lilly

Karma: 2,472

lilly 7 Sep 2023 13:51 UTC
173 points
90 ∶ 12
on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
This situation reminded me of this post, EA’s weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior. Regardless of whether you believe Chloe and Alice’s allegations (which I do), it’s hard to imagine that most of these disputes would have arisen under more normal professional conditions (e.g., ones in which employees and employers don’t live together, travel the world together, and become romantically entangled). A lot of the things that (no one is disputing) happened here are professionally weird; for example, these anecdotes from Ben’s summary of Nonlinear’s response (also the linked job ad):
- “Our intention wasn’t just to have employees, but also to have members of our family unit who we traveled with and worked closely together with in having a strong positive impact in the world, and were very personally close with.”
- “We wanted to give these employees a pretty standard amount of compensation, but also mostly not worry about negotiating minor financial details as we traveled the world. So we covered basic rent/groceries/travel for these people.”
- “The formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn’t”
- “The semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn’t push hard on this.”
I am reminded again that, while many professional norms are stupid, a lot of them exist for good reasons. Further, I think it’s often pretty easy to disentangle the stupid professional norms from the reasonable professional norms by just thinking: “Are there good reasons this norm exists?” (E.g., “Is there a reason employees and employers shouldn’t live together?” Yes: the power dynamics inherent to the employer/employee dynamic are at odds with healthy roommate dynamics, in which people generally shouldn’t have lots of power over one another. “Is there a reason I should have to wear high heels to work in an office?” …. no.) Trying to make employees part of your family unit, not negotiating financial details with your employees, covering your employees’ rent and groceries, and being in any way involved in your employees breaking the law are all behaviors that are at odds with standard professional practices, and there are very obviously good reasons for this.
What links here?
- JWS's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by Ben Pace (7 Sep 2023 22:00 UTC; 25 points)
- Erich_Grunewald's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by Ben Pace (8 Sep 2023 8:51 UTC; 11 points)

lilly 12 Dec 2023 19:14 UTC
136 points
53 ∶ 5
in reply to: Kat Woods’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Since Frances is not commenting more:

This rhetorical strategy is analogous to a prosecutor showing smiling photos of a couple on vacation to argue that he couldn’t have possibly murdered her, or showing flirty texts between a man and woman to argue that he couldn’t have raped her, etc. This is a bad rhetorical strategy when prosecutors use it—and it’s a bad rhetorical strategy here—because it perpetuates misinformation about what abusive relationships look like; namely, that they are uniformly bad, with no happy moments or mitigating qualities.

As anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you, this is rarely what abuse looks like. And you insinuating that Chloe and Alice are lying because there were happy-appearing moments is exactly the kind of thing that makes many victims afraid to come forward.

To be clear: I do not think these photos provide any evidence against the allegations in Ben’s post because no one is contesting that the group hung out in tropical locations. Additionally, having hung out in tropical locations is entirely compatible with the allegations made in the initial post. Ironically, this rhetorical strategy—the photos, the assertion that this was a “dream job”—strikes me as eerily similar to the job ad linked in Ben’s original post (https://web.archive.org/web/20211022160447/https://www.nonlinear.org/operations.html). Probably this did seem like a dream job, which is presumably why Chloe and Alice accepted it. And what’s at issue now is their claim that it wasn’t, a point that these photos do nothing to refute.
What links here?
- bruce's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by Kat Woods (14 Dec 2023 7:19 UTC; 123 points)

lilly 30 Mar 2023 17:41 UTC
123 points
9 ∶ 2
on: Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky
In light of this discussion about whether people would find this article alienating, I sent it to four very smart/reasonable friends who aren’t involved in EA, don’t work on AI, and don’t live in the Bay Area (definitely not representative TIME readers, but maybe representative of the kind of people EAs want to reach). Given I don’t work on AI/have only ever discussed AI risk with one of them, I don’t think social desirability bias played much of a role. I also ran this comment by them after we discussed. Here’s a summary of their reactions:

Friend 1: Says it’s hard for them to understand why AI would want to kill everyone, but acknowledges that experts know much more about this than they do and takes seriously that experts believe this is a real possibility. Given this, they think it makes sense to err on the side of caution and drastically slow down AI development to get the right safety measures in place.

