Feel free to DM me anything you want to share but don’t want to or can’t under your own account(s), and I can share them on your behalf if I think it’s adding value to the discourse/community.
The corollary is that views shared on this account don’t necessarily reflect my own personal views, though they will usually be worded to sound like they are.
I’ll just point out that you say here Manifest is a non-EA conference, but here you say that “Manifest is not a rationalist event significantly more than it is an EA one”. I know the two claims are not fully contradictory, but it does seem like you are insinuating EAs should not be complaining about a non-EA event while telling Dustin that he shouldn’t blame the Hanania invite on rationality more than EA.
I hear about and see non-trivial levels of grift.
Can you share more?
I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson.
Given Chloe is not involved in this claim, do you also stand behind the framing that Alice is more reliable than Kat/Emerson?
If you think writing an 100 word summary of all of this content is as easy as downvoting, you’re probably significantly overrating the value of your original comment.
I disagree, I think it’s entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by “people changed their minds”.
I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of “people changed their minds
One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesn’t exist, and conflating “good epistemics” with “people who agree with me”. (“75% of people agree with us! I’m so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthy”). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have “good epistemics”, especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.
On the uncharitable case:
I think there are other examples in the post that seem reasonable at first glance but can be interpreted or misinterpreted as similar cases of creating some kind of social pressure to take the Nonlinear position. Some of these are are raised in Yarrow’s comment.
Others include:
“However, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.”
“EA’s high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and “sharing only negative information about X person/charity” posts will destroy it.
“EA since FTX has trauma. We’re infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
We’re attacking each other instead of attacking the world’s problems.”
Most of the rest of the section titled “So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?”)
“This doesn’t mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans. Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict. We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX. Let’s do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.”
On the charitable case:
I think it’s fairly obvious that using post upvotes is a poor way of indicating support for the Nonlinear position, because there are a lot of reasons for upvotes (or downvotes) that are unrelated to whether voters agree or disagree with the post itself.
Skimming some comments quickly (moved to footnote for ease of reading).[1]
There are obviously problems with aggregating votes which make these hard to interpret, but even if you take a looser definition, like “75% of readers now have a better net impression of Nonlinear than after Ben Pace’s post”, this still feels very unclear to me without cherry picking comments. I’m not expecting NL to have attempted to modelling consensus with agreevotes, but I think it’s clear even on skimming that opinions here are mixed (this doesn’t discount the possibility of multiple NL staff agree/disagreevoting many of these posts or comments), and ceteris paribus make it more surprising that the 75% claim was made.
Yarrow’s comment
“Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.”
has 68 agreevotes and 24 disagreevotes.
Lukas’ comment:
“I updated significantly in the direction of “Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought”,
“it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.”,
“I’m still confused about some of the fact-checking claims”, “I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning (in a “this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity” rather than “this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word”). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn’t change my initial opinion here by too much”
has 34 agree-votes and 4 disagreevotes.
Ollie’s comment:
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren’t backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
has 78 agreevotes and 31 disagreevotes
Muireall’s comment/spot check:
From my perspective, this is between “not responsive to the complaint” and “evidence for the spirit of the complaint”. It seems an overreach to call “They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend...” a “sad, unbelievable lie” “discrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truth” when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe “advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’” as in “direct contradiction” with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on “high potential” or being among the “highest quality people”. Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloe’s boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived “quality”.
has 20 agreevotes and 3 disagreevotes
Geoffrey’s comment:
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it’s clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
has 53 agreevotes and 11 disagreevotes
Vipulnaik’s comment:
“For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.”
has 24 agreevotes and 2 disagreevotes
Peter’s comment:
“Personally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinear”
has 9 agreevotes and 15 disagreevotes
Kerry’s comment:
“to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases”
has 30 agreevotes and 26 disagreevotes
Marcus’ comment:
“Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.”
has 14 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
John’s comment:
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
has 12 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
In the same comment at the bottom:
”Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.”
Apart from the 3 month period, this also had multiple reviewers. It would quite surprising if none or only a few of these pushbacks by Yarrow or others in the comment section were raised. So (along with Kat’s comment that there was a lot of internal debate) I think it is better to model these decisions as intentional and considered, rather than due to “loss of equanimity”.
