MaxDalton

• MaxDaltonJun 12, 2023, 2:51 PM

  28 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: Effec­tive al­tru­ism or­ga­ni­za­tions should avoid us­ing “po­lariz­ing tech­niques”

  Thanks! I agree with this post.

  I notice that I want to reframe this more positively, as “If you meet someone who is not a good fit for your approach to doing good, you should try to signpost them to communities/​organizations that are a better fit”. (But maybe that’s saying something importantly different from your point?)

• MaxDaltonMay 3, 2023, 9:52 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Suggest can­di­dates for CEA’s next Ex­ec­u­tive Director

  Thanks for the feedback! We’re still discussing how we should get community input on visions later on in the process, so I don’t yet have a clear answer, sorry. One thing that we’ve (briefly) discussed is asking candidates (probably anonymously) to share their visions on the Forum, for people to comment on. But there’s some disagreement among committee members about whether that would make sense, and it might depend a bit on the visions/​candidates, so we don’t have firm plans yet.

• MaxDaltonApr 28, 2023, 2:49 PM

  20 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sol3:2’s comment on: Suggest can­di­dates for CEA’s next Ex­ec­u­tive Director

  I’m not sure if this is answering your first question, but they wouldn’t just be CEO for two weeks! Instead we’d design particular work trials to test attributes they would need in the role, set up meetings for them to get to know staff and stakeholders, and give them time and information to begin to develop a vision for CEA.

  Re your second question: as we say, this is our ideal but we’d shape things around candidates. We know that this might not work for some candidates, but we think that it would work for others. If it did work out for candidates, it would give both us and them a lot more information, and we think that would be worthwhile. If this didn’t work out, we’d work with candidates to find other ways of testing fit (shorter trial tasks, references, etc).

Suggest can­di­dates for CEA’s next Ex­ec­u­tive Director

• MaxDaltonApr 24, 2023, 11:30 AM

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: But what has EA done? A call for ac­cu­rate sound­bites.

  If they don’t trust GW, why would they trust your calculation, which also rests on GW’s analysis? Here’s a spreadsheet with GW’s analysis: I think that the 159,000 figure is just them doing a pretty similar BOTEC to yours, but across all of their top charities (and they seem to have a higher figure for total donations to AMF, not sure what’s driving the difference there).

• MaxDaltonApr 24, 2023, 8:37 AM

  3 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aaron R’s comment on: What do you think?

  Thanks! I edited—does it seem clearer now?

• MaxDaltonApr 24, 2023, 8:32 AM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: But what has EA done? A call for ac­cu­rate sound­bites.

  Moreover, GiveWell estimate that “GiveWell-directed donations to our recommended charities between 2009 and 2021 will avert over 159,000 deaths” (accounting for all top charities, not just AMF).

• MaxDaltonApr 3, 2023, 10:07 AM

  10 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Some up­dates to my think­ing in light of the FTX col­lapse by Owen Cot­ton Bar­ratt [Link Post]

  Here’s a post from a few months ago where they announced the event. (Maybe this is what Owen wanted to link to.)

• MaxDaltonApr 3, 2023, 9:30 AM

  6 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Diego Oliveira 🔸’s comment on: Our fi­nal cen­tury?

  1. I’m not sure, but I’ll ask someone who knows to respond. (Though looks like you managed to delete a comment below, so maybe you figured it out?)

  2. I think another thing you could do is message the author (go to their profile page and then click “message”), but I think that commenting is also fine. Pointing out typos is an act of community service, so I think that people will be OK with you leaving the comment up!

• MaxDaltonMar 30, 2023, 7:28 AM

  8 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Some up­dates to my think­ing in light of the FTX col­lapse by Owen Cot­ton Bar­ratt [Link Post]

  I interpreted that as “against exceptionalism” or “place lower credence in EA exceptionalism”, but I’m not sure.

• MaxDaltonMar 29, 2023, 9:59 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Diego Oliveira 🔸’s comment on: Our fi­nal cen­tury?

  Fixed, thanks!

Tran­si­tion­ing to an ad­vi­sory role

• MaxDaltonDec 23, 2022, 6:51 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: RobertJones’s comment on: CEA’s work in 2022

  You can read a bit more about why we did this here. We handed the funding side off to OP, and we hoped someone else would take on the support side, but no-one did. OP are currently handling funding only, and we would work on support only, which reduces much of the risk of duplication.

  I’ll ask someone on the groups team to explain more about why we’re more optimistic about our approach now.

• MaxDaltonDec 22, 2022, 10:37 AM

  33 points

  10 ∶ 7

  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: CEA’s work in 2022

  Hey Ryan, thanks for writing this up—keen to explain this and reflect more.

  First, I do think that I could have written this post better: e.g. given the disclaimer about not focusing on FTX up front.

  I think that a lot of this is a substantive disagreement about how CEA’s year went, which I think might be driven by a substantive disagreement about what CEA is.^[1]

  I’m aware that some people (possibly including you) have a model that’s a bit like “CEA is responsible for what happens in the EA community. A big bad thing happened to the EA community, so CEA is responsible, and so they had a pretty bad year.” (I expect that this is a bit of an oversimplification of your view, but hopefully it helps make the direction clear.)

