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 three children.
I appreciate you helping others learn from your experiences, and I’m sorry they were difficult ones. Thank you for flagging the risks here.
I don’t think this is correct; most of the US doesn’t have any age limit on informal jobs like babysitting and yard work. It’s typically legal for children of any age to work for their parents’ business. My ten-year-old is sometimes keen to earn money by washing windows or raking leaves for our neighbors, and I don’t see anything wrong with this as long as she can opt out when she wishes.
Hi, some thoughts from the community health team.
First, I’m sorry you’ve had this bad experience — we don’t want EA groups to be like this! I do notice that sub-areas within the same community can develop pretty different cultures, and I’m sorry you’ve ended up in an area where the culture is so discouraging.
There are options for professional networking in EA outside your local group if you decide you still want to, for example:
EA Anywhere online group
EA Global and EAGx conferences, especially meetups for specific fields
There may be an online group for your career area
You’ve likely already considered this, but if you leave your field to avoid needing to interact with these people, there’s a question of whether other fields are significantly better. Basically any field will include some people who do shady things — sites like Ask A Manager are full of people behaving badly in professional contexts. But interacting with a shady person in the same professional field is different from needing to work closely with them, and it’s much more possible to choose to work for a team or an organization you generally feel good about.
You mentioned you don’t feel that comfortable talking to the community health team — in case it’s helpful, you can ask us questions about how we work, or raise things anonymously via this form. (Please leave a burner email or something if you’d like us to get back to you!) You may want to talk to someone else at CEA, even if you don’t want to talk to our team — for example someone on the groups team if you have concerns about a group organizer.
The ability to schedule when you want (as opposed to a therapist who only has a slot at 2:30 on Thursdays) is another benefit, especially compared to in-person therapy you need to travel to. I have a pet peeve about studies that don’t count the cost to beneficiaries of taking time off work, or whatever else they’d be doing with their time, to travel to and from an appointment during the workday.
There are no whistleblower systems in place at any major EA orgs as far as I know
I’ve heard this claim repeatedly, but it’s not true that EA orgs have no whistleblower systems.
I looked into this as part of this project on reforms at EA organizations: Resource on whistleblowing and other ways of escalating concerns
Many organizations in EA have whistleblower policies, some of which are public in their bylaws (for example, GiveWell and ACE publish their whistleblower policies among other policies). EV US and EV UK have whistleblower policies that apply to all the projects under their umbrella (CEA, 80,000 Hours, etc.) This is just a normal thing for nonprofits; the IRS asks whether you have one even though they don’t strictly require it, and you can look up on a nonprofit’s 990 whether they have such a policy.
Additionally, UK law, state law in many US states, and lots of other countries provide some legal protections for whistleblowers. Legal protection varies by state in the US, but is relatively strong in California.
Neither government protections nor organizational policies cover all the scenarios where someone might reasonably want protection from negative effects of bringing a problem to light. But that seems to be the case in all industries, including in the nonprofit field in general, not something unusual about EA.
I’m not aware of any EA organizations that provide financial rewards for whistleblowers, which seem like they’d be very tricky to administer without creating incentives you don’t want. The main example of financial rewards that I’m aware of is that the US government provides large financial rewards to whistleblowers whose evidence leads to the conviction of some fraud cases.
I’m not sure if anybody ever figured out how much the authors of this paper were joking. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2114430/Save-planet-genetically-engineering-humans-smaller-suggests-NYU-philosopher.html
Thank you for writing this up!
It’s helpful that you flag that the large majority of studies are done in the US. I would find it helpful in discussing interventions if the location is flagged more—for example, the cash transfers intervention is in rural Kenya. My impression is that these interventions don’t generalize well across different settings.
Love this topic!
>Do these interventions lead to a permanent reduction in family size, or a temporary one?
Note that even if total number of children ends up the same, there are benefits to spacing children by at least 18 months in terms of health (mother has more chance to recover between pregnancies, mother and baby are better nourished, better care for older siblings). Families may also be able to better afford to educate children who are more widely spaced.
This isn’t relevant to all the impacts, you list, though — still worth thinking about those separately!
Does “before/after” mean the kids came before the Nobel, or the Nobel came before the kids? (probably what you want is the work that earned the Nobel, which is harder to time.)
I’d also guess it’s confounded by more intense careers and people who are more dedicated to spending a lot of time at work. I doubt you change outcomes much by taking a shorter leave, once your personality and career are already a given.
I did laugh at this — it’s a helpful strategy for your career if you’d by default be doing more than half, and anti-helpful if not!
