I don’t follow your question. Can you re-state it differently?
It would not destroy me to come to a different conclusion.
I don’t think this answers your question, but I can easily sympathize with how someone in Austin’s shoes could find reasons to make this call that he sincerely believes are correct, while being a smart and compassionate person. I still strongly disagree with his decision here.
nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon
Karma: 471
I don’t think you should make decisions like this based on “what’s good for EA reputation.” I am not swayed by those arguments here.
I do think — unless you think Caroline was wrongfully convicted or convicted under a bogus law and you can say that — this seems a shockingly naïve decision.
We’ve seen hubris and in-group biased naïveté before, the kind that treats EAs and EA orgs as if we’re somehow above boring, straight-up sensible, standard safeguards within a business because we’re too smart and too morally evolved for all that or something, or too rational. This attitude caused some of the FTX failures. Now you’re here telling us that you’re ignoring boring, straight-up sensible standard safeguards within a business like “don’t hire someone with a finance-related felony conviction into a finance position.” And only 4 years after the crime was committed. What reasons do you have to ignore that standard?I can be sympathetic and even forgiving in my heart of Caroline as a person. I don’t need to turn that feeling into a finance job for her. I’d be less concerned if an org were hiring her in a comms role based on her writings or something and could assure everyone that she’d have nothing to do with finances. Still controversial, but not so out of touch.
This is not smart or wise. It’s the kind of willful, wide-eyed foolishness, while fooling oneself into thinking it’s good, that we’ve seen before. It does not bode well.
No problem, thanks for the wiki link
Fair.
Having run through the analogy, EA becoming more like an academic field or a profession rather than a movement seems very improbable.
I agree that “try to reduce abuses common within the church” seems a better analogy.
JWS, do you think EA could work as a professional network of “impact analysts” or “impact engineers” rather than as a “movement”?
Ryan, do you have a sense of what that would concretely look like?
If we look at other professionals, for example, engineers have in common some key ideas, values, and broad goals (like ‘build things that work’). Senior engineers recruit young engineers and go to professional conferences to advance their engineering skills and ideas. Some engineers work in policy or politics, but they clearly aren’t a political movement. They don’t assume engineering is a complete ethos for all major life decisions, and they don’t assume that other engineers are trustworthy just because they are engineers.
I share your appreciation for EA ideas and think they’ll have longevity. I don’t know that there is a way to push back against the pitfallls of being a social movement instead of just being a collection of professionals. But I agree with Ryan that if there were a way to just be a group of skilled colleagues rather than “brethren”, it would be better. Social movements have the pitfalls of religions, tribes, and cults that most professions do not and fall prey to more demagogues as a result.
I understand the usage of “should” in this context. I was noting that it reads oddly to me, like a possible typo, and could be written to read more clearly.
For context on my own vote: I’d give the same answer for talking about monogamy.
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People should clearly be able to say “my partner(s) and I are celebrating my birthday tonight” and “it’s my anniversary!” and look at this cute picture of my metamour’s dog!” and then answer questions if a colleague says, “what’s a metamour?” Just like all colleagues should be able to talk about their families at work.
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People should be aware that it’s risky to spend work time nerding out about dating, romantic issues, sex, hitting on people, etc. People should be aware that mono people in the Bay have often reported feeling pressured or judged for not being poly. But just like with any relation type, discussing romance at work is very likely to make someone feel uncomfortable and junior people often won’t feel like they can say so.
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That seems much less good than appearing in the SwapCard list of attendees where everyone is scheduling 1:1s already, but I agree that a cheap version of the thing here is very doable even without SwapCard
A hard thing here: For any project where “learn to work with external partners and train them to work with us” might be a good goal, there is usually a clear, higher priority and time-sensitive outcome in play, like “Make a hire for this role.” The time trade-offs are real, so the lower-priority goal doesn’t happen.
This may be the wrong long-term play. I am inclined to agree with you that more successful external partnerships would be valuable, but I see why orgs take the more obvious win in the short-term.