I think ultimately this is just “how much do you trust Sam’s testimony about himself (e.g. how plausible is it that he thinks it’s OK to take billions of customer money). Given his willingness to be misleading or lie about other things (e.g. whether or not Alameda received special treatment, the frugal image etc), this might be some reason to discount his own testimony.
I also think generally with large scale financial fraud you should expect that it is much easier to have nonzero idea of the fraud occurring than have zero knowledge of the fraud occurring; it seems not super relevant to me whether this is something SBF “let happen” or defrauding as an action was what SBF was actively pursuing, though you may disagree.
Fair point about reputational harms being worse and possibly too punishing in some cases. I think in terms of a proposed standard it might be worth differentiating (if possible) between e.g. careless errors, or momentary lapses in judgement that were quickly rectified and likely caused no harm in expectation, versus a pattern of dishonest voting intended to mislead the EAF audience, and especially if they or an org that they work for stand to gain from it, or the comments in question are directly harmful to another org. In these latter cases the reputational harm may be more justifiable.
Corrected, thanks!
pinkfrog: 1 month (12 cases of double voting)
LukeDing: 6 months (>200 times)
JamesS: indefinite (8 accounts, number not specified)
[Redacted]: 2 months (13 double votes, most are “likely accidental”, two “self upvotes”)
RichardTK: 6 months (number not specified)
Charles He: 10 years (not quite analogous as these are using alts to circumvent initial bans, included other violations)
Torres: 20 years (not quite analogous as these are using alts to circumvent initial bans, included other violations)
Have the moderators come to a view on identifying information? is pinkfrog the account with higher karma or more forum activity?
In other cases the identity has been revealed to various degrees:
LukeDing
JamesS
Richard TK (noting that an alt account in this case, Anin, was also named)
[Redacted]
Charles He
philosophytorres (but identified as “Torres” in the moderator post)
It seems inconsistent to have this info public for some, and redacted for others. I do think it is good public service to have this information public, but am primarily pushing here for consistency and some more visibility around existing decisions.
Theory A says that SBF genuinely believed in effective altruism when running FTX, and he does not have DAE. Additionally, this theory says that his unethical behaviors were just the result of some mixture of incompetence and bad luck (possibly, though not necessarily, exacerbated by a belief in naïve utilitarianism). In this theory, he did not intentionally defraud anyone, though he was, at the very minimum, extremely reckless. This theory says that he was either so incompetent that he didn’t know he was behaving unethically and breaking the law, or else he was able to justify his behaviors to himself (even if he felt very bad/guilty about his actions) via a naïve utilitarian calculus based on his guess that doing so would yield more utility in the world in the long-run for all conscious beings (compared to if he followed the law and behaved ethically).
Possibly nitpicky, but I don’t think “In this theory, he did not intentionally defraud anyone” is necessarily the case even if we assume theory A (SBF genuinely believed in EA principles and did not have DAE).
I’m not sure if there’s something here along the line of “if you believe in the ideas of EA then you would never intentionally defraud anyone / behave unethically under any reasonable interpretation / break the law”, which I think I feel less sure about, but at the minimum it’s plausible to think (as you point out) that SBF could have been a naive utilitarian, which could have made him more likely to intentionally defraud someone than if he wasn’t, all else equal.
Alternatively, you do mean this to be the “unintentional” theory, but in this case there should probably also be room to explore the hypothesis that he was acting more intentionally and as a naive utilitarian, and I think there is definitely some evidence out there to support this (and I would find this more compelling and probably more likely than theory C).
This failure mode seemed similar in nature to this listed mistake on the CEA website. Specifically:
We think we should have taken on fewer new projects, set clearer expectations for them, and ended unsuccessful projects earlier.
Running this wide array of projects has sometimes resulted in a lack of organizational focus, poor execution, and a lack of follow-through. It also meant that we were staking a claim on projects that might otherwise have been taken on by other individuals or groups that could have done a better job than we were doing (for example, by funding good projects that we were slow to fund).
OTOH, it may not have caused harm in this case if 1) or others were sufficient reasons to close the project without 2), or if this wasn’t a project that could have been done better than CEA.
There’s some evidence in that thread they weren’t dismissed by the EA community given the claim that multiple people were banned from EA events as a result. Perhaps not all accusations lead to an action, and you/OP mean dismissed as in “not entirely accept all claims”, but it does seem like that’s a pretty high, and likely unreasonable bar.
