Back to earning the give I guess, I’ll see you guys at the McKinsey office
freedomandutility
Karma: 4,863
I think the criticism of the theory of change here is a good example of an isolated demand for rigour (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/), which I feel EAs often apply when it comes to criticisms.
It’s entirely reasonable to express your views on an issue on the EA forum for discussion and consideration, rather than immediately going directly to relevant stakeholders and lobbying for change. I think this is what almost every EA Forum post does and I have never before seen these posts criticised as ‘complaining’.
I was at an EA party this year where there was definitely an overspend of hundreds of pounds of EA money on food which was mostly wasted. As someone who was there, at the time, this was very clearly avoidable.
It remains true that this money could have changed lives if donated to EA charities instead (or even used less wastefully towards EA community building!) and I think we should view things like this as a serious community failure which we want to avoid repeating.
At the time, I felt extremely uncomfortable / disappointed with the way the money was used.
I think if this happened very early into my time affiliated with EA, it would have made me a lot less likely to stay involved—the optics were literally “rich kids who claim to be improving the world in the best way possible and tell everyone to donate lots of money to poor people are wasting hundreds of pounds on food that they were obviously never going to eat”.
I think this happened because the flow of money into EA has made the obligations to optimise cost-efficiency and to think counterfactually seem a lot weaker to many EAs. I don’t think the obligations are any weaker than they were—we should just have a slightly lower cost effectiveness bar for funding things than before.
I think this comment reads as though it’s almost entirely the authors’ responsibility to convince other EAs and EA orgs that certain interventions would help maximise impact, and that it is barely the responsibility of EAs and EA orgs to actively seek out and consider interventions which might help them maximise impact. I disagree with this kind of view.
I disagree with Moskovitz that raising taxes on American billionaires would be a good thing, and I think most EAs should also disagree.
Individuals who value the lives of all people equally, regardless of nationality, should prefer a system that does not increase taxes on EA billionaires , because the American government only spends its resources a bit more democratically and in a way that is far less efficient at improving wellbeing or reducing inequality, and in many cases has negative expected value.
95% of the world’s people, including all of the world’s poorest people, do not get a say in the American government’s spending through voting.
If they did, it is likely that they would vote to radically distribute USA’s wealth to poorer countries, rather than having close to 99% American GDP spent primarily on Americans.
The 5% who do get a say in the American government’s spending get a very indirect say via representative democracy.
And this group (and electorates in other rich democratic countries), have time and time again failed to elect leaders who are willing to enact policies which value the lives of all people equally.
And not only does the American government place less value on the lives of most of the world’s poorest people, the American government has time and time again actively spent its money on harming other countries for its own benefit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
So I feel comfortable saying I would rather Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Bankman Fried decide how to spend their wealth, than have someone like Donald Trump decide how to spend it.
I do think it’s possible that billionaires in general spend their money in a way that is even less efficient than the American government at improving wellbeing and equality, but I’d say with something like 80% confidence that this is not true.
The way I’d phrase this more succinctly, is: “sure Elon Musk is spending his money in badly, but why do you think Donald Trump will spend it in a better way?”
(By the way, I think this is a great example of a bias resulting from EA not being diverse enough. If EA was more international, we wouldn’t have so many EAs essentially endorsing American nationalism, which is very much antithetical to the idea of impartiality!)
EDIT: One idea I’d be interested in reading more about, is the idea of EA billionaires donating money directly to the governments of the poorest democracies.
EDIT 2: Based on discussion in replies, I realised I ignored a key consideration—how the taxes would be raised. I’d support massively raising a land value tax or other (successfully enforced) property taxes on US billionaires, because it wouldn’t affect EA associated billionaires that much.
EDIT 3: I was wrong to say that US government spending is only a bit more democratic than billionaire spending. Although US government spending is extremely undemocratic, it’s much more democratic than billionaire spending.
“I’m concerned that people still think that if you have good enough character (or are smart enough, etc), you don’t need good boundaries and systems.”
I strongly agree with this.
I think EA fails to recognise that traditional professional boundaries are a safeguard against tail risks and that these tail risks still remain when people appear to be kind / altruistic / rational.
Concrete example affecting me right now: this summer I’m considering internships in mental health, x-risk or global health cause prioritisation, and I’m also considering just doing a bunch of Coursera courses and working on a start up.
I think ideally I would be choosing entirely based on what offers more career capital / is more impactful, but it’s difficult not to be influenced by the fact that one of the internships would pay me £11k more than the other 3.
I’m grateful to the women who have publicly spoken about sexual misconduct in EA, which I hope will result in us making EA spaces safer and more welcoming to women.
As you’re reading this old email and the ‘apology’, instead of diving into debates about race, IQ, consequentialism, reputation and PR, please think about how black EAs and longtermists are feeling reading all of this.
Based only on the allegations which Nonlinear admits to, which I think we can assume are 100% true, I would:
a) very strongly discourage anyone from working for Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods.
and
b) very strongly encourage CEA and other EA orgs to distance themselves from Nonlinear.
“First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn’t, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn’t that bad.”
This is illegal. Employers should not be asking employees to do things which are illegal, even if the punishment is a small fine.
“Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn’t push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn’t need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it’s not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she’s generally open to.”
Employers should not be asking “semi-employees” to transport illegal drugs, regardless of context.
Saying you’re “saving the world” does not give you a free pass to ask your employees to break the law.
