Owen Cotton-Barratt

Karma: 8,940

Owen Cotton-Barratt 22 Apr 2021 9:36 UTC
108 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: evhub’s comment on: Concerns with ACE’s Recent Behavior
I didn’t downvote (because as you say it’s providing relevant information), but I did have a negative reaction to the comment. I think the generator of that negative reaction is roughly: the vibe of the comment seems more like a political attempt to close down the conversation than an attempt to cooperatively engage. I’m reminded of “missing moods”; it seems like there’s a legitimate position of “it would be great to have time to hash this out but unfortunately we find it super time consuming so we’re not going to”, but it would naturally come with a mood of sadness that there wasn’t time to get into things, whereas the mood here feels more like “why do we have to put up with you morons posting inaccurate critiques?”. And perhaps that’s a reasonable position, but it at least leaves a kind of bad taste.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 29 Jan 2024 21:38 UTC
95 points
3 ∶ 0
on: EV investigation into Owen and Community Health
Thanks for posting this update. I prefer to have it out rather than pending, and I think it’s appropriate that people will get a sense of approximately the scope of what happened. I deeply regret my actions, which were wrong and harmful; I think it’s a fair standard to expect me to have known better; I will of course abide by the restrictions you’re imposing.
I spent a lot of last year working on these issues, and I put up an update in December; that’s still the best place to understand my perspective on things going forwards.
I think that the first-order impression given by these findings is broadly accurate — I did a poor job of navigating feelings of romantic attraction, failed to track others’ experiences, took actions which were misguided and wrong, and hurt people. For most readers that’s probably enough to be going with. Other people might be interested in more granularity, either because they care about the nature of my character flaws and what types of mistakes I might be prone to in the future, or because they care about building detailed pictures of the patterns that cause harm. For this audience I’ve put my takes on the specific findings in this document. My December update also includes implicit discussion of some subtle harms not discussed in EV’s findings.
I continue to care a lot about this community, including making it a very safe, inclusive, and welcoming space. I am pained that I’ve hurt individuals, and harmed the fabric of the community itself. I’d like to do whatever I can to contribute to it continuing to build towards being the best version of itself, but I expect I’ll continue to tread cautiously in community interactions for a while (as well as avoiding romance-related things altogether).

Owen Cotton-Barratt 21 Feb 2023 17:36 UTC
90 points
6 ∶ 6
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: A statement and an apology
Sorry I’m mostly trying to take a day away from the forum, but someone let me know that it would be helpful to chime in here. Essentially what happened:
- The org had arranged accommodation (not a hotel), but it didn’t cover the first night she’d be in the country
- The people running the recruitment talked to me in a “this is your friend you recommended, could you help out?” way
- We had a spare room so I offered that; they said yes so I communicated with her about that
- This was all arranged on the day of her flight (before she flew)
(I’m eliding details to reduce risk of leaking information about the person’s identity.)
What links here?
- pseudonym's comment on A statement and an apology by Owen Cotton-Barratt (22 Feb 2023 11:37 UTC; 16 points)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 29 Mar 2024 11:03 UTC
72 points
21 ∶ 4
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Recent and upcoming media related to EA
I think you’re missing some important ground in between “reflection process” and “PR exercise”.
I can’t speak for EV or other people then on the boards, but from my perspective the purpose of the legal investigation was primarily about helping to facilitate justified trust. Sam had by many been seen as a trusted EA leader, and had previously been on the board of CEA US. It seemed it wouldn’t be unreasonable if people in EA (or even within EV) started worrying that leadership were covering things up. Having an external investigation was, although not a cheap signal to send, much cheaper in worlds where there was nothing to hide compared to worlds where we wanted to hide something; and internal trust is extremely important. Between that and wanting to be able to credibly signal to external stakeholders like the Charity Commission, I think general PR was a long way down the list of considerations.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 1 Jul 2022 22:37 UTC
65 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: The Future Might Not Be So Great.
[meta for onlookers: I’m investing more energy into holding John to high standards here than Jacy because I’m more convinced that John is a good faith actor and I care about his standards being high. I don’t know where Jacy is on the spectrum from “kind of bad judgement but nothing terrible” to “outright bad actor”, but I get a bad smell from the way he seems to consistently turns to present things in a way that puts him in a relatively positive light and ignores hard questions, so absent further evidence I’m just not very interested in engaging]