Friend 2: Says it’s intuitive that AI being super powerful, not well understood, and rapidly developing is a dangerous combination. Given this, they think it makes sense to implement safeguards. But they found the article overwrought, especially given missing links in the argument (e.g., they think it’s unclear whether/why AI would want our atoms, given immense uncertainty about what AI would want; compared their initial reaction to this argument to their initial reaction to Descartes’ ontological argument).

Friend 3: Says they find this article hard to argue with, especially because they recognize how little they know on the topic relative to EY; compared themselves disagreeing with it to anti-vaxxers arguing with virologists. Given the uncertainty about risks, they think it’s pretty obvious we ought to slow down.

Friend 4: Says EY knows vastly more about this issue than they do, but finds the tone of the article a little over the top, given missing links. Remains optimistic AI will make the world better, but recognizes possible optimism bias. Generally agrees there should be more safeguards in place, especially given there are ~none.

Anyways, I would encourage others to add their own anecdata to the mix, so we can get a bit more grounded on how people interpret articles like this one, since this seems important to understand and we can do better than just speculate.

lilly 18 Feb 2023 15:03 UTC
72 points
43 ∶ 22
on: People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You
I think your general point is a good one—EA has been criticized for a lot of things, many critiques of EA are unfair, and journalists score points by writing salacious stories. I also agree that it’s really hard to interpret some of the anecdotes in the TIME article without more context. But I don’t agree with this:
I’m not saying that EA is perfect or that nothing in the article is true, but rather that reading it, my gut instinct was that roughly 80% was entirely misleading
I think we have good reason to believe the article is broadly right, even if some of the specific anecdotes don’t do a good job of proving this. Here’s a rough summary of the main (non-anecdote) points of the article:
1. EA involves many “complex professional relationships” (true)
2. “Most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement [is] controlled by men” (true)
3. “Effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated ‘rationalist’ groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away.” This language is inflammatory (“overwhelming”, “incestuous”), but we can boil this down to a more sterile sounding claim: “EA is very male and there is a complex mixing of professional and personal relationships, partly because there are many polyamorous people in the EA/rationalist communities; this creates an environment in which sexual misconduct may be addressed suboptimally.” This strikes me as totally plausible.
4. “Several women say that the way their allegations were received by the broader EA community was as upsetting as the original misconduct itself. ‘The playbook of these EAs is to discourage victims to seek any form of objective, third-party justice possible.’” This is an ambiguous one: the Community Health Team explicitly says otherwise (“if a crime happened, we think the victim should consider going to the police”), but boy is there a lot of discussion within EA about the importance of protecting EA’s reputation, so someone might understandably feel pressure not to go to the police, even if no one ever told them not to.
5. “The movement’s high-minded goals can create a moral shield, they say, allowing members to present themselves as altruists committed to saving humanity regardless of how they treat the people around them.” (seems fair)
6. “The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement.” (I think people agree with this)
7. “That balancing of interests is a starkly different approach than the one espoused by the #MeToo” (true)
8. “#MeToo urged society to ‘believe women;’ EAs tend to be a bit more skeptical.” (also seems true)
9. “EA’s polyamorous subculture was a key reason why the community had become a hostile environment for women.” To be clear, I think this article is bigoted about polyamory, and I agree with this. But it’s plausible that the polyamorous subculture contributes a hostile environment for women, if only because it is combined with a 2:1 male:female ratio and high tolerance for people hitting on each other in EA spaces. In general, the fact that a lot of people are polyamorous would seem to have two important implications: 1) more people are open to dating other people and 2) casually mentioning that you’re in a relationship is less likely to signal to someone that they shouldn’t hit on you. As a result of all of these things (not just the polyamorous subculture), women who don’t want to be hit on at EA events may have a set of relatively suboptimal options—being hit on, or saying “please stop hitting on me”. There are also upsides to the polyamorous subculture, including for women, but if there are more women in the “I don’t want to be hit on at this event” camp than not, it’s conceivable that the net effect is bad for women.
Importantly, these kinds of claims are hard to substantiate with stories: I mean, how do you prove that the combination of gender imbalance in EA, men having disproportionate power in EA, mixture of professional and personal relationships, and polyamorous subculture have created an environment in which sexual misconduct is not addressed optimally? You suggest:
The default orientation to this should be “Let’s carefully evaluate each claim by the evidence we have for it, and assess the context of those claims”, instead of an automatic “believe and support every claim in this article, both the facts and the narrative the writer is trying to use those facts for.”
And sure; we should evaluate evidence critically. My impression was that people did basically adopt this orientation, at least as was evidenced in the comments section here.
But it’s just hard to present evidence that conclusively proves the very reasonable—if possibly incorrect—hypothesis put forward by both the reporter and interviewees. In addition, this is not the first time these kinds of allegations have been made, other women have since said they’ve grappled with gender issues, and the article includes unambiguously bad anecdotes (“an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs… arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview. [She was] surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, ‘he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me’).
In sum, I think we have good reason to think that the article is broadly true, even if some of the specific stories leave a lot of questions unanswered. And I’m glad the Community Health Team is trying to answer those questions.
What links here?
- Things that can make EA a good place for women by lilly (6 Apr 2023 17:09 UTC; 182 points)

