Linch

Karma: 15,835

“To see the world as it is, rather than as I wish it to be.”

I’m a Research Manager on the General Longtermism team at Rethink Priorities. Right now, my team and I are re-orienting towards what are the best things to do.

I also work part-time as a Fund Manager at EA Funds’ Long-term Future Fund (Not to be confused with the FTX Future Fund).

People may or may not also be interested in my comments on Metaculus and Twitter, though (un)fortunately I’m now less active on them:

Metaculus: https://pandemic.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/112057/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LinchZhang

Clarification on commenting norms

COI disclaimers: Like many(most?) people doing direct work in EA nonprofits, I have financial COIs with the large funders in EA in the sense that they directly or indirectly fund my work. I think compared to most direct workers, my COI with FTX is relatively larger.
(EDIT: I’m leaving the above up for honesty reasons, but recent events has “fortunately” reduced my COIs with FTX substantially)

Linch 4 Dec 2022 1:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Meta: I couldn’t figure out why the first chart renders with so much whitespace.

Linch 3 Dec 2022 4:25 UTC
29 points
on: Linch’s Shortform
tl;dr:
In the context of interpersonal harm:
1. I think we should be more willing than we currently are to ban or softban people.
2. I think we should not assume that CEA’s Community Health team “has everything covered”
3. I think more people should feel empowered to tell CEA CH about their concerns, even (especially?) if other people appear to not pay attention or do not think it’s a major concern.
4. I think the community is responsible for helping the CEA CH team with having a stronger mandate to deal with interpersonal harm, including some degree of acceptance of mistakes of overzealous moderation.
(all views my own) I want to publicly register what I’ve said privately for a while:

For people (usually but not always men) who we have considerable suspicion that they’ve been responsible for significant direct harm within the community, we should be significantly more willing than we currently are to take on more actions and the associated tradeoffs of limiting their ability to cause more harm in the community.
Some of these actions may look pretty informal/unofficial (gossip, explicitly warning newcomers against specific people, keep an unofficial eye out for some people during parties, etc). However, in the context of a highly distributed community with many people (including newcomers) that’s also embedded within a professional network, we should be willing to take more explicit and formal actions as well.
This means I broadly think we should increase our willingness to a) ban potentially harmful people from events, b) reduce grants we make to people in ways that increase harmful people’s power, c) warn organizational leaders about hiring people in positions of power/contact with potentially vulnerable people.
I expect taking this seriously to involve taking on nontrivial costs. However, I think this is probably worth it.
I’m not sure why my opinion here is different from others^[1]’, however I will try to share some generators of my opinion, in case it’s helpful:

A. We should aim to be a community that’s empowered to do the most good. This likely entails appropriately navigating the tradeoff of both attempting to reducing the harms of a) contributors feeling or being unwelcome due to sexual harassment or other harms and b) contributors feeling or being unwelcome due to false accusations or overly zealous response.
B. I think some of this is fundamentally a sensitivity vs specificity tradeoff. If we have a detection system that’s too tuned to reduce the risk of false positives (wrong accusations being acted on), we will overlook too many false negatives (people being too slow to be banned/censured, or not at all), and vice versa.
Consider the first section of “Difficult Tradeoffs”
Avoid false negatives: take action if there’s reason to think someone is causing problems Avoid false positives: don’t unfairly harm someone’s reputation / ability to participate in EA
In the world we live in, I’ve yet to hear of a single incidence where, in full context, I strongly suspect CEA CH (or for that matter, other prominent EA organizations) was overzealous in recommending bans due to interpersonal harm. If our institutions are designed to only reduce first-order harm (both from direct interpersonal harm and from accusations), I’d expect to see people err in both directions.
Given the (apparent) lack of false positives, I broadly expect we accept too high a rate of false negatives. More precisely, I do not think CEA CH’s current work on interpersonal harm will lead to a conclusion like “We’ve evaluated all the evidence available for the accusations against X. We currently think there’s only a ~45% chance that X has actually committed such harms, but given the magnitude of the potential harm, and our inability to get further clarity with more investigation, we’ve pre-emptively decided to ban X from all EA Globals pending further evidence.”

