Linch

Karma: 24,391

Linch 23 Apr 2024 23:40 UTC
6 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: ixex’s comment on: On failing to get EA jobs: My experience and recommendations to EA orgs
A relevant reframing here is whether having a PhD provides a high Bayes factor update to being hired. Eg, if people with and without PhDs have a 2% chance of being hired, but “>50% of successful applicants had a PhD” because most applicants have a PhD, then you should probably not include this, but if 1 in 50 applicants are hired, but it rises to 1 in 10 people if you have a PhD and falls to 1 in 100 if you don’t, then the PhD is a massive evidential update even if there is no causal effect.

Linch 23 Apr 2024 1:50 UTC
16 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Motivation gaps: Why so much EA criticism is hostile and lazy
@JWS asked the question: why do EA critics hate EA so much? Are all EA haters just irrational culture warriors?
I genuinely don’t know if this is an interesting/relevant question that’s unique to EA. To me, the obvious follow-up question here is whether EA is unique or special in having this (average) level of vitriol in critiques of us? Like is the answer to “why so much EA criticism is hostile and lazy” the same answer to “why is so much criticism, period, hostile and lazy?” Or are there specific factors of EA that’s at all relevant here?

I haven’t been sufficiently embedded in other intellectual or social movements. I was a bit involved in global development before and don’t recall much serious vitirol, maybe something like Easterly or Moyo are closest. I guess maybe MAGA implicitly doesn’t like global dev?

But otoh I’ve heard of other people involved in say animal rights who say that the “critiques” of EA are all really light and milquetoast by comparison.
I’d really appreciate answers from people who have been more “around the block” than I have.

Linch 23 Apr 2024 0:00 UTC
48 points
14 ∶ 1
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
Sure, social aggression is a rather subjective call. I do think decoupling/locality norms are relevant here. “Garden variety incompetence” may not have been the best choice of words on Sean’s part,^[1] but it did seem like a) a locally scoped comment specifically answering a question that people on the forum understandably had, b) much of it empirically checkable (other people formerly at FHI, particularly ops staff, could present their perspectives re: relationship management), and c) Bostom’s capacity as director is very much relevant to the discussion of the organization’s operations or why the organization shut down.
Your comment first presents what I consider to be a core observation that is true and important, namely, FHI did a lot of good work, and this type of magic might not be easy to replicate if you do everything with apparent garden-variety competence. But afterwards, it also brought in a bunch of what I consider to be extraneous details on Sean’s competency, judgment, and integrity. The points you raise are also more murkily defined and harder to check. So overall I think of your comment as more escalatory.
1. ^
  or maybe it was under the circumstances. I don’t know the details here, maybe the phrase was carefully chosen.

Linch 22 Apr 2024 21:14 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
Interesting example! I don’t know much about Tate, but I understand him as a) only “influential” in a very ephemeral way, in the way that e.g. pro wrestlers are, and b) only influential among people who themselves aren’t influential.

It’s possible we aren’t using the word “influential” in the same way. E.g. implicit in my understanding of “influential” is something like “having influence on people who matter” whereas maybe you’re just defining it as “having influence on (many) people, period?”

Linch 22 Apr 2024 20:40 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 8
in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
I claim that on net FHI would’ve brought more prestige to Oxford than the other way around, especially in the counterfactual world where it thrived/was allowed to thrive (which might be impractical for other reasons).

Linch 22 Apr 2024 20:37 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
I might not be tracking all the exact nuances, but I’d have thought that prestige is ~just legible influence aged a bit, in the same way that old money is just new money aged a bit. I model institutions like Oxford as trying to play the “long game” here.

Linch 22 Apr 2024 3:41 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Hamish McDoodles’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
Erm, looking at the accomplishments of FHI, I’d be genuinely surprised if random philosophers from Oxford will be nearly as influential going forwards. “It’s the man that honors the medal.”

Linch 22 Apr 2024 3:27 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
The vast majority of academic philosophy at prestigious universities will be relegated to the dustbins of history, FHI’s work is quite plausibly an exception.

To be clear, this is not a knock on philosophy; I’d guess that total funding for academic philosophy in the world is on the order of 1B. Most things that are 0.001% of the world economy won’t be remembered much 100 years from now. I’d guess philosophy in general punches well above its weight here, but base rates are brutal.

