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.
Out of curiosity, what else does Lightcone spend $ on?
After excluding the $3MM for operating costs of Lightcone Offices, there’s still $6.5MM, not including the 3.3MM construction loan. Was the 16MM Rose Garden Inn a separate loan to the above?
Also more male, by that argument, given
We found a number of differences between men and non-men respondents, including non-men respondents expressing more concern, being more inclined to agree the community should look significantly different as a result of the crisis, and less likely to agree that the community had responded well to the crisis.
I think you may have very high standards? By these standards, I don’t think there are any communities at all that would score 0 here.
I think where we differ is that I’m not making a comparison of whether EA is worse than this compared to other groups, if every group scores in the range of 0.5-1 I’ll still score 0.5 as 0.5, and not scale 0.5 down to 0 and 0.75 down to 0.5. Maybe that’s the wrong way to approach it but I think the least culty organization can still have cult-like tendencies, instead of being 0 by definition.
Also if it’s true that someone working at GPI was facing these pressures from “senior scholars in the field”, then that does seem like reason for others to worry. There also has been a lot of discussion on the forum about the types of critiques that seem like they are acceptable and the ones that aren’t etc. Your colleague also seems to believe this is a concern, for example, so I’m currently inclined to think that 0.2 is pretty reasonable and I don’t think I should update much based on your comment-but happy for more pushback!
Not sure, but my guess is the worry here is if many EA community builders end up having the vast majority of their social connections tied to the EA space this might be an issue?
Also there are certain implications of this I’d find very disrespectful to the people who had the key idea in the first place.
Sorry, are you referring to Jacy here? what key idea did he come up with?
He was punished (possibly quite overpunished) via expulsion and it is not our job to do so further.
Agree that it is not CEA’s job to punish Jacy for his actions at Brown, but this was largely not what happened.
perhaps proof of rehabilitation and actions taken to learn would help, and I don’t really know why he didn’t at least come back and talk about that.
I agree, and lack of this after 3 years should be a reason to update against its existence or the extent Jacy actually cares about this.
Conjecture on exposure to “victims”
It isn’t clear he ever did anything toward any woman he worked with?
One quick question-do you think if sexual harassment allegations are true, is the EA community more or less at risk if Jacy is an independent researcher with no interaction to other EA researchers, or if he’s actively trying to form a research network, or if he takes a community building role?
Troubling men can do troubling things to women anywhere. It might actually be better to have him in EA where people are primed to call him on things and he knows he is treading on thin ice. I know this sentence will gross people out but I’m just saying that EA women are not worth more than other EA women.
I think in that set of claims, the one doing the most work is “establish that risk is pretty low”, which in Jacy’s case, is an open question. To respond to the other parts-EA women are not cannon fodder for non-EA women. The community health team’s job is to protect the EA community and should not be based on the extent adjacent communities are adequately managing the situation. The EA community does not exist primarily to internalize the negative externalities of society, and members of the EA community should not be expected to sacrifice themselves like this.
I can definitely imagine situations where I report someone doing some stuff like Jacy did, repeatedly asking out or something related to that
Do you have nonpublic info on Jacy? Can you be more clear on the kinds of situations you are imagining? How many of these do you think would result in a ban from CEA events? I guess my view here is that in most situations that would lead to a ban from CEA events, the word “victim” is probably appropriate. I think again this points to the issues around lack of clarity here, as some may be indexing the level of severity based on other things that CEA have banned people for, which are much worse than “Jacy had asked some women out on dates”, while you are basing this off other information or taking Jacy’s apology at face value etc, which doesn’t seem super well justified.
Makes sense, thanks again. One small nitpick on re-reading your last message:
I do think giving Michael a small speculation grant budget ($200k initially) seems reasonable, and the speculation grant program includes a lot of people and I think includes a lot of people who I wouldn’t think of as being involved in the EA community at all.
I think I’d appreciate some clarification around your thought process around what kind of monetary value is acceptable for Michael (similar question for Jacy here).
