Michael_PJ

Karma: 2,526

Keep EA high-trust

Michael_PJ22 Dec 2022 14:58 UTC

155 points

45 comments4 min readEA link

Michael_PJ 17 Nov 2022 16:44 UTC
117 points
36 ∶ 20
on: Some important questions for the EA Leadership
(This is an annoyed post. Having re-read it, I think it’s mostly not mean, but please downvote it if you think it is mean and I’ll delete it.)
I have a pretty negative reaction to this post, and a number of similar others in this vein. Maybe I should write a longer post on this, but my general observation is that many people have suddenly started looking for the “adults in the room”, mostly so that they can say “why didn’t the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?”, and that they have decided that “EA Leadership” are the adults.
But I’m not sure “EA Leadership” is really a thing, since EA is a movement of all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, and so “EA Leadership” fails to identify specific people who actually have any responsibility towards you. The result is that these kinds of questions end up either being vague or suggesting some kind of mysterious shadowy council of “EA Leaders” who are secretly doing naughty things.
It gets worse! When people do look for an identifiable figure to blame, the only person who looks vaguely like a leader is Will, so they pick on him. But Will is not the CEO of EA! He’s a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff. But people really want him to be the CEO of EA so they can be angry that he’s not being more CEO-like, and that seems pretty unfair to me.
But I think the reality is: there are no adults in the room, who are managing everything behind the scenes, and who you can be angry at for failing you. There are a lot of people doing various specific ways, and working with each other in various more-or-less coordinated ways. “EA” does not do things, “EA” did not “endorse” SBF. Some specific individuals may have done this, but the shadowy council of EA Leadership did not meet at midnight to declare SBF the Chosen Saviour.
Habryka gave nice answers to the questions already, which is great. Here are some grumpy answers:
- Why is the attendance of the Coordination forum secret? Why should it be open? It’s a get-together for some people to talk to each other, why are they obliged to be super-transparent to you? It’s not the Secret Gathering of EA Leadership.
- Why did Will not consult people before he talked to Elon? Because he’s an individual who can do his own thing, and there’s no Council of Elders of EA to be “consulted” at times like this.
- Why did Will not adopt Zoe’s suggestions? Is that Will’s job? To enforce the uptake of structural reforms across EA? Sounds like the sort of thing the CEO of an organization might be responsible for… but Will isn’t the CEO of EA.
- Why isn’t Will doing something about people hero-worshipping him? Because that’s also not his job? If you’re concerned about people hero-worshipping Will, perhaps you should get angry at the people doing it instead of Will, who’s not obviously doing anything to encourage it.
- Why has the community health team not solved emergent social problems on the forum? Because that’s hard? And maybe also not their job? Perhaps we as a community should be being nicer to people.
- What is the decision-making procedure for things going into the media? There probably isn’t one? That would imply a some kind of central EA comms org, which doesn’t exist. CEA has a comms department, but I think they mostly help people out when requested. Probably any number of orgs do their own comms stuff as they see fit.
- I won’t comment on Carrick except that Habryka points out that Carrick did it, again, no anointing by EA Leadership or anything.
To be clear, I’m not saying we as a community get a free pass, nor that specific individuals or organizations shouldn’t get some criticism. I just think we should avoid imagining centralized loci of control that don’t really exist.
What links here?
- Ubuntu's comment on Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed” by Nathan Young (18 Mar 2023 19:08 UTC; 4 points)

Michael_PJ 7 Feb 2023 9:20 UTC
109 points
43 ∶ 7
on: The number of burner accounts is too damn high
I’m concerned that there’s an information cascade going on. That is, some claims were made about people being negatively affected by having posted public criticism; as a result some people made critical posts anonymously; that reinforces the perception that the original claim is true; more people post anonymously; the cycle continues.

But I just roll to disbelieve that people facing bad consequences for posting criticism is a serious problem. I can totally believe that it has happened at some point, but I’d be very surprised if it’s widespread. Especially given how mild some of the stuff that’s getting anonymously posted is!

