An anonymous account for a few long-time EAs to share concerns about community issues in a less filtered way, because we think others may also have similar views.
Some takes might be spicier than average—but we encourage pushback and disagreements.
Grumpy Squid
Karma: 215
In your earlier post, you write:
Nonlinear has not been invited or permitted to run sessions or give talks relating to their work, or host a recruiting table at EAG and EAGx conferences this year.
And
Kat ran a session on a personal topic at EAG Bay Area 2023 in February. EDIT: Kat, Emerson and Drew also had a community office hour slot at that conference.
Community office hours are an event that organizers invite you to sign up for (not all EAG attendees can sign up). While not as prominent as a recruiting table or talk, they still signal status to the attendees.
Given that public comments were made as early as November, it seems that there was sufficient time to ensure they were disunited from the event in February. Additionally, even if you don’t table at EAG, you can still actively recruit via 1-1 meetings.
I think the lack of acknowledgement or explanation of how this choice happened—and whether CHT sees this as a mistake—worries me, especially now that the anonymity constraints have been lifted.
I agree. The governance and decision-making of the EV boards is an important matter that shouldn’t be dismissed because of Will and Nick’s other contributions.
Context:
Advisors often only have a few pages of context and a single call (sometimes there are follow-ups) to talk about career options. In my experience, this can be pretty insufficient to understand someone’s needs.
I would be worried that they might push people towards something that may not make sense, and two things could happen:
1) the person may feel more pressure to pursue something that’s not a good fit for them
2) if they disagree with the advice given, the may not raise it. For example, they may not feel comfortable raising the issue because of concerns around anonymity and potential career harm, since your advisors are often making valuable connections and sharing potential candidate names with orgs that are hiring.
I know that 80K don’t want people to take their advice so seriously, and numerous posts have been written on this topic. However, I think these efforts won’t necessarily negate 1) and 2) because many 80K advisees may not be as familiar with all of 80K’s content or Forum discourse, and the prospect of valuable connections remains nonetheless.
I personally had a positive experience during a career call, but have heard of a handful of negative experiences second- and third-hand.
What processes do you have in place to monitor potentially harmful advice advisees may be given on calls, and counteracting nonreporting due to anonymity concerns?
Ideally, could you share a representative example of how cases like this and what procedure your team followed?
(Additional context in a reply to this comment)
As an addendum, it’s also non-trivial to find out the exact appointment & departure dates of all the EVF UK & US board of trustees over the history of the organization. The Way Back Machine is somewhat spotty, and financial records for EVF UK are hard to find.
It would be good to have a history of the leadership & trustees of both entities somewhere publicly available.
Thanks so much for all your hard work since before EA existed, Nick. The qualities you brought and inspired in others as a foundational and highly capable figure in EA are evident in the love that so many people this comment section have for you.
Can you help me understand why you stepped down from the EV boards in August 2023 because of too many recusals starting in November 2022? Did the amount you could participate in the boards meaningfully change recently? You said this was a good time for you to step down, but from the post, it doesn’t sound like there have been significant changes in your ability to contribute to the board since November 2022.
It’s very difficult for me to understand why, in the aftermath of a crisis, someone with wide-ranging recusals stemming from the crisis that were preventing them from contributing enough would take 9+ months to step down.
You did this for both the EV boards, which further compounds the issue.
Additionally, the point of EA is to do the most good. This has been the most critical time period in EA’s history. The EA community meaningfully contributed to an $8,000,000,000 fraud. In the 10 months since then, we have endured painful scandal after scandal, some exposing important governance and leadership failures. Importantly, governance and leadership failures were a factor in the catastrophic FTX fraud, such as the CEA/EV trustees—Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, and likely Nick Beckstead for the time period in question (based on the Wayback Machine)[1] - and other EA leaders effectively ignoring concerns about the business ethics and risk management of SBF while promoting and helping him.
With all this and more context than I could possibly get into here, it’s even more difficult for me to understand why you stayed on either, let alone both, of the EV boards for 9+ months after FTX exploded.
I’m sure one consideration was the challenge of finding new and trustworthy board members for small boards. But if this was the bottleneck, why wasn’t it prioritized and dealt with much earlier? It really shouldn’t take close to a year to replace members with wide-ranging recusals in crisis time. This should have been one of the first problems to solve.
This is all the more true considering the central role of EV in the EA ecosystem. EA has had serious leadership vacuums in this critical period that have significantly impacted our community and, much more importantly, our attempt to make the world a better place.
It was noteworthy to me that an EV US board member, Rebecca Kagan, resigned her position in April of this year due to disagreements with the EV boards’ strategy and approach. I hope we hear from her in the future.
