Jonas V

EAF’s bal­lot ini­ti­a­tive dou­bled Zurich’s de­vel­op­ment aid

Some quick notes on “effec­tive al­tru­ism”

• Jonas V 26 Sep 2022 15:35 UTC

  161 points

  28 ∶ 0

  on: Switzer­land fails to ban fac­tory farm­ing – les­sons for the pur­suit of EA-in­spired poli­cies?

  I was one of the people who helped draft the constitutional amendment and launch the initiative. My quick takes:

  • My forecast had been a 3% chance of the initiative passing*, with a best guess of ~44% of voters in favor. So I was mildly disappointed by the results.

  • 37% is pretty good; many ambitious initiatives (with real rather than symbolic effects) that aren’t right-wing-populist have had much worse failures.

  • In Swiss politics, initiatives that fail with 30-50% of voters in favor generally aren’t regarded as total failures. They are generally perceived to lend symbolic support in favor of the issue.

  • I find it fairly encouraging that 37% of a mostly meat-eating population are voting in favor of fairly costly measures that would negatively affect them personally on a daily basis. Initial polls even suggested that 55% were in favor (but as voters got more informed, and as the countercampaign (with ~5x more funding) played out, it got lower).

  (* An initiative passing doesn’t just require a majority of the voters, but also a majority of the voters in a majority of cantons (states), which is a target that’s much harder to hit for non-conservative initiatives. Even if >50% of the voters were in favor, this would’ve been unlikely to happen.)

  Separately, I think the effective animal activism community should be much clearer on a long-term strategy to inform their prioritization. By when do we expect to get meat alternatives that are competitive on taste and price? At that point, how many people do we expect to go vegetarian? Is there a date by which we expect >50% of the developed-world population to go vegetarian? To what degree are policies shaped by precedents from other countries? I think this sort of thinking has happened to a substantial degree for AI alignment/​deployment, but not much for animal activism. Instead, everyone is running cost-effectiveness analyses with relatively short time horizons and a direct focus on animal lives improved. (This might be reasonable if you’re very pessimistic about large-scale shifts away from meat consumption anytime soon.)

  These sorts of macrostrategic considerations could then inform whether to let an initiative like this one fail, or to make a concerted effort to actually win it, e.g., deploying a campaign budget of $5m, an experienced campaign team, plus a data science team.

EA Funds is more flex­ible than you might think

• Jonas V 21 Feb 2023 2:21 UTC

  115 points

  63 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: EV UK board state­ment on Owen’s resignation

  it was a lot less bad than what I’d have expected based on the TIME piece account

  From my personal perspective: While the additional context makes the interaction itself seem less bad, I think the fact that it involved Owen (rather than, say, a more tangentially involved or less influential community member) made it a lot worse than what I would have expected. In addition, this seems the first second time (after this one*) I hear about a case that the community health team didn’t address forcefully enough, which wasn’t clear to me based on the Time article.

  * edited based on feedback that someone sent me via DM, thank you

  (edit: I think you acknowledge this elsewhere in your comment)

• Jonas V 28 Aug 2023 19:01 UTC

  111 points

  36 ∶ 4

  on: Jonas Vol­lmer’s Shortform

  How to fix EA “community building”

  Today, I mentioned to someone that I tend to disagree with others on some aspects of EA community building, and they asked me to elaborate further. Here’s what I sent them, very quickly written and only lightly edited:

  Hard to summarize quickly, but here’s some loose gesturing in the direction:

  • We should stop thinking about “community building” and instead think about “talent development”. While building a community/​culture is important and useful, the wording overall sounds too much like we’re inward-focused as opposed to trying to get important things done in the world.

  • We should focus on the object level (what’s the probability of an extinction-level pandemic this century?) over social reality (what does Toby Ord think is the probability of an extinction-level pandemic this century?).

  • We should talk about AI alignment, but also broaden our horizon to not-traditionally-core-EA causes to sharpen our reasoning skills and resist insularity. Example topics I think should be more present in talent development programs are optimal taxation, cybersecurity, global migration and open borders, 1DaySooner, etc.

  • Useful test: Does your talent development program make sense if EA didn’t exist? (I.e., is it helping people grow and do useful things, or is it just funnelling people according to shallow metrics?)