lilly 17 Jun 2023 14:14 UTC
69 points
31 ∶ 10
on: Update on task force on reforms at EA organizations
I have concerns about the impartiality and efficacy of this task force, largely due to the overlap in personnel between this task force and the Community Health and Special Projects Team (i.e., Julia Wise, who seems to be centrally involved in both. Note: I do not want this comment to be read as a criticism of Julia specifically, but rather as a critique of structuring a review process in this way).
My concerns:
1. The specific goals of this task force are a bit opaque (“will sort through different ideas for reforms that EA organizations might enact, and try to recommend the most promising ideas” is an exceptionally broad mandate). But the task force seems to be doing something that I would’ve thought the Community Health Team ought to have been doing anyways, given that the mandate of the latter is to: “strengthen the effective altruism community’s ability to fulfill its potential for impact, and to address problems that could prevent that.” Is the task force’s work meant to be independent of the CHT’s work? If so, why are members of the CHT involved? If not, why hasn’t the connection between the CHT and the task force been made explicit and justified?
2. It strikes me that this task force was—or at least should have been—prompted, in part, by sexual misconduct allegations made in the TIME article and related discussions, in addition to the FTX stuff. Given the task force’s broad mandate, and likely role of the sexual harassment allegations in prompting the creation of this task force, it’s notable to me that no explicit mention is made of the potential need for reforms aimed at addressing sexual harassment in either post about the task force. Is investigating these potential reforms not part of the mandate of the task force? If not, why not? If so, are the blind spots that led to the very errors the CHT made in the first place (with respect to the sexual misconduct stuff) going to lead to similar blind spots in assessing reforms?
3. Given the connection between the CHT and task force, will dramatic reforms pertaining to the CHT (e.g., eliminating the Community Health Team and creating new organizations/teams aimed at strengthening the EA community) be adequately discussed and considered?