I didn’t want to potentially change the mood on a leaving post that ideally should have been just filled with appreciation for a person with many outstanding qualities, but it’s really very difficult for me to understand how these sorts of consequential and inexplicable actions—much of this also applies to Will MacAskill of course—are accepted without comment in some of the most important organizations of the EA movement.
It makes me worry that not enough lessons have been learned from FTX.
If what I have said is wrong in any way—very possible! - I would love to hear how.
All that said, I wish you best of luck for the future Nick.
- ^
There is a small chance I am unable to rule out that Hilary Greaves had replaced Nick Beckstead as a trustee at the time the CEA UK trustees considered allegations against SBF but took no action. Confirmation either way is welcome.
- ^
One problem with scandals is that there’s no real solution or steps taken in response to them. When stuff happens, there is a lot of discussion, but little changes structurally or institutionally.
I think the community was not meant to scale. OP and EVF (affiliated organization) promoted EA growth in the past so they could get more people working on their priority problems but never set in place mechanisms to govern a larger community.
Essentially, I think to some extent these organizations see the EA community as an means to an end, and don’t want to take responsibility for the messiness that comes with building a community.
I would like to see the EA community set up in ways to govern itself rather than depend on a few actors (OP/EVF ecosystem) whose incentives don’t always line up with what is best for the community.
FWIW I think it would likely be hard for most people (especially those without a strong internet presence or who don’t write regularly) to have a rich comments section on other platforms, but I could be underestimating the difficulty of getting blog readers.
The point is that it seemed like the post was banned from the front page because of strong language, and this doesn’t see to have been a rule that has been enforced in the past.
Clarification: I think they underinvest in staff specifically, and sometimes overinvest in specific programs (e.g. conference spend in 2022, maybe the university groups program from 2021-2022). But overall I think they just underinvest in these things across the board, despite having had the capacity to raise more funds / hire more.
If they were unable to raise more funds (which I’m very skeptical of since it appears they haven’t actively fundraised non-OP funders), then I’d have wanted them to scale down to have fewer projects, and put more resources into fewer programs.
RE outlier—Do you mean an outlier in that there are more admin hours put in than other places?
I don’t think that is true, at least from my impression of a couple other places, but this is a weak impression.
I would make the case that we probably don’t want to compare the Forum to most other online communities, because unlike in other places, people are writing & sharing substantive research and trying to, in some sense, do work. Of course, there is a community / social element to it as well, but I think there is a case to see the Forum as more than just that. As a result, I think it’s okay for the mod team to be an outlier.
I’ll also say that in general, I believe CEA as an organization undervalues / underinvests in infrastructural investments for the EA movement and community (e.g. the Groups team, Events team and Community health had been chronically understaffed until early 2022. The Forum only had ~3 FTE until 2021 and only had capacity to maintain rather than build new features. I’d argue the Community Health team is still very understaffed relative to their remit.)
I think having adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive—would add ~5% to the Forums’ overall budget (currently $2M per year per a recent comment). Onboarding and recruiting would take some time, but the process for hiring moderators (AFAIK) is less time-consuming if they are in a contract role.
It’s true that new moderators could make worse decisions, but they could also be trained by existing moderators, read up on past instances of moderation that worked / didn’t, and initially run decisions by more experienced mods to reduce the chance of decreasing quality. It seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job, at least Forum leadership’s standards.
Thanks for sharing your reasoning, openly acknowledging a mistake and explaining how it happened.
Note: the below is an observation of a structural problem, rather than any individual. person Moderation is not an easy job and I do believe that the Forum mods are doing their best.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this).
This could result in a sub-optimal situation that decisions like this are either delayed, or made quickly (with a higher chance of mistakes). I think this is bad because the Forum is actively used by hundreds of community members, and time spent critiquing mod decisions is valuable time that isn’t being spent on object-level issues.
In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
Some notes on mod capacity:
From my understanding the forum has hired some paid moderators in the past year or two, but it seems like it may not be sufficient (possibly because of a increase in forum usage over the same time period)
I am also aware that the Forum is trying to hire another Content Specialist, although it is unclear whether they are replacing Lizka or adding more capacity.
Thanks for clarifying Linch, removing the reference to your comment since it’s making a different claim.
(out of curiosity, do you agree with that statement as it stands?)
I’m disappointed in the mod team’s recent actions regarding this post on Yudkowsky.