Owen Cotton-Barratt 4 May 2022 9:40 UTC
64 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Should we buy coal mines?
Thanks John. I happen to have done a BOTEC on this; I’ll post it here b/c this seems like a canonical place for conversation. It’s pretty scrappy, and you shouldn’t feel obliged to respond, but I’d be interested to know if you think it’s going wrong anywhere (I think my bottom-line is slightly more negative than your “might be a good option for donors who would otherwise have lower impact”).
- What does success look like?
  - Large amounts of fossil fuels remain in the ground but accessible for re-industrialization in the event of civilizational collapse
  - Mostly targeted at civ collapse in 50+ years (since early enough there’s plenty of coal left) but pre-singularity (or we presumably have more effective ways of improving robustness to collapse)
- How good is that?
  - 2% estimated risk of civilizational collapse on relevant timescale (mostly in worlds where AGI is very far off)
  - 50,000 microdooms from chance of no industrial recovery given civ collapse
  - ⇒ 1,000 microdooms affectable
  - Doubling available fossil fuel reserves maybe cuts 5% of the risk
  - ⇒ doubling fossil fuel in the ground averts 50 microdooms
    On default trajectory expect to have 5% of mineable coal stay in the ground
    So extra 1% of fossil fuel staying in the ground is worth 10 microdooms
    If coal is half of relevant fossil fuel, extra 1% of coal staying in ground worth 5 microdooms
- What does it cost?
  - At scale?
    $
    Guess elasticity of coal consumed with available coal = 0.5 (i.e. have to buy twice as much as you’d naively think to get a given effect)
    Worth of global coal reserves = $25T
    About $50T at current prices. This is for reserves not resources, so things that people are pretty confident they know how to get out. The price of extraction should reduce this somewhat, I guess by a factor of 2
    (my naive guess before looking things up was $2.5T)
    ⇒ cost to pay for an extra 1% of coal to stay in ground = $500B
    Labour
    Negligible
    ⇒ CE = 0.01 microdooms/$B
    This is pretty low!
    Maybe by being tactical about which mines one buys one can bump this up by a factor of 2 or 3? It feels like it’s out of reach to make it a good buy, though
  - Pilot
    I think the at-scale cost is sufficiently bad that we shouldn’t put aligned dollars into this
    Is there a way to leverage public funds into this? If so possible a pilot could be cost-effective
    However, my suspicion is that this is a less leveraged way to keep fossil fuels in the ground than the things goverments spend dollars on by default to encourage transition to green economy (e.g. clean energy R&D; also subsidies for clean energy stuff, which indirectly feed back into R&D)
    Transition to clean energy economy will presumably happen when tech is sufficiently advanced
    Advancing tech by 1 year means we can expect 1 year more of current consumption to be left in the ground (if we’d complete transition before fossil fuels run out), or an increased chance of completing the transition before fossil fuels run out
    I guess we’re consuming around 1% of reserves per year at the moment, so guess this would be worth 1% of all fossil fuel staying in ground (not just coal)
    (Plus probably bigger effects in intermediate years)
    Clean energy sector R&D budget = approx $10B/yr (I found recent energy R&D = $22B, of which “less than half” on clean energy)
    Guess 5x budget would double rate of progress
    ⇒ $50B/yr worth 10 microdooms
    Think smart choices about where to invest R&D can probably beat that by a factor of 10 for EAs
    ⇒ 0.2 microdooms/$B for governments, or 2 microdooms/$B for EAs
    I therefore think buying coal mines is most likely net negative to pursue, although it’s close enough to untargeted clean energy R&D on my calculations that it could be worth getting more careful calculations (maybe from economists, maybe from someone like McKinsey)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 28 Dec 2021 23:24 UTC
63 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Democratising Risk—or how EA deals with critics
I feel like there’s just a crazy number of minority views (in the limit a bunch of psychoses held by just one individual), most of which must be wrong. We’re more likely to hear about minority views which later turn out to be correct, but it seems very implausible that the base rate of correctness is higher for minority views than majority views.

