Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
Nathan Young
Karma: 17,808
Yeah that’s a fair point. I don’t come on here much. So maybe I am wrong on how receptive people would be. But this doesn’t sound great.
I am pretty happy with my EA circles, for what it’s worth. I have come here to say somethings about this place and to some extent about the powerful organisation that runs it.
But I’d hear more about your EA in the Lakes thing. Which lakes?
If I might engage you sort of conflicty, what do you think of the other comments on this post. Like many of them seem to be saying that actually EA probably is worse or that my sums are bad?
And isn’t there some value in pinning down some sense of where we are?
To me this feels a bit like whack a mole. A big chunk of people are arguing (and then never responding afterwards) that my sums are bad. Another chunk are saying ‘sure you might be right but shouldn’t we do better’ and another chunk are saying that I am not really arguing the thing I claim to be arguing.
Can’t you see how all of this taxes me making the point? Can you see how it seems to me that everyone wants to make a different point about why it’s bad but no one wants to disagree with each other? Isn’t that strange?
My theory there is a large shape that most of you don’t wish to turn your focus on and that in this post I am forcing your attention to it, so you all know deep down that it must be bad and that you must disagree. And of course you don’t need to disagree with each other because the real disagreement is that I am forcing your attention to it. And that doesn’t sound very healthy or very EA.I would take a top level comment saying that on the substance I am right but that you disagree with the framing or for you to disagree with some other comments as evidence against this theory.
A personal reflection:
When I was a Christian, I led a lot of Bible study groups. Christians care a lot about Truth. In theory any question was askable but in practise it was clear that some questions were not. If somebody asked them I maybe allowed some kind of response, and then moved the discussion on. Discussions about the historicity of the Bible often created a mess so you didn’t really want to have them. In practise I recall having them very rarely, if at all.
To me the EA forum often has the smell of the same kind of thing where many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’. Below, James links CEA’s growth discusison. Do I really want to engage with that? Not really. I think I’ll feel like someone who is grumpy at a wedding. But also, from a quick scroll, do I think that CEA getting it’s engagement numbers up is the central thing it should be tracking? Not really. How many career changes are there? What is some notion of total impact?
And, sure, these are hard questions and I am not sure there are good answers. But when I came on here 7 years ago, this felt like a place to have those discussions. And now.. it doesn’t.
My standard position on reputational risk is as follows.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/pr-is-corrosive-reputation-is-not
To my eye, CEA has repeatedly focused on having good PR, meanwhile Yudkowsky wears a shiny gold hat and talks to Bernie Sanders and has a NYT best seller. Is all of that comms effort working?
Thoughts on the Centre for Effective Altruism, weakly held, n = 1, but feeling like things someone should say:
EAGs seem good
Community Health seems better than replacement. It’s a hard job, not perfect, but I am glad someone is doing it.
the Forum seems like not a place I want to be despite having previously been here a lot. Hard to make sense of what’s important, somehow
I rarely see comms work I think is good. Maybe it’s in places I don’t see, but on twitter, is does EA have a reputation that is helped by CEA? The odd thread I guess?
Vision? I dunno. Is there meant to be some kind of movement-wide vision I am meant to understand and get behind? ‘Do AI safety/policy work’, I guess?
Functionalness? Has there been any EA org as mired in dysfunction as CEA (other than FTX)? Has that changed recently? Base rates aren’t good.
Uni teams, no idea.
I imagine that there are lots of good, hard-working people at CEA and my intention isn’t to hurt. But I think we should see the world as it is and perhaps this is information to some. It is so easy never to say anything and then wonder why nothing changes. If this seems false to you, downvote it. But if it is upvoted when you see it, update on it. CEA in some ways speaks for EA, or has been seen to. What is going on?
People are welcome to DM me to chat about this though I prefer twitter DMs or emails to nathanpmyoung@gmail.com
I have thought about this a lot and have my own (work in progress site) (dm me if you want to see it).
My issue is that I think for this to get widespread adoption, it needs to be seen as canonical, and yet most peopel don’t really agree on the core assumptions of any kind of ranking. Like forbes can do a rich list because we roughly agree on money. But it seems too many steps to teach people both the ranking and the assumptions at once.
But maybe that’s just me.
What did peoople think of it? Does anyone expect to check it more than once a quarter?
I have made a semi-functional rich person impact ranker. It requires votes (and optionally, longform analyses from humans or AIs). If you want to help flesh it out, dm me on here or on twitter or if you have my details, anywhere I am contactable and I’ll send it to you.
Meh, you can comment further if you wish. I am choosing to engage here and it’s not that costly to me. This has felt like a pretty positive interaction at least at the end.
I appreciate your points. And to your first point I agree that people care about this a lot and feel invested in it. I can empathise with a desire to reduce sexual harassment, I mean, don’t most of us want to feel safe and comfortable?
Thanks for your time.