lilly 10 Mar 2023 15:16 UTC
66 points
18 ∶ 2
on: Racial and gender demographics at EA Global in 2022
Thanks so much for doing this analysis and writing this up! I’m curious whether there is a principled reason for using POC as a category, rather than focusing on specific ethnic groups that are underrepresented in EA, especially given what footnote 4 says about the breakdown of EAG attendees who are POC (24% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 2% Black, 1% multiracial). Some people have been critical of the term “POC” because they think it can gloss over this kind of information.
What links here?
- Racial and gender demographics at EA Global in 2022 by Amy Labenz (10 Mar 2023 14:29 UTC; 147 points)
- geoffrey's comment on Racial and gender demographics at EA Global in 2022 by Amy Labenz (10 Mar 2023 20:31 UTC; 25 points)

lilly 6 Jan 2024 8:26 UTC
63 points
26 ∶ 13
on: Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures
I appreciate that a ton of work went into this, and the results are interesting. That said, I am skeptical of the value of surveys with low response rates (in this case, 15%), especially when those surveys are likely subject to non-response bias, as I suspect this one is, given: (1) many AI researchers just don’t seem too concerned about the risks posed by AI, so may not have opened the survey and (2) those researchers would likely have answered the questions on the survey differently. (I do appreciate that the authors took steps to mitigate the risk of non-response bias at the survey level, and did not find evidence of this at the question level.)

I don’t find the “expert surveys tend to have low response rates” defense particularly compelling, given: (1) the loaded nature of the content of the survey (meaning bias is especially likely), (2) the fact that such a broad group of people were surveyed that it’s hard to imagine they’re all actually “experts” (let alone have relevant expertise), (3) the fact that expert surveys often do have higher response rates (26% is a lot higher than 15%), especially when you account for the fact that it’s extremely unlikely other large surveys are compensating participants anywhere close to this well, and (4) the possibility that many expert surveys just aren’t very useful.

Given the non-response bias issue, I am not inclined to update very much on what AI researchers in general think about AI risk on the basis of this survey. I recognize that the survey may have value independent of its knowledge value—for instance, I can see how other researchers citing these kinds of results (as I have!) may serve a useful rhetorical function, given readers of work that cites this work are unlikely to review the references closely. That said, I don’t think we should make a habit of citing work that has methodological issues simply because such results may be compelling to people who won’t dig into them.

Given my aforementioned concerns, I wonder whether the cost of this survey can be justified (am I calculating correctly that $138,000 was spent just compensating participants for taking this survey, and that doesn’t include other costs, like those associated with using the outside firm to compensate participants, researchers’ time, etc?). In light of my concerns about cost and non-response bias, I am wondering whether a better approach would instead be to randomly sample a subset of potential respondents (say, 4,000 people), and offer to compensate them at a much higher rate (e.g., $100), given this strategy could both reduce costs and improve response rates.

lilly 31 Aug 2023 16:12 UTC
63 points
21 ∶ 7
on: Progress report on CEA’s search for a new CEO
Thanks for sharing this!
At a few points here, you say things like:
1. You learned a lot from talking to “professional recruiters” or “people with more experience of executive recruitment.”
2. “I’m not sure how avoidable this was, but I expect that if I had done this type of executive search many times in the past I would have found this easier to navigate.”
3. “Overall I felt more frequently confused working on this project than I have in most prior pieces of work I’ve done. It felt fairly different from running a standard recruitment round.”
Given this, I’m led to believe that: a) experienced executive recruiters were not directly involved in the selection process and b) the three of you (Claire, Max, and Michelle) don’t have a lot of experience recruiting executive directors (though I know you have substantial experience being executive directors, and I assume this experience helps you identify others who might be well-suited to the role). Is that impression correct? If so, why was the decision made not to involve someone who does have substantial experience doing executive recruitment?
In the interest of candor: I can think of a bunch of reasons why it wouldn’t make sense to directly involve an experienced executive recruiter in this process—maybe there aren’t too many of these, or they charge $1,000/hour, or they wouldn’t be much of a value add, given your knowledge of what being an executive director takes, or they know nothing about EA, etc. But I think EA does tend to do this thing I’ll call “delegating hard, important tasks to very competent people who have a deep knowledge of EA, even when those people lack experience in the relevant domain (in this case: recruiting executive directors).” Sometimes it seems totally reasonable to do this, and sometimes it seems less reasonable. So my broader question is: do you think that’s what happened here, and if so, do you think this was a reasonable approach?
Again, I really do appreciate your transparency. I raise this question mainly because I think EA differs from other organizations/sectors/social movements in its tendency to prioritize ability and familiarity with EA over domain-specific expertise or formal training in something, so I think it’s worth flagging this when it may be occurring, so we can consider whether and when this tendency makes sense.