On the other hand I think there’s some distinction to be drawn between “minority view disagrees with strongly held majority view” and “minority view concerns something that majority mostly ignores / doesn’t have a view on”.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 10 May 2022 21:27 UTC
60 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jeff Kaufman’s comment on: EA and the current funding situation
FWIW I’ve been trying to fly business class for transatlantic flights for a few years for these reasons. I think it’s an usually big effect size for me because otherwise long haul flights play badly with my chronic fatigue and can cost me effectively >1 day, but I expect that many people would get a few hours’ worth of extra productive time (I take advantage of both the lie-flat bed and the good work environment for writing that doesn’t need internet).

I’ve felt weird about expensing it so mostly just been paying for it myself (I don’t have many other big expenses in my life except childcare), but I have noticed that I’m sometimes wanting to make a strong recommendation that a particular other person try to fly business class, and offered to pay for it personally because I think this will help significantly more than what I can otherwise do with my donations. So I seem to be at “we should probably do a bit more of this at the margin”.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 15 Dec 2020 22:04 UTC
57 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A case against strong longtermism
Thanks! I think that there’s quite a lot of good content in your critical review, including some issues that really should be discussed more. In my view there are a number of things to be careful of, but ultimately not enough to undermine the longtermist position. (I’m not an author on the piece you’re critiquing, but I agree with enough of its content to want to respond to you.)
Overall I feel like a lot of your critique is not engaging directly with the case for strong longtermism; rather you’re pointing out apparently unpalatable implications. I think this is a useful type of criticism, but one that often leads me suspecting that neither side is simply-incorrect, but rather looking for a good synthesis position which understands all of the important points. (Your argument against expected value is a direct rebuttal of the argument for, but in my eyes this is one of your weaker criticisms.)
The point I most appreciate you making is that it seems like strong longtermism could be used to justify ignoring all sorts of pressing present problems. I think that this is justifiably concerning, and deserves attention. However my view is more like “beware naive longtermism” (rather like “beware naive utilitarianism”) rather than thinking that the entire framework is lost.
To expand on that:
- I think that a properly interpreted version of strong longtermism would not recommend that the world ignores present-day issues
  - Indeed, building towards the version of the future which is most likely to produce really good longterm outcomes will mean both removing acute pains and issues for the world, and broadly fostering good-decision-making (which would lead to people solving urgent and tractable issues)
  - Of course there are a lot of things wrong with the world and we’re not very close to optimal global allocation of resources, so I think it’s acceptable as a form of triage to say “right now while these extremely pressing global issues (existential risk etc.) are so severely neglected, we’d prefer to devote marginal resources there than to solving immediate suffering”
- I think that “strong longtermism” (as analysed by philosophers) won’t end up being the best version of action-guiding advice to spread (even on longtermist grounds), because there will be too much scope for naive interpretation; rather we’ll end up building up a deeper repertoire of things to communicate
(I’ll address a few other points in replies to this comment, for better threading and because they seem less centrally important to me.)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 20 Jun 2022 23:31 UTC
56 points
0 ∶ 0
on: You don’t have to respond to every comment
I think this post is literally correct—I don’t think there should be a strong norm of responding to every comment.
But … I kind of think there should be a norm of trying to respond to substantive comments (where it’s OK not to do it, but that’s an “OK not to always meet the norm when it’s not convenient”, not “there isn’t even a norm here”). I don’t think post authors are just in the same position of “it’s nice to respond to things” as everyone else. I guess I think of it as analogous to giving a talk and not taking questions … sure, sometimes it’s the right call (and I’m supportive if someone really isn’t up for taking questions), but it’s really nice to try to clear some space for it if you can. And I worry that it’s easy to read this post as having the implicature of “just don’t bother responding if you don’t feel like it”.
This matters to me because I think we’re collectively into truth-seeking about important topics, and I think that often some of the best content comes in back-and-forths where people are arguing about detailed points. I worry that a culture where people are encouraged to not respond to comments and go write their next post instead leads to more talking past each other, less accountability, and ultimately less grounding of our culture and our knowledge.
e.g. say I make a post arguing X, and someone else asks a pointed question in the comments. If I don’t respond and this is fully socially endorsed it might be easy for readers to think “oh I’m sure Owen was just busy but he has a good response”. But then if I don’t have a good answer to the point it may be hard for the pointed question to get the social impact that it deserves, unless someone takes the time/effort to write up enough context that it can be a top-level post and rise to prominence itself.
(I don’t think responses to substantive comments always need to be substantive to be helpful. I think it’s great to just share “good point”, or “hmm, yeah, I want to think more about that”, or “I’ve never found this kind of argument compelling although I can’t put my finger on exactly why” if that’s where you’re at.)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 19 Jun 2022 13:42 UTC
55 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Evie’s comment on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
I get where you’re coming from (although I think domineeringness is less universally rewarded than intelligence across different parts of society). But given that we don’t think the ideal society consists of people being very domineering, I worry that the indirect harms of pushing this in EA culture may be significant. I think it’s harder to know what these are than the benefits, but I’m worried that it’s a kind of naive consequentialist stance to privilege the things we have cleaner explicit arguments for.

