Linch 9 Sep 2023 7:33 UTC
127 points
34 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
I think people are overcomplicating this. You should generally follow the law, but to shield against risks that you are being such a stickler in unreasonable ways (trying to avoid “3 felonies a day”), you can just imagine whether uninvolved peers hearing about your actions would think a situation is obviously okay. Some potential ways to think about such peer groups:
1. What laws people in the country you live in think are absolutely normal and commonplace to break.
  1. For example, bribing police officers is generally illegal, but iiuc in some countries approximately everybody bribes police officers at traffic stops
2. What laws people in your home country think is illegitimate and thus worth breaking
  1. For example some countries ban homosexuality, but your typical American would not consider it blameworthy to be gay.
3. What laws other EAs (not affiliated in any way with your organization) think is okay to break.
  1. So far, candidates people gave include ag-gag laws and taking stimulants for undiagnosed ADHD.
    FWIW I’m not necessarily convinced that the majority of EAs agree here; I’d like to see polls.
4. What laws your non-EA friends think is totally okay to break
  1. For example, most college-educated Millennials would not consider downloading papers on Sci-Hub to be blameworthy.
I think a relatively conservative organization should find it permissive to break the law if and only if every possible reasonable peer group considers it acceptable, and a relatively liberal but probably acceptable organization may consider it permissive to break laws if some reasonable peer group considers it acceptable.

In the most problematic examples in question, all the alleged law-breaking I’m aware of (driving without a license^[1], pressuring someone to transport recreational drugs across borders) are not likely to be considered readily acceptable by any reasonable peer group, including other EAs.
This is similarly true for other law-breaking scandals I’ve heard about in the past, including theft, fraud, workplace sexual harassment, etc.
1. ^
  Puerto Rico is in the US
What links here?
- bruce's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by Ben Pace (9 Sep 2023 15:29 UTC; 62 points)

Help us make civilizational refuges happen

Linch13 Apr 2022 12:57 UTC

120 points

12 comments1 min readEA link

Linch 23 Jun 2021 1:18 UTC
116 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Linch’s Shortform
Red teaming papers as an EA training exercise?
I think a plausibly good training exercise for EAs wanting to be better at empirical/conceptual research is to deep dive into seminal papers/blog posts and attempt to identify all the empirical and conceptual errors in past work, especially writings by either a) other respected EAs or b) other stuff that we otherwise think of as especially important.
I’m not sure how knowledgeable you have to be to do this well, but I suspect it’s approachable for smart people who finish high school, and certainly by the time they finish undergrad^ with a decent science or social science degree.
I think this is good career building for various reasons:
- you can develop a healthy skepticism of the existing EA orthodoxy
  - I mean skepticism that’s grounded in specific beliefs about why things ought to be different, rather than just vague “weirdness heuristics” or feeling like the goals of EA conflict with other tribal goals.
    (I personally have not found high-level critiques of EA, and I have read many, to be particularly interesting or insightful, but this is just a personal take).
- you actually deeply understand at least one topic well enough to point out errors
- For many people and personalities, critiquing a specific paper/blog post may be a less hairy “entry point” into doing EA-research adjacent work than plausible alternatives like trying to form your own deep inside views on questions that are really open-ended and ambiguous like “come up with a novel solution in AI alignment” or “identify a new cause X”
- creates legible career capital (at least within EA)
- requires relatively little training/guidance from external mentors, meaning
  - our movement devotes less scarce mentorship resources into this
  - people with worse social skills/network/geographical situation don’t feel (as much) at a disadvantage for getting the relevant training
- you can start forming your own opinions/intuitions of both object-level and meta-level heuristics for what things are likely to be correct vs wrong.
- In some cases, the errors are actually quite big, and worth correcting (relevant parts of ) the entire EA movement on.
Main “cons” I can think of:
- I’m not aware of anybody successfully doing a really good critique for the sake of doing a really good critique. The most exciting things I’m aware of (publicly, zdgroff’s critique of Ng’s original paper on wild animal suffering, alexrjl’s critique of Giving Green. I also have private examples) mostly comes from people trying to deeply understand a thing for themselves, and then along the way spotting errors with existing work.
- It’s possible that doing deliberate “red-teaming” would make one predisposed to spot trivial issues rather than serious ones, or falsely identify issues where there aren’t any.
- Maybe critiques are a less important skill to develop than forming your own vision/research direction and executing on it, and telling people to train for this skill might actively hinder their ability to be bold & imaginative?
^ Of course, this depends on field. I think even relatively technical papers within EA are readable to a recent undergrad who cares enough, but this will not be true for eg (most) papers in physics or math.
What links here?

Linch 9 Dec 2022 1:26 UTC
111 points
35 ∶ 21
on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
I’m confused why people keep insisting this is a “CEA” decision even after Owen Cotton-Barratt’s clarification (which I assume everyone commenting has read).

I see the process on deciding to purchase Wytham Abbey as:
1. Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal to spend ~$15M for a conference center
2. His funder(s) were willing to give him money.
3. Effective Ventures agreed to be a fiscal sponsor.
To the extent that anyone is responsible for this decision, it’s primarily (1) Owen, and (2) his funder(s). I don’t think (3) is much to blame here. Also, CEA the organization is distinct from EV, their fiscal sponsor.
I think if you think this is an ineffective use of limited resources, you absolutely should feel entitled to critique it! In many ways this is what our movement is about! But I think you should place the burden of blame on the actual decision-makers, and not vaguely associated institutions.
What links here?
- CEA Disambiguation by Jeff Kaufman (19 Dec 2022 13:27 UTC; 134 points)
- CEA Disambiguation by jefftk (LessWrong; 19 Dec 2022 13:20 UTC; 24 points)

Linch 3 Dec 2022 4:25 UTC
108 points
1 ∶ 0
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.

EDIT 2023/02: I tentatively withhold my endorsement until this allegation is cleared up.
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.
What links here?
- Linch's comment on EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse by whistleblower9 (6 Feb 2023 21:05 UTC; 18 points)

Linch 1 Sep 2022 4:46 UTC
106 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Open EA Global
Not opinionating on the general point, but:
In her early 20s, Kelsey was taking leave from college for mental health reasons and babysitting her friends’ kid for room and board. If either of us had been in the student group, we would have been the least promising of the lot
IIRC, Kelsey was in fact the president of the Stanford EA student group, and I do not think she would’ve been voted “least likely to succeed” by the other members.
What links here?
- Linch's comment on Open EA Global by Scott Alexander (4 Sep 2022 16:27 UTC; 40 points)

[Question] What are some key numbers that (almost) every EA should know?

Linch18 Jun 2021 0:37 UTC

105 points

36 comments1 min readEA link

Linch 7 Feb 2023 3:29 UTC
104 points
27 ∶ 6
on: [Atlas Fellowship] Why do 100 high-schoolers need $50k each from Open Philanthropy?
Hi, I think on balance I appreciate this post. This is a hard thing for me to say, as the post has likely caused nontrivial costs to some people rather close to me, and has broken some norms that I view as both subtle and important. But on balance I think our movement will do better with more critical thinkers, and more people with critical pushback when there is apparent divergence between stated memes and revealed goals.
I think this is better both culturally, and also is directly necessary to combat actual harm if there is also actual large-scale wrongdoing that agreeable people have been acculturated to not point out. I think it will be bad for the composition and future of our movement if we push away young people who are idealistic and disagreeable, which I think is the default outcome if posts like this only receive critical pushback.
So thank you for this post. I hope you stay and continue being critical.
What links here?
- The number of burner accounts is too damn high by quinn (7 Feb 2023 7:04 UTC; 99 points)