GWWC board member, software engineer in Boston, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise. Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/ânews/âea
Jeff Kaufman đ¸
Karma: 16,204
I do think there are downsides with sharing draft reviews with organizations ahead of time, but I think theyâre mostly different from the ones listed here. The biggest risk I see is that the organization could use the time to take an adversarial approach:
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Trying to keep the review from being published. This could look like accusations of libel and threats to sue, or other kinds of retaliation (âis publishing this really in the best interest of your career...?â).
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Preparing people to astroturf the comment section
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Preparing a refutation that is seriously flawed but in a way that takes significant effort to investigate. This then risks turning into the opposite of the situation people usually worry about: instead of people seeing a negative review but not the orgâs follow-up with corrections they might see a negative review and a thorough refutation come out at the same time, and then never see the reviewerâs follow-up where they show that the refutation is misleading.
I also think what you list as risk 2, âUnconscious biases from interacting with charity staffâ, is a real risk. If people at an evaluator have been working with people at a charity, especially if they do this over long periods, they will naturally become more sympathetic. [1]
Of the other listed issues, however, I agree with the other commenters that theyâre avoidable:
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There are many services for archiving web pages, and falsely claiming that archives have been tampered with is a pretty terrible strategy for a charity to take. If youâre especially concerned about this, however, you could publish your own archives of your evidence in advance (without checking with the org). The analogy to police is not a good one, because police have the ability get search warrants and learn additional things that are not already public.
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If the charity says âVettedCausesâ review is about problems we have already addressedâ without acknowledging that they fixed the problems in response to your feedback I think that would look quite bad for them. There is risk of dispute over whether they made changes in response to your review or coincidentally, but if you give them a week to review and they claim they just happened to make the changes in that short time between their receiving the draft and you releasing it I think people would be quite skeptical.
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On âIt is not acceptable for charities to make public and important claims (such as claims intended to convince people to donate), but not provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence that justifies their important claimsâ, I donât think youâve weighed how difficult this is. When I read through the funding appeals of even pretty careful and thoughtful charities I basically always notice claims that are not fully backed up by publicly stated evidence. While this does sound bad, organizations have a bunch of competing priorities and justifying their work to this level is rarely worth it.
Overall, I donât think these considerations appreciably change my view that you should run reviews by the orgs theyâre about.
[1] Charities can also trade access (allowing a more comprehensive evaluation) for more favorable coverage, generally not in an explicit way. I think this is related to why GiveWell and ACE have ended up with a policy that they only release reviews if charities are willing to see them released. This is a lot like access journalism. But this isnât related to whether you share drafts for review.
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Iâm confused why youâre posting this?
Are you trying to say I should have included some sort of disclosure in my comment? Or trying to give this as an example of the kind of thing VettedCauses is worried about with sharing reviews before publication? Something else?
That sort of âitâs hard to archive things reliably long-termâ seems less relevant in the context of a review, where thereâs a pretty short time between sharing the doc with the charity and making the review public.
To the extent that you update against an org, of currently existing orgs this would be 80k, not CEA. At the time that this happened current CEA and current 80k were both independently managed efforts under the umbrella organization then known as CEA and now known as EV (more).
Separately, I agree this editing was bad, but doing it in the context of a review would be much worse.
The motivation for focusing on global catastrophic risks is that these could dramatically limit humanityâs potential. If, per your population ethics, such a limitation wouldnât be concerning, then itâs not surprising that you wouldnât find work aiming to avert or mitigate such risks compelling.
I think the post would be clearer if it were explicit about this up front: the disagreement here isnât about the relative scale of biorisk vs factory farming, but instead about how much value there is in averting civilizational collapse and/âor extinction.
I would expect most donations to be in giving season, though, which in 2022 would be after FTX collapsed
Looking at the two comments, I see:
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Your comment on a comment on a quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for violating their charter and including an argument for why. Voted to +4.
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Aaronâs quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for their for-profit conversion. No argument included. Voted to +173.
I donât see anything weird here. With the design of the site a quick take is likely to get much more attention than a nested comment on a quick take, and then when people start voting one up this snowballs because the site makes it more visible.
But even if youâd posted your comment as your own quick take I think it probably wouldnât have taken off: it doesnât give enough context for someone seeing it out of nowhere to figure out if they think itâs worth paying attention to, or enough of an explanation for what a suit would look like. You can gloss this as packaging/ârigor, I guess, but I think itâs serving a useful purpose.
(I think neither posting is amazing: a few minutes with an LLM asking about what the rules are for converting 501c3s into for-profits would have helped both a lot. Iâd hold that against them if they were regular posts but thatâs not a standard we do, or should, hold quick takes or comments to.)
