MaxDalton

Tran­si­tion­ing to an ad­vi­sory role

Progress re­port on CEA’s search for a new CEO

• MaxDalton 12 Nov 2022 21:45 UTC

  156 points

  30 ∶ 0

  on: CEA/​EV + OP + RP should en­gage an in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tor to de­ter­mine whether key figures in EA knew about the (likely) fraud at FTX

  Hi, this is something we’re already exploring, but we are not in a position to say anything just yet.

  What links here?

  • FTX FAQ by Hamish McDoodles (13 Nov 2022 5:00 UTC; 144 points)
  • bruce's comment on CEA/​EV + OP + RP should en­gage an in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tor to de­ter­mine whether key figures in EA knew about the (likely) fraud at FTX by Tyrone-Jay Barugh (13 Nov 2022 1:49 UTC; 75 points)

Suggest can­di­dates for CEA’s next Ex­ec­u­tive Director

• MaxDalton 31 Jul 2022 15:26 UTC

  110 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA in the main­stream me­dia: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu

  Hey, yeah, for the last few months CEA and Forethought and a few other organizations have been working to try to help accurately explain EA and related ideas in the media. We’ve been working with experienced communications professionals. CEA recently also hired a Head of Communications to lead these efforts, and they’re starting in September. I think that it was a mistake on CEA’s part not to do more of this sooner.

  I think that there might be a post sharing more of about these efforts in the future (but not 100% sure this will happen).

Giv­ing What We Can & EA Funds now op­er­ate in­de­pen­dently of CEA

CEA up­date: Q1 2021

Things CEA is not doing

CEA’s head­count nearly dou­bled in 2021 (and other up­dates)

About this handbook

• MaxDalton 23 Sep 2022 19:12 UTC

  87 points

  6 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Vaidehi Agarwalla’s comment on: My Per­sonal Story of Re­jec­tion from EA Global

  Here’s an anonymous form where people can criticize us, in case that helps.

CEA Mid-year up­date (2020)

CEA grew a lot in the past year

• MaxDalton 25 Mar 2021 8:45 UTC

  84 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some quick notes on “effec­tive al­tru­ism”

  I asked my team about this, and Sky provided the following information. This quarter CEA did a small brand test, with Rethink’s help. We asked a sample of US college students if they had heard of “effective altruism.” Some respondents were also asked to give a brief definition of EA and a Likert scale rating of how negative/​positive their first impression was of “effective altruism.”

  Students who had never heard of “effective altruism” before the survey still had positive associations with it. Comments suggested that they thought it sounded good - effectiveness means doing things well; altruism means kindness and helping people. (IIRC, the average Likert scale score was 4+ out of 5). There were a small number of critiques too, but fewer than we expected. (Sorry that this is just a high-level summary—we don’t have a full writeup ready yet.)

  Caveats: We didn’t test the name “effective altruism” against other possible names. Impressions will probably vary by audience. Maybe “EA” puts off a small-but-important subsection of the audience we tested on (e.g. unusually critical/​free-thinking people).

  I don’t think this is dispositive—I think that testing other brands might still be a good idea. We’re currently considering trying to hire someone to test and develop the EA brand, and help field media enquiries. I’m grateful for the work that Rethink and Sky Mayhew have been doing on this.

  What links here?

  • sky's comment on Why I pre­fer “Effec­tive Altru­ism” to “Global Pri­ori­ties” by DirectedEvolution (29 Mar 2021 0:41 UTC; 17 points)

CEA’s work in 2022

The Effec­tive­ness Mindset

[Question] What are you grate­ful for?

• MaxDalton 1 Sep 2022 14:54 UTC

  71 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Red Team­ing CEA’s Com­mu­nity Build­ing Work

  Thank you so much for the effort that you put into this review. Your work is incredibly thorough, and I think it’s a public service to hold key organizations accountable.

  I also appreciate that you make clear that many of these issues occurred before 2019, and that CEA has been on a positive trajectory over the last few years.

