Michael_PJ

Karma: 2,807

Michael_PJ 8 Nov 2025 12:42 UTC
12 points
8 ∶ 0
in reply to: Greg_Colbourn ⏸️ ’s comment on: Leaving Open Philanthropy, going to Anthropic
The content of your comment is not just “I disagree with the post”. It’s “I disagree with the post plus some implicature that the author is rationalizing an immoral decision”. So it’s quite reasonable for people to disagree with both the post and you.

Michael_PJ 30 Oct 2025 13:26 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Bridget L 🔸’s comment on: My EA Senescence
If the intellectual project is too taxing in an otherwise busy life (work, family, other interests etc), I’m not sure there’s a way to meaningfully re-engage the old-hand EAs.
This seems plausible to me. EA should be a community organized around doing the intellectual project, not a random social club.
(On the other hand, I am doing an EA activity, namely giving away money effectively. But there’s not much to talk about with that!)
So I think a very relevant question is just: is it actually useful or desirable to “retain” people like me? It depends on what we want the EA community to look like.

Michael_PJ 22 Oct 2025 16:20 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: My EA Senescence
I have not—maybe I should!

Michael_PJ 22 Oct 2025 16:04 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Henry Stanley 🔸’s comment on: My EA Senescence
Yes, I guess I didn’t go into this so much in the project post-mortem. But in short:
- The actual work that needed doing was not work that I was very good at or enjoyed. There was a lot of synoptic research and networking.
- There was a very high level of uncertainty about what we were doing. I think I deal fairly well with medium-level uncertainty, but much less well with high-level uncertainty.
- Much of this could have been overcome, but I think I fundamentally lacked the non-instrumental desire to become the kind of person who was good at the project; and the instrumental need wasn’t motivating enough. In practice this manifested as a lack of grit—if I had kept at it and pushed harder, maybe the project would have got further… but I don’t think I actually wanted to be in that position either!

Michael_PJ 21 Oct 2025 15:42 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jack_S🔸’s comment on: My EA Senescence
These are good ideas. I think I wrote this post in a bit of a negative frame of mind, thank you for the positive lens!

Michael_PJ 21 Oct 2025 15:41 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason Green-Lowe’s comment on: My EA Senescence
Yeah, those are somewhat reasonable. I guess then the question becomes: how to actually deploy those?

My EA Senescence

Michael_PJ19 Oct 2025 16:51 UTC

217 points

32 comments3 min readEA link

Michael_PJ 13 Oct 2024 14:04 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I think animal welfare is still very underfunded, and the problem is very bad. My main worry is tractabiilty, and whether we actually have levers to pull on to make a significant difference.

Michael_PJ 21 Apr 2024 12:06 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: What should the EA community learn from the FTX / SBF disaster? An in-depth discussion with Will MacAskill on the Clearer Thinking podcast
Okay yes, I agree that a driver of bank runs is the knowledge that the bank usually can’t cover all deposits, by design. So as long as you keep that fact secret you’re much less likely to face a run.
I am now unsure how to reason about the likelihood of a run-like scenario in this case.

Michael_PJ 19 Apr 2024 9:19 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform
The measures you list would have prevented some financial harm to FTXFF grantees, but it seems to me that that is not the harm that people have been most concerned about. I think it’s fair for Ben to ask about what would have prevented the bigger harms.

Michael_PJ 19 Apr 2024 9:17 UTC
8 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV
if any charity’s rationale for not being at least moderately open and transparent with relevant constituencies and the public is “we are afraid the CC will shut us down,” that is a charity most people would run away from fast, and for good reason
I do think a subtext of the reported discussion above is that the CC is not considered to be a necessarily trustworthy or fair arbiter here. “If we do this investigation then the CC may see things and take them the wrong way” means you don’t trust the CC to take them the right way. Now, I have no idea whether that is justified in this case, but it’s pretty consistent with my impression of government bureaucracies in general.
So it perhaps comes down to whether you previously considered the charity or the CC more trustworthy. In this case I think I trust EVF more.

Michael_PJ 19 Apr 2024 9:11 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 2
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: What should the EA community learn from the FTX / SBF disaster? An in-depth discussion with Will MacAskill on the Clearer Thinking podcast
He’d need a catastrophic stock/bond market crash, plus almost all depositors wanting out, to be unable to honor withdrawals.
I think this significantly under-estimates the likelihood of “bank run”-type scenarios. It is not uncommon for financial institutions with backing for a substantial fraction of their deposits to still get run out due a simple loss of confidence snowballing.

Michael_PJ 19 Apr 2024 8:59 UTC
41 points
18 ∶ 4
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Personal reflections on FTX
I feel like “if you get legal advice, follow it” is a pretty widely held and sensible broad principle, and violating it can have very bad personal consequences. I think the bar should be pretty high for someone violating that principle, and I’m not sure “avoiding quite a lot of frustration” meets that bar, especially since the magnitude of the frustration is only obvious in hindsight.

