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.
Are you in a position to share more information that might help readers know how much they should update on this comment?
I think the pertinent question here is primarily not “Were Kat and Julia close”, but “What standard should we hold the Community Health team to here”. If you updated significantly negatively on Julia/the Community Health team due to recent events, you might want to hold them to a standard closer to the one Morpheus is proposing. This is especially true if you view the cause of inaction closer to some kind of deferral/information cascade (they are well-established and well-regarded members of the EA community), rather than due to Julia’s close personal relationship with the people in question. I do think this may be a good opportunity for the community health team to regain some trust though, and I would be interested in hearing more about the Community Health team’s involvement too, and whether we should be understanding this as “Ben spent his time on something that the Community Health team should have done but actively deprioritized”, or “The Community Health team played an active role in this investigation”, or something else.
This account receives and posts comment requests from people who prefer to not post under their own account (see bio).
I do think it is particularly reasonable in this case given claims of Nonlinear staff being willing to retaliate, as well as an active threat to take legal action (though I am not speaking for the person I posted on behalf of, and other justifications for pseudonymous comments exist even where litigation is not a major concern). I will also say that I asked the commentor to ensure this is a comment that they are willing to endorse personally, just not associate with publicly.
I agree that not much justification was provided about the claim of mediocrity, and I also agree with Ben Millwood’s comment that the object level discussion is likely of lower priority at this stage. This passed my vetting despite that in part because I saw this comment’s value more as a discussion prompt (“I’d be curious how other people evaluate Nonlinear’s work”) that could bring out more information, which may have been helpful in getting a better overview of Nonlinear’s practices or how their staff operated, or what it was like interacting with them (for good or bad), and thought this was positive in expectation. I see Gavriel’s comment (see below) as weakly supportive of this, and can imagine worlds where even more useful information came out as a result.
Disclaimer copied: “I have not carefully kept track of Nonlinear’s work and this is a pretty uninformed vague impression”
I just think they had ideas that sounded not particularly fruitful, or more costly than they were worth.
I respect the ethos of just try-it-and-see-what-happens for something like that, with minimal downside risk.
despite Nonlinear’s high profile as coordinators, I have no evidence of Nonlinear’s impact, and I’m unconvinced that they’ve found good pressure points for coordination in general.
I have also judged them more harshly for this than I otherwise would, due to what I perceive as a gimmicky and overconfident style to some of their written materials.
To the best of my recollection, it appears that individuals affiliated with Nonlinear made efforts to influence the funding-related processes in which they were involved, or, perhaps, made implicit threats to tarnish their reputation. There were reports of the spreading of damaging rumors by Nonlinear about this person among individuals of influence who were pertinent to their career.
Do you have ways to substantiate these claims?
To clarify, do you mean you have never asked/recruited someone to stalk, intimidate, or harass someone else, or do you mean you have never boasted about it?
Props to Ben for the investigation. And my thoughts go out to those who’ve been affected.
As a side-note, I am skeptical of the impact of Nonlinear’s work so far in pure results terms. Their direct work seems pretty mediocre and easy, and the rest has just been throwing money at prizes that don’t seem to have had much, if any, positive impact. I’d be curious how other people evaluate Nonlinear’s work.
Just a quick note that my read of the full email does not really change the context of the libel suit threat, or Habryka’s claims, especially given much of the missing information from the email was already in a public comment by Kat.
I also agree that if Nonlinear provided substantive evidence in a top-level post that dramatically changed the narrative of this story, e.g. change my personal credence of each of these claims to <15%, it would receive significant attention, such as staying on the front page on the community tab for at least 1 week, gain >150 karma etc.
This is a useful post! Are there any of the discussions or justifications behind various people’s responses (especially in points of disagreement) that might be shareable? Did people change their mind or come to a consensus after the discussions, and if so, in which directions?
Thanks for the response! Overall I found this comment surprisingly less helpful than I’d hoped (though I wasn’t one of the downvotes). My best guess for why is that most of the answers seem like they should be fairly accessible but I feel like I didn’t get as much of substance as I originally expected.[1]
1) On the question “How are you modelling the negative impacts non-AI cause areas might suffer as a result, or EA groups who might move away from EA branding as a result when making this decision?”, I thought it was fairly clear I was mainly asking about negative externalities to non-AI parts of the movement. That there are stories of animal welfare benefitting from being part of EA in the past doesn’t exclude the possibility that such a shift in CEA’s strategic direction is a mistake. To be clear, I’m not claiming that it is a mistake to make such a shift, but I’m interested in how CEA has gone about weighing the pros and cons when considering such a decision.
As an example, see Will giving his thoughts on AI safety VS EA movement building here. If he is correct, and it is the case that AI safety should have a separate movement building infrastructure to EA, would it be a good idea for the “Centre for Effective Altruism” to do more AI safety work, or more “EA qua EA” work? If the former, what kinds of AI safety work would they be best placed to do?
These are the kind of questions that I am curious about seeing what CEA’s thoughts are and would be interested in more visibility on, and generally I’m more interested in CEA’s internal views rather than a link to a external GHD/animal welfare person’s opinion here.
My guess is that you commenting about why having these posts being public would be useful to you might increase the likelihood that they eventually get published, so I would encourage you to share that, if you indeed do think it would be useful.
I also personally feel unclear about how useful it is to share our thinking in public; if you had concrete stories of how us doing this in the past made your work more impactful I would be interested to hear them.
