I’m a contact person for the effective altruism community: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community
Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to make the EA community stronger and more welcoming. I also serve on the board of GiveWell.
Besides effective altruism, I’m interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my two young children.
I also like the writeups there. I was hoping I could refer community members to the actual practice, but Scott writes in a recent post: “Stop trying to sign up for my psychiatry practice. It says in three different places there that it’s only currently open to patients who are transferring from my previous practice.”
Well you did announce the policy change as a comment on an article about Delo!
Sorry, I mean my most recent comment specifically—the reasons we’re considering these kinds of changes are not just because of this one situation but also because of others that could arise. I’ll edit to clarify.
I don’t want this comment to read as all commentary on Delo or BitMEX specifically; we’re also thinking about how to be prepared for other situations that could arise. [Edited for clarity]
A lot of what’s happening here is CEA realizing that there are a lot of potential donors who make money in crypto or other emerging fields where society is still trying to figure out how to apply legal and ethical frameworks. We need better systems for thinking about that. Many of the steps CEA is taking or considering are not strictly legally required, but that’s not our only consideration.
EA has long included the idea that some ways of making money could create net negative impact even if you donate your earnings, for example 80,000 Hours’ post on Why you should avoid harmful jobs even if you’ll do more good.
There are other ways of making money that don’t reach that bar, but that involve enough harm that their overall effect could be really damaging to EA, for example by spreading a norm that it doesn’t really matter whether you make your money in an ethical way as long as you donate it afterwards.
CEA’s guiding principles include this section on integrity:
Because we believe that trust, cooperation, and accurate information are essential to doing good, we strive to be honest and trustworthy. More broadly, we strive to follow those rules of good conduct that allow communities (and the people within them) to thrive. We also value the reputation of effective altruism, and recognize that our actions reflect on it.
I am checking with operations staff about this.
Here’s an update from CEA’s operations team, which has been working on updating our practices for handling donations. This also applies to other organizations that are legally within CEA (80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Forethought Foundation, and EA Funds).
“We are working with our lawyers to devise and implement an overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors and donations going forward.
We’ve engaged a third party who now conducts KYC (know your client) due diligence research on all major donors (>$20K a year).
We have established a working relationship with TRM labs who conduct compliance and back-tracing for all crypto donations.”
This stood out to me, too. The situation that came to my mind was an extreme one, but maybe it illustrates the importance of having some basic shared beliefs about how to seek truth:
I used to live upstairs from a neighbor who was from a culture that considered witchcraft a real and serious problem. When she heard noises that she considered strange, she came to my door and told me to stop practicing witchcraft against her. She was not interested in hearing my objections that I was not practicing witchcraft, because she was very sure that I was a witch. I was very sure that I was not (but of course that’s what a witch would say!)
Let’s just say the sharing of our different perspectives did not lead to any epistemic breakthroughs.
I agree with something in this direction, though not with everything as stated.
Some ways I see research affected by demographics:
Research of all kinds has been shaped by the viewpoints of people with more status, money, etc.
Sometimes this leads to serious slants in our understanding of the world—for example, the fact that so much psychology research has been done on WEIRD undergraduates means that our understanding of human psychology is badly skewed. Medical research that’s primarily carried out on one demographic group may not be generalizable to other populations, meaning worse health outcomes for less-studied groups.
In some other cases, findings are less susceptible to bias coming from the demographics of the researchers or research subjects. I can imagine how some aspects of climate science are swayed by demographics: do we look at how people of different geographies, ages, and genders are affected by food and water shortages, for example? But it’s hard for me to see how some other aspects, like how polar ice melts, are all that susceptible to demographic bias.
Aside from what or whom is being studied, there is also the question of who is taken seriously in the research community itself.
When there are unnecessary slants in what’s seen as professional or credible, we systematically devalue the contributions of groups who don’t fit that mold. Example: someone with an accent perceived as lower-status may be taken less seriously. Or a workplace may treat straight hairstyles as professional but textured hair as less so.
Structural problems. Examples: a lack of all-gender or single-person bathrooms in a workplace or conference venue disproportionately affects trans people who have reason to fear harassment in bathrooms. A bad parental leave policy disproportionately affects staff who give birth.
Reducing people to their demographic, even if it feels positive. Example: after my first child was born, I went to an EA talk with my baby. Two male friends of mine were there. One talked excitedly in front of the group about the baby and my new status as a parent. The other didn’t mention the baby and only talked to me about EA-related topics, including asking me about an area and pointing out that I knew more than he did about this topic. (He did come over at the end of the gathering to visit with the baby.) While both friends were completely well-intentioned, the first made me fear “Oh no, am I just going to be a mommy now? Is that how they’ll see me?” The second was intentionally trying to avoid that, and he made me feel I was still valued for intellectual contributions.