Instead, I get the impression that substantially more certainty is deemed necessary to take action. This differentially advantages conservatism, and increases the probability and allowance of predatory behavior.
C. I expect an environment with more enforcement is more pleasant than an environment with less enforcement.
I expect an environment where there’s a default expectation of enforcement for interpersonal harm is more pleasant for both men and women. Most directly in reducing the first-order harm itself, but secondarily an environment where people are less “on edge” for potential violence is generally more pleasant. As a man, I at least will find it more pleasant to interact with women in a professional context if I’m not worried that they’re worried I’ll harm them. I expect this to be true for most men, and the loud worries online about men being worried about false accusations to be heavily exaggerated and selection-skewed^[2].
Additionally, I note that I expect someone who exhibit traits like reduced empathy, willingness to push past boundaries, sociopathy, etc, to also exhibit similar traits in other domains. So someone who is harmful in (e.g.) sexual matters is likely to also be harmful in friendly and professional matters. For example, in the more prominent cases I’m aware of where people accused of sexual assault were eventually banned, they also appeared to have done other harmful activities like a systematic history of deliberate deception, being very nasty to men, cheating on rent, harassing people online, etc. So I expect more bans to broadly be better for our community.
D. I expect people who are involved in EA for longer to be systematically biased in both which harms we see, and which things are the relevant warning signals.
The negative framing here is “normalization of deviance”. The more neutral framing here is that people (including women) who have been around EA for longer a) may be systematically less likely to be targeted (as they have more institutional power and cachet) and b) are selection-biased to be less likely to be harmed within our community (since the people who have received the most harm are more likely to have bounced off).
E. I broadly trust the judgement of CEA CH in general, and Julia Wise in particular.
I think their judgement is broadly reasonable, and they act well within the constraints that they’ve been given. If I did not trust them (e.g. if I was worried that they’d pursue political vendettas in the guise of harm-reduction), I’d be significantly more worried about given them more leeway to make mistakes with banning people.^[3]
F. Nonetheless, the CEA CH team is just one group of individuals, and does a lot of work that’s not just on interpersonal harm. We should expect them to a) only have a limited amount of information to act on, and b) for the rest of EA to need to pick up some of the slack where they’ve left off.
For a), I think an appropriate action is for people to be significantly more willing to report issues to them, as well as make sure new members know about the existence of the CEA CH team and Julia Wise’s work within it. For b), my understanding is that CEA CH sees themself as having what I call a “limited purview”: e.g. they only have the authority to ban people from official CEA and maybe CEA-sponsored events, and not e.g. events hosted by local groups. So I think EA community-builders in a group organizing capacity should probably make it one of their priorities to be aware of the potential broken stairs in their community, and be willing to take decisive actions to reduce interpersonal harms.
Remember: EA is not a legal system. Our objective is to do the most good, not to wait to be absolutely certain of harm before taking steps to further limit harm.
One thing my post does not cover is opportunity cost. I mostly framed things as changing the decision-boundary. However, in practice I can see how having more bans is more costly in time and maybe money than the status quo. I don’t have good calculations here, however my intuition is strongly in the direction that having a safer and more cohesive is worth the relevant opportunity costs.
1. ^
  fwiw my guess is that the average person in EA leadership wishes the CEA CH team does more (is currently insufficiently punitive), rather than wish that they did less (is currently overzealous). I expect there’s significant variance in this opinion however.
2. ^
  This is a potential crux.
3. ^
  I can imagine this being a crux for people who oppose greater action. If so, I’d like to a) see this argument explicitly being presented and debated, and b) see people propose alternatives for reducing interpersonal harm that routes around CEA CH.

Linch 3 Dec 2022 2:16 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: c.trout’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Thanks for responding! (upvoted)

On my end, I’m sorry if my words sounded too strong or emotive.
Separately, I strongly disagree that we suffer from overthinking ethical stuff too much. I don’t think SBF’s problems with ethics came from careful debate in business ethics and then missing a decimal point in the relevant calculations. I would guess that if he actually consulted senior EA leaders or researchers on the morality of his actions, this would predictably have resulted in less fraud.