I guess I get the sense that letting Michael act as a grantor is bad e.g. because of the signaling effects that SFF is willing to overlook someone’s history of sexual harassment/assault etc, and not because the money will necessarily be poorly spent. Whereas you think 50k to Jacy is reasonable and 200k to Michael as a grantor is reasonable because it’s sufficiently small that this effect doesn’t matter? I basically don’t follow, and I’d be interested in hearing more about your reasoning, if you’re happy to clarify!
No worries, thanks for the response.
though I find him being listed on the website but not on the internal spreadsheet confusing enough that I might be missing something.
He is no longer on the website, which might explain the discrepancy, unless you meant he wasn’t on the internal spreadsheet even back in Feb 2022 or earlier?
Hi Habryka,
I found this comment disappointing to read.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230203024435/https://survivalandflourishing.fund/speculation-grants
I don’t know Michael, nor how SFF works, but a <1minute google search suggests that Michael Vassar was serving as a grantor as of Feb 2022. His name has since been removed, but it is unclear whether this is because he is no longer involved, or because he has rescinded consent to have his name listed, or because SFF no longer wish to list his name. It is reasonable to think that Michael Vassar may still be involved with SFF if you take either of the latter two interpretations.
My guess is you just totally made this up or heard a rumor from someone that did since I can’t think of an interpretation under which this is true.
This came across unnecessarily defensive to me, and I’m surprised that you missed this interpretation for someone “very closely involved with basically all SFF operations in the last 3-4 years”, given how easy this information was to find.
Additionally, did you know that Michael was involved in 2022, or had his name listed on the website? If you knew he was involved in 2022, but made the claim that you “can’t think of an interpretation that this is true” because he’s no longer involved in 2023, and accused burneraccountman of just totally making this up just because of that, this feels highly uncharitable to me (I would have expected you to clarify that you knew he was involved last year but this is no longer the case). If you did not know, then I suspect this is may be an update to how much you think you knew about “basically all SFF operations”, and how well calibrated you are about confident claims going forward.
I may chime back about the object level question around the case soon, but I do want to flag in the interim that this comment that suggests “Jacy had asked some women out on dates” is likely to be a misleading interpretation of the actual events. See also this thread, and this comment.
My view is that whether someone receives funding depends on the kind of work they are doing, as well as the level of risk they present to the community. On replaceability—he is pivoting to AI safety work. Would you say his difficult-to-replace nature in the animal space, to whatever extent this is true, translates to his AI safety work? His latest post was about establishing “a network of DM research collaborators and advisors”. Is he difficult to replace in this context also?
I think it’s fine for him to independently do research, but whether he should be associated with the EA community, receive EA funding for his work, or be in a position where he can be exposed to more victims (recruiting researchers) is less clear to me and depends on the details of what happened.
There has been no additional communication from CEA or Jacy acknowledging what actually happened, or why we can trust that Jacy has taken accountability for his actions, and is no longer a risk to members of this community, apart from the passage of time. Until then, I will point out the tension here that Jacy is someone who is barred from CEA events, but encouraged by 80,000 hours as a place to work at and is able to recruit from EAs without EAs having this knowledge, and will continue to raise this as a consideration so people can make better-informed decisions about potential risks in associating or working with Jacy.
Because of this lack of clarity, and because his organization’s current plan does seem to involve exposure to new potential victims, I’ve disagree-voted. But I don’t have a way of disagree-voting as 1 vote (it automatically gives 2), so take that into consideration also.
It was 2 years after his apology for this repeated troubling behavior that he got funding.
I will note that if you know about events that have happened 2 years prior to the SFF funding in 2022, this suggests there were incidents in 2020, which is after CEA’s ban in 2019. If this is what you mean, this should update you negatively about whether Jacy has taken sufficient steps to make positive changes in this regard.
He’s currently listed on the website as co-founder, and he was the one who shared the post that included the call for funding and job application on the EA forum. His bio says “@SentienceInst researching AI safety”.
What gives you the impression that he is no longer officially involved?
$50k really isn’t a lot of money and the SFF is not “EA funding”
What’s an acceptable amount of money, and what’s an unacceptable amount of money?
