IanDavidMoss

Karma: 2,723

IanDavidMoss Aug 30, 2022, 12:24 AM
21 points
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in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Earn To Give $1M/year or Work Directly?
Effective Institutions Project here. As of now I’d say our number is more like $150-200K, assuming we’re talking about an annual commitment. The number is lower because our networks give us access to a large talent pool and I’m fairly optimistic that we can fill openings easily once we have the budget for them.
What links here?
- Earn To Give $1M/year or Work Directly? by Yonatan Cale (Aug 29, 2022, 12:43 PM; 60 points)

IanDavidMoss Aug 15, 2022, 4:39 PM
2 points
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in reply to: abergal’s comment on: Some concerns about policy work funding and the Long Term Future Fund
Thanks for the response!
I don’t think any of the projects I remember us rejecting seemed like they had a huge amount of upside
That’s fair, and I should also be clear that I’m less familiar with LTFF’s grantmaking than some others in the EA universe.
It would be nice if we did quantified risk analysis for all of our grant applications, but ultimately we have limited time, and I think it makes sense to focus attention on cases where it does seem like the upside is unusually high.
Oh, I totally agree that the kind of risk analysis I mentioned is not costless, and for EA Funds in particular it seems like too much to expect. My main point is that in the absence of it, it’s not necessarily an optimal strategy to substitute an extreme version of the precautionary principle instead.
Overall, I agree that judging policy/institution-focused projects primarily based on upside makes sense.

IanDavidMoss Aug 13, 2022, 8:11 PM
29 points
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in reply to: weeatquince’s comment on: Some concerns about policy work funding and the Long Term Future Fund
I strongly agree with Sam on the first point regarding downside risks. My view, based on a range of separate but similar interactions with EA funders, is that they tend to overrate the risks of accidental harm ^[1] from policy projects, and especially so for more entrepreneurial, early-stage efforts.
To back this up a bit, let’s take a closer look at the risk factors Asya cited in the comment above.
- Pushing policies that are harmful. In any institutional context where policy decisions matter, there is a huge ecosystem of existing players, ranging from industry lobbyists to funders to media outlets to think tanks to agency staff to policymakers themselves, who are also trying to influence the outcomes of legislation/regulation/etc. in their preferred direction. As a result, making policies actually become reality is inherently quite hard and almost impossible to make happen without achieving buy-in from a diverse range of stakeholders. While that process can be frustrating and often results in watering down really good ideas to something less inspiring, it is actually quite good for mitigating the downside risks from bad policies! It’s understandable to think of such a volatile mix of influences as scary and something to be avoided, but we should also consider the possibility that it is a productive way to stress-test ideas coming out of EA/longtermist communities by exposing them to audiences with different interests and perspectives. After all, these interests at least in part do reflect the landscape of competing motivations and goals in the public more generally, and thus are often relevant for whether a policy idea will be successful or not.
- Making key issues partisan. My view is that this is much more likely to happen by way of involvement in electoral politics than traditional policy-advocacy work. Importantly, though, we just had a high-profile test of this idea in the form of Carrick Flynn’s bid for Congress. By the logic of EA grantmakers worried about partisan politicization, my sense is that the Flynn campaign is one of the riskiest things this community has ever taken on (and remember, we only saw the primary—if he had won and run in the general, many Republican politicians’ and campaign strategists’ first exposure to EA and longtermism would have been by way of seeing a Democrat supported by two of the largest Democratic donors running on EA themes in a competitive race against one of their own.) And yet as it turned out, it did not result in longtermism being politicized basically at all. So while the jury is still out, perhaps a reasonable working hypothesis based on what we’ve seen thus far is that “try to do good and help people” is just not a very polarizing POV for most people, and therefore we should stress out about it a little less.
- Creating an impression (among policymakers or the broader world) that people who care about the long-term future are offputting, unrealistic, incompetent, or otherwise undesirable to work with. I think this one is pretty easily avoided. If you have someone leading a policy initiative who is any of those things, they probably aren’t going to make much progress and their work thus won’t cause much harm (other than wasting the grantmaker’s money). Furthermore, the increasing media coverage of longtermism and the fact that longtermism has credible allies in society (multiple billionaires, an increasing number of public intellectuals, etc.) both significantly mitigate against the concern expressed here, as the former factors are much more likely to influence a broad set of policymakers’ opinions and actions.
- “Taking up the space” such that future actors who want to make long-term future-focused asks are encouraged or expected to work through or coordinate with the existing project. This seems to be more of a general concern about grantmaking to early-stage organizations and doesn’t strike me as unique to the policy space at all. If anything, it seems to rest on a questionable premise that there is only one channel for communicating with policymakers and only one organization or individual can occupy that channel at a time. As I stated earlier, policymakers already have huge ecosystems of people trying to influence policy outcomes; another entrant into the mix isn’t going to take up much space at all. But also, policymakers themselves are part of a huge bureaucratic apparatus and there are many, many potential levers and points of access that can’t all possibly be covered by a single organization. I do agree that coordination is important and desirable, but we shouldn’t let in itself that be a barrier to policy entrepreneurship, IMHO.
To be clear, I do think these risks are all real and worth thinking about! But to my reasonably well-informed understanding of at least three EA grantmakers’ processes, most of these projects are not judged by way of a sober risk analysis that clearly articulates specific threat models, assigns probabilities to each, and weighs the resulting estimates of harm against a similarly detailed model of the potential benefits. Instead, the risks are assessed on a holistic and qualitative basis, with the result that many things that seem potentially risky are not invested in even if the upside of them working out could really be quite valuable. Furthermore, the risks of not acting are almost never assessed—if you aren’t trying to get the policymaker’s attention tomorrow, who’s going to get their ear instead, and how likely might it be that it’s someone you’d really prefer they didn’t listen to?
While there are always going to be applications that are not worth funding in any grantmaking process, I think when it comes to policy and related work we are too ready to let perfect be the enemy of the good.
1. ^
  Important to note that the observations here are most relevant to policymaking in Western democracies; the considerations in other contexts are very different.