I think about optimization and scale of impact for my donations, but not for my day to day work (anymore). I am most productive and useful when I’m focused on helping the people I encounter on a given day, however I can help them. When I’m looking for general opportunities to help my neighbors, friends, colleagues, and family on an individual level, by offering whatever bit of helpful energy I have to give at a given moment, I get consistently positive feedback about giving useful help, and I am energized.
When I used to let my peers or managers or myself push me to justify how I help people, Optimization mindset led me to burn tons of energy trying to find “the most good” I could to, but actually doing almost nothing useful.
Seconding this: In my city, A TRO (temporary restraining order) is very easy to get:
“If the judge is convinced that a temporary restraining order is necessary*, he or she may issue the order immediately, without informing the other parties and without holding a hearing.”
*IMO, local judges are very lenient with TROs, issuing them “just in case” the complaint is valid, and reserving more conservative judgements for the actual hearing, 14+ days later.
Typo? “I believe there is a reasonable risk should EAs:”
Do you mean “a reasonable risk if EAs” or “a reasonable risk that EAs should not…”
The wording is confusing to me
I assume this trust difference is due to perceived or real value differences among different EAs, not rampant mistrust of CH among all EAs. Trust would only be shifted around rather than “solved” by having different people in CH roles.
I was not interviewed or involved in this situation but I have asked Julia and Catherine for support on other issues and felt supported. While Chris would share more things with Ben than he would share with CH, I would share more things with the current CH team than I would share with Ben. Chris trusts Ben more; I trust CH more.
I respect many things about Ben based on his writing (and I would be more willing to talk to him now after reading about his experiences with Alice and Chloe), but I would still reach out to CH team members first. It’s not a critique of Ben, it’s just a fact based on our different views and experiences. I assume there are plenty of people like me and plenty of people like Chris, though I don’t know the distribution.
Because EA includes people with a variety of values, uniformity of trust in just 2-3 individuals should not to be expected. That said, if someone could hire Ben to be a more trusted CH rep to the people who do trust him more, I’m sure they would. If we could do that for all the sub-communities in EA, we likely would. But Ben, and most others!, don’t want that job as he’s said.
Maybe Chris also prefers Ben’s independence from CEA. I do wonder if there’s an argument for making a CH investigative team more independent from CEA but that has pros and cons.
I don’t see a reason to think that dismantling a team that others do indeed trust will make things better.
First, CEA definitely have access to legal counsel.
Second, I don’t think these issues are that relevant, after reading Ben’s posts.
Regardless of legal risk, the reasons for not making claims public are clear -
(A) It took Ben hundreds of hours to feel confident and clear enough to make a useful public statement while also balancing the potential harms to Alice and Chloe. This is not uncommon in such situations and I think people should not expect CH to be able to do this in most cases.
(B) CEA is not in charge of Nonlinear or most other EA orgs. Just like Ben tried to be responsible for behavior in his offices and ended up down a rabbit hole, CEA tries to be responsible for behavior at their events, and has to choose which rabbit holes to go down. As Ben has said, they are not the EA police.
I agree it would be good to be clear about what jobs they are not doing, but think it would absolutely be worse to have no people in EA paid to work on similar issues rather than 2-3 people who still cannot do all of the work people might ask of them.
I share Holly’s appreciation for you all, and also the concern that Lightcone’s culture and your specific views of these problem don’t necessarily scale nor translate well outside of rat spheres of influence. I agree that’s sad, but I think it’s good for people to update their own views and with that in mind.
My takeaways from all this are fairly confidently the following:*
EA orgs could do with following more “common sense” in their operations.
For example,
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hire “normie” staff or contractors early on who are expected to know and enforce laws, financial regulations, and labor practices conscientiously, despite the costs of “red tape.” Build org knowledge and infrastructure for conscientious accounting, payroll, and contracting practices, like a “normal” non-profit or startup. After putting that in place, allow leaders to pushback on red tape, but expect them to justify the costs of not following any “unnecessary” rules, rather than expecting junior employees to justify the costs of following rules.
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don’t frequently mention a world-saving mission when trying to convince junior staff to do things they are hesitant to do. Focus on object level tasks and clear, org-level results instead. It’s fine to believe in the world-saving mission, obviously. But when you regularly invoke the potential for astronomical impact as a way to persuade junior staff to do things, you run a very high risk of creating manipulative pressure, suppressing disagreement, and short-circuiting their own judgment.
