist (though I personally disagree with climate Twitter consensus on this).
I wouldn’t do it myself in your situation, especially since there are probably plenty of non-FF-owned clean tech companies hiring SWEs. But it’s not clear to me whether it would be net good or bad, for the world or for you.
Yeah, strong agree with this. [I used to work in VC and frequently diligenced ARPA-E grantees.] I don’t think the cited study supports the claim that all externalities are priced in in the US, let alone globally.
I would also guess that the valuation of the 26 exited companies is an underestimation of overall impact for other reasons—top of mind: impact of non-exited companies, learning benefit to the field of a company that “fails” and exits at a very low valuation.
@charrin thanks for writing this, as a below commenter said it’s nice to see an EA-style investigation of a potentially impactful career path outside the community!
Thank you for sharing that!
For what it’s worth, I think “discussions of DEI end up becoming discussions about women” is pretty common—not to say it’s excusable, but I don’t think that’s unique to EA.
Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I’m coming in with a stronger prior from “the outside world”, where I’ve seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn’t be at odds, and that’s what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn’t want people to come away from your comment thinking “ah, Maya’s wrong and people shouldn’t criticize EA culture.” I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don’t rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn’t expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)
You’re probably right that it’s not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!
Thank you, this is clarifying for me and I hope for others.
Responses to me, including yours, have helped me update my thinking on how the EA community handles gendered violence. I wasn’t aware of these cases and am glad, and hope that other women seeing this might also feel more supported within EA knowing this. I realize there are obvious reasons why these things aren’t very public, but I hope that somehow we can make it clearer to women that Kathy’s case, and the community’s response, was an outlier.
I would still push back against the gender-reversal false equivalency that you and others have mentioned. EA doesn’t exist in a bubble. We live in a world where survivors, and in particular women, are not supported, not believed, and victim-blamed. Therefore I think it is pretty reasonable to have a prior that we should take accusations seriously and respond to them delicately. The Forum, if anywhere on earth, should be a place where we can have the nuanced understanding that (1) the accusations were false AND (2) because we live in a world where true accusations against powerful men are often disbelieved, causing avoidable harm to victims, we need to keep that context in mind while condemning said false accusations.
So to clarify my stance: I don’t think it was wrong to mention that the false accusation is false. I think it seems dismissive and insensitive to do so without any acknowledgement of the rest of the post. I don’t think it would have hurt your point to say “yes, EA is a male-dominated culture and we need to take seriously the harms done to women in our community. In this specific instance, the accusations were false, and I don’t believe the community’s response to these accusations is representative of how we handle harm.”
I think the disconnect here is that you are responding / care about this specific claim, which you have close knowledge of. I know nothing about it, and am responding to / care about the larger claim about EA’s culture. I believe that Maya’s post is not trying to to make truth claims about Kathy’s case and is more meant to point out a broad trend in EA culture, and I’m trying to encourage people to read it as such, and not let the wrongness of Kathy’s claims undermine Maya’s overall point.
(edit: basically I agree with your comment above:
if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.)
Thank you, yeah I think I may be overindexing on a few public examples (not being privy to the private examples that you and others in thread have brought up). Glad to hear that there are plenty of examples of the community responding well to protect victims/survivors.
I still also don’t think everything’s fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.
Yeah, this is very fair and I agree that transparency is not always the right call. To clarify, I’ll say that my stance here, medium confidence, is: (1) in instances which the victim/survivor has already made their accusations public, or in instances where it’s already necessarily something that isn’t interpersonal [e.g. hotness ranking], the process of accountability or repair, or at least the fact that one exists, should be public; (2) it should be transparent what kind of process a victim can expect when harm happens.
There’s some literature around procedural justice and trust that indicates that people feel better and trust the outcomes of a process more when it is transparent and invites engagement, regardless of whether the actual outcome favors them or not.
I am glad to hear that there have been cases where women have felt safe reporting and action has been taken!
(edited to delete a para about CEA community health team’s work that I realized was wrong, after seeing this page linked below)
edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim “EA community is bad at addressing harm”, but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy’s claims doesn’t detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don’t think people should discount the rest of these points.
A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a “was Kathy lying?” lens: I think it’s also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault and violence. The reason this kind of thing stings to a woman in the community is because it says “this is how this community will react if you speak up about harm; this is not a welcoming place for you if you are a survivor.” It’s not about whether Kathy, in particular, was falsely accusing others.
The way I read Maya’s critique here is “there were major accusations of major harm done, and we collectively brushed it off instead of engaging with how this person felt harmed;” which is distinct from “she was right and the perpetrator should be punished”. This is a call for the EA community to be more transparent and fair in how it deals with accusations of wrongdoing, not a callout post of anybody.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women, but as it stands AFAIK we have a lot of examples like those Maya pointed out and not much transparent accountability for them. :/ Would be very happy to be corrected about that.
(Maya, I know it’s probably really hard to see that the first reply on your post is an example of exactly the problem you’re describing, so I just want to add in case you see this that I relate to a lot of what you’ve shared and you have an open offer to DM me if you need someone to hold space for your anger!)
hi sarah! yeah i think that’s true as well. i think in my head it was already obvious and therefore not realization-worthy that engaged EAs believe AW is underfunded, but i also probably talk to people with this belief disproportionately often due to the climate/AW funding overlap bc i am learning elsewhere on the internet that people think this is weird