Along with my co-founder, Marcus A. Davis, I run Rethink Priorities. I’m also a Grant Manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund and a top forecaster on Metaculus. Previously, I was a professional data scientist.
Peter Wildeford
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I think there’s a lot that’s intriguing here. I also really enjoyed the author’s prior takedown of “Why We Sleep”.
However, I need to throw a flag on the field for isolated demands of rigor / motivated reasoning here—I think you are demanding a lot from sleep science to prove their hypotheses about needing >7hrs of sleep but then heavily relying on an unproven analogy to eating (why should we think sleeping and eating are similar?), the sleep patterns of a few hunter-gatherers (why should we think what hunter-gatherers did was the healthiest?), the sailing coach guy (this was the most compelling IMO but shouldn’t be taken as conclusive), and a random person with brain surgery (that wasn’t even an RCT). If someone had the same scattered evidence in favor of sleep, there’s no way you’d accept it.
Maybe not sleeping doesn’t affect writing essays, but in the medical field at least there seems to at least be an increased risk of medical error for physicians who are sleep deprived. “I’m pretty sure this is 100% psyop” goes too far.
For what it’s worth (and it should be worth roughly the same as this blog post), my personal anecdotes:
1.) Perhaps too convenient and my data quality is not great and non-random, but I found analyzing a year of my time-tracking data showed that sleeping exactly 8hrs (not more not less) maximized my total hours worked (an imperfect but still useful metric of output).
2.) Multiple semi-sustained attempts of mine to regularly sleep <8hrs (including several attempts at polyphasic sleep) did not improve productivity.
3.) Sleeping <6hrs definitely gives me a feeling of “ugh I can’t do this because I’m too tired”, noticeable “brain fog”, and I also have noticeably less willpower. (Though I’ve not tried to long term “adapt”.)
4.) I would agree that oversleeping (>8hrs of sleep) harms my productivity though.
(Note: some of what I comment here is repeating the opinions of other people I talk to, but these people remain uncredited.)
Do you think it was a mistake to put “FTX” in the “FTX Future Fund” so prominently? My thinking is that you likely want the goodness of EA and philanthropy to make people feel more positively about FTX, which seems fine to me, but in doing so you also run a risk of if FTX has any big scandal or other issue it could cause blowback on EA, whether merited or not.
I understand the Future Fund has tried to distance itself from effective altruism somewhat, though I’m skeptical this has worked in practice.
To be clear, I do like FTX personally, am very grateful for what the FTX Future Fund does, and could see reasons why putting FTX in the name is also a positive.
Thanks. Is this person still active in the EA community? Does this person still have a role in “picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs”?
EA risks falling into a “meta trap”. But we can avoid it.
In current EA, scalability matters
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AMA: Peter Wildeford (Co-CEO at Rethink Priorities)
If anyone has any neartermist community building ideas, I’d be happy to evaluate them at any scale (under $500K to $3M+). I’m on the EA Infrastructure Fund and helping fund more neartermist ideas is one of my biggest projects for the fund. You can contact me at peter@rethinkpriorities.org to discuss further (though note that my grantmaking on the EAIF is not a part of my work at Rethink Priorities).
Additionally, I’d be happy to discuss with anyone who wants seed funding in global poverty, neartermist EA community building, mental health, family planning, wild animal suffering, biorisk, climate, or broad policy and see how I can get them started.
I don’t think it’s witchhunty at all. The fact is we really have very little knowledge about how Will and Nick are involved with FTX. I really don’t think they did any fraud or condoned any fraud, and I do genuinely feel bad for them, and I want to hope for the best when it comes to their character. I’m pretty substantially unsure if Will/Nick/others made any ex ante mistakes, but they definitely made severe ex post mistakes and lost a lot of trust in the community as a result.
I think this means three things:
1.) I think Nathan is right about the prior. If we’re unsure bout whether they made severe ex ante mistakes, we should remove them. I’d only keep them if I was sure they did not make severe ex ante mistakes. I think this applies more forcefully the more severe the mistake was and the situation with FTX makes me suspect that any mistakes could’ve been about as severe as you would get.
2.) I think in order to be on EVF’s board it’s a mandatory job requirement you to maintain the trust of the community and removing people over this makes sense.
3.) I think a traditional/”normie” board would’ve 100% removed Will and Nick back in November. Though I don’t think that we should always do what a traditional board would do, it strikes me that EA in general is lacking in good governance best practice and would benefit from going in the traditional direction at least on some axes when it comes to better governance (though which axes and how much I’m still unsure).
Obviously speaking very much only for myself here purely personally, definitely not speaking on behalf of Rethink Priorities in any means.