When you have slants like these that affect who gets published, who gets funded, who gets hired, who can focus better on their work, etc, you lose good contributions. And that’s a loss to the field as well as to those individuals. (And all of this is aside from any knowing/intentional discrimination.)
I think these are problems we should be on guard against. I’m always happy to see people in EA thinking about how to avoid them in workplaces, funding, local groups, etc.
I do agree with other commenters that different backgrounds and demographics will not by themselves necessarily be good for epistemics or truth-seeking.
Also, this reminds me of Horton Hears a Who.
Yes! I’m not sure what the book was meant to be an allegory for, if anything, but I think of this kind of thing every time I read it to my kids. It’s about a character with hearing so keen he can hear the shout for help from a microscopic town, but no one else can hear them and they think he’s crazy. The repeated theme is “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
I was about to say the same thing—I skimmed for “eggs” and it took me a bit to figure it out.
I suggest making clearer that these are one researcher’s rough estimates. Otherwise I think it gives a false sense of precision. Maybe by titling the infographic “Rough guess at global catastrophic risks from The Precipice” or similar.
Thank you for writing this up! I think it’s helpful to see how the different eras of EA advice has played out in people’s actual decisions.
“One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
Terry Pratchett (character is Lord Vetinari), Unseen Academicals
To me “Inhaled analgesia appears to be effective in reducing pain intensity and in giving pain relief in labour” sounds like a ringing endorsement from Cochrane given that their usual bottom line seems to be “not enough evidence.” Just about anything for childbirth pain seems to be pretty hit-or-miss, so the fact that it’s not that effective for some people seems like not that big of a downside compared to other methods or no method.
I’m pleased to see this work.
Obviously childbirth accounts for relatively few hours of one’s life spent in pain, but I wonder if you’ve looked into it. Nitrous oxide is safe and relatively cheap and does not need an anesthetist because the patient can administer it themselves. It’s commonly used in some Western countries but only getting started in the US, and I can’t find anything about its use in middle or low income countries.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time on EA community-building and also on parenting, I’d caution against any strong weighting on “my children will turn out like me / will be especially altruistic.” That seems like a recipe for strained relationships. I think the decision to parent should be made because it’s important to you personally, not because you’re hoping for impact. You can almost certainly have more impact by talking to existing young people about EA or supporting community-building or field-building in some other way than by breeding more people.
I’d also caution against treating adoption as less intensive in time and effort. The process of adopting internationally or from foster care is intensive and often full of uncertainty and disappointment as placements fall through, policies change, etc. And I think the ongoing task of shoring up attachment with an adopted child is significant.(For example, I have a friend who realized her ten-year-old, adopted before he can remember, had somehow developed the belief that his parents would “give him back” at some point and that he was not actually a permanent member of the family. I think this kind of thing is pretty common.) I’d be much more reluctant to travel for work as much as I do if I had adopted children. I think adoption can be really good, but I think it’s important that parents expect it to be an ongoing factor in their relationship with the child, not a one-and-done thing.
A post I wrote on costs:
How much do kids cost? The first 5 years—this is less complete than the 18-year estimates, obviously, but it includes lost income which none of the other estimates I’ve seen include.
But still relevant for the Munich organizers, since Singer seems to get protested more per event in Germany than in other countries.
I got permission to add the full quote, though the meaning is the same. This example was actually in the US.
I appreciate that Larks sent a draft of this post to CEA, and that we had the chance to give some feedback and do some fact-checking.
I agree with many of the concerns in this post. I also see some of this differently.
In particular, I agree that a climate of fear — wherever it originates— silences not only people who are directly targeted, but also others who see what happened to someone else. That silencing limits writers/speakers, limits readers/listeners who won’t hear the ideas or information they have to offer, and ultimately limits our ability to find ways to do good in the world.
These are real and serious costs. I’ve been talking with my coworkers about them over the last months and seeking input from other people who are particularly concerned about them. I’ll continue to do that.
But I think there are also real costs to pushing groups to go forward with events they don’t want to hold. I’m still thinking through how I see the tradeoffs between these costs and the costs above, but here’s one I think is relevant:
It makes it more costly to be an organizer. In one discussion amongst group organizers after the Munich situation, one organizer wrote about the Peter Singer talk their group hosted. [I’m waiting to see if I can give a fuller quote, but their summary was about how the Q&A session got conflicted enough that the group was known as “the group that invited Peter Singer” for two years and basically overpowered any other impression students had of what the EA group was about.]