  We had a chance to fact-check this post before it was published, and I haven’t re-read it since then, so I don’t have any substantive comments to add on what happened.

  Instead, I’ll focus on our actions and attitudes towards the suggestions you make. I generally won’t say too much about our future plans (we try to avoid making public commitments about our work, partly for reasons you explain in your post!).

  CEA should hire dedicated Metrics, Evaluation, and Learning staff

  This was already on a list of potential future hires. We may also shift one of our current staff (who could be a good fit for this area) into this sort of role (this move would be prompted by other factors, not this post in particular).

  However, overall I endorse that we focused on filling operational roles on our programs over this hire, because:

  • I feel like we have enough capacity within each team to reflect on that team’s work and make improvements: for example, the online team do a lot of data analysis and user interviews; and the events team do an in-depth analysis of EA Global survey responses after each event, making recommendations for what to change.

  • I feel like others (particularly OpenPhilanthropy) have provided broader-scope analysis that suggests that our programs are highly impactful.

  • I think that we’ve managed to make some exceptionally useful hires to our programs: e.g. events staff have helped us to ~quadruple our capacity at events this year. Given the last two points, I think that the marginal impact of these hires is greater than a Metrics/​Evaluation/​Learning hire.

  CEA should prioritize sharing evaluations publicly

  I think that you’re right that doing more of this would help others to learn from our experience, and allow others to more easily provide feedback on our work. These are benefits.

  I still feel pretty unsure whether they outweigh the costs of producing public reports, especially because I think much of our work relies on data that it’s hard to communicate about publicly. I discuss a couple of specific examples below. But thanks for this feedback—we’ll bear it in mind for the future.

  CEA should publish a post describing the process and benefits of its expansion and professionalization

  Thanks for this suggestion and the implicit positive feedback behind it—I think that you’re right that this could be helpful for some people, and I might write more on our experiences here in the future (though I’m also aware that we’re just one case study, and we don’t have all the answers).

  In the meantime, if people feel like they would benefit from hearing about CEA’s experience here, I would probably be happy to chat—feel free to message me on the Forum.

  CEA should clearly and explicitly communicate its strategy

  As you noted, I have a draft post on this which I may share at some point. For reference, our current strategy page is here.

  CEA should publish what it has learned about group support work and invest in structured evaluation

  As you acknowledge we have shared some of this publicly (and, for instance, Jack later edited his post to clarify that he had missed a recent public update where we share some reflections).

  Again, sharing more information publicly would be useful, but I’m not convinced that sharing things publicly vs. more privately with people actively working in the space is the right call.

  On quasi-experiments: my feeling is that overall these wouldn’t be cruxy for deciding whether this sort of work is worth doing at all (because I think that we have strong enough evidence, e.g. from OP’s survey, that this is likely the case).

  So then they’d be focused on finding the best way to achieve our goals. As background, we’re operating in quite a complex and judgement-driven domain (there aren’t nice outcome measures like there would be for studies of e.g. malaria). For this sort of setup, I think that we’re better off using a looser form of iteration, feedback, and case studies, and user interviews. (This is analogous to the pre-product-market-fit stage of a company where you’re not doing tonnes of A/​B testing or profit maximization, but are instead trying to get a richer sense of what products would be useful via user interviews etc.) I think that experiments/​quasi-experiments are much more useful for situations where there are clear outcome measures and the overall complexity of the environment is somewhat lower.

  Additionally, we have contracted someone (contract confirmed, however they are yet to start) who will be centralising and sharing tools that will be useful—potentially including an intro training for new group organisers.

  CEA should have a meaningful mistakes page, or no mistakes page

  As you mentioned, we tried to flag that the page was not going to be complete.

  We have updated our mistakes page to include many of the mistakes that you mention, particularly historic ones that we weren’t previously aware of. We also plan to link to this post from our mistakes page.

  I expect that you will think that this new page misses or underplays some important mistakes, and indeed there were some issues that you list that we deliberately decided not to include.