So I think there’s a risk that we meme ourselves into thinking there’s an object level problem when there actually isn’t. I would love to know what if any actual examples we have of this happening.

Michael_PJ 26 Jun 2023 15:00 UTC
104 points
25 ∶ 5
on: Decision-making and decentralisation in EA
Thank you! This post says very well a lot of things I had been thinking and feeling in the last year but not able to articulate properly.
I think it’s very right to say that EA is a “do-ocracy”, and I want to focus in on that a bit. You talked about whether EA should become more or less centralized, but I think it’s also interesting to ask “Should EA be a do-ocracy?”
My response is a resounding yes: this aspect of EA feels (to me) deeply linked to an underrated part of the EA spirit. Namely, that the EA community is a community of people who not only identify problems in the world, but take personal action to remedy them.
- I love that we have a community where random community members who feel like an idea is neglected feel empowered to just do the research and write it up.
- I love that we have a community where even those who do not devote much of their time to action take the very powerful action of giving effectively and significantly.
- I love that we have a community where we fund lots of small experimental projects that people just though should exist.
- I love that most of our “big” orgs started with a couple of people in a basement because they thought it was a good idea.
Honoring the taking of action and supporting people who take action is really great and I hope it remains a core part of EA culture indefinitely.
I always feel a bit sad when I see “EA should …” posts. I want to say: “Maybe you should do it! Look at the fire within you that made you write that long critique, could you nurture that into a fire that could actually make it happen?”. The idea that you might just write an angry critique and hope that some mandarin with centralized power will pick it up is very sad to me and antithecal to (my conception of) the EA spirit.
I think this is related to an important feature of a do-ocracy which is that you don’t have any voice if you don’t do. You can persuade, but nobody has any obligation whatsoever to listen to you. It’s not a democracy (and that’s good). I think this confuses people a lot.
I definitely think there’s a “generational” thing here. For those of us who’ve been around long enough to see how everything came from nothing but people doing things they thought needed to be done, it’s perfectly obvious. But I can very much see how if you join the community today it looks like there are these serious, important organizations who are In Charge. But I do think it’s still not really true.
What links here?
- Why I’m still going out to bat for the EA movement post FTX by Gemma Paterson (30 Sep 2023 15:02 UTC; 161 points)

Michael_PJ 14 Jan 2023 14:56 UTC
90 points
48 ∶ 8
in reply to: aella’s comment on: Thread for discussing Bostrom’s email and apology
Let us take a moment of sympathy for the folks at CEA (who are, after all, or allies in the flight to make the world better). Scant weeks ago they were facing harsh criticism for failing to quickly make the conventional statement about the FTX scandal. Now they’re facing criticism for doing exactly that. I’m glad I’m not comms director at CEA for sure.

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.

Michael_PJ 4 Apr 2024 9:21 UTC
65 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 18 Jan 2023 14:49 UTC
61 points
20 ∶ 4
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Doing EA Better
As a weak counter-point to this, I have found in the past that experts who are not value-aligned can almost find EA ways of thinking incomprehensible, such that it can be very difficult to extract useful information from them. I have experienced talking to a whole series of non-EA experts and really struggling to get them to even engage with the questions I was asking (a lot of “I just haven’t thought about that”), whereas I got a ton of value very quickly from talking to an EA grad student in the area.

Michael_PJ 23 Feb 2023 17:56 UTC
60 points
19 ∶ 1
on: EA is too New & Important to Schism
One thing I’d really like to see is more experimentation inside the community.

For example, there was some discussion about democratic control of funding decisions. This isn’t something we need to centrally decide, you can just… start doing it. Start a fund that makes decisions democratically! I bet you’d get funding from the EAIF even.

Got a great idea for how to set up codes of conduct to make diverse people feel welcome? Try them in your local group and report back on how they work!