I find it hard to engage with the full sweep of your messages. The choice for me feels like its between long slightly bitter responses and ungaged surface-level ones. I tried to avoid that by picking specific points last time, but you’re right that I didn’t really engage. I may not be capable of doing so. But let me see if this works.
On “people aren’t saying EA is uniquely bad, they’re invested” if that were the central thing, I’d expect critical comments here to open with “yes, you’re probably right about the comparable-communities point, but I think you’re missing the deeper thing.” Almost none do. (Some straightforwardly disagree, which is a different thing) Most spend their words on what I got wrong, and only when pressed do they acknowledge agreeing with the empirical claim. To me it feels like the piece has struck a nerve. Does mere investment explain why this post provokes that response?
On “I think this whole post would’ve gone over differently” — I spent about ten hours on it. I could spend another ten and I don’t think it would change the response. The methodological criticisms raised so far would lift the numbers by less than 10x on my read, which is still inside the bounds of the estimate. When I’ve pushed back on those criticisms, people have given way or stopped responding. I don’t think they are the crux.
As for if you could write a post that would be more accepted. Of course you could. I’m not debating that. But I don’t think it implies much either. We are different people, with different histories from different EA sub communities and I am mediocre at reading social cues.You’re right that I’m defensive. I am. Part of why is that this comment section feels deeply defensive to me—unwilling to give an inch on the central claim, unwilling to back up criticisms when challenged, willing to imply things about motives. To me, most of these comments feel defensive, including my own.
But I would like us to move to a bette mode of communication. I have at times been defensive and unengaged. Here is a new attempt to engage more fully.
No, they thought it was controversial, but I took on board many suggestions to soften it.
Separately if it’s a useful data point, reading these comments made me not wish to engage with this piece at the object level, at least at the moment.
So in your view I’m being defensive/unpleasant in the comments? Or at least significantly more so?
Okay :)
And what about EA compared to typical workplaces/ university spaces?
In my epistemic norms if someone makes 5 points, I’ll respond to whichever one I choose, if they make one point, i’ll respond to that. Perhaps we have different norms.
If you have specific criticisms I’m happy to respond to them.
Thank you.
The discussion in the comments so far focuses on two claims:
We can’t easily tell from this data whether EA is better or worse than baseline
I agree, though I do think it’s some evidence we’re not much worse.
Why does it even matter whether EA is better or worse than baseline? Community members are welcome to hold EA to a much higher-than-baseline standard, if they want to.
Yes this seems right and hope it’s a thing people will take forward.
You’re right. My bad. I retract it.
I have comments, if you’re interested.
Yeah I think I disagree. I think that this post by virtue of not being a persons experiences can allow more pushback and hopefully something more resembling open discussion.
I appreciate the straightforwardness of this comment. Feels clear that we actually disagree.
I feel like I see comments as a natural bid to discuss things, but maybe you don’t.
I guess there are some things that we could discuss but that I’m not gonna bid for here.
“Importantly, I have reported zero of these instances to the community health team; there are several reasons for this, including some standard ones”
“if these kinds of behaviors had happened at a non-EA conference, I would’ve immediately known they weren’t allowed”
“he definitions and measures of harassment differ across the data sources you cite, charting them on the same axis (“annual rate”) constitutes bad analysis.”
Were we to chat, I think the area I’d like to start is here “I do think that things have improved in recent years”. So even with this improvement you think that EA is still significantly worse than other communities?
Possible yes. This seems like it would be worthy of investigation to understand. Right?
Hey, elsewhere someone pointed out that the community seems more interested in engaging with criticism than I previously thought so here are some thoughts:
Here growth seems to be about more people engaging with CEA. I am unsure that is the main component of impact regarding EA. I prefer 80k’s notion of trajectory changes and going back over time and updating those. Surely CEA succeeds when EA does a lot of what we think of as good.
Commmunity healthiness is also a key part of this. Does the community feel able to take on struggles, does it have integrity? I guess all this feels a bit divorced from what is discussed in this piece.
Personally, I have found CEA’s recent output pretty uninspiring and corporate. And I think maybe that lines up with a real focus on growth metrics, like when a company has been sold from it’s previous owners and is run by a conglomerate. Numbers are easy to track so they get tracked. Is EA well? And perhaps my model of CEA takes a lot of flack in return and so just wants to get on with the job, but that isn’t gonna fix the relationship between us (and maybe that’s fine)
I don’t particularly like being on the forum these days so I am rarely here. I guess I think if the community felt more alive/capable of disagreement/self-assured etc then I would be, but the whole place just smells of things that can’t be said and there are far too many topics without a shared knoweldge base so its hard to engage with the factual stuff.
As I’ve said elsewhere I imagine most people at CEA work hard and really want to help. I am sure the authors of this piece do. And I know posting on the forum can be a gruelling experience. But maybe there is a reason for this. A fundamental thing about this community that isn’t well such that this is the case. And maybe it’s worth focusing more on that rather than just ever more members.