Linch 2 Dec 2022 0:54 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: c.trout’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Yeah I think this is fair. I probably didn’t read you very carefully or fairly. However, it is hard to control connotations of words, and I have to admit I had a slightly negative visceral reaction for what I believed to be my sincerely held moral views (that I tried pretty hard to live up to, and I made large sacrifices for) medicalized and dismissed so casually.

Linch 1 Dec 2022 22:17 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: c.trout’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
I think “hypocrisy” is too strong and too narrow
Fwiw I consider “hypocrisy” to be a much weaker accusation than “schizophrenia”

Linch 30 Nov 2022 20:46 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
To readers: Agree with my comment if before reading this exchange, you previously thought RP leadership said literally that they “unequivocally condemn all fraud.”
(Note that you should agree if you knew in context they didn’t mean it completely, but just that you thought this was literally said).

Linch 30 Nov 2022 11:07 UTC
32 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
When I hear prominent EAs, people that I have often personally discussed the ethics of lying to nazi officials when hiding jews in your closet, or the tradeoffs of cooperating with corrupt government regimes in foreign countries, say that they now suddenly “unequivocally condemn all fraud”, I feel gaslit and confused by what is happening.
These are not sentences that anyone I worked with in EA believed a month ago, and I don’t think that you believe them now.
Hi Oli. I talked to a friend and they pointed out that many people reading your comment may reasonably read you as saying a) there’s a direct quote where RP leadership in the post above “unequivocally condemn all fraud” (including fraud relevant to hiding jews from nazi officials) and b) that you’ve “often personally discussed” ethics with RP leadership.
a) is clearly false, as the post above only refers to condemning “any potential fraud or misuse of customer funds and trust that occurred at FTX,” and does not refer to any broad condemnation for fraud or fraud-like activities relevant to hiding jews from nazis or cooperating with corrupt government regimes. I’m guessing b) is false as well based on my personal understanding of how often you interact with RP leadership.
I can see how this is an honest misunderstanding, however, it’ll be helpful to be very clear that in the statement above, RP leaders gave no literal indication one way or another about their position on e.g. lying to Nazis.

Linch 30 Nov 2022 11:05 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Roodman’s comment on: Does putting kids in school now put money in their pockets later? Revisiting a natural experiment in Indonesia
Thank you so much! I’m embarrassed to admit that I was indeed probably subliminally affected here by the ordering.

Linch 30 Nov 2022 0:48 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Doing good by doing nothing: How can we better praise frugality?
I don’t think the primary reason rich people are rich is from having frugal lifestyles. I also would be surprised that the primary reason once-rich people become poor is through extravagant consumption (as opposed to bad investments).^[1]
The takeaway is that for normal, non-wealthy people, there are two ways to gain praise for altruism: donations and lifestyle. In contrast, the ultra-wealthy only have only avenue for praise: donations.
This is very bad
To the extent that you think shaming works, you should/could instead shame people for not donating enough to charities, or donating to obviously-ineffective-but-feel-good causes.
I continue to think that in general we care way too much about the personal virtues and excesses of powerful people, and not enough about their consequences on the world.
1. ^
  Though I don’t have data on this, happy to be corrected otherwise.

Linch 30 Nov 2022 0:26 UTC
4 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Clarifications on diminishing returns and risk aversion in giving
Overall I think I screwed up a bunch about this episode. If you were inclined to think that the content of these interviews is reliable the great majority of the time, then this is a helpful reminder that ideas are sometimes garbled on the show — and if something sounds wrong to you, it might well just be because it’s wrong. I’m sorry about that, and we try to keep it at reasonable levels, though with the format we have we’ll never get it to zero.
FWIW I’ve generally assumed that the content in those interviews are wrong pretty often, certainly I’d expect the average interview to have at least one egregious mistake.
I don’t think this should be too surprising, being fully accurate for 2h+ on interesting topics is very hard.