  • Based on personal experience and observations of others’ development, the same person can have a much higher or much lower impact depending on the cultural environment they’re embedded in, and the incentives they perceive to affect them. Much of EA talent development should be about transmitting a particular culture that has produced impressive results in the past (and avoiding cultural pitfalls that are responsible for some of the biggest fuckups of the last decade). Shaping culture is really important, and hard to measure, and will systematically be neglected by talent metrics, and avoiding this pitfall requires constantly reminding yourself of that.

  • Much of the culture is shaped by incentives (such as funding, karma, event admissions, etc.). We should be really deliberate in how we set these incentives.

  What links here?

  • Cause-Gen­er­al­ity Is Hard If Some Causes Have Higher ROI by Ben_West (12 Jan 2024 18:27 UTC; 102 points)
  • Lorenzo Buonanno's comment on Eliezer Yud­kowsky Is Fre­quently, Con­fi­dently, Egre­giously Wrong by Omnizoid (8 Sep 2023 16:57 UTC; 12 points)

• Jonas V 9 Nov 2021 17:46 UTC

  111 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Should EA Global Lon­don 2021 have been ex­panded?

  I think it’s great that CEA increased the event size on short notice. It’s hard to anticipate everything in advance for complex projects like this one, and I think it’s very cool that when CEA realized the potential mistake, it fixed the issue and expanded capacity in time.

  I’d much rather have a CEA that gets important things broadly right and acts swiftly to fix any issues in time, than a CEA that overall gets less done due to risk aversion resulting from pushback from posts like this one*, or one that stubbornly sticks to early commitments rather than flexibly adjusting its plans.

  I also feel like the decision not to worry too much about Covid seems correct given the most up-to-date risk estimates, similar to how conference organizers usually don’t worry too much about the risk of flu/​norovirus outbreaks.

  (Edit—disclosure: From a legal perspective, I am employed by CEA, but my project (EA Funds) operates independently (meaning I don’t report to CEA staff), and I wasn’t involved in any decisions related to EA Global.)

  * Edit: I don’t mean to discourage thoughtful critiques like this post. I just don’t want CEA to become more risk-averse because of them.

• Jonas V 13 Apr 2022 19:15 UTC

  107 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Free-spend­ing EA might be a big prob­lem for op­tics and epistemics

  Most EAs I’ve met over the years don’t seem to value their time enough, so I worry that the frugal option would often cost people more impact in terms of time spent (e.g. cooking), and it would implicitly encourage frugality norms beyond what actually maximizes altruistic impact.

  That said, I like options and norms that discourage fancy options that don’t come with clear productivity benefits. E.g. it could make sense to pay more for a fancier hotel if it has substantially better Wi-Fi and the person might do some work in the room, but it typically doesn’t make sense to pay extra for a nice room.

• Jonas V 12 Dec 2022 22:27 UTC

  104 points

  31 ∶ 1

  on: Jonas Vol­lmer’s Shortform

  EA Forum discourse tracks actual stakes very poorly

  Examples:

  1. There have been many posts about EA spending lots of money, but to my knowledge no posts about the failure to hedge crypto exposure against the crypto crash of the last year, or the failure to hedge Meta/​Asana stock, or EA’s failure to produce more billion-dollar start-ups. EA spending norms seem responsible for $1m–$30m of 2022 expenses, but failures to preserve/​increase EA assets seem responsible for $1b–$30b of 2022 financial losses, a ~1000x difference.

  2. People are demanding transparency about the purchase of Wytham Abbey (£15m), but they’re not discussing whether it was a good idea to invest $580m in Anthropic (HT to someone else for this example). The financial difference is ~30x, the potential impact difference seems much greater still.

  Basically I think EA Forum discourse, Karma voting, and the inflation-adjusted overview of top posts completely fails to correctly track the importance of the ideas presented there. Karma seems to be useful to decide which comments to read, but otherwise its use seems fairly limited.

  (Here’s a related post.)

  What links here?

  • Lukas_Gloor's comment on If EA Com­mu­nity-Build­ing Could Be Net-Nega­tive, What Fol­lows? by joshcmorrison (3 Jan 2023 15:25 UTC; 29 points)
  • Thomas Kwa's comment on Thomas Kwa’s Quick takes by Thomas Kwa (19 Dec 2022 1:50 UTC; 21 points)

• Jonas V 18 Apr 2024 16:53 UTC

  102 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Per­sonal re­flec­tions on FTX

  I broadly agree with the picture and it matches my perception.