At the very least I think there’s something like a “missing mood” of ~sadness here about pushing for EAs to do lots of this. The attitude I want EAs to be adopting is more like “obviously in an ideal world this wouldn’t be rewarded, but in the world we live in it is, and the moral purity of avoiding this generally isn’t worth the foregone benefits”. If we don’t have that sadness I worry that (a) it’s more likely that we forget our fundamentals and this becomes part of the culture unthinkingly, and (b) a bunch of conscientious people who intuit the costs of people turning this dial up see the attitudes towards it and decide that EA isn’t for them.

This is exacerbated by the fact that I don’t think there’s a clean boundary between EA and non-EA worlds (e.g. if there are EA-adjacent professors perhaps lots of the applicants to work with them are EAs, and we don’t really want the competition between them to be in terms of domineeringness).

But … I don’t think sadness is always correct around this! In particular I think many people do much less of putting themselves forwards // asking for favours than is socially optimal! I think most of the benefits of getting EAs to do more of this comes from the uncomplicated good of getting those people up to the social ideal rather than from the complicated case where there are tradeoffs. I think something which helped people to get up there (by helping them to think about what’s socially ideal and when it’s ambiguous whether to do more) would be really great.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 12 Mar 2024 12:17 UTC
54 points
30 ∶ 1
on: Be More Katja
I had a mix of desires to up-vote and down-vote (I have done neither), which might possibly be helpful to express:
- Positive affect:
  - I like Katja and appreciate her virtues
  - I think this is a good articulation of some under-appreciated things
- Negative affect:
  - I have some generic distaste for public celebration of individuals; I think it’s weaker for Katja than this would be for perhaps almost anyone (who’s meaningfully “still around”), but it’s still there
  - I might be miscalibrated, but I imagine this could be a bit hard to follow for people who don’t know Katja, and I worry about it contributing to a feeling of the community being insular (especially if it’s highly upvoted)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 18 Jun 2022 22:40 UTC
47 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
I like quite a bit of this post (particularly points #2,3,6,7), but also left it feeling uneasy and with a desire to downvote (although I haven’t done that because I’m conflicted).

I’m having trouble putting my finger on what I don’t like. I think it’s something like “I expect some people to be allergic to this, and it to correlate with the people who most need to hear the advice” (and the people who most feel excited about this correlating with those who most need to hear the opposite advice). So I’m feeling good about its existence as a resource to point specific people to (although a version which was less likely to trigger allergies would be even better!), but bad about the idea of it entering into EA cannon or being broadly seen as representing what EA is.