I would also be interested in more clarification about how EA relevant the case studies provided might be, to whatever extent this is possible without breaking confidentiality. For example:
We were pressured to sign non-disclosure agreements or “consent statements” in a manipulative “community process”.
this does not sound like the work of CEA Community health team, but it would be an important update if it was, and it would be useful to clarify if it wasn’t so people don’t jump to the wrong conclusions.
That being said, I think the AI community in the Bay Area is probably sufficiently small such that these cases may be personally relevant to individual EAs even if it’s not institutionally relevant-it seems plausible that a potential victim who gets into AI work via EA might meet alleged abusers in cases A to K, even if no EA organizations or self-identified EAs are involved.
Given the multiple pushbacks by different people, is there a reason you didn’t just take Kyle’s suggested text “concludes that things may be bad and getting worse”?
A case study of Investigative Journalism solving an important problem
I think this bar is too high, given most top charities do not claim to “solve” a problem. Philanthropic dollars going towards reducing malaria burden, reducing number of chickens slaughtered for factory farming, reducing AI X-risk can be impactful even if the problem is not solved.
I think if there were case studies that showed IJ was a good use of philanthropic resources on the margin, or directionally supported the claim that “EA should focus at least 10% of its effort towards both IJ and connecting their work with such organizations that can do sanctions, take organizations or politicians to international criminal courts, and reparations” that would be useful, even if they didn’t solve an important problem.
Sorry I missed this comment, just got a recent notification on this post and realized.
I am specifically talking about the Collins’ brand of pronatalism here as reported, as well as the possibility of a faction that are opportunistically seeking to co-opt the goals of the EA movement, rather than pronatalism that is as broad as you describe “more babies is good, pushing society in that direction is good”.
In the link (as well as in the comments above), there is discussion of some of these views. Are you happy to defend these views as things that EAs should spend more time discussing and funding on the margin?
To be clear I’m not likely to engage on the object level even if you are happy to defend these points, I’m just not sure it’s useful or relevant for me to spell out all the versions and parts of pronatalism I do support in order to make a post like this. I’m not even making a claim that any of pronatalism beyond what is reported is bad!
I’m just indicating that if there’s a faction of people focused on genetic improvement and low birth rates in “Western Civilization” in the EA community, I can see how longtermism rhetoric can be easily co-opted for this, and how this might implicate EA as a result. I stand by that, and I also believe that it should be seen as a clear potential risk for the EA community’s ability to fulfill its potential for impact! And if you’re just a “more babies is good” pronatalist and don’t think these views represent your movement, then this concern applies to you too (or perhaps even more so).
If you do think individual EAs, funders, or EA orgs should be spending more about ways to ensure Western Civilizational values remain competitive in the gene pool on the margin, that’s entirely your prerogative! In that case consider this post as well as comments like these to be an indication of the kinds of tradeoffs your movement should take into account when asking people to engage with arguments like this. (I’m reminded of similar conversations and disagreements around Bostrom’s letter and “truth-seeking” here).
Some things worth considering:
What kind of harms that these kinds of discussions could have? For example, should we dedicate more EA forum discussions to Bostrom’s use of a racial slur and whether that’s appropriate or not in the pursuit of truth-seeking? How action-guiding are these discussions? Should we spend more time on racial differences in IQ and the implications of this on EA community building? Are discussions of these topics actually a good indicator for people who deeply value truth-seeking, or just people who are edgy and want to outwardly signal this in a community where doing this is rewarded? Is this a strong signal, or is it noisy? Not everyone values outward signals of “truth-seeking” above all, especially if those signals can also be a cover-up for harmful ideas. Being open-minded doesn’t mean you give the same space to every idea. Which groups of people are harmed, which groups of people might (wrongly) never join EA because of an unnecessary focus on these discussions?
I think if you think talking about broad likely to be action guiding in ways that will benefit more than it will harm in expectation then it’s worth talking about. Unfortunately, on priors, cause areas that sound like the ensuring the survival of Western Civilization combined with strong genetic determinism do not have a strong track record here, and I’m happy to dismiss by default unless there’s good reason to believe this is misguided (whereas talking about feeling anxious about a sharp increase in EA funding does not have the same issue).