  That said, I’m also aware of specific people who held significant reservations about SBF and FTX throughout the end of 2021 (though perhaps not in 2022 anymore), based on information that was distinct from the 2018 disputes. This involved things like:

  • predicting a 10% annual risk of FTX collapsing with FTX investors and the Future Fund (though not customers) FTX investors, the Future Fund, and possibly customers losing all of their money,

    • [edit: I checked my prediction logs and I actually did predict a 10% annual risk of loss of customer funds in November 2021, though I lowered that to 5% in March 2022. Note that I predicted hacks and investment losses, but not fraud.]

  • recommending in favor of ‘Future Fund’ and against ‘FTX Future Fund’ or ‘FTX Foundation’ branding, and against further affiliation with SBF,

  • warnings that FTX was spending its US dollar assets recklessly, including propping up the price of its own tokens by purchasing large amounts of them on open markets (separate from the official buy & burns),

  • concerns about Sam continuing to employ very risky and reckless business practices throughout 2021.

  I think several people had pieces of the puzzle but failed to put them together or realize the significance of it all. E.g. I told a specific person about all of the above issues, but they didn’t have a ‘holy shit’ reaction, and when I later checked with them they had forgotten most of the information I had shared with them.

  I also tried to make several further conversations about these concerns happen, but it was pretty hard because many people were often busy and not interested, or worried about the significant risks from sharing sensitive information. Also, with the benefit of hindsight, I clearly didn’t try hard enough.

  I also think it was (and I think still is) pretty unclear what, if anything, should’ve been done at the time, so it’s unclear how action-relevant any of this would’ve been.

  It’s possible that most of this didn’t reach Will (perhaps partly because many, including myself, perceived him as more of an SBF supporter). I certainly don’t think these worries were as widely disseminated as they should’ve been.

You can now ap­ply to EA Funds any­time! (LTFF & EAIF only)

EA In­fras­truc­ture Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations

• Jonas V 2 Jan 2022 11:21 UTC

  91 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nick_Beckstead’s comment on: Democratis­ing Risk—or how EA deals with critics

  +1, EA Funds (which I run) is interested in funding critiques of popular EA-relevant ideas.

  What links here?

  • Row­ing and Steer­ing the Effec­tive Altru­ism Movement by jtm (9 Jan 2022 17:28 UTC; 146 points)
  • Some benefits and risks of failure transparency by Vaidehi Agarwalla (27 Mar 2022 2:09 UTC; 52 points)
  • Aaron Gertler's comment on Row­ing and Steer­ing the Effec­tive Altru­ism Movement by jtm (12 Jan 2022 9:36 UTC; 18 points)

EAF/​FRI are now the Cen­ter on Long-Term Risk (CLR)

• Jonas V 30 Jan 2024 1:14 UTC

  85 points

  41 ∶ 25

  on: EV in­ves­ti­ga­tion into Owen and Com­mu­nity Health

  Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of community building, and had to deal with a pretty broad range of bad actors, toxic leadership, sexual misconduct, manipulation tactics and the like. Many of these cases were associated with a pattern of narcissism and dark triad spectrum traits, self-aggrandizing behavior, manipulative defense tactics, and unwillingness to learn from feedback. I think people with this pattern rarely learn and improve, and in most cases should be fired and banned from the community even if they are making useful contributions (and I have been involved with handling several such cases over the last decade). I think it’s important that more people learn to recognize this; I encourage you to read the two above-linked articles.

  I feel worried that some readers of this Forum might think Owen matches that pattern. Knowing him professionally and to some degree personally, I think he clearly does not. I’ve collaborated and talked with him for hours in all kinds of settings, and based on my overall impression of his character, I understand his problematic behavior to have arisen from an inability to model others’ emotions, an inability to recognize that he was in a position of power and influence, and moral scrupulosity (obsession about whether he’s a bad person or not for inappropriately feeling attracted to someone).