Michael_PJ 6 Apr 2024 22:52 UTC
16 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV
Thanks, I think this is all right. I think I didn’t write what I meant. I want more specificity, but I do agree with you that it’s wrong to expect full specificity (and that’s what I sounded like I was asking for).
What I want something more like “CEA should investigate the staff of EVF for whether they knew about X and Y”, not “Alice should investigate Bob and Carol for whether they knew about X and Y”.
I do think that specificity raises questions, and that this can be a good thing. I agree that it’s not reasonable for someone to work out e.g. exactly where the funding comes from, but I do think it’s reasonable for them to think in enough detail about what they are proposing to realise that a) it will need funding, b) possibly quite a lot of funding, c) this trades off against other uses of the money, so d) what does that mean for whether this is a good idea. Whereas if “EA” is going to do it, then we don’t need to worry about any of those things. I’m sure someone can just do it, right?

Michael_PJ 6 Apr 2024 9:42 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: A trilogy on anti-philanthropic misdirection
We do of course need to worry about the flip side: plenty of times (especially in political groups) you see people being told not to criticise the group’s positions because it will make it less likely that the public in general will buy the overall picture (which the critic probably still agrees with). This can be pretty toxic.
I don’t think Richard is advocating for that, but I think it’s a risk once you legitimize this kind of argument.

Michael_PJ 4 Apr 2024 9:24 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RobBensinger’s comment on: Why hasn’t EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?
At some point it surely has to be the case that they’ve done enough.
This doesn’t seem true? It makes perfect sense for advocacy groups to continue advocating their position, since a lot of the point is to reach people for whom the message is new. 80k is (or at least was) all about how to use your career for good, I would expect them to always be talking about earning to give as an option.

Michael_PJ 4 Apr 2024 9:21 UTC
63 points
24 ∶ 14
in reply to: RobBensinger’s comment on: Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV
I think I agree with Hypothetical EA that we basically know the broad picture.
- Probably nobody was actually complicit or knew there was fraud; and
- Various people made bad judgement calls and/or didn’t listen to useful rumours about Sam
I guess I’m just… satisfied with that? You say:
But there are plenty of people, both within EA and outside of it, who legitimately just want to know what happened, and will be very reassured to have a clearer picture of the basic sequence of events, which orgs did a better or worse job, which processes failed or succeeded.
.. why? None of this seems that important to me? Most of it seems like a matter for the person/org in question to reflect/improve on. Why is it important for “plenty of people” to learn this stuff, given we already know the broad picture above?
I would sum up my personal position as:
- We got taken for a ride, so we should take the general lesson to be more cautious of charismatic people with low scruples, especially bearing large sums of money.
- If you or your org were specifically taken for a ride you should reflect on why that happened to you and why you didn’t listen to the people who did spot what was going on.

Michael_PJ 4 Apr 2024 9:06 UTC
41 points
18 ∶ 14
in reply to: RobBensinger’s comment on: Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV
I’m against doing further investigation. I expressed why I think we have already spent too much time on this here.
I also think your comments are falling into the trap of referring to “EA” like it was an entity. Who specifically should do an investigation, and who specifically should they be investigating? (This less monolithic view of EA is also part of why I don’t feel as bothered by the the whole thing: so maybe some people in “senior” positions made some bad judgement calls about Sam. They should maybe feel bad. I’m not sure we should feel much collective guilt about that.)

Michael_PJ 27 Mar 2024 11:53 UTC
17 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey
On the object level, the original question was:

> Are financial statements going to be released? In particular, how much was spent on estate agent fees, maintaince and bills? And the value of the events hosted. Is the reason for the change that EA has less money or that there was an error in the initial reasoning for buying it?
Even given the context I think this is asking too much. I would support a question like “I would love to know what the reasoning was: in particular, was the project financially unsustainable or were there other reasons?”.
Asking whether the financial statements for the project are going to be published is asking for way more information than is necessary or useful. From the follow up question, it sounds like Dean is interested in doing a financial audit of the project and maybe thinks they were paying too much on maintenance or something? (Apologies if I’m putting words in your mouth, Dean, but I’m trying to talk about how it comes across to me as a reader) This doesn’t seem like a reasonable avenue for Forum commenters to be encouraged to push down.
On the meta level, while there are not that many items at this level, the calls for random transparency are constant. Look at almost any post made by an EA org and you will see people asking for everything from full financial statements, to written documentation of hiring processes, to extensive reports on all kinds of internal operations.
To put it another way, by all means ask for transparency when it matters… but stick to when it matters, please!

Michael_PJ 26 Mar 2024 17:24 UTC
86 points
39 ∶ 5
in reply to: MvK🔸’s comment on: Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey
I think there is a bit of tendency to assume that it is appropriate to ask for arbitrary amounts of transparency from EA orgs. I don’t think this is a good norm: transparency has costs, often significant, and constantly asking for all kinds of information (often with a tone that suggests that it ought to be presented) is I think often harmful.