I wish people felt more empowered to do this kind of thing. That’s how we got our existing organisations and institutions: someone just went ahead and started doing it. They weren’t created when Dustin Moskovitz arose out of the sea on a shell. Maybe e.g. the EAIF could explicitly call out experimentation as something it wants to fund.

Of course, this argument only applies to stuff you can do differently. If you don’t like the way other people behave and just don’t want to be associated with them, that’s harder to reconcile.

Michael_PJ 6 Feb 2023 9:49 UTC
52 points
20 ∶ 26
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Should EVF consider appointing new board members?
Did Nick and Will massively miscalculate? I think the evidence is still not clear. At the moment it seems more to me that “some people on the EA Forum think they massively miscalculated”, and removing board members for that reason seems a bit witch-hunty to me.

Michael_PJ 20 Jan 2023 9:33 UTC
50 points
24 ∶ 9
in reply to: Devon Fritz’s comment on: Doing EA Better
Scott Alexander, from “If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism”:

Leading UN climatologist Dr. John Scholtz is in serious condition after being wounded in the mass shooting at Smithfield Park. Scholtz claims that his models can predict the temperature of the Earth from now until 2200 - but he couldn’t even predict a mass shooting in his own neighborhood. Why should we trust climatologists to protect us from some future catastrophe, when they can’t even protect themselves in the present?

Michael_PJ 7 Feb 2023 19:26 UTC
43 points
11 ∶ 1
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: The number of burner accounts is too damn high
Maybe people have started to use “value-aligned” to mean “agrees with everything we say”, but the way I understand it it means “_cares_ about the same things as us”. Being value-aligned does not mean agreeing with you about your strategy, or anything else much. In fact, someone posting a critical screed about your organization on the EA forum is probably some decent evidence that they are value-aligned: they cared enough to turn up in their spare time and talk about how you could do things better (implicit: to achieve the goal you both share).
There are definitely some criticisms that suggest that you might not be value-aligned, but for most of the ones I can think of it seems kind of legitimate to take them into account. e.g. “Given that you wrote the post ‘Why animal suffering is totally irrelevant’, why did you apply to work at ACE?”
So, many things that could be said about PELTIV, but I’m not convinced that filtering for value-alignment filters negatively for criticality, if anything I think it’s the opposite.

Michael_PJ 19 Apr 2024 8:59 UTC
41 points
18 ∶ 3
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 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 19 Jun 2023 16:40 UTC
38 points
5 ∶ 0
on: Third Wave Effective Altruism
I think this is a useful exercise for a few reasons.
1. It’s helpful for outsiders and new people to reconcile different material that they see from different points in time.
2. It’s helpful for people to clarify if they hold a bundle of positions that’s associated with a particular wave. The old waves don’t necessarily go away, they just cease to dominate. It’s quite handy to be able to say “To understand my positions it may help to know that I’m a first-wave EA” or whatever.
I would be tempted to divide the second wave in two. I think there was a distinct period where career choice and talent constraints became a dominant theme, but before longtermism took off. So I’d say:
1. As you have it
2. Talent constraints become prominent, 80k becomes prominent, money becomes looser as OPP becomes a major player etc.
3. Longtermism becomes prominent, money becomes silly as FTX enters the scene, WWOTF
Not sure on dates. This gives us a very short third wave, but I think that matches reality: the FTX crisis and AI panic killed/substantially changed it.
Also, I think an interesting row for your table would be “Prominent thinkers”. It’s interesting that in other movements the waves are typically spearheaded by new people and thinkers, whereas in our case it’s often the same people again. Some extremely incomplete lists:
1. Singer, Ord, Karnofsky …
2. Todd, MacAskill …
3. Ord, Cotton-Barratt, MacAskill, Bostrom …
I also think this can help us with the question of “where is the next wave going?”. We can instead ask “who are the thinkers who are gaining prominence?”. It seems to me that there’s a bit of a void, except in the AIS space, so maybe that will dominate by default.