IanDavidMoss Jul 21, 2022, 8:05 PM
5 points
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on: Why EA needs Operations Research: the science of decision making
Re: “Why haven’t I heard of OR?”, I think your comments on the fragmentation and branding challenges are extremely on point. Last year Effective Institutions Project did a scoping exercise looking at different fields and academic disciplines that intersect with institutional decision-making, and it was amazing to see the variety of names and frames for what is ultimately a collection of pretty similar ideas. With that said, I think the directions that have been explored under the OR banner are particularly interesting and impressive, and am really glad to have someone in the community who knows that field well!

Leveraging labor shortages as a pathway to career impact?

IanDavidMossJul 14, 2022, 1:32 PM

18 points

2 comments2 min readEA link

IanDavidMoss Jul 11, 2022, 11:24 AM
5 points
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in reply to: AnonymousThrowAway’s comment on: Senior EA ‘ops’ roles: if you want to undo the bottleneck, hire differently
One thing that occurs to me is that your post assumes that the only way to address the issues raised here is to hire different people and/or give them different responsibilities. But another possible route is for EA organizations to make more use of management consultancies. That could be a path worth considering for small nonprofits whose leaders mainly do just want to hire someone to take care of all the tasks they don’t want to do themselves, and whose opportunity to make use of more strategic and advanced operations expertise is likely to be too sporadic to satisfy an experienced operations professional, especially one whose experience is mostly with larger organizations or companies and who is not strongly aligned with EA values. Said experienced ops pros could in turn perhaps do more of the work they want to do (and be better paid for it) working for a consultancy rather than in-house at a small organization.
I know there have been some efforts to get an EA-branded management consulting agency going since Luke’s post last year but am not aware of any of them hitting paydirt quite yet—happy to connect you or others interested to relevant people as appropriate. The main barrier as I understand it so far has been EA orgs’ lack of demonstrated demand for the services, but I wouldn’t necessarily take this as a signal that the resources are already there in-house or that there would be no benefit to the organizations from accessing them.