“It seemed like the talk itself went pretty well, but during the Q&A section a few people basically took over the discussion and only asked question about all the previous things he has said about disabled people (and possibly some other things). The Q&A is basically all people remembered from the event. I think it did a lot of reputation damage to our group, which took 2 years to get over (by which point many attendees of the talk graduated). Before that, people basically didn’t know what EA was and after it was “the group that invited Peter Singer”. ”
Hosting Singer and other speakers who have said controversial things has been good for many EA groups. But I also think it’s okay for individual organizers to decide they’re not up for hosting an event that carries some risk of seriously throwing their group off the rails. Being at the center of a controversy, especially for student organizers constantly living in the same environment where the talk is held, can bear a heavy personal cost as well. (Of course, knowing that people will back down if you make it costly enough for them to follow through is exactly what incentivizes you to make it costly.)
On the specifics: I was the main staff member who advised the Munich organizers, and I’d like to add more detail about how this all unfolded. There are a lot of quotes so I’ll italicize them.
The week before Hanson’s scheduled online talk about tort law reform for the Munich group, the organizers contacted CEA to say they were considering canceling the event after learning about some of Hanson’s past writing. From my first message to the Munich organizers:
“I don’t have a clear answer about whether to cancel the event. I could it being reasonable either way. . . . If the discussion goes into areas where you think people may be offended or upset, maybe have an organizer or two stay behind after to have continued discussion after the Q&A with Hanson is done. I looked at what I think is basically the same talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPdHXw05SvU Some parts will probably go over ok with an audience that’s used to thinking about alternate governance systems. But for example he suggests torture as a possible penalty, and as far as I saw from a cursory look through the slides, he doesn’t address objections to that. People seem to find his work very polarizing, so some people find it very refreshing because he says things almost no one else says, and other people hate it. So you may well get some indication from the Q&A about how people are feeling, and you may want to follow up with them if they seem upset.”
After that, the Munich organizers discussed the situation internally, held a vote, and wrote to Hanson saying that they had decided to cancel the talk. Hanson tweeted about the cancellation, indicating he didn’t think they had adequately explained their decision.
I wrote to the Munich organizers:
“If you were going to respond, I’d send this both to Hanson and perhaps also reply on the Twitter, with points along these lines:
We weren’t familiar with all of Hanson’s work, but we saw (and still believe) that he has raised some interesting and valuable ideas. We booked him to give a talk about an idea for reforming the legal system. It was not a large event—around 17 people were RSVPd.
After booking the talk, we heard about some of his work that we weren’t familiar with, specifically his posts on “gentle silent rape” and sex redistribution.
We discussed what to do, and found it a difficult decision. The strongest consideration in favor of continuing the event was that we did not want to further “cancel culture” or make it so that only uncontroversial ideas could be shared in EA spaces.
However, we’re aware that many people, particularly women, have found Hanson’s writing on rape and “redistribution” of sex to be offensive and disturbing.
We got in touch with CEA, who said they could see either decision about the event being reasonable. We discussed ways to mitigate negative effects if we went ahead with the event.
In the end, we decided that Hanson’s previous work was not something we were comfortable tying to our group.
Instead, we scheduled a discussion about cancel culture, to give our group a chance to discuss how we could handled controversial ideas and speakers in the future.
For anyone eager to see the presentation Hanson would have given, we believe this video shares the material he was planning to present”
Using these suggestions, the Munich organizers drafted their statement explaining the situation and their decision, and a coworker and I made some minor suggestions afterwards.
Since they were volunteers writing what was probably their first public statement to be read by the wider internet on a tight timeframe, I do wish I had given them more feedback on the draft. I also wish I had focused my advice not just on the practicalities, but also on the tradeoffs discussed above. Specifically, I should have checked that organizers were tracking some of the things that Larks raises in the conclusion. I also agree that when CEA leaves the final decision to organizers, we aren’t off the hook — we aim to provide the best advice we can to organizers, and to learn from experience.
Seconding this. My partner was spooked by seeing a family member on heavy-duty medications for a more serious mental health situation, so our vague impression was that antidepressants might really change who I was. I did need to try a couple meds and try different times of day, etc to deal with side effects, but at this point I have a med and dose that makes my life better and has very minor side effects.