Michael_PJ 20 Jan 2023 23:43 UTC
37 points
10 ∶ 0
in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
There’s a big difference between your two examples. EA has historically tried to influence people to use their money differently through persuasion: actually making an argument that they should use their money in a particular way and persuading them of it.

“Democratising funding decisions” instead gives direct power over decisions, regardless of argumentation. You don’t have to persuade people if you have a voting bloc that agrees with you.

And the old route is still there! If you think people should donate differently, then make this case. This might be a lot of work, but so be it. I think a good example of this is Michael Plant and HLI: they’ve put in serious work in making their case and they get taken seriously.

I don’t see why people are entitled to more power than that.

Michael_PJ 8 Feb 2023 17:13 UTC
34 points
7 ∶ 2
in reply to: Jeff Kaufman’s comment on: Why People Use Burner Accounts: A Commentary on Blacklists, the EA “Inner Circle”, and Funding
I think stuff failing is usually not as bad as it seems, and most of the reputational harm would have fallen on the organisers (who deserved it). On the other hand there are substantial risks to creating a perception that poorly executed things will be bailed out.

So from an outside view (I don’t know much about the event itself) I say they should have let it fail.

(EDIT: to be clear, in light of the new comments about the Future Forum: I think bailouts are often bad, if the Future Forum wasn’t actually bailed out then great. )

Michael_PJ 19 Jan 2023 8:57 UTC
34 points
15 ∶ 2
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
I find this framing a bit confusing. It doesn’t to me seem that there is any obligation between EAs who are pursuing direct work and EA funders than there is between EA funders and any other potentially effective program that needs money.

Consider:
1. Alice gives up a lucrative career in order to go work in global health and development. However, Alice ends up just working for an ineffective organisation.
2. Bob is not an EA and never was in line for a high paying career, but ends up working for GiveDirectly.
Do we want to say that we should try and fund Alice more because we made some kind of implicit deal with her even though that money won’t produce effective good in the world? And if the money is conditional on the person doing good work… how is that different from the funders just funding good work without consideration for who’s doing it?

If I were going to switch to direct work the deal I would expect is “There is a large group of value-aligned funders, so insofar as I do work that seems high-impact, I can expect to get funded”. I would not expect that the community was going to somehow ensure I got well above median outcomes for the career area I was going into.

I’m not sure why you would expect more than that? Is this a talking point that I missed where people argued that there’s a deal? Is this some kind of clever “act as though you made the deals you would have wanted to have made, even if you actually didn’t” thing?

I think in an ideal world this balance of funds and power would be made more explicit by having something like impact-certificate markets with evaluations from current donors

I absolutely agree that altruistic labour is under-paid and a system like impact certificates would be great, what confuses me is the idea that people got into direct work today with the expectation that the community was committing to make something like that happen today.

Michael_PJ 17 Mar 2023 13:10 UTC
33 points
11 ∶ 7
in reply to: lilly’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”

to put this guy on a pedestal; to elevate him as a moral paragon and someone to emulate; to tie EA’s reputation so closely to his

I always find this claim a bit confusing: did we actually do those things? Are there some specific examples of doing this?

I can think of… the 80k interview and that’s about it? I guess engaging with the FTX Foundation was somewhat positive but I don’t think it was putting him on a pedestal. In fact when I look back I feel like a lot of the content linking Sam to EA came from people talking to Sam. I may well just not be remembering stuff though!

I don’t deny that Sam was perceived in that way, but it’s not clear to me that this was something that was done (even accidentally) by “EA leaders”.
What links here?
- David_Althaus's comment on Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed” by Nathan Young (26 Mar 2023 10:41 UTC; 11 points)

Michael_PJ 18 Nov 2022 9:32 UTC
31 points
6 ∶ 2
in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Media attention on EA (again)
This post just seems like a snarky way of saying you disagree with their decision, but without offering any actual arguments against.