I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they donât generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized
In general, if you want ideas to receive attention you should expect to put in some work preparing them for other peopleâs attention: gather the information that will help others evaluate them, make an argument for why these ideas are important. If you do that work, and then post as a quick take or (better, but requires more investment) top-level post, I do think youâll get attention. This is no guarantee of a positive reaction (people may disagree that youâve sufficiently made your case) but I donât think itâs a process that selects against weird ideas.
Thereâs a reason people use âlow-effortâ as a negative term: you pay with your own effort in a bid on other peopleâs attention.
I got downvoted/âdisagreevoted for asking if thereâs a better place to post offbeat ideas
Your comment starts with claims about what people want on the forum and a thesis about how to gain karma, and only gets to asking about where to post weird ideas in the last paragraph. I interpret the downvoting and disagree voting as being primarily about the first two paragraphs.
basically acknowledges that this is a hypothetical, and new ideas mostly donât get posted here
I wasnât trying to make a claim either way on this in my comment. Instead, I was adding a caveat that I was going by my impression of the site instead of taking the time to look for specific examples that would support or counter my claim, and so people should put less weight on my claim.
Thinking now, some example ideas that were new/âweird in the sense that they were pretty different from the lines of thought Iâd seen here before but that still got attention (or at least comments /â votes):
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Top level post: Letâs think about slowing down AI
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Quick take: EA Awards
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Copying Chandlerâs response from the comments of the open thread:
Hi Arnold,
Thanks for your question! You are correct that our funds raised for metrics year 2023, $355 million, was below our 10% percentile estimate from our April 2023 blog post. We knew our forecasts were quite uncertain (80% confidence interval), and, looking back, we see two primary reasons that our forecasts were incorrect.
First, we were optimistic about the growth of non-Open Philanthropy funding. Our funds raised in 2023 from sources other than Open Philanthropy was $255 million, which is about at our 10% percentile estimate and is similar to the $253 million we raised in 2022 from sources other than Open Philanthropy (see the bottom chart in the blog post). Weâve continued to expand our outreach team, with a focus on retaining our existing donors and bringing in new donors, and we believe these investments will produce results over the longer term.
Second, Open Philanthropy committed $300 million in October 2023 and gave us flexibility to spend it over three years. We chose to allocate $100 million to 2023, 2024, and 2025, which is less than the $250 million we had forecast for 2023.
We discuss our current funding situation in a recent blog post about our approach to grant deployment timelines. We remain funding constrained at our current cost-effectiveness bar. Raising more money remains our single most important lever for maximizing impactâif we have more funding, weâll be able to make more grants to cost-effective programs that save and improve lives.
I donât think this is the strongest case for abortion, taking the world view of the protesters as a given. If you presented this BOTEC to them, I think itâs very likely that they would tell you that they care much more about humans than chickens.
I would guess that weird EA ideas that were appropriately caveated would do reasonably well here, and the main negative reaction is to weird ideas that are presented overconfidently? But this is just my impression of the Forum, not a result of looking over how various posts have done.
I do list this on my donations page, but Iâm trying to be pretty conservative in what I count as my donations: only the actual money I actually donate. So I donât count it towards my 50% and put it in grey italics like my employer donation matches, donations in exchange for work, the PayPal 1% match, and other counterfactual money moved that I donât fully include.
I think itâs fine (and probably good) if others are less strict about this, though!
VolÂunÂtary Salary Reduction
NAO UpÂdates, JanÂuary 2025
Thanks!
I think itâs some combination of temperament (I just really like writing!) and practice (Iâve been writing posts multiple times a week for over a decade)?
I think youâre probably also only seeing my better posts, since I donât cross-post most things to the Forum?
Wow!
If youâd like me to review it for accuracy before you publish it Iâd be happy to!
How Much to Give is a PragÂmatic Question
Sorry! Iâve edited my comment to make it clearer that Iâm trying to say that suffering caused by eating meat is not the only factor you should weigh in estimating expected utility.
(For what itâs worth I do still think itâs likely that, taking these other benefits into account and assuming you think society is seriously undervaluing the moral worth of animals, veganism still doesnât make sense as a matter of maximizing utility.)
Perhaps delete this one (or move it to your drafts), since I think the other one went up first?
I donât think I gave any conclusion about CEA? I was pointing out that 80kâs past actions are primarily evidence about what we should expect from 80k in the future.
I think your comment is still pretty misleading: âCEA released âŚâ would be much clearer as â80k released âŚâ or perhaps â80k, at the time a sibling project of CEA, released âŚâ.
FYI Iâm not getting into the separate incident because, as you point out, it involves my partner.