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do not live with your employees. Peers might be ok, but it’s high risk of too much entanglement for junior and senior staff to live together.
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similarly, do not expect staff to be your “family” or tribe, nor treat them with familial intimacy. Expecting productivity is enough. Expect them to leave for other jobs regularly, for a lot of reasons. Wish them well, don’t take it personally.
I think these 4 guidelines would have prevented 90%+ of the problems Alice and Chloe experienced.
I expect we only agree on the 4th point?
[*I have not worked directly with anyone involved. I have, however, worked in a similar rat-based project environment that lacked ‘normal’ professional boundaries. It left me seriously hurt, bewildered, isolated, and with a deeply distressing blow to my finances and sense of self, despite everyone’s good intentions. I resonated with Alice and Chloe a lot, even without dealing with any adversarial views like those attributed to Emerson.
I think the guidelines above would have prevented about 70% of my distress.
I believe Richenda and Minh that they’ve had good experiences with Kat. I had many positive experiences too on my project. I think it’s possible to have neutral to positive experiences with someone with Kat’s views, but only with much better boundaries in place].
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You asked about translation. I feel tired trying to explain this and I know that’s not your fault! But it’s why I just don’t think the Forum works well for this topic.
My guess is that talking about “women’s issues” on the Forum feels as similarly taxing to me as it does for most AI safety researchers to respond to people whose reaction to AGI concerns is, “ugh, tech bros are at it again” or even a well-intentioned, “I bet being in Silicon Valley skews your perspective on this. How many non-SV people have the kinds of concerns you mention?”
Most of us are tired of that naïve convo, esp with someone who thinks they have an informed take. Where do you even start?
Someone they trust has to say, “I’m like you and I’m concerned about this; it’s not just tech bro hype, and here’s why.” They have to translate across the inferential distance, ignorance, trust gap, and knowledge gap. They need to have the patience, time, and investment in bridging the gap.
I’ve been away from the Forum and just saw this comment. When you say “that figure”, what are you referring to?
This may be unhelpful… I don’t think it’s possible to get to 0 instances of harassment in any human community.
I think a healthy community will do lots of prevention and also have services in place for addressing the times that prevention fails, because it will. This is a painful change of perspective from when I hoped for a 0% harm utopia.
I think EA really may have a culture problem and that we’re too passive on these issues because it’s seen as “not tractable” to fix problems like gender/power imbalances and interpersonal violence. We should still work on some of those issues because a culture of prevention is safer.
But while it’s fine to aim for 0 instances of harm as an inspiring stretch goal, it may also be honest to notice when that goal isn’t possible to achieve.
Point of confusion/disagreement: I don’t think EA is big (15k globally?). I don’t think EA has domain level experts in most fields to work with to find neglected solutions. EAs typically have (far) less than 15 years work experience in any field and in my experience, they don’t have extensive professional networks outside of EA.
We have a lot more than we did ten years ago! And I agree ITN has flaws regardless, but I wanted to point out that if those are someone’s 2 main objections to using ITN today, it might not apply.
This answers one of my questions, thank you. I expect you can’t say so directly without making your advisors nervous, but I would gather from this that you may think that FTX was working on a financial frontier where things were moving fast, and that poor internal systems and culture at FTX were all wrapped up into a very complex mess where even a talented and typically quite ethical person could find themselves in a morass and be unsure how to get out.
Fwiw, if I’m close to right on that front, I agree with you! That is not far from my view. And, I think some of those people very clearly should have trained stronger intuitions around redlines they simply don’t cross for the EV when making decisions.
I think you should still be very discerning and careful, to Ben’s point, with the human tendency to assume the best of our peers and take risky action on that basis. I don’t think you’re wrong for assuming Caroline is a smart, empathetic person who can do good work despite her conviction. I think the decision to put her in a core position in your org is wrong, because it disregards some clear “just don’t do that” principles from accumulated deontological wisdom that should really give you more pause. Even in a rapidly changing world, I think we and you should have a much higher bar for ignoring that wisdom.