Linch 28 Nov 2022 10:12 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Does putting kids in school now put money in their pockets later? Revisiting a natural experiment in Indonesia
The bottom line (as it were): natives of places that got more schools in the 1970s would exhibit a smaller young-old pay gap in 1995. That is the correlation that the Duflo study looks for…

I think I had to reread the Methods and results several times before understanding what seemed very unintuitive -- I initially would’ve guessed that the young-old wage gap would’ve been higher among the more educated population. Since the more educated youngsters would have made more money.
I think upon rereading and brief reflection that the young-old wage gap is supposed to be a situation where older men make more money? And the gap is lower if younger men had more education. This makes sense but I got tripped up a few times (and am still not certain my reading is correct). Sorry if this question is really naive for people who understand the labor econ literature!

Linch 28 Nov 2022 7:00 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lauren Gilbert’s comment on: Why Advocacy for Children in Developed Countries Could be a Top Cause Area
Re. the Wikipedia article: those are ever harassed numbers; the Zambia number is within the last year. Assuming that sexual harassment is spread across all grades (K-12), “within the last year” (81/12) would be ~7% (which is how I got a quarter of the 26% I quote, though you’re right that I was misreading the tweet). Upon further thought, dividing by 12 is a little aggressive, since sexual harassment is more likely in last six years of that (grades 6-12), so say, 15% risk per year.
Interesting. I think I disagree with this renewed assessment, as:

1. We shouldn’t assume that “reported sexual harassment in school” is the same thing as “have ever been sexually harassed exactly once in school.” If anything there should be a presumption that this have happened to many people significantly more than once.
2. The survey is of “2064 students in 8th through 11th grade,” so of course many surveyed students literally were not around for the full span of grades 6-12.
Qualitatively, my impression is that what counts as “the kind of violence you’d remember and report in surveys” is a significantly lower bar in the US than in SSA. (I once tried to report being harassed in Uganda, and got completely blank looks like “this is normal, why are you are complaining”.). But I don’t have data to hand to back that up beyond my own experience.
I do agree that reporting bias differences are pretty likely. And I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been harassed in Uganda.

Linch 27 Nov 2022 23:54 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lauren Gilbert’s comment on: Why Advocacy for Children in Developed Countries Could be a Top Cause Area
about four times the rate in the US
I looked at your link and didn’t see evidence of this? Instead, Wikipedia (your link) says:
In their 2000 survey on 2064 students in 8th through 11th grade, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) reported:^[6]
- 81% or eight out of 10 students experience sexual harassment in school
- 83% of girls have been sexually harassed
- 78% of boys have been sexually harassed
- 38% of the students were harassed by teachers or school employees
- 36% of school employees or teachers were harassed by students
- 42% of school employees or teachers had been harassed by each other
Also, your source for

26% of Zambian girls have been sexually abused at school in the last year
is a Tweet that says 26.4% of Zambian girls have been sexually abused at all, and 1.9% in school (the US comparatively has 15.2% at all, and 0% in school).
These number all sound very high to me. And my initial prior is very much that the situation is worse on average in developing countries than the US. But I don’t think the evidence presented so far is conclusive here.

Linch 27 Nov 2022 22:52 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Democratizing the workplace as a cause area
Apologies if I misunderstood your argument.
1. You open your argument with saying, in essence, that people hate their jobs and are miserable at their jobs.
2. You then argue that socialist firms are better for employees.
3. The logical inference here would be that socialist firms make for happier employees.
Is this a reasonable summary?

However, in the “Are socialist firms good for employees?” section, you do not give much evidence that workers in socialist firms are significantly happier. Instead, the paragraph says things like:
Giving employees stock in a company seems to boost their performance.^[33] Research has shown that employees getting more ownership of the company is associated with higher trust, perception of fairness, information sharing and cooperation.^[34] There seems to be a small increase in companywide productivity^[33], while employee retention is boosted.^[35] Perhaps capitalist firms could slowly be eased into becoming socialist firms by first giving the employees more stakes in the company and then expanding their participation rights.
These things, while maybe valuable, does not give that much overall evidence for life satisfaction or happiness.
Overall I am not sold that your argument-as-stated is sound, even if every individual piece of evidence is true (which is of course unlikely).