  This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it. But it makes it more likely that he makes a real effort to learn and improve, and based on some conversations I’ve had with Owen, I believe this learning has indeed happened. I think Owen is unlikely to repeat his mistakes, and his document seems honest and he’s not just trying to tell us what we want to hear (in fact, I think his moral scrupulosity makes him unusually honest in this situation).^[1]

  Personally, I hope Owen can be involved in the community soon again. I think a temporary ban is important, both as an incentive against bad behavior and as a precaution so the harms don’t continue. That said, two years are a long time, and I hope other EA orgs won’t take his loss too lightly and will consider inviting him to participate again. I think we would benefit a lot from his participation, both in terms of ensuring the community is safe and welcoming for everyone (where I’ve seen him go out of his way in the past), and in terms of getting more of his contributions to the causes we all care about.

  (This comment is intended as sharing my impression from knowing Owen personally, which I figured might be helpful context for some readers. I welcome others sharing different perspectives, especially if you disagree. By default I won’t engage in much discussion due to lack of time.)
  

  1. ^

     I think a significant share of sexual misconduct or unwelcome sexual attention in EA is caused by the broad cluster of poor theory of mind and autism-spectrum /​ OCD-spectrum personality traits, as opposed to the more broadly publicized manipulative/​sociopathic/​narcissistic spectrum. The latter seems characterized by not caring sufficiently about the victim’s experience, whereas the former seems characterized by a lack of understanding of the effects of one’s actions, which makes it more tractable. I think Owen’s example could be instructive and hope it helps others avoid similar mistakes.

  What links here?

  • Emma Abele's comment on EV in­ves­ti­ga­tion into Owen and Com­mu­nity Health by EV US Board (30 Jan 2024 2:31 UTC; 75 points)

Effec­tive Altru­ism Foun­da­tion: Plans for 2020

Ap­ply to EA Funds now

• Jonas V 15 Mar 2023 19:33 UTC

  79 points

  29 ∶ 25

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Time Ar­ti­cle Dis­cus­sion—“Effec­tive Altru­ist Lead­ers Were Re­peat­edly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Be­fore FTX Col­lapsed”

  I would still like an argument that they shouldn’t be removed from boards, when almost any other org would. I would like the argument made and seen to be made.

  Here’s my tentative take:

  • It’s really hard to find competent board members that meet the relevant criteria.

  • Nick (together with Owen) did a pretty good job turning CEA from a highly dysfunctional into a functional organization during CEA’s leadership change in 2018/​2019.

  • Similarly, while Nick took SBF’s money, he didn’t give SBF a strong platform or otherwise promote him a lot, and instead tried to independently do a good (not perfect, but good enough!) job running a philanthropic organization. While SBF may have wanted to use the philanthropy to promote the FTX/​SBF brand, Nick didn’t do this. [Edit: This should not be read as me implying that Will did those things. While I think Will made some mistakes, I don’t think this describes them.]

  • Continuity is useful. Nick has seen lots of crises and presumably learnt from them.

  So, while Will should be removed, Nick has demonstrated competence and should stay on.

  (Meta note: I feel frustrated about the lack of distinction between Nick and Will on this question. People are a bit like “Will did a poor job, therefore Nick and Will should be removed from the board.” Please, discuss the two people separately.)

  What links here?

  • AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on EV UK board state­ment on Owen’s resignation by EV UK Board (16 Mar 2023 16:24 UTC; 7 points)
  • Ubuntu's comment on Time Ar­ti­cle Dis­cus­sion—“Effec­tive Altru­ist Lead­ers Were Re­peat­edly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Be­fore FTX Col­lapsed” by Nathan Young (18 Mar 2023 11:30 UTC; 4 points)

EA Funds has ap­pointed new fund managers

• Jonas V 14 Feb 2022 7:15 UTC

  73 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some thoughts on veg­e­tar­i­anism and veganism

  Copying a comment I once wrote:

  • eating veg sits somewhere between “avoid intercontinental flights” and “donate to effective charities” in terms of expected impact, and I’m not sure where to draw the line between “altruistic actions that seem way too costly and should be discouraged” and “altruistic actions that seem a reasonable early step in one’s EA journey and should be encouraged”

  • Intuitively and anecdotally (and based on some likely-crappy papers), it seems harder to see animals as sentient beings or think correctly about the badness of factory farming while eating meat; this form of motivated reasoning plausibly distorts most people’s epistemics, and this is about a pretty important part of the world, and recognizing the badness of factory farming has minor implications for s-risks and other AI stuff