Linch 22 Apr 2024 3:23 UTC
13 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
Yeah I made a similar point here.

Linch 22 Apr 2024 3:09 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 3
in reply to: finm’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
What a champ. if institutions can be heroes, FHI is surely one.

Linch 22 Apr 2024 2:58 UTC
51 points
17 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report
...I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization...
Fwiw I think part of the issue that I had^[1] with your comment is that the comment came across much more aggressively and personally, rather than as a critique of an organization. I do think the bar for critiquing individuals ought to be moderately higher than the bar for critiquing organizations. Particularly when the critique comes from a different place/capacity^[2] than strictly necessary for the conversation^[3].

I expect some other people like JWS had a similar reaction to me, and stronger in magnitude. I did think your comment was on net useful for the conversation (not including the more global effects/externalities).
1. ^
  Before your comment blew up, I upvoted/agreevoted it because I do think there’s a true and important point to be made about FHI being much more successful at doing future-of-humanityish research than “peer” organizations that are more successful at looking like a normal/respectable organization. But I did wince (and didn’t strong upvote). I also lacked the information necessary to judge whether your perceived causal models were correct.
2. ^
  Put another way, I read your comment as quite far on the “contextualizing” end of contextualizaing vs decoupling norms, and I expected more decoupling in online spaces we both frequent.
3. ^
  Eg, if this was a fundraising post for CSER, or a post similar to the Conjecture critique, public criticisms of Sean in his capacity as director might be necessary. Similarly, if Sean made logical errors locally in his comment, or displayed poor reading comprehension, or was overly aggressive, criticisms of him in his capacity as an internet commentator may be necessary.

Linch 15 Apr 2024 19:45 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Introducing Open Asteroid Impact
People who prefer short videos to longform text might enjoy SereneDesiree’s interview of me talking about Open Asteroid Impact’s work:

We covered:
- Our mission to have as much impact as possible and reshape the Earth
- OAI’s approach to safety
- Competitors
- Our commitment to DEI
- Our windfall clause

Linch 14 Apr 2024 2:57 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: David T’s comment on: Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philanthropy’s large grants be longer than 1 paragraph?
I ’d expect there would be some details of some applications that wouldn’t be appropriate to share on a public forum though
Hopefully grantees can opt-in/out as appropriate! They don’t need so share everything.

Linch 13 Apr 2024 22:24 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philanthropy’s large grants be longer than 1 paragraph?
Grantees are obviously welcome to do this. That said, my guess is that this will make the forum less enjoyable/useful for the average reader, rather than more.

Linch 12 Apr 2024 21:19 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund
Thank you! This is a good point; your analysis makes a lot of sense to me.

Linch 10 Apr 2024 11:32 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: David Mathers’s Quick takes
This entire thread just demonstrates how confused and useless it is to argue “by definition”, or argue about term definitions.
You keep inserting words into people’s mouths lmao. Nobody said “by definition” before you did. (Control-F for “by definition” if you don’t believe me).

I did not miss your “if.” I didn’t think it was necessary to go into the semantics dive because I thought the analogy would be relatively clear. Let me try again:
In general, when someone says X group is Y, a reasonable interpretation is that members of X group are more likely to be Y. If you are being Gricean, somebody saying A is a member of X implies that they think A is a fairly central member of X and thus are more likely to exhibit Y.
In colloquial English, “X is Y” almost never means “if X, then Y, for all values of X and Y”. Eg, if somebody said “men are taller than women” you should take this as a claim about statistical averages, not a claim that all men are taller than all women.
Similarly, if you see someone say something like “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites” you should interpret this as a claim that Nazis are on average significantly less respectful to nonwhites than other people would be to nonwhites. If you assume someone’s being Gricean when they said that, you might further assume that they believe that the specific Nazi they’re referring to exhibits similar behaviors to other Nazis on at least this dimension.
You should not interpret it as “every single Nazi is disrespectful to every single nonwhite person, in every case and in full generality.” I don’t think this is difficult. I don’t think you’d genuinely object to a claim “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites,” despite cases like allying with Imperial Japan, or adopting a swastika from Indian culture, or John Rabe. Even if the Nazis writ large made an entire exception for an entire ethnicity of people (eg suppose they were never disrespectful to the Japanese), I’d still consider the basic claim “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites” to be approximately correct, and would not go all out of my way to continuously correct every incidence of that remark with “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites who are not Japanese.”^[1]
Analogies aside, let’s go back to Yarrow’s original claim:
I find it so maddeningly short-sighted to praise a white supremacist for being “respectful”. White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!
I think your attempt at a gotcha fails. For the same reason that it’s reasonable for someone to say men are taller than women without being immediately disproven as soon as you find a woman who’s taller than a man, or that Nazis are disrespectful of nonwhites despite allying with Japan.
Before writing angry/inflammatory replies, I recommend reading the actual text.
1. ^
  And I certainly won’t say the claim overall is false just because of a class ^[2]of exceptions! This is very much not how English works.
2. ^
  It’d be even more absurd to rate the claim as false due to a single exception