2) If the organization you run is called the “Centre for Effective Altruism”, and your mission is “to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them”, then it seems relevant to share your thinking to the community of people you purport to nurture, to help them decide whether this is the right community for them, and to help other people in adjacent spaces decide what other gaps might need to be filled, especially given a previous mistake of of CEA being that CEA “stak[ed] 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”. This is also part of why I asked about CEA’s comparative advantage in the AI space.
3) My intention with the questions around stakeholders is not to elicit a list of names, but wanting to know the extent to which CEA has engaged other stakeholders who are going to be affected by their decisions, and how much coordination has been done in this space.
4) Lastly, also just following up on the Qs you deferred to Shakeel on CEA’s comparative advantage, i.e., specific examples of positive coverage in the mainstream media that was due to CEA’s efforts, and the two branding related Qs.
Thanks!
For example, you linked a few posts, but Rob’s post discusses why a potential community builder might consider AI community building, while Jess focuses on uni group organizers. Rob states “CEA’s groups team is at an EA organisation, not an AI-safety organisation”, and “I think work on the most pressing problems could go better if EAs did not form a super-majority (but still a large enough faction that EA principles are strongly weighted in decision making)”, while Jess states she is “fairly confused about the value of EA community building versus cause-specific community building in the landscape that we are now in (especially with increased attention on AI). All this is to say that I don’t get a compelling case from those posts that support CEA as an organization doing more AI safety work etc.
What do you think EA Warwick did that made it more successful than other university groups?
Are you happy to share a short summary of the non-funding factors that contributed to this decision? All the best with whatever is next!
Just another +1 to Zach and Akash.
A related point, speaking for myself: The likelihood of me funding these projects based on descriptions if these are mainly to hype is lower, because I may not have the time and energy to evaluate how much they are hyped, and I don’t know Manifund’s track record well enough to defer. On the other hand, if I have reason to believe these are well-calibrated statements then I’m more likely to be happy to defer in future. Don’t feel like you should change your approach based on one individual’s preferences, but just thought this might be a useful data point.
The dashboard is neat!
Some questions about the AI safety related updates.
There are risks to associating AI safety work with the EA brand, as well as risks to non-AI portions of EA if the “Centre of Effective Altruism” moves towards more AI work. On risks to AI safety:
What’s CEA’s comparative advantage in communicating AI safety efforts? I’d love to see some specific examples of positive coverage in the mainstream media that was due to CEA’s efforts.
What are CEA’s plans in making sure the EA brand does not negatively affect AI safety efforts, either in community building, engaging policy makers, engaging the public, or risking exacerbating further politicization between AI safety and ethics folk?
Which stakeholders in the AI safety space have you spoken to or have already planned to speak to about CEA’s potential shift in strategic direction?
On risks to non-AI portions of EA:
Which stakeholders outside of the AI safety space have you spoken to or have already planned to speak to about CEA’s potential shift in strategic direction?
If none, how are you modelling the negative impacts non-AI cause areas might suffer as a result, or EA groups who might move away from EA branding as a result when making this decision?
How much AI safety work will CEA be doing before the team decides that the “Centre for Effective Altruism” is no longer the appropriate brand for its goals, or whether an offshoot/different organization is a better home for more AI safety heavy community building work?
Lastly, the linked quote of “list of things we are not focusing on” currently includes “cause-specific work (such as community building specifically for effective animal advocacy, AI safety, biosecurity, etc.)”, which seems to be in tension somewhat with the AI related updates (e.g. AI safety group support). I’d love to see the website updated accordingly once the decision is finalized so this doesn’t contribute to more miscommunication in future.
The salary of the content specialist is here.
It sounds like the 1.5 million does not include $ on the forum team or facilitators—what does the total spending/average salary look like if you include these groups?
This was asked here, though I’m not super sure I found the answer convincing.
Are you happy to share a rough breakdown for what you plan to spend the $3-6M?
It increasingly sounds like you are coming from a starting point of “there is no scheming” and looking for evidence to update.
But to be more explicit, you shouldn’t start from “there is no scheming”, because base rates would suggest that there is scheming that goes on ahead of time.
“Some” ranges from 2 or 3 people to every person but one. There’s not much point debating a claim so vague.
If your intention is to work out whether OP means “2 or 3 people” or “every person but one” or anything in between, it would have been helpful to clarify.
The reason I say this is because it’s common for people to ask innocuous questions with a more insidious subtext, and it’s often hard to tell this from people asking when you are online.
One possible reading of your series of questions is that you’re coming from a place where you are skeptical that this is happening, and you’re asking OP to provide evidence for you to update. But most of this evidence is going to be anecdotal, so it’s not going to be super helpful for you in terms of getting a rate. So I’m struggling to follow where your starting point is in terms of what you believe is happening in these communities, how you’re reading into OP’s claim, and what level of evidence you’re expecting from OP in order to update.
Great! So based on evidence and reasoning, what is your credence that the following claim is true?
Some bad actors know this and will deliberately give a woman LSD/MDMA with the purpose of getting her in a vulnerable/altered state so that he can have sex with her, without making any of these motives explicit upfront.
And what is your credence that either of the following claims are true?
No bad actors will deliberately give a woman LSD/MDMA with the purpose of getting her in an altered state so he can have sex with her
Bad actors who want to do this will make their motives explicit upfront
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.