IanDavidMoss Jul 10, 2022, 4:30 PM
3 points
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on: What is Operations Management?
I think this post is excellent overall, but I do want to register a disagreement with your bid to separate operations work from the work that PAs do in most small nonprofit organizations. You have a keen observation about how the nature of operations work changes with scale: at top levels of a multinational corporation, the notion of a senior operations executive doing PA-style work is ludicrous. But for most EA organizations, that comparison is kind of nonsensical; we’re talking about small outfits with 2-6 staff members and a mishmash of interns, contractors, volunteers and other loosely affiliated workers, not a 100,000-person behemoth with offices around the world. In the context of a small nonprofit, the proportion of operations work that looks like PA work is typically much larger than is the case in a huge company like that. Similarly, I disagree with statements like “You can make a decent argument that the janitor taking out the garbage is necessary for the core functions of the business to go forward (because nobody could work if the floor was covered with garbage), but I think you would be hard pressed to find somebody who considers the janitor to be part of the operations department.” In my experience, organizations (such as schools) that hire janitors consider them maintenance staff, they are situated in the Facilities department, and Facilities is overseen by the COO or equivalent.

IanDavidMoss Jun 26, 2022, 11:06 PM
13 points
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in reply to: ColdButtonIssues’s comment on: Before There Was Effective Altruism, There Was Effective Philanthropy
Do you think that some of the people who would have been attracted to effective philanthropy in the past now just join effective altruism?
Some, sure. EA seems to be a lot more mainstream now than it was even 3-4 years ago, so that’s probably the main reason.
While I think EP has been influential, I just didn’t find the work from CEP and similar places as intellectually engaging as what EA puts out (or as important overall).
I think the main thing EA has going for it over EP is that it has a much better track record of taking ideas seriously. EP explored a lot of promising directions and anticipated a number of things that EA organizations ended up doing (e.g., incorporating expected value estimates into grantmaking). But in my view the key players, in trying to optimize for elite credibility at the same time as intellectual rigor, didn’t give themselves enough weirdness points to work with. As a result, they both failed to pursue their best ideas to their logical conclusion and didn’t do enough to distinguish between transformative ideas and mediocre ones.

IanDavidMoss Jun 26, 2022, 9:14 PM
39 points
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on: Before There Was Effective Altruism, There Was Effective Philanthropy
I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but have followed the effective philanthropy “scene” since 2007 or so. My sense is that most EA community members aren’t very knowledgeable about this whole side of institutional philanthropy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the history recounted pretty accurately here! With that said, one quibble is that the book you cited entitled Effective Philanthropy by Mary Ellen Capek and Molly Mead is not one I’d ever heard of before reading this post; I think this is just a case of a low-profile resource happening to get good Google search results years later.
Here is a bit of additional background on the key players and some of their intersections, as I understand it:
- The effective philanthropy movement was very much a child of the original dot-com boom in the late 1990s. While CEP is based in Boston, the scene was mostly driven by an earlier generation of West Coast tech magnates who were interested in bringing business concepts like results-based management to philanthropy. Education funding was viewed as a major priority and there were close ties to the charter school movement, which saw a number of influential organizations like KIPP incubated by funders looking to put these ideas into practice. With that said, CEP’s Phil Buchanan has consistently pushed back against the idea that nonprofits are analogous to businesses, despite his own MBA from Harvard Business School.
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has an Effective Philanthropy Program and has been a major financial supporter of CEP for a long time. Hewlett’s former president Paul Brest (2000-2012) pioneered the notion of “strategic philanthropy” which is closely related both in spirit and sociologically to this movement. Fun trivia note: Hewlett’s Effective Philanthropy program was an early funder of GiveWell at the time when that organization was precariously situated (i.e., pre-Dustin & Cari).
- Stanford Social Innovation Review was closely associated with this scene as well. With startup funding from Hewlett, I believe it was intended to be a Harvard Business Review for the social sector when it was founded in 2003. (HBR had published the original article on “venture philanthropy” in 1997.)
- Some other funders that have been influential include Mario Marino’s Venture Philanthropy Partners and his Leap of Reason community, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and REDF (which developed the social return on investment methodology, a form of cost-benefit analysis).
Over the past decade, the consensus among US-based staffed foundations has shifted hard against some of the technocratic premises that drove the effective philanthropy movement, in particular its emphasis on measurable outcomes and tendency to invest lots of funder resources in strategy development. The Whitman Institute’s work probably contributed in a minor way to that dynamic, but in my read a much stronger influence has been the growing emphasis on racial justice in the nonprofit sector since the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement that, via a variety of pathways including the widespread socialization of Tema Okun’s work, caused so-called “top-down” approaches like effective/strategic philanthropy to feel out of touch with the moment. One of the earliest points of tension was a series put out beginning in 2009 by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy called “Philanthropy at its Best” critiquing current foundation practices, which Brest wrote a four-part essay responding to in 2011. A parallel thread of critique comes from complexity science, via the argument that the wicked problems philanthropy is trying to solve are knotty enough that trying to predict the outcomes of philanthropic investments with any meaningful level of detail is a fool’s errand, and funders should therefore defer to the expertise of grantees wherever possible. On that front, this essay from one of the co-founders of FSG (a philanthropy consultancy closely associated with Harvard Business School and the early days of venture philanthropy) was particularly influential.
I don’t believe there was one single event that caused the momentum around effective philanthropy to fall apart, but by 2016 or so it was clear that its peak was in the rear-view mirror; a particularly dramatic turn was when Hal Harvey, Paul Brest’s co-author on their 2008 book Money Well Spent which was written while Brest was still president of Hewlett, wrote an op-ed apologizing for his role advancing strategic philanthropy. There’s a much longer conversation to have about to what extent and which of the critiques of effective philanthropy are worth attending to, and how they relate to effective altruism, but I’m happy to see it pointed out that many of the topics EA is most concerned with have been discussed at length in other venues.