I really want to emphasise, particularly to younger EAs and EAs in college who want to work for EA orgs, that it is not normal for employers to ask you to do illegal things and you will almost certainly be able to very easily find impactful work with employers who are better than this.Also, please do not work for employers who want you to live with them and be “a part of their family”—this situation is very unusual for a good reason and leaves you at very high risk of exploitation, abuse and mistreatment.
Part of being successful when running any organisation is being a good employer so you can hire and retain the best talent. Asking your employees to do illegal things is preposterously stupid and means you are an exceptionally bad employer, and means your organisation is probably not going to do a very good job of saving the world. This kind of behaviour also puts EA’s reputation at risk and makes you a massive liability to the rest of us. Please do not do this.
FWIW there were lots of cause area themed / profession themed dinners at external venues on both days of EAGx Oxford and EAG London this year, despite the catered dinner being available, so that seems like a sensible area for you guys to cut spending.
A bit concerned about travel funding reductions though, as that might have negative effects on cultural diversity within EA. Might make sense to target this reduction further, eg—retaining funding for people in LMICs but not providing it for people in HICs.
Great post—there are potential trade-offs here which are underdiscussed.
I’m definitely in the global EA camp, but not primarily for justice / equality reasons. I think the main benefits of global EA are:
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Cause Prioritisation: In practice, I think cause prioritisation in EA is heavily influenced by culture, wider society etc, and not just by rational thought. I think cause prioritisation influenced by every living culture is more likely to be closer to some universal truth, than cause prioritisation primarily influenced by the cultures of the US, the UK, the West and high income countries.
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Local Problems, Local Influence and Local Knowledge: I think many high impact interventions in biosecurity, global health and well-being and farmed animal welfare in EA require extensive local action in middle and low income countries. Narrow EA will both lack the local knowledge and local influence / power to deliver these interventions.
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Capture by / Drift Towards Selfish Elite Interests: You acknowledge a related optics concern in “I have a sense that the way that this strategy is pursued often leads to an optic of secrecy and icky elite-control”, but I think cause prioritisation in EA is very uncertain and therefore very vulnerable to capture by the selfish interests of groups inside it. I think global diversity of EAs protects against this risk.
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Cost-Effectiveness of Community Building: Money goes further in low income countries, which means the same investments in community building should lead to more EAs.
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Outsized Influence of Small Countries in Multilateral Orgs: This isn’t about middle and low income countries specifically, but I think CEA and Open Phil should specifically invest in community building focused on careers in government in a country with a very small population, to help the country advocate for good ideas in multilateral organisations.
I continue to think that EA Community Building should prioritise places like Oxford and Harvard.
But I also think places like Delhi or Nairobi should be prioritised over less influential British universities like Durham, Edinburgh, Sussex, Bristol, etc.
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Strongly agree with the idea that we should stop saying “EA loves criticism”.
I think everyone should have a very strong prior that they are bad at accepting criticism, and everyone should have a very strong prior that they overestimate how good they are at accepting criticism.
I don’t think employers should tell employees to do illegal things, it’s about both power dynamics and legality.
I would very strongly recommend that employers do not ask employees to illegally move melatonin across borders.
Obviously jaywalking is much less bad and asking your employees to jaywalk is much less bad—but I would still recommend that employers do not ask employees to jaywalk. Generally I’d say that it’s much less bad to ask your employees to do an illegal thing that lots of people do anyway, but I would recommend that employees still do not ask employees to do them. (Jaywalking would fit into this category, moving drugs illegally across borders and driving without a license in Puerto Rico would not).
I would love frugality options!
I think EA is better than most movements at self criticism and engaging with criticism.
I think many EAs mistake this for meaning that EA is “good” at engaging with criticism.
I think EA is still very bad at engaging with criticism, but other movements are just worse.
I think ever since EA has become more of an “expected value maximisation” movement rather than a “doing good based on high quality evidence” movement, it has been quite plausible for EA activity overall, or community building specifically, to turn out to be net-negative in retrospect, but I think the expected value of community building remains extremely high.
I support more emphasis on thin EA and the development of a sort of rule of thumb for what a good ratio of meta spending vs object level impact spending would be.
Strongly agree that it is surprising that some of Carla Zoe Kremer’s reforms haven’t been implemented. Frankly, I would guess the reason is that too many leadership EAs are overconfident in their decision making and are much too focused on “rowing” instead of “steering” in Holden Karnofsky’s terms.
“ Social movements are likely to overvalue efforts to increase the power of their movement and undervalue their goals actually being accomplished, and EA is not immune to this failure mode.” Why do you think this, it is mostly intuition?
My view of other social movements is that they undervalue efforts to increase power which is why most are unsuccessful. I credit a lot of EA’s success in terms of object level impact to a healthy degree of focus on increasing power as a means to increasing impact.
Have you explored how donating to Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated family planning charities might compare to anti-abortion advocacy?
I suspect it might be more effective at reducing the abortion rate whilst also not having the same downside of reducing women’s control over their lives. There are also large additional benefits of avoiding negative health outcomes like obstetric fistulas and increasing women’s control over their lives.
Can we add “ask their employees to break the law” to this
Given that debating race and IQ would make EA very unwelcoming for black people, probably has the effect of increasing racism, and clearly does not help us do the most good, we shouldn’t even be debating it with ‘empathy and rigour’.
EA is a community for doing the most good, not for debating your favourite edgy topic