lilly 16 Feb 2023 12:59 UTC
63 points
24 ∶ 2
in reply to: agunning’s comment on: Plans for investigating and improving the experience of women, non-binary and trans people in EA
That this is reasonably well-ingrained in the community is less clear to me, especially post FTX. If the Community Health Team does see their goal as simply “support the community by supporting community members,” why not just plainly state that?

I’d actually love the Community Health Team to clarify:
1. Holding fixed the facts of a case, would the Community Health Team endorse a policy of considering the value of the accused/their work to EA when deciding how forcefully to respond? For example, if someone did something bad at an EAG, would “how valuable is this person’s work to the community?” be considered when deciding whether to ban them from future EAGs?
2. If the Community Health Team does endorse (1), how much weight does the “value to the community” criterion get relative to other criteria in determining a response?
3. If the Community Health Team does not endorse (1), are there any policies or procedures on the books to prevent (1) from happening?
What links here?

lilly 15 Feb 2023 4:01 UTC
61 points
25 ∶ 7
on: Plans for investigating and improving the experience of women, non-binary and trans people in EA
I think collecting data is a great idea, and I’m really glad this is happening. Thank you for doing this! Because one of your goals is to “better [understand] the experiences of women and gender minorities in the EA community,” I wanted to relay one reaction I had to the Community Health Team’s website.
I found some of the language offputting because it seems to suggest that instances of (e.g.) sexual misconduct will be assessed primarily in terms of their impact on EA, rather than on the people involved. Here’s an example:
“Our goal is to help the EA community and related communities have more positive impact, because we want a radically better world. A healthy community is a means to that end.”
My basic reaction is: it is important to prevent sexual harassment (etc) because harassment is bad for the people who experience it, regardless of whether it affects the EA community’s ability to have a positive impact.
This language is potentially alienating in and of itself, but also risks contributing to biased reporting by suggesting that the Community Health Team’s response to the same kind of behavior might depend, for instance, on the perceived importance to EA of the parties involved. People are often already reluctant to disclose bad experiences, and I worry that framing the Community Health Team’s work in this way will compound this, particularly in cases where accusations are being made against more established members of the community.
What links here?
- Things that can make EA a good place for women by lilly (6 Apr 2023 17:09 UTC; 182 points)
- lilly's comment on Against EA-Community-Received-Wisdom on Practical Sociological Questions by Michael_Cohen (9 Mar 2023 17:48 UTC; 4 points)

lilly 20 Feb 2023 22:51 UTC
56 points
26 ∶ 10
on: EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation
I just wanted to flag one issue that may have contributed to this situation, as well as some of the others described in the TIME article:
As far as I am aware, CEA has no clear, public, working definition of sexual harassment, and there are no clear guidelines regarding appropriate and inappropriate behavior at different types of EA events. This is a significant problem in a community where personal and professional relationships are frequently intertwined.
The lack of guidelines will predictably lead to bad consequences:
1. People may engage in behavior that seems non-problematic to them, but that puts others in situations they don’t want to be in. (Guidelines alleviate the pressure on individuals to consistently exercise good judgment, and can also serve an educational purpose by clarifying that/why certain behaviors are harmful.)
2. People may not report situations that made them uncomfortable because no rules were technically broken. (When some mixing of professional/personal relationships is considered appropriate, it is harder to discern when lines have been crossed, especially when these lines have not been explicitly drawn.)
3. The Community Health Team may have substantial leeway in resolving disputes, potentially leading to more biased or unfair decisions.
I am really glad to hear there will be an external investigation by an independent law firm, and I hope one of the things they will recommend is developing clearer standards regarding appropriate conduct.
What links here?