I didn’t make a claim personally that SFF was EA funding, which is why I said “if”, though I think many people would consider SFF a funder that was EA-aligned. They have an EA forum page, their description is “Our goal is to bring financial support to organizations working to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing.” which sounds pretty EA, and they were included in a List of EA funding opportunities, with no pushback about their inclusion as a “funder that is part of the EA community” (OTOH, they are not included in the airtable by Effective Thesis)
I personally think this is better than the decision that both the LTFF and Open Phil face where a grant is also seen as an endorsement of the org
I don’t really understand what you mean by a process that gives an organization $ that isn’t seen as endorsement of the organization. Can you clarify what you mean here?
For example, it seems like a long time since I’ve heard of Jacy Reese getting EA funding.
Jacy’s org received funding from the SFF in 2022, if you consider that EA funding. More weakly, his organization is also advertised on the 80,000 hours job board. He also recently tried to seek funding and recruit on the forum (until he deleted his post, plausibly due to pushback), and thus still benefits from EA institutions and infrastructure even if that doesn’t look like direct funding.
Oh I see! My mistake, I misunderstood what you were referring to, thanks for clarifying!
They definitely do not consider people who work in other cause areas less smart or quantitative. They are passionate about their cause so these conversations come up, but the conversations are very respectful and display deep open-mindedness.
I think this is an empirical question, and likely varies between communities, so “definitely do not...” seems too strong. For example, here’s Gregory Lewis, a fairly senior and well-respected EA, commenting on different cause areas (emphasis added):
Yet I think I’d be surprised if it wasn’t the case that among those working ‘in’ EA, the majority work on the far future, and a plurality work on AI. It also agrees with my impression that the most involved in the EA community strongly skew towards the far future cause area in general and AI in particular. I think they do so, bluntly, because these people have better access to the balance of reason, which in fact favours these being the most important things to work on.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other people shared this view.
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NJwqKSbnAgFHogaL2/key-questions-for-digital-minds#comment-S9jjzKf3AaTt62Lja
Leaving this comment up for myself and as a PSA, as the original post by Jacy was deleted shortly after this comment was posted.
Edit: received a message saying the link is broken. I’m not sure why this is, but I think this is an issue if you click the link but not if you copy+paste the link. Screenshot below in any case if this issue persists for others.
I feel like you and Ben are talking past each other; you claim that, like Ben, you don’t want to discuss this. Yet you don’t respond to Bill’s comment about how the problems Nick faces are not contingent on whether the research is discredited. Your point about the value EA contributes is also irrelevant, unless you’re making a claim here that Bostrom is providing this value and that this value is stronger than the value of his counterfactual replacement.
Thanks for clarifying!
On “controversy bad enough”, I asked that because your statement was “I think asking Bostrom to step down because of controversies belies the value that FHI most provides for the world”, and I didn’t know whether you were referring to these recent controversies specifically (the bad effects of the recent controversies isn’t bad enough to override the good that Bostrom is expected to provide in the future over the counterfactual), or about controversies generally (asking Bostrom to step down because of controversies in general misses the value of what Bostrom brings; we should not do this).
A lot of people seem angry at Bostrom, but that surely isn’t a good measure of “how bad” something that someone did was.
Yeah, I agree that in many cases it isn’t a good measure, but I think saying it “surely isn’t a good measure” probably goes too far. There probably are nonzero contexts where it is a good measure, even if this isn’t one of them. For example, if someone’s work and role was highly dependent on or affected by popular opinion or buy-in, then something can be bad just because of a lot of people being angry at it.
Lightcone spent more than $3.3MM on renovation in 2022? How many square feet of renovations is this for? How much does Lightcone usually spend a year on renovation?
That leaves ~3MM, which I assume is mainly going towards salaries (how many staff are being paid for from this 3MM outside of the 7 listed on the website?), as the LW review prizes appear to be in the hundreds per prize, and less than 10k overall. There was only 1 EA Global event in 2022 in the Bay (did Lightcone fund after parties at other EAGs?), and presumably events are going to be in the ~10s of thousands range at most. I don’t know how much LW server costs, but I’d be surprised if it was more than 10s of thousands/year.
Instead of me speculating, are you happy to share any more detailed breakdowns on the above? Are any of Lightcone’s financials publicly available?