Linch 25 Nov 2022 23:10 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Miguel’s comment on: Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
Unless you can justify that grand narrative that the Gestapos are following is for the common good, I cannot consider the example a correct position to lie—as for me saving people is not lying.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your position here. But I think I would be pretty worried about having “truth” be defined to be inclusive of things roughly in the vein of “saying false things when I do not think the people I’m talking to are benefitting the common good.”

PS. As an aside, I do really appreciate your knowledge and professional experience here! Many of us are the forum are trying to figure out pretty hard questions from first principles, and are unwittingly thrust into a situation of having to figure out detailed questions about accounting, PR, financial law, etc, as they intersect with ethics. Perhaps some of us come across as brusque. But I do appreciate your expertise and experience in these trying times.

Linch 25 Nov 2022 22:30 UTC
15 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
I’m confused about this comment tbh. I can’t tell if we just have very different life experiences or if there is some cognitive fallacy thing going on where it’s easier to generate examples for my position than examples against my position.
For example, (in my family’s lore) my grandfather was asked to cover up a (as I understand it) minor instance of corruption by his superior. He refused to do so, and was majorly screwed over during Cultural Revolution times as a result. Now this example isn’t a clean one since “doing the right thing, even when it’s hard” here pointed against fraud, and he in fact did not choose to do so. But I think I would not have faulted him if he chose protecting his family over loyalty to the party for some pretty minor thing. Particularly since his actual choice could easily have counterfactually resulted in my own non-existence.
As another example, at least some forms of American whistleblower animal activism involve skirting the edges of ag-gag laws, which may involve falsifying documents to be allowed access to factory farms to be able to film atrocities. Now maybe their moves here are unethical (I personally would hesitate to lie to an employer to that extent, though it’s unclear if this is judicious moral reasoning or just insufficient bravery). But I think this is at least the type of question that’s subject to debate, and I would not want to condemn such actions without substantially more detailed thinking and debate.
Note however that the post above only condemns fraud at FTX, not globally.

Linch 25 Nov 2022 22:17 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
I agree with the general tenor of your comment, but a) I think many of the examples you listed would not be considered financial fraud and b) I disagree on the object-level with several of your examples:
I also think racism was a serious enough problem within the last 50 years that I would not judge someone if they had lied about their race in various government documents in order to gain access to fair treatment
I’m not sure which are the specific examples you’re thinking of, but I know some people have advocated that Asian American students lie about their race and e.g. pretend to be white to gain college admissions. I think this is probably immoral and I do not recommend this.
I think I support people who said that they hadn’t received a second dose yet in order to get a booster, since the only reason why boosters weren’t happening was crazy FDA shenanigans.
I think I’m on the other side here, at least for healthy adults, and this was directly decision-relevant in me waiting to get a booster (but I will not fault people who have made a different choice here, particularly ones with medical necessity or who are caretakers for more vulnerable people).

Linch 25 Nov 2022 19:15 UTC
9 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: FTX, ‘EA Principles’, and ‘The (Longtermist) EA Community’
Agreed. The style is slightly different than what I’m used to, but the arguments seem correct and forceful. In particular the arguments against taking common-sense morality too far seems a) correct and b) important to our community’s^[1] self-conception, that we can’t just elide easily.
1. ^
  or at least mine

Linch 25 Nov 2022 18:19 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: The biggest red flag about SBF
I think I agree with most if not everything you said. I don’t see any of them as good arguments for
The amount of non-speculator money flowing into crypto is miniscule

Linch 25 Nov 2022 8:47 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Cullen_OKeefe’s comment on: The biggest red flag about SBF
How clear is it that stablecoins have value other than by enabling speculative transactions on blockchains?
I don’t have a good sense of this tbh, I mostly got this from pretty anecdotal evidence rather than looking at data (and realistically I won’t do a deep dive on this data unless some analysis was handed to me on a platter).^[1]

My current guess is that there is significant uses for stablecoins in practice right now. My guess is that their theoretical value is probably lower than if you were to use the same resources to build more centralized systems like MPesa or Wave, but of course there’s less VC interest and also less of an easy path to profitability than from being subsidized by crypto speculation/fraud.
1. ^
  If I search around there’s certainly evidence of significant crypto uses in some places, but I’m not sure about the reliability of this evidence.