IanDavidMoss Jun 16, 2022, 7:48 PM
24 points
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in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
I don’t have any inside info here, but based on my work with other organizations I think each of your first three hypotheses are plausible, either alone or in combination.
Another consideration I would mention is that it’s just really hard to judge how to interpret advocacy failures over a short time horizon. Given that your first try failed, does that mean the situation is hopeless and you should stop throwing good money after bad? Or does it mean that you meaningfully moved the needle on people’s opinions and the next campaign is now likelier to succeed? It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 2016-17 or so, having seen some intermediate successes that didn’t ultimately result in legislation signed into law, OP staff might have held out genuine hope that victory was still close at hand. Or after the First Step Act was passed in 2018 and signed into law by Trump, maybe they thought they could convert Trump into a more consistent champion on the issue and bring the GOP along with him. Even as late as 2020, when the George Floyd protests broke out, Chloe’s grantmaking recommendations ended up being circulated widely and presumably moved a lot of money; I could imagine there was hope at that time for transformative policy potential. Knowing when to walk away from sustained but not-yet-successful efforts at achieving low-probability, high-impact results, especially when previous attempts have unknown correlations with the probability of future success, is intrinsically a very difficult estimation problem. (Indeed, if someone at QURI could develop a general solution to this, I think that would be a very useful contribution to the discourse!)

IanDavidMoss Jun 16, 2022, 6:00 PM
63 points
1 ∶ 0
on: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
One context note that doesn’t seem to be reflected here is that in 2014, there was a lot of optimism for a bipartisan political compromise on criminal justice reform in the US. The Koch network of charities and advocacy groups had, to some people’s surprise, begun advocating for it in their conservative-libertarian circles, which in turn motivated Republican participation in negotiations on the hill. My recollection is that Open Phil’s bet on criminal justice reform funding was not just a “bet on Chloe,” but also a bet on tractability: i.e., that a relatively cheap investment could yield a big win on policy because the political conditions were such that only a small nudge might be needed. This seems to have been an important miscalculation in retrospect, as (unless I missed something) a limited-scope compromise bill took until the end of 2018 to get passed. ~~I’m not aware of any significant other criminal justice legislation that has passed in that time period.~~ [Edit: while this is true at the national level, arguably there has been a lot of progress on CJR at state and local levels since 2014, much of which could probably be traced back to advocacy by groups like those Open Phil funded.]
This information strongly supports the “Leverage Hypothesis,” which was cited by Open Phil staff themselves, so I think it ought to be weighted pretty strongly in your updates.