I guess I’ve talked myself into downvoting (since I currently think there are better effects from it having low karma), but I want to attach this to a “thank you for writing it”.
What links here?
- “Agency” needs nuance by Evie (12 Sep 2022 16:52 UTC; 141 points)
- “Agency” needs nuance by Evie Cottrell (LessWrong; 25 Sep 2022 7:40 UTC; 23 points)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 14 Mar 2024 12:00 UTC
45 points
12 ∶ 1
on: Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution
I find myself sympathetic to a lot of what you write, while being in disagreement with some of your top-level conclusions (in some cases as-written; in some cases more a disagreement with the vibe of what’s being said).
To elaborate:
- I think that you’re primarily pointing at a bunch of problems that can come from people inhabiting the “power-law distribution” perspective on impact and pursuing the tails
- I think that these are real and important problems, and I think that they are sometimes underappreciated in EA circles, and sometimes things would be better if people less inhabited this mentality
- Structurally, these problems give us some reason to reduce emphasis on the claim, but they don’t (by themselves) cast doubt on the claim
- You have one argument casting doubt on the claim (what you call the “empirical problem” of the difficulty of impact attribution)
  - I basically agree that this is an issue which muddies the waters, and somewhat levels the distribution of impact compared to a more naive analysis
  - However, I think that after you sort through this kind of consideration you would be able to recover some version of the power law claim basically intact
- To my mind the stronger reason for scepticism about the truth of the claim is the distinction between ex ante and ex post distributions
  - The case for a power law distribution is stronger ex post, but it’s ex ante that’s relevant for our decisions
  - I think that this dulls the power law argument significantly—but doesn’t eliminate it
- Something which you don’t do is talk about the benefits of the power-law mentality
  - I think these are real and significant
  - Basically by encouraging people to think through and seek after ways that things could be very impactful, it may increase people finding highly effective strategies that might not have been reliably uncovered by other search strategies
  - I think that this is sometimes a big deal even for people choosing among socially-beneficial paths
    (I agree, however, that it shouldn’t be the only lens that is applied)
- Given this, my position is something like: “it would be great to find framings and cultural norms which support some attention going to looking for tail-upsides, while also being much more attentive to the real issues that you’re pointing at, and ensuring that people routinely use a much broader range of lenses than just individual impact calculations”
What links here?
- Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution by Sarah Weiler (14 Mar 2024 10:28 UTC; 88 points)
- Sam_Coggins's comment on Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution by Sarah Weiler (20 Mar 2024 23:42 UTC; 11 points)

Owen Cotton-Barratt 10 Apr 2024 17:45 UTC
43 points
11 ∶ 1
on: Summary: Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Existential Risk (David Thorstad)
This work hinges on the assumption that we’re not in a time of perils situation. In other work Thorstad argues that the common arguments for thinking we’re in a time of perils are uncompelling. I’m not sure I agree (i.e. on balance my inside view supports a time of perils, but I’m not sure that the case for this has ever been spelled out in a watertight way), but fair enough—it’s very healthy and good to poke at foundational assumptions. But he doesn’t provide any strong arguments that we aren’t in a time of perils. And the arguments presented here rely in important ways on certainty (rather than just likelihood) in the assumption that we’re not in a time of perils—the far-distant future should be discounted at its lowest possible rate, and that applies just as much to discounting for hazard rate (chance that we will go extinct) as to any other kind of discounting.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 1 Jul 2022 21:29 UTC
43 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: The Future Might Not Be So Great.
I wouldn’t have described Jacy as a co-founder of effective altruism and don’t like him having had it on his website, but it definitely doesn’t seem like a lie to me (I kind of dislike the term “co-founder of EA” because of how ambiguous it is).

Anyway I think calling it a lie is roughly as egregious a stretch of the truth as Jacy’s claim to be a co-founder (if less objectionable since it reads less like motivated delusion). In both cases I’m like “seems wrong to me, but if you squint you can see where it’s coming from”.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 28 Apr 2022 14:06 UTC
42 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Against immortality?
I hadn’t seen this discussion, thanks! I find the dictator data somewhat reassuring, but only somewhat. Because I care about not the average case dictator, but the tail of dictators having power for a long time. And if say 2% of dictators are such that they’d effectively work out how to have an ironclad grasp of their country that would persist for 1000+ years, I don’t really expect our data to be rich enough to be able to pull out that structure.