1. As far as I know [edited] there hasn’t been a previous rule around strong language not resulting in a front page ban since the language was toned down in response to feedback and the comments were civil and productive. (Note that the author still hasn’t changed the title, which a number of people have commented on, but this doesn’t seem like it would have changed the mod decision)
2. I also agree with Linch’s point that correctness hasn’t been a distinction point either.
3. Several people left responses and criticisms of the decision, all were popular with readers but the mod team has not (yet) replied or substantively engaged with those comments (which seem reasonable).
Edits / notes since posting:
I edited 1) and added point 2) after Linch’s clarification comment.
Note that Lizka responded to the post a few hours after this shortform went up (thanks for flagging Lorenzo)
Thanks for the clarificaton!
Why did the LTFF/EAIF chairs step down before new chairs were recruited?
I was excited to see this post—appreciate the events team sharing this.
Some people seem hopeful that the new CEA CEO will lead to important changes and improvements in CEA. I’m pessimistic. The CEO is a powerful role, but faces a lot of constraints from trustees, funders, past decisions, and organizational setup.
While CEA’s finances are difficult to track down, it’s safe to assume a large chunk of their funding comes from OP, and specifically the OP LT team (estimated $30 million in general support from March 2022 - January 2023). The senior OP LT grantmaker who leads OP’s work on the EA community is one of three people on the search team. The search team has signaled openness to radical changes to CEA’s vision by CEO candidates, but also thinks CEA’s work has historically been “highly effective” and are open to candidates who just build on CEA’s existing work.
It’s likely the Center for Effective Altruism will continue to act as a talent recruitment arm for OP’s EA LT team’s priorities and be unenthusiastic about transparency and accountability to the broader EA community in its programs.
On the bright side, they may change their name to something more fitting, which would help publicize a vacuum that others can fill in—see prior discussion. This would help alleviate some of the historical problems of CEA wanting to have general community authority without responsibility towards to the EA community.
Note that this won’t wholly fix the problem. In the past when CEA or 80K have tried to be clearer on the scope of their work and left some clearer gaps for others, those gaps sometimes haven’t been filled. Even when they are attempted to be filled, new parties may lack the trust, skills and networks to excel at filling the gap because they are starting from scratch from an institutional knowledge POV.
The most likely possibility for fundamental improvements to CEA might be if someone very skilled who is also not deeply embedded within the EA community becomes CEO. But I’m pessimistic that this will happen.
While I don’t doubt the search team’s desire to have a fair process that includes outsiders from EA, why would skilled outsiders want to be head of CEA when they could have many better, less thankless (and probably more impactful) jobs?
An outside CEO will likely need to be a very impressive operator and communicator in addition to relevant alignment with the search committee and key funders and decision makers. Making fundamental improvements to CEA will involve a lot of cleaning up other people’s messes and making the best of bad situations for relatively little reward in the near-mid term. The dependence of funding on one megafunder with a niche vision and the complex web of relationships involved is not an easy problem to navigate for anyone, let alone someone seeking fundamental changes. And as an outsider it will take time and effort to simply understand the situation and what can be effectively changed and what can’t. Executing on real, substantive changes may inevitably involve some amount of conflict with powerful figures in EA. What would attract people who are capable of executing such tough tasks to the CEA CEO role?
Moreover, why would the search committee take the risk of recommending an outsider to EA, when they seem content with the status quo and hiring an outsider could be easily seen as a predictable mistake by key EA decision makers if it runs into problems? I think an outsider suggesting radical changes to CEA, especially changes that might (intentionally or unintentionally) pull the rug back on previous bad decisions, would have to be significantly more skilled and impressive than the best insider to be hired.
I think the best option might be a paired leadership role with one person more embedded in EA and the other less. But this seems unlikely. It can be difficult to construct and maintain co-leadership roles. Perhaps if there was an agreement for an insider to guide the outsider for some period of time before transitioning to the outsider being the sole leader, but this would require a level of commitment to the outsider that seems unlikely to be achieved even if deserved.
To summarize, I expect some minor improvements and changes but fundamental problems to remain with CEA, except for a possible name (and clear scope) change.
All that being said, I still recommended people apply for the role if they’re interested. Just be careful what you’re getting yourself into.
(Note: Multiple people contributed to this note.)
Thanks for this in-depth response, it makes me feel more confident in the processes for the period of time when you were at 80K.
However, since you have left the team, it would be helpful to know which of these practices your successor will keep in place and how much they will change—for example, since you mentioned you were on the high end for giving feedback on calls, for example.
My understanding of many meta EA orgs is that individuals have a fair amount of autonomy. This definitely has its upsides, but it also means that practices can change (substantially) between managers.