Just noting for posterity that the OPs’ organisation Pronatalist.org got a $482,000 grant from the Survival & Flourishing Fund in the second 2022 round: https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2022-h2-recommendations
Markus Amalthea Magnuson
Karma: 1,064
Thank you for the kind words.
I think the JS alert was caused by my ad blockers. When I turned off both uBlock Origin and Firefox’s built-in one, the request was sent to Mailchimp successfully. Have not received a confirmation though which might be related to the issue you mention.
Very interesting and beautifully crafted. Just wanted to mention that your newsletter signup might have some issue, when I try to sign up I get an error alert saying “Could not connect to the registration server. Please try again later.”.
I just find it funny how posting something like that in a public forum will, of course, make it seen by journalists sooner or later, anyway.
It’s the second bit that concerns me more because I think it’s essentially a correct description of how CEA, and EAs in general (largely because of CEA’s influence), view public engagement. Any interaction outside the community is seen mainly as something that should be handled through a lens of risk mitigation. The way it’s phrased makes it sound like the CEA stopped 78% of 137 virus outbreaks.
Like I wrote elsewhere, I think the danger with the “don’t talk to media” approach is that you get very few views into a movement, mostly from leadership, and if one of those rare appearances takes a wrong turn, there is not a plurality of other views and appearances out there to balance it.
For example, if the only people who “should” give interviews are EA leadership philosophers that are deeply into longtermism, that will make it seem like the entire EA movement is all about longtermism. This is not true.
Imagine thinking this is a good outcome of the “keep your mouth shut” strategy CEA recommends regarding media:
Effective altruism is not a cult. As one EA advised his peers in a forum post about how to talk to journalists: “Don’t ever say ‘People sometimes think EA is a cult, but it’s not.’ If you say something like that, the journalist will likely think this is a catchy line and print it in the article. This will give readers the impression that EA is not quite a cult, but perhaps almost.”
…
Effective altruism treats public engagement as yet another dire risk. Bostrom has written about “information hazards” when talking about instructions for assembling lethal weaponry, but some effective altruists now use such parlance to connote bad press. EAs speak of avoiding “reputational risks” to their movement and of making sure their “optics” are good. In its annual report in 2020, the Centre for Effective Altruism logged all 137 “PR cases” it handled that year: “We learned about 78% of interviews before they took place. The earlier we learn of an interview, the more proactive help we can give on mitigating risks.” It also noted the PR team’s progress in monitoring “risky actors”: not people whose activities might increase the existential risks to humanity, but those who might harm the movement’s standing.
Terrible look, to be honest.
It seems very important to involve the community at all levels, including the main arena of discussions.
Additionally, delegating important community-affecting processes (and eventually, decisions) to small “expert groups” might actually be one of the mechanisms one could criticise the EA community to be over-reliant on, and that causes some of the problems in the first place.
I also wanted to point out that norm changes might not be entirely what a lot of people have in mind, but rule changes too. An important distinction.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year looking into this exact scenario and discussing various models with many people with different views. Most other EA agencies are trying to figure it out as well.
What is most likely is that I’ll move to a hybrid model where the first X hours are free, and after that, most would pay some (below market rate) fee that is offset by larger clients that can afford market rate. The main reason for this is that my data suggests around 70% of clients would have tried to solve the issues themselves otherwise, which is a huge time waste. Another reason is that there is a significant transaction cost, especially given that the funding for services like these often comes from the same sources (in the EA funding landscape) in the end.
In any case, I expect this part of the agency’s activities to be relatively small in the future, as creating public goods and services is immensely more valuable.
Thank you for taking the time to post this reply, this is really helpful.
Thank you, Ezra, that is very kind of you.
To be frank, that was the purpose of my comment. I still think it’s a reasonable prediction based on previous posts, such as those pointed out by Tyrone in the original post, not leading to meaningful mechanisms such as a formal whistleblower function within EA. But I did make the reply pointed to get a reaction, and I hope this is not construed as dishonest in any way. Judging by all the disagreement votes, the upvotes for the original post, and the discussion going on here, I hope to be very, very wrong this time.
Any healthy community or organisation would, of course, do this without hesitation. My prediction, however, is that this thread will get downvoted and/or ignored.
I’m curious about this as well. Does leaving immediately not impede the chances of getting a better (I’d never dare say “full”) picture of what went down? Additionally, in terms of accountability, I guess now we’ll never know or have records of (from emails etc.) who knew what and when.
That a situation where they are not “absolutely sure” can even occur is one of the major causes of worry here, regardless of the conclusions that can be drawn at this point.
The FTX Future Fund recently finished a large round of regrants, meaning a lot of people are approved for grants that have not yet been paid out. At least one person has gotten word from them that these payouts are on hold for now. This seems very worrisome and suggests the legal structure of the fund is not as robust or isolated as you might have thought. I think a great community support intervention would be to get clarity on this situation and communicate it clearly. This would be helpful not only to grantees but to the EA community as a whole, since what is on many people’s minds is not as much what will happen to FTX but what will happen to the Future Fund. (From the few people I have talked to, many were under the impression that funds committed to the Future Fund were actually committed in a strict sense, e.g. transferred to a separate entity. If that turns out not to be the case, it’s really bad.)
For the same reason that e.g. net electricity generation from fusion power is not the “number one single factor debated in every single argument on any economic/political topic with medium-length scope”: Until it exists, it is fictional – why should everyone focus so much on fictional technology? It remains a narrow, academic field. The difference is that there is actual progress towards fusion.
I don’t have a view on that, but it would be cool if it was available as a forum setting (”Weight votes by account age”) and some people might like it better that way.
I wrote this in 2013, might be of interest to those concerned:
Why would you want to help build AGI?
Yeah, I think a lot of people simply have not looked into how essential voluntary immigration has been for the demographics and economy of most rich countries.