IanDavidMoss Jun 9, 2022, 2:22 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Luise’s comment on: What’s the theory of change of “Come to the bay over the summer!”?
Separating out how important networking is for different kinds of roles seems valuable, not only for the people trying to climb the ladder but also for the people already on the ladder. (e.g., maybe some of these folks desperate to find good people to own valuable projects that otherwise wouldn’t get done should be putting more effort into recruiting outside of the Bay.)

IanDavidMoss Jun 9, 2022, 2:12 PM
18 points
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in reply to: Joseph’s comment on: What’s the theory of change of “Come to the bay over the summer!”?
I like this comment because it does a great job of illustrating how socioeconomic status influences the risks one can take. Consider the juxtaposition of these two statements:
(from the comment)
Maybe this is mainly targeted at undergraduate students, who are more likely to have a few months of time over the summer with no commitments. But in that case how do they have the money to do what is basically an extended vacation? Most students aren’t earning much/any money.
- Maybe this is only targeted at students who have wealthy families willing to fund expensive adventures.
(from the OP)
It’s unclear from the outside:
- How easy it is to start a project and how secure this is relative to starting ambitious things outside of EA. Funding, advisors, a high-trust community, and social prestige are available...Looking at what scale EA projects in the bay operate at disperses false notions of limits and helps shoot for the correct level of ambition
Even once you know these things intellectually, it’s hard to act in accordance with them before knowing them viscerally, e.g., viscerally feel secure in starting an ambitious project. Coming to Berkeley really helps with that.
Let’s say that for a typical motivated early-career EA, there’s a 60% chance that moving to the Bay will result in desirable full-time employment within one month. (I have no idea if that’s the correct number, just taking a wild guess.) From an expected-value standpoint, that seems like a great deal! Of course you would do that! But for someone who’s resource-constrained, that 40% combined with the high living costs are really big red flags. What happens if things don’t work out? What happens is that you’ve now blown all your savings and are up shit creek, and if you didn’t embed yourself in the community well enough during that time to get a job, you probably don’t have enough good friends to help you out of a financial hole either. So do you make the leap? Without a safety net or an upfront commitment, it’s so much harder to opt for high-upside but riskier pathways, and that in turn ends up impacting the composition of the community.

IanDavidMoss Jun 3, 2022, 7:10 PM
30 points
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on: Unflattering reasons why I’m attracted to EA
Really appreciate you writing this! Echoing others, I think many of these more self-serving motivations are pretty common in the community. With that said, I think some of these are much more potentially problematic than others, and the list is worth disaggregating on that dimension. For example, your comment about EA helping you not feel so fragile strikes me as prosocial, if anything, and I don’t think anyone would have a problem with someone gaining hope that their own suffering could be reduced from engaging in EA.
The ones that I think are most worrying and worth pushing back on (not just for you, but for all of us in the community) are:
- Affiliation with EA aligns me with high-status people and elite institutions, which makes me feel part of something special, important and exclusive (even if it’s not meant to be)
- EA is partly an intellectual puzzle, and gives me opportunities to show off and feel like I’m right and other people are wrong / I don’t have to get my hands dirty helping people, yet I can still feel as or more legitimate than someone who is actually on the front line
- It is a way to feel morally superior to other people, to craft a moral dominance hierarchy where I am higher than other people
The first one is tricky, as affiliation with high-status people and organizations can be instrumentally quite useful for achieving impact—indeed, in some contexts it’s essential—and for that reason we shouldn’t reject it on principle. And just like I think it’s okay to enjoy money, I think it’s okay to enjoy the feeling of doing something special and important! The danger is in having the status become its own reward, replacing the drive for impact. I feel that this is something we need to be constantly vigilant about, as it’s easy to mistake social signals of importance for actual importance (aka LARPing at impact.)
I grouped the “intellectual puzzle” and “get my hands dirty” items because I see them as two sides of the same coin. In recent years it feels to me that EA has lost touch a bit with its emotional core, which is arguably easier to bring forward in the contexts of animal welfare and global poverty than x-risk (and to the extent there is an emotional core to x-risk, it is mostly one of fear rather than compassion). I personally love solving intellectual puzzles and it’s a big reason why I keep coming back to this community, but it mustn’t come at the expense of the A in EA. I group this with “get my hands dirty” because I think for many of us, hard intellectual puzzles are our bread and butter and actually take less effort/provoke less discomfort than putting ourselves in a position to help people suffering right in front of us. I similarly see this one as a balance to strike.
The last one is the only one that I think is just unambiguously bad. Not only is it incorrect on its face, or at least at odds with what I see as EA’s core values, but it is a surefire way to turn off people who might otherwise be motivated to help. And indeed there has been a history of people in EA publicly communicating in a way that came across to others as morally arrogant, especially in early years of the movement, which created rifts with mainstream nonprofit/social sector practice that are still there today (e.g.).