Owen Cotton-Barratt 29 Dec 2023 8:27 UTC
41 points
9 ∶ 0
on: Say how much, not more or less versus someone else
It’s somewhat striking that you frame your top-level advice as a comparative:
I recommend everyone cut this habit down ~90% in aggregate for topics they deem important, replacing the great majority of second-order evaluations with first-order evaluations.
People surely differ in their current behaviour, and need different adjustments. So why not simply specify what you think the optimal ratio of first- to second-order evaluations is?

Owen Cotton-Barratt 19 Dec 2023 13:50 UTC
41 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A statement and an apology
Hi all,
Nine months later, I wanted to provide a brief update, in service of letting people make informed decisions about how to interact with me, and in service of helping people to understand the patterns that can cause harm.
Professional updates
I previously said I was pausing some professional activities, such as starting new mentor relationships or organizing events, and actually paused a larger class (e.g. posting on the forum; attending professional events I’m invited to). I’m now cautiously resuming some of these activities. In some cases (like posting things online) this is just a decision in my court, though I’ll continue to seek advice. In other cases there will be decisions for others to make about how to interface with me^[1] (e.g. whether to have me at events) — in such cases I’d like to cooperate with the relevant parties to help them reach whatever decisions they’d most endorse. I’m making this change after working in-depth with a therapist, integrating more feedback, asking advice from wiser folks, and reflecting to better understand what I did wrong, how it was problematic, and how to act appropriately going forwards.
If anyone has any bad experiences interacting with me in the future, I want to say — please share that with somebody if you feel comfortable doing so. I’d love it if you could share with me (and I don’t think I’ve ever thought badly of someone for giving me blunt feedback), but I understand if it would be easier to share with someone else. I know that my colleagues (broadly understood) won’t want to support patterns where I’m doing harm.
Advice to people in similar situations
Based on my original statement, a few people expressed to me confusion about what had gone wrong. I want to be clear that I wasn’t just unlucky here: my actions would have been ill-judged even absent any power differential, and were decidedly inappropriate when there was one. In particular, I sought increased intimacy — heavily grounded in misguided emotional angst^[2] — in ways that were inattentive to romantic communication norms, and sometimes lost touch with what the other person wanted. In case this might reach anyone in a similar position to where I was (and thereby help to avert the pattern playing out again), here is the advice I’d want to give to my past self:
You need to get over yourself. Emotionally, the question of whether you’re bad for feeling attracted to people is crushing. It happens that it’s a misguided question, and not one that other people would be interested in. I recommend — if you can access it — just not feeling bad about it. But you’re allowed to be misguided on things. What’s not OK is casting other people as your judge (a role that shouldn’t exist!) without their permission.
What’s worse is trying to involve the people you feel attracted to in determining whether you’re bad. This is a recipe for harm — both because they should never have to engage with you on that question, but also because its reductive nature doesn’t leave room for their own feelings, and you’re at risk both of not noticing their experience, and even of asking them to be complicit in masking their experience to provide reassurances on your nonsense question. People who have less structural power are at greater risk of not feeling comfortable being direct — you’re not being respectful by “taking them at their word” and assuming they’ll say the important things, because it doesn’t really give them room to choose how to engage. Moreover, (1) if you have professional interactions with someone where shame inhibits your ability to think/talk directly about the meta of the relationship, this could make things go wrong, and (2) if you ever hurt someone who regards you in some way as a mentor, that would be a betrayal of their trust.
Instead, think things through in private, or with help. Principally, process your feelings; when it’s no longer painful to think about, if you still feel moved to act, think through how any action may be received. (It’s not bad to think about these things! it’s actually laudable to do so. Naïvety is not a shield. Your sex aversion won’t always stop others from seeing things as about sex.) Journal about it. Talk to friends. Get a therapist.
(If you’re reading this and you feel like this might in some way be talking to you, feel free to reach out — I could say a bit more, but am also just very happy to listen to anyone who finds it difficult to talk about this.)
Personal updates
Having spent time working through my angst I now think I know how to seek romantic connection in healthy ways. However, I also now identify as monogamous — I still think polyamory has a philosophical appeal, but it’s apparent to me that I don’t really want more romance in my life; and it’s now apparent that feeling attraction while monogamous need not involve wronging people. Going forwards I won’t bring these topics up in conversation. Also having taken feedback from folks I’ll avoid some behaviours I wasn’t tracking as potentially problematic (notably, taking meetings in hotel rooms when it was more convenient).^[3]
I’m conscious that in some cases people might be uncomfortable interacting with me because of my past actions. Navigating this is tricky. I’m quite uncomfortable with the idea that people who don’t want to might feel compelled to interact with me, but I don’t think I can promise never to be present in any spaces where this might occur. I will say that I would like it if people felt affordance to withdraw or to ask me to withdraw. (I can’t imagine holding this against someone, and if I find the experience difficult that’s between me and my therapist.)
I’m sorry again to everyone. I care deeply about giving people interacting with me good experiences, and strive to be one of the people who proactively contributes to a healthy culture with robust safeguards against harm. I fell well short of that standard. I’ll work hard to do consistently better on this in the future — I never get to know exactly what my remaining blindspots are, but I’m hopeful that I’ve now understood enough to give the problematic behaviour a wide berth — and I welcome others helping to hold me accountable in this.
1. ^
  And in some cases that might take some time; e.g. CEA had said that they wouldn’t talk to me about the issues in-depth or consider having me at their events until the external investigation EV commissioned was complete — which seemed very reasonable. When I shared a draft of this comment with EV they let me know that the investigation has now concluded; I don’t yet know what its recommendations are or how they plan to respond. I thought I’d go ahead and post now because it seems epistemically cleaner for me to just share things without a question of those being influenced by where EV land. Of course I plan to cooperate with whatever they end up asking of me, and could end up making further policy updates if there’s further useful feedback.
2. ^
  I’ve been confused about whether/how to mention this because I don’t think that motivations excuse actions. But it’s central enough to what went wrong that I expect things to make less sense — and be less useful for helping to avert similar patterns — if I omit it.
3. ^
  These are serious policy updates — I’m thinking about things pretty differently now, and will act in ways that should steer well clear of what was problematic. They’re not ironclad commitments, because there are clear exceptions (e.g. I don’t want to stop talking to my wife or therapist) and I don’t want to lock something in when I’m not sure I’ve understood all of the cases where it would be a bad idea.
What links here?

