Could you say why you chose the name Probably Good, and to what extent that’s locked-in at this stage?
I may be alone in this, but to me it seems like a weird name, perhaps especially if a large part of your target audience will be new EAs and non-EAs.
Firstly, it seems like it doesn’t make it at all clear what the focus of the organisation is (i.e., career advice). 80,000 Hours’ name also doesn’t make its focus clear right away, but the connection can be explained in a single sentence, and from then on the connection seems very clear. Whereas if you say “We want to give career advice that’s probably good”, I might still think “But couldn’t that name work just as well and for just the same reason for donation advice, or AI research, or relationship advice, or advice about what present to buy a friend?”
This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that “good” can be about either morality or quality, and that the name doesn’t provide any clues that in this case it’s about morality. (Whereas CEA has “altruism” in the name—not just “effective”—and GiveWell has “give” in the name—not just “well”.)
In contrast, most other EA orgs’ names seem to more clearly gesture at roughly what they focus on (e.g., Animal Advocacy Careers, Animal Charity Evaluators, GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Centre for Effective Altruism...).
Secondly, I think I’d feel pretty underwhelmed if someone introduces what they do as “We want to give career advice that’s probably good.”
I’d be even more strongly turned off if someone said “We give highly precise career advice that’s all definitely good for everyone”, as I’d think they’re wrong and overconfident. And I’d want your org, 80,000 Hours, GiveWell, etc. to all make very clear how complicated the questions they tackle are and how confident they are in what they say (which should and will often be “not very”).
But maybe the best way to do that is by saying something like “We want to help people have the highest impact they can have. This is extremely complicated, and we know we don’t have all the answers, and on some questions on which we have pretty much no clue at all. But we work hard to get the best answers we can, and there are some questions where we’re pretty confident we can be quite helpful.” (This is just what came to mind quickly; I’m not saying it’s the ideal pitch.)
Maybe to me, starting by saying “Probably Good” sounds not like virtuous humility and recognition of uncertainty, but rather like a lack of ambition—like shrugging and settling for something decent, rather than pushing hard to get closer and closer to the best answers, even if they can never be reached with certainty. (I’m saying that’s what the phrase brings to mind, not that I think that accurately describes your approach.)
I suspect this might be a bigger problem for new or non-EAs. They might think the answers should be relatively easy and certain, as they haven’t considered complexities like downside risks and counterfactuals and flow-through effects. If so, they might find something less attractive if it says it’s just “Probably Good”. And/or they might be used to overconfidence, and thus instinctively interpret people saying “certainly” as “probably”, “probably” as “maybe”, etc.
So my personal view is that it seems likely you could come up with a better name. And it also seems like the best time to think carefully about this is now or soon, before you e.g. put up a website.
I appreciate you sharing this additional info and reflections, Julia.
I notice you mention being friends with Owen, but, as far as I can tell, the post, your comment, and other comments don’t highlight that Owen was on the board of (what’s now called) EV UK when you learned about this incident and tried to figure out how to deal with it, and EV UK was the umbrella organization hosting the org (CEA) that was employing you (including specifically for this work).[1] This seems to me like a key potential conflict of interest, and like it may have warranted someone outside CEA being looped in to decide what to do about this incident. At first glance, I feel confused about this not having been mentioned in these comments. I’d be curious to hear whether you explicitly thought about that when you were thinking about this incident in 2021?
That is, if I understand correctly, in some sense Owen had a key position of authority in an organization that in turn technically had authority over the organization you worked at. That said, my rough impression from the outside is that, prior to November 2022, the umbrella organization in practice exerted little influence over what the organizations it hosted did. So this conflict of interest was probably in practice weaker than it would’ve looked on paper. But still it seems noteworthy.
More generally, this makes me realise that it seems like it would be valuable for the community health team to:
have a standard protocol for dealing with reports/incidents related to leadership or board members at CEA itself, EV UK, and EV US
And perhaps also to other staff at those orgs, and senior staff at any funder providing these orgs with (say) >10% of their funding (which I’d guess might just be Open Phil?)
have that protocol try to reduce reliance on the community health team’s own judgment/actions in those cases
Probably meaning finding someone similarly suited to this kind of work but who sits outside of those lines of authority, who can deal with the small minority of cases that this protocol applies to. Or perhaps multiple people, each handling a different subset of cases.
(I’m not saying this should extend to the other orgs EV UK / EV US host, e.g. GWWC or 80k, just CEA and the umbrella orgs themselves.)
I’d be curious to hear whether such a thing is already in place, and if so what it looks like.
Caveats in a footnote. [2]
(I wrote this just in a personal capacity. I didn’t run this by anyone.)
I’n not sure if this terminology is exactly right. I’m drawing on the post CEA Disambiguation.
:
I’m certainly not an expert on how these sorts of things should be handled.
I think your team has a tricky job that has to involve many tradeoffs.
I think it’s probably disproportionately common for the times when your actions were followed by bad outcomes (even if that wasn’t caused by your action, or was you making a good bet but getting unlucky) to become visible and salient.
I think there are likely many considerations I’m missing.
I didn’t saliently notice worries or ideas about how should the community health team should handle various conflicts of interest prior to November 2022, and didn’t saliently notice the question of what to do about incidents relating to senior staff at CEA / EV UK / EV US until this morning, and of course things tend to be easier to spot in hindsight. (OTOH I just hadn’t spent much time thinking about the community health team at all, since it wasn’t very relevant to my job.)