  On that page we say “We don’t list all the ways our projects were inefficient or suboptimal.” I think that we need to do this to limit the scope of the page and make it easier to decide what to include. I think that you may categorize some things as “mistakes” where I would say they’re “suboptimal”.

  Re the Funds issues: We think that these issues were resolved around the time that this project spun out of CEA, and then were reintroduced when we no longer controlled the project. We therefore view them as out of scope of the mistakes page, and we have tried to make this clearer in the introduction text.

  Overall, I believe that it’s better to have this page, which is at least relatively complete, than nothing at all. I’d be interested in others’ views here.

  CEA should consider creating a public dashboard of its commitments to others

  As mentioned to you, we maintained an internal dashboard of commitments in 2019, to address these issues. My impression (including from your report) is that these issues were mostly (but not totally) resolved by this and other processes.

  It’s not currently a priority to maintain a public or private dashboard of such commitments, partly because we generally try to avoid making public commitments about our plans.

  CEA should consider using targeted pilot programs

  This is something that we have done recently, for instance with the UGAP program, the biosecurity advisors pilot or the EA Librarian project.

  CEA should publish its internal evaluations of EA Grants

  I think that sharing these internal evaluations would not be particularly informative for other grantmakers or the community: the program clearly had serious issues, and I don’t think that it was sufficiently close to optimal that other grantmakers would learn much from it. In any case, the board and key grantmakers were informed of the status of the program and had the chance to ask more questions. Grantmakers have since been conducting better-run experiments of this sort (e.g. EA Funds and FTX’s recent experiments).

  Writing this up for the public would take valuable staff time, so I don’t think that this is worth the cost. The basic version would be easier to produce but seems even lower value, particularly given that the program has disbursed nothing in the last 3 years or so.

  The EA community should seriously engage with governance questions

  This is in the “EA community” section, but seems to be mostly directed at CEA, so I’ll respond to it too.

  CEA currently receives oversight and scrutiny from its board and its funders. They regularly (~weekly) share critical feedback with us, and annually appraise my performance. I’ve also recently been spending more time talking to community members (from different sections of the community) to ask for their input and feedback on our work. We have recently asked for (anonymous) feedback from community members. Additionally, we regularly receive public feedback (positive and negative) via surveys and public Forum posts/​comments. I don’t think that this is a setup with few opportunities for giving feedback, or little accountability.

  I think it’s pretty unclear whether there should be more, fewer or different people providing that accountability. I think that the current balance is OK all things considered. That being said, as we go through the operations spinoff and since the organization is growing the board is planning to think more about the right governance setup for CEA (and other organizations in the legal entity), and they may make some changes here. I expect these conversations to be mostly between CEA staff and the board, though they will probably consult other community members too.

  Implicitly, you’re suggesting that the appropriate place for discussion of CEA’s governance is in public. In contrast, I think CEA’s board holds that responsibility. Overall, I think that discussion is going to be more productive with a few highly-skilled and high-context individuals rather than a broad discussion. While I agree that getting broad community input into our work is important, I also think that it’s critical that we are held accountable for doing impactful work, which will not always be the same as what pleases community members.
  

  What links here?

  • Ask (Every­one) Any­thing — “EA 101” by Lizka (5 Oct 2022 10:17 UTC; 110 points)
  • AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on The FTX crisis high­lights a deeper cul­tural prob­lem within EA—we don’t suffi­ciently value good governance by Fods12 (17 Nov 2022 0:29 UTC; 67 points)
  • bruce's comment on Win­ners of the EA Crit­i­cism and Red Team­ing Contest by Lizka (1 Oct 2022 3:02 UTC; 47 points)
  • Guy Raveh's comment on Case Study of EA Global Re­jec­tion + Crit­i­cisms/​Solutions by Constance Li (23 Sep 2022 12:34 UTC; 37 points)
  • MaxDalton's comment on Red Team­ing CEA’s Com­mu­nity Build­ing Work by AnonymousEAForumAccount (27 Sep 2022 14:56 UTC; 2 points)

CEA’s 2020 An­nual Review

CEA’s Plans for 2021