Owen Cotton-Barratt 30 Mar 2024 0:36 UTC
40 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey
Meta: I’m worried there could be some people-talking-past-each-other here. I never meant to claim that PR concerns shouldn’t influence one’s decision-making, but that they shouldn’t drive one’s decision-making. On this view you should certainly be willing to change direction on relatively unimportant issues for PR reasons, but should be somewhat resolute against doing so when it would change what was otherwise the central important thing you wanted to do.
I defended a similar broad position to this in a post a couple of years back on the perils of optimizing in social contexts.
Similarly, I agree with Habryka’s clarification in the thread above:
I am not saying that we should fully blind ourselves to considerations of reputation and public relations. However, I think this kind of reputational optimization is perilous and if is one of the domains where naive consequentialist-type reasoning tends to most often go awry.
In any case I don’t think that the case in point was primarily a PR-driven decision of the type being objected to. If it had been, I think that that would have been a little corrosive to the reputation of Open Philanthropy of trying to take everything seriously and go after the most fundamental things.
Alexander Berger’s reflections on Wytham are consistent with the thing that seems to me to be desirable. He regretted not weighing possible PR risks more heavily on a grant that they regarded as marginal—that seems fine. If they let such PR risks dominate their decision-making for a non-marginal grant, or mean that they wouldn’t even get to the point of assessing whether a grant was marginal, that would (of course depending on the details) seem more unwise.
But of course you’re right that it would be bad to ~never weigh PR considerations. I used to sometimes find it kind of distasteful (/veering towards ~immoral) to try explicitly to model how other people might think of me or of orgs I was a part of. But I think this was just a mistake.

Owen Cotton-Barratt

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