Linch 10 Apr 2024 8:01 UTC
22 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: David Mathers’s Quick takes
The comment you’re replying to has somewhat sloppy language and reasoning. Unfortunately your comment managed to be even worse.
If white supremacists are by definition non-respectful to non-white people, and Hanania appears fairly respectful to non-white people, perhaps that allows us to conclude that Hanania does not, in fact, qualify for your definition of “white supremacist”?
This line of reasoning is implausible. If having a single nonwhite person over on a podcast without being rude is strong evidence against white supremacy, trusting nonwhite people enough to ally with you in a war is surely even better evidence.
The literal historical Nazis allied in a literal war with literal historical Imperial Japan (a country which is mostly nonwhite). While I don’t personally like to throw around phrases like “white supremacy” very often, I think reasonable people can agree that Nazis are white supremacists.

Linch 9 Apr 2024 23:22 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philanthropy’s large grants be longer than 1 paragraph?
(Appreciate the upvote!)

At a high level, l I’m of the opinion that we practice better reasoning transparency than ~all EA funding sources outside of global health, e.g. a) I’m responding to your thread here and other people have not, b) (I think) people can have a decent model of what we actually do rather than just an amorphous positive impression, and c) I make an effort of politely delivering messages that most grantmakers are aware of but don’t say because they’re worried about flack.
It’s really not obvious that this is the best use of limited resources compared to e.g. engaging with large donors directly or having very polished outwards-facing content, but I do think criticizing our lack of public output is odd given that we invest more in it than almost anybody else.

(I do wonder if there’s an effect where because we communicate our overall views so much, we become a more obvious/noticeable target to criticize.)
This illustrates CE shares much more information about the interventions they support than EA Funds’ shares about the grants for which there are longer write-ups. So it is possible to have a better picture of CE’s work than EA Funds’. This is not to say CE’s donors actually have a better picture of CE’s work than EA Funds’ donors have of EA Funds’ work. I do not know how whether CE’s donors look into their reports.
Well, I haven’t read CE’s reports. Have you?
I think you have a procedure-focused view where the important thing is that articles are written, regardless of whether they’re read. I mostly don’t personally think it’s valuable to write things people don’t read. (though again for all I know CE’s reports are widely read, in which case I’d update!) And it’s actually harder to write things people want to read than to just write things.
(To be clear, I think there are exceptions. Eg all else equal, writing up your thoughts/cruxes/BOTECs are good even if nobody else reads them because it helps with improving quality of thinking).
How about just making some applications public, as Austin suggested? I actually think it would be good to make public the applications of all grants EA Funds makes, and maybe even rejected applications.
We’ve started working on this, but no promises. My guess is that making public the rejected applications is more valuable than accepted ones, eg on Manifund. Note that grantees also have the option to upload their applications as well (and there are less privacy concerns if grantees choose to reveal this information).

Linch 9 Apr 2024 23:11 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philanthropy’s large grants be longer than 1 paragraph?
Hmm, I still think your numbers are not internally consistent but I don’t know if it’s worth getting into.

Linch 8 Apr 2024 23:35 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund’s Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA
Really late to respond to this! Just wanted to quickly say that I’ve been mulling over this question for a while and don’t have clear/coherent answers; hope other people (at EAIF and elsewhere) can comment with either more well-thought-out responses or their initial thoughts!