lilly 11 Mar 2023 5:40 UTC
53 points
21 ∶ 1
on: Share the burden
Thanks for bravely sharing this. I’m really sorry to hear what you’ve been through.
This passage resonated with me:
Last week at EAG, I received a Swapcard message that proposed a non-platonic interaction under the guise of professional interaction. I went to an afterparty where someone I had just met—literally introduced to me moments before—put their hand on the small of my back and grabbed and held onto my arm multiple times. These might seem like minor annoyances, but I have heard and experienced that these kinds of small moments happen often to women in EA. These kinds of experiences undermine my own feelings of comfort and value in the community.
This kind of stuff has happened to me too. Each incident has felt too minor to do anything about, primarily because if I did, I’d then have to think about it as a Bad Thing That Happened, rather than an awkward interaction; something to forget. So there is a death-by-a-thousand-cuts element to all of this, where no individual interaction has risen to the level of wanting to make a fuss, but in combination, these things change how I perceive myself in EA spaces (more male gaze-y) and how I act (a bit more guarded).
And then I felt sad reading what followed:
This might be anecdata, as some people say, and I know obtaining robust data on these issues has its own challenges $.$
Because it felt as if you were writing for a reader who might be inclined to doubt you. (Sorry if I am projecting; it’s just that some people have raised this sort of objection.) So I just want to say: I think that in the context of an issue that is notoriously hard to study (as you note), our experiences—and the experiences of the many other women who have shared their stories—do provide strong evidence of an important, systemic issue. Thanks again for speaking up.

lilly 10 Jul 2023 21:20 UTC
47 points
16 ∶ 1
in reply to: JWS’s comment on: The Happier Lives Institute is funding constrained and needs you!
This is speculative, and I don’t want this to be read as an endorsement of people’s critical comments; rather, it’s a hypothesis about what’s driving the “harsh discussion”:
It seems like one theme in people’s critical comments is misrepresentation. Specifically, multiple people have accused HLI of making claims that are more confident and/or more positive than are warranted (see, e.g., some of the comments below, which say things like: “I don’t think this is an accurate representation,” “it was about whether I thought that sentence and set of links gave an accurate impression,” and “HLI’s institutional agenda corrupts its ability to conduct fair-minded and even-handed assessments”).
I wonder if people are particularly sensitive to this, because EA partly grew out of a desire to make charitable giving more objective and unbiased, and so the perception that HLI is misrepresenting information feels antithetical to EA in a very fundamental way.
What links here?
- bruce's comment on The Happier Lives Institute is funding constrained and needs you! by MichaelPlant (10 Jul 2023 22:22 UTC; 45 points)

lilly 12 Dec 2023 19:47 UTC
44 points
25 ∶ 9
in reply to: Kat Woods’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I think you cannot and should not expect people to read hundreds of pages about this, as you acknowledge. And I am not going to. The reason I reacted to the photos is just that this is not the kind of evidence an actor acting in good faith typically invokes because: 1) their arguments should speak for themselves, such that this kind of vibes-based attack is rendered unnecessary and 2) this kind of evidence is typically used to wrongly and unfairly undermine an accuser’s credibility. In short, this isn’t an issue of “disliking your tone or pictures,” because the pictures (irrelevant, wrongly biasing) and tone (retaliatory, unapologetic) provide important information about the kind of organization nonlinear is, and what it was like to work there, which is a central part of what is at issue.

lilly 11 Sep 2023 15:14 UTC
43 points
27 ∶ 0
in reply to: Emerson Spartz’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
I look forward to reading your point-by-point response. I suspect you will convince me that some of the events described in this post were characterized inaccurately, in ways that are unflattering to Nonlinear. However, I think it is very unlikely you will convince me that Nonlinear didn’t screw up in several big, important ways, causing significant harm in the process (for reasons along these lines).
I would thus strongly encourage you to also think about what mistakes Nonlinear made, and what things it is worth apologizing for. I think this would be very good for the community, since it would help us gain better insight into what went wrong here, and how to avoid similar situations going forward.