I could imagine benefits to overall productivity across the couple by allocating to whoever can most spare the time. When our childcare falls through, my husband and I work out who will handle what based on the timing of our meetings, who’s done more lately, etc, rather than it defaulting to the mother.
I keep thinking about this post. Thank you for the work you’re doing, and for writing up this effort and your learnings.
I hadn’t read this at the time I wrote the post, but an excerpt from Ricki Heicklen’s piece in the “Mistakes” issue of Asterisk Magazine:
In January 2022, I decided to leave my job at Jane Street Capital to move to the Bahamas and take a job as a generalist at a new crypto firm funded by Sam Bankman-Fried. In the weeks that followed, I had three strokes of good luck:
a) I talked to a family friend, a lawyer familiar with financial fraud, who expressed alarm about various details of my new job. From our conversations, I made a list of a few dozen questions to investigate before committing.
b) I shared those questions with my new employers, believing they would be appreciated as valuable for our firm.
c) A few hours after sharing the questions, I was told not to come into work the next day
A thought on joy in righteousness:
I haven’t read anything by Benjamin Lay, and have no idea how he felt about his actions. But during my more intensely Quaker stage I read the writings of John Woolman, another weirdo vegetarian Quaker who was ardently abolitionist before it was cool. I went in thinking, “It’s one thing for someone who kind of enjoys being disruptive, but I’m not like that, I find it really embarrassing and uncomfortable.” But in his diary he’s clear that he also found it embarrassing and uncomfortable, would have liked to lead a more normal life, and pushed through because of his convictions.
Thanks for your question, Tiresias. We appreciate people coming to us with concerns, and we absolutely don’t want to disincentive people from doing so. And we know that people usually aren’t at their best when they’re in the midst of stressful situations.
However, we don’t think it’s a workable policy to promise never to take action against people who come to us. Many concerns we get involve two or more people who each have complaints about the other’s actions. In those cases, we don’t want to unfairly advantage the side of the person who raises the topic with us first. Or there could be a concern separate from the problem the person reported. So we have to balance these two considerations.
As we got more caseworkers, practices like getting input / sanity-checking from other caseworkers and managers on important cases have been helpful in a variety of situations.
Thanks — yes, we’ve done this in some cases.
I’m sorry I didn’t handle this better in the first place. My original comments are here, but to reiterate some of the mistakes I think I made in handling the concerns about Owen:
I wish I had asked the various women for permission to get a second opinion from a colleague or to hand the case over to a colleague.
In the case where Owen told me he believed he’d made someone uncomfortable, I wish I had reached out to the woman to get her side of the story (if she was willing to share that). This would have given me a clearer picture of some of his actions that I didn’t know about until after the investigation.
I wish I had been clearer to Owen about specific changes he should make.
I wish I had flagged my concerns earlier and more clearly to people at CEA and EV. Two of the people I told about some of my concerns were on the boards of EV US or EV UK (then called CEA US and CEA UK), but I didn’t properly think through Owen’s role on the board or flag that to them.
Some things that are different now, related to the changes that Chana describes:
The community health team has spent months going through lessons learned both from this situation and from other cases we’ve handled. Based on reflecting independently and together, and now with the input from the HSF investigation, we drew up a list of practices to change and additional steps to add.
Each month the casework team goes through cases we’re handling, and checks whether we’re implementing the practices we agreed on.
To me, the most important change is getting more advice and support from other caseworkers when handling difficult cases, especially if the case involves someone with influence or power in EA. I think this helps correct for an earlier pattern where there was too much deferral to individual judgment. We had started this change before 2023, and now I feel it’s much better-established. For example, when working on a recent difficult case, two of us went over the information and wrote up our questions and proposals independently, then discussed together and came to a joint set of proposed actions. This takes more time, but I think it’s a more robust process.
Over time our team has grown, and it’s more viable than it once was to hand off cases when one of us has some entanglement or conflict of interest.
As Chana describes, we’re developing a process for getting independent opinions when a concern relates to EV leadership or someone else who has power over the community health team.
Yep, that’s all true. I think what I’m pointing to is that de facto people do decide what to pay attention to and what arguments to dig into based on arbitrary factors and tribalism. Ideally I’d have had some less arbitrary way to decide where to focus my attention, but here we are.
I admire your drive to help others!
I do think early in my life I underweighted shopping around because I was so focused on frugality (and it’s easy to be discouraged when job searches take a long time). Best wishes as you explore the options.