IanDavidMoss May 30, 2022, 5:20 PM
20 points
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in reply to: leillustrations🔸’s comment on: Revisiting the karma system
I think the issue is more that different users have very disparate norms about how often to vote, when to use a strong vote, and what to use it on. My sense (from a combination of noticing voting patterns and reading specific users’ comments about how they vote) is that most are pretty low-key about voting, but a few high-karma users are much more intense about it and don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. These users can then have a wildly disproportionate effect on discourse because if their vote is worth, say, 7 points, their opinion on one piece of content vs. another can be and often is worth a full 14 points.
In addition to scaling down the weight of strong votes as MichaelStJules suggested, another corrective we could think about is giving all users a limited allocation of strong upvotes/downvotes they can use, say, each month. That way high-karma users can still act in a kind of decentralized moderator role on the level of individual posts and comments, but it’s more difficult for one person to exert too much influence over the whole site.

IanDavidMoss May 30, 2022, 5:06 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: Revisiting the karma system
Sorry if I’m being dense, but where is this 4-tuple available?

IanDavidMoss May 29, 2022, 5:58 PM
19 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Revisiting the karma system
I would be in favor of eliminating strong downvotes entirely. If a post or comment is going to be censored or given less visibility, it should be because a lot of people wanted that to happen rather than just two or three.

IanDavidMoss May 26, 2022, 9:13 PM
6 points
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on: Focus on Civilizational Resilience over Cause Areas
Thought-provoking! I think one organization that illustrates the split you’re talking about well is the Centre for Long Term Resilience. This is an EA-aligned advocacy group focused on increasing awareness of and capacity to respond to extreme risks in the UK government. What’s interesting with regard to your post is that they’ve divided their work into three divisions. The first two, AI and biosecurity, are issue-specific. But the third division focuses on generalized “risk management,” or as they put it, “the process of both transforming risk governance, and of identifying, assessing and mitigating all extreme risks.”
I think I agree with you that the community could benefit from more investment in cross-issue and exploratory work of this type. The rest of the world is already too siloed and EA set itself apart in the first place with its commitment to cause neutrality. It’s important to retain that openness and integrative approach even as we get deeper into implementation work on high-impact causes.

IanDavidMoss May 19, 2022, 12:15 PM
22 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Early spending research and Carrick Flynn
Why isn’t it easy for me to look up a beautiful 80,000 Hours article on how to build a campaign in a contested US Congressional primary?
FWIW, there are several US-based candidate training programs out there that aren’t EA-specific but would give people the advice and skills they need to run a competitive campaign, while also developing helpful networks in the political sphere. For example, Run for Something is well positioned on the Democratic side and in the midst of a massive expansion this year. New Politics may be of interest to some as well, as they focus on candidates with a service background (e.g., military, Americorps) and work on both sides of the aisle.

IanDavidMoss May 19, 2022, 12:55 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Many Faces of Effective Altruism
I enjoyed this! I don’t quite get the distinction between #1 and #6, though. Is the primary axis around the weirdness of the ideas you’re into? So, Wholesome EAs are anti-weirdness, cheerful utilitarians are weirdness-neutral, and contrarians are pro-weird?

IanDavidMoss

Lev­er­ag­ing la­bor short­ages as a path­way to ca­reer im­pact?

Leveraging labor shortages as a pathway to career impact?