lilly 16 Mar 2023 15:01 UTC
41 points
20 ∶ 6
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I am also eager to see what the investigation concludes, but I’m pretty convinced at this point that EA leaders made big mistakes.
It’s not obvious to me (yet) that they should’ve known not to take Sam’s money—non-profits accept donations from dubious characters all the time. Even if EA leaders thought Sam was sketchy (which it appears some did), it’s not clear to me they should’ve known Sam was don’t-take-money-from-this-person bad. This is a line non-profits walk all the time, and many have erred on the side of taking money from people they shouldn’t have taken money from.
But I cannot wrap my head around why—knowing what it appears they knew then—anyone thought it was a good idea to put this guy on a pedestal; to elevate him as a moral paragon and someone to emulate; to tie EA’s reputation so closely to his. It really feels like they should’ve (at least) known not to do that.
What links here?
- 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 19:08 UTC; 4 points)

lilly 18 Jan 2023 21:43 UTC
40 points
9 ∶ 5
on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
I am also skeptical of democratizing EA funding decisions because I share your concerns about effective implementation, but want to note that EA norms around this are somewhat out of step with norms around priority setting in other fields, particularly global health. In recent years, global health funders have taken steps to democratize funding decisions. For instance, the World Health Organization increasingly emphasizes the importance of fair decision-making processes; here’s a representative title: “Priority Setting for Universal Health Coverage: We Need Evidence-Informed Deliberative Processes, Not Just More Evidence on Cost-Effectiveness.”

Plausibly the increased emphasis on procedural approaches to priority setting is misguided, but there has been a decent amount of philosophical and empirical work on this. At a minimum, it seems like funders should engage with this literature before determining whether any of these approaches are worth considering.
What links here?
- lilly's comment on Funding by Voting: Ignorance and Irrationality by pradyuprasad (20 Jan 2023 18:48 UTC; 3 points)

lilly 13 Nov 2023 14:57 UTC
39 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Kids or No Kids
Thanks for writing this—super helpful. Just one anecdote on the childcare front: my siblings and I had full-time nannies/au pairs from when we were babies until we could drive, because our parents worked full-time and often traveled. (My mom had an intensive screening process for said nannies/au pairs, and chose excellent ones.) I view this as having been a really good thing for my development—I became less shy, valued my time with my parents more, learned about other parts of the world/cultures/ways of life, was mentored by women in their 20s as a pre-teen/teenager, and developed close relationships with some amazing people. I think parents sometimes view hiring external childcare as a necessary evil, but for me (and, I think, my siblings) it was a really positive aspect of our childhoods.

lilly 21 Feb 2023 12:10 UTC
39 points
21 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation
I suspect it’s because many people like the culture around dating in EA, and are glad EA hasn’t taken a hard line on, e.g., workplace relationships. And people may be worried about the difficulty of drawing lines well, or having outside actors do it, and the chilling effect this could have on people’s ability to date within EA (which I can understand and am sympathetic to).

I think, though, that the solution is to create guidelines, and then develop creative solutions in accordance with them (e.g., more events/apps designed for EAs interested in dating).

lilly 18 Feb 2023 18:01 UTC
38 points
16 ∶ 4
in reply to: EliezerYudkowsky’s comment on: People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You
I admit that my desire to steelman this article stems from my personal experiences in EA, and my general sense—as a woman in EA, who is friends with other women in EA, and has heard stories from still other women in EA—that this article does get at something important about the Bay Area EA community, even if it makes some important mistakes, many of which Aella helpfully identifies.
To steelman your comment, I assume by “your” you mean the EA community’s (not my) “tendency to undercompensate and not realize how distorted these things actually are” (although I’m still not sure quite what this means), but as I said before, I have seen very little evidence that the community’s response to the TIME article has been uncritical or unreasonable. I’d be eager to hear specific examples of the mistakes you think the community has made since the article came out.