  An oversimplification of my view is “CEA is responsible for running EAG, EAGx, UGAP, groups support, virtual programs, the EA Forum, EA.org. A couple of these things had middling years, but many of them seemed to grow or improve significantly (like 5x, 2.9x growth). So CEA had a pretty good year, and “a year of continued growth” is a good summary.”

  The key way in which that is an oversimplification is that the Community Health & Special Projects team does have a broader mandate: scanning for risks and trajectory changes to the community and trying to address them. As mentioned in that section, we clearly didn’t prioritise or eliminate this risk—we’re reflecting on how much that was a mistake, versus a good decision (to focus on other significant risks). We are reflecting on what we should do differently to reduce this and related risks in the future, and we’ll communicate more about that in due course. As I say in response to Larks, there may well be things that we end up thinking were big mistakes here, that should cause us to course-correct (and should go on our mistakes page). But we’re not yet confident in if/​what the mistakes were, so we didn’t want to add them in this post yet. I should have noted that in that section though—I’ll go and edit.

  So one way I think of this is, should CEA’s annual review be kinda the same thing as EA’s annual review? If I were writing EA’s annual review, there would be a bunch of negative stuff in there, and the overall tone would be pretty different to the above. If this is what CEA’s annual review should be, I did a pretty bad job and you’re right.

  Or should it be more like Rethink Priorities^[2] annual review? I think that Rethink Priorities could reasonably be like “Our core work went well! (Footnote: though it’s impact may be attenuated by one of EA’s major funders blowing up in a very visible way. We’ll reflect on what that changes for us.)” I think there’s a legit version of CEA’s annual review that is like this, if you view CEA as more being responsible for running EAG, groups support, etc.

  Overall, I think that CEA is clearly somewhere in between these extremes—we’re more focused on and accountable for how EA overall goes than RP are. But my current take, based on how I view CEA’s role/​mandate, is that it’s a bit more on the “Rethink Priorities” end, whereas I guess you think it’s more on the “EA annual review” end. I expect that this partly explains why I took a different approach to the annual review.

  Going through your nitpicks:

  • Agree that morale dipped around FTX stuff. My impression is that it’s more back-to-normal, but we should probably have noted this. (And I think it’s a caveat to the overall thing of “doubled the team size and maintained morale/​retention” thing though.)

  • Yep, some of the growth was due to FTX attention (but again, this feels like a bit of a footnote—a significant majority of the growth was not to do with FTX, and I think that the FTX growth was an example of the Forum providing real value, by helping people to process the news).

  • This is a fair point about Forum quality—I’m aware that some people think this. Our current take, having looked into this a bit and looked over top post lists from previous years, is that the quality is pretty constant but that people are struggling to find the most interesting posts as post volume has increased. This is still a problem, and something that we’re looking to fix. I think that this is an important amendment to the statement in the post, and something I’ll correct.

  • Understatement of the FTX thing—I agree the tone is maybe a bit bland here, but I’m not sure it really understates it? “Community took a significant hit” seems about the right level.

  To sum up, despite the big-picture disagreement above, I think that you’re right that we should have added a bit more on the setbacks and caveats to the big picture. But my perspective is that the big picture on CEA’s year really is positive.
  

  1. ^

     As a meta point, I’m aware that I’m clearly biased to think that CEA went well, and to want to say that CEA went well. This post is an attempt to accurately convey the big picture as I see it, but I’m aware that I may be biased here! I think that I can speak somewhat definitively to how I view CEA’s scope though.

  2. ^

     I chose Rethink Priorities kind of at random as an example—this could be many EA orgs, and I don’t mean it to reflect anything on RP in particular.

• MaxDaltonDec 22, 2022, 10:35 AM

  6 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: CEA’s work in 2022

  Thanks—that’s a good point. We do discuss this in the latter sections of the post, but I think you’re right that we should have mentioned it up front to set expectations.

• MaxDaltonDec 21, 2022, 7:03 PM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: CEA’s work in 2022

  Re criticism contest, agree that it’s a disappointment that that contest didn’t surface more criticism of FTX. I also think that overall it drove some meaningful and useful criticism of core EA ideas and institutions, and that’s worth highlighting. Not sure if we got the right balance between those two sides in the post.

• MaxDaltonDec 21, 2022, 6:31 PM

  23 points

  5 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: CEA’s work in 2022

  Hi Larks, as we mentioned in the post (especially the last two sections) we’re actively reflecting on what, if anything, we should have done differently around FTX. I’m not yet confident what the conclusion of that will be, so it seemed premature to include it in the mistakes section, but maybe we should have mentioned it still.

  Once we’re done with our reflection, we’ll share more about our takeaways and (if necessary) update our mistakes page etc.

• MaxDaltonDec 21, 2022, 9:51 AM

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: RobertJones’s comment on: The case for trans­par­ent spending

  FYI we just posted our annual review here.

CEA’s work in 2022

• MaxDaltonDec 11, 2022, 9:51 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: More to ex­plore on ‘The Effec­tive­ness Mind­set’

  I think there’s currently a bug with sequences—we’re aware and someone’s looking into a fix.