RobBensinger

• RobBensinger 20 Jan 2023 1:12 UTC

  247 points

  94 ∶ 6

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: FLI FAQ on the re­jected grant pro­posal controversy

  The timeline (in PT time zone) seems to be:

  Jan 13, 12:46am: Expo article published.

  Jan 13, 4:20am: First mention of this on the EA Forum.

  Jan 13, 6:46am: Shakeel Hashim (speaking for himself and not for CEA; +110 karma, +109 net agreement as of the 15th) writes, “If this is true it’s absolutely horrifying. FLI needs to give a full explanation of what exactly happened here and I don’t understand why they haven’t. If FLI did knowingly agree to give money to a neo-Nazi group, that’s despicable. I don’t think people who would do something like that ought to have any place in this community.”

  Jan 13, 9:18pm: Shakeel follows up, repeating that he sees no reason why FLI wouldn’t have already made a public statement that it’s really weird that FLI hasn’t already made a public statement, and raises the possibility that FLI has maybe done sinister questionably-legal things and that’s why they haven’t spoken up.

  Jan 14, 3:43am: You (titotal) comment, “If the letter is genuine (and they have never denied that it is), then someone at FLI is either grossly incompetent or malicious. They need to address this ASAP. ”

  Jan 14, 8:16am: Jason comments (+15 karma, +13 net agreement as of the 15th): “I think it very likely that FLI would have made a statement here if there were an innocent or merely negligent explanation (e.g., the document is a forgery, or they got duped somehow into believing the grantee was related to FLI’s stated charitable purposes and not pro-Nazi). So, unless there is a satisfactory explanation forthcoming, the stonewalling strongly points to a more sinister one.”

  Jan 14, 6:39pm: Tegmark’s initial response.

  To be clear, this is Shakeel saying “I don’t understand why [FLI hasn’t given a full explanation]” six hours after the article came out /​ two hours after EAs started discussing it, at 9:46am Boston time. (FLI is based in Boston.) And Jason accusing FLI of “stonewalling” one day after the article’s release.

  [Update ¹⁄₂₁: Jason says that he was actually thinking of FLI stonewalling Expo, not FLI stonewalling the EA Forum. That makes a big difference, though I wish Jason had been clear about this in his comments, since I think the aggregate effect of a bunch of comments like this on the EA Forum was to cause myself and others to think that Tegmark was taking a weirdly long time to reply to the article or to the EA Forum discussion.]

  (And I’m only mentioning the explicit condemnation of FLI for not speaking up sooner here. The many highly upvoted and agreevoted EA Forum comments roasting FLI and making confident claims about what happened prior to Tegmark’s comment, with language like “the squalid character of Tegmark’s choices”, are obviously a further reason Tegmark /​ FLI might have wanted to rush out a response.)

  The level of speed-in-replying demanded by EAs in this case (and endorsed by the larger EA Forum community, insofar as we strongly upvoted and up-agreevoted those comments) is frankly absurd, and I do think several apologies are owed here.

  (Like, “respond within two hours of a 7am forum post” is wildly absurd even if we’re adopting a norm of expecting people to just blurt out their initial thoughts in real time, warts and errors and all. But it’s even more absurd if we’re demanding carefully crafted Public Statements that make no missteps and have no PR defects.)

  What links here?

  • Linch's comment on Linch’s Quick takes by Linch (20 Jan 2023 6:44 UTC; 31 points)

• RobBensinger 7 Sep 2023 22:19 UTC

  179 points

  40 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Kelsey Piper’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  I’d appreciate it if Nonlinear spent their limited resources on the claims that I think are most shocking and most important, such as the claim that Woods said “your career in EA would be over with a few DMs” to a former employee after the former employee was rumored to have complained about the company.

  I agree that this is a way more important incident, but I downvoted this comment because:

  • I don’t want to discourage Nonlinear from nitpicking smaller claims. A lot of what worries people here is a gestalt impression that Nonlinear is callous and manipulative; if that impression is wrong, it will probably be because of systematic distortions in many claims, and it will probably be hard to un-convince people of the impression without weighing in on lots of the claims, both major and minor.

  • I expect some correlation between “this concern is easier to properly and fully address” and “this concern is more minor”, so I think it’s normal and to be expected that Nonlinear would start with relatively-minor stuff.

  • I do think it’s good to state your cruxes, but people’s cruxes will vary some; I’d rather that Nonlinear overshare and try to cover everything, and I don’t want to locally punish them for addressing a serious concern even if it’s not the top concern. “I’d appreciate if Nonlinear spent their limited resources...” makes it sound like you didn’t want Nonlinear to address the veganism thing at all, which I think would have been a mistake.

  • I’m generally wary of the dynamic “someone makes a criticism of Nonlinear, Nonlinear addresses it in a way that’s at least partly exculpatory, but then a third party steps in to say ‘you shouldn’t have addressed that claim, it’s not the one I care about the most’”. This (a) makes it more likely that Nonlinear will feel pushed into not-correcting-the-record on all sorts of false claims, and (b) makes it more likely that EAs will fail to properly dwell on each data point and update on it (because they can always respond to a refutation of X by saying ‘but what about Y?!’ when the list of criticisms is this danged long).

  I also think it’s pretty normal and fine to need a week to properly address big concerns. Maybe you’ve forgotten a bunch of the details and need to fact-check things. Maybe you’re emotionally processing stuff and need another 24h to draft a thing that you trust to be free of motivated reasoning.

  I think it’s fine to take some time, and I also think it’s fine to break off some especially-easy-to-address points and respond to those faster.

A challenge for AGI or­ga­ni­za­tions, and a challenge for readers

Why hasn’t EA done an SBF in­ves­ti­ga­tion and post­mortem?

• RobBensinger 5 Feb 2023 10:21 UTC

  163 points

  72 ∶ 14

  on: EA’s weird­ness makes it un­usu­ally sus­cep­ti­ble to bad behavior

  Be marginally less accepting of weirdness overall.

  I agree that a low-weirdness EA would have fewer weird scandals. I’m not sure whether these would just be replaced by more normal scandals. It probably depends a lot on exactly what changes you make? A surprisingly large fraction of the “normal” communities I’ve observed are perpetually riven by political infighting, personal conflicts, allegations of bad behavior, etc., to a far greater degree than is true for EA.

  Choosing the right target depends on understanding what EA is doing right in addition to understanding what it’s doing wrong, and protecting and cultivating the former at the same time we combat the latter.

  I’m skeptical that optimizing against marginal weirdness is a good way to reduce rates of sexual misconduct, mostly for two reasons:

  • The proposal is basically to regress EA to the mean, but I haven’t seen evidence that EA is worse than the mean of the populations we’d realistically move toward. This actually matters; it would be PlayPump levels of tragicomic if EA put a ton of effort into Becoming More Normal for the sake of making sex and gender minorities safer in EA, only to find out that the normal demographic we’ve merged with has worse rates of sexual assault, harassment, etc.

  • There’s an inherent tension between “make EA normal and inoffensive” and “make EA honest and high-integrity”. Optimizing for normality also means optimizing for faking normality. Optimizing for a scandal-free EA also means optimizing for covering up information that makes EA look bad. An EA that’s less honest, less open, less able to have “real” and frank EA-to-EA conversations, and less willing to take PR hits for the sake of Doing The Right Thing, is not particularly one that I’d expect to be overall safer for its members.

  In the long run, I think the best way to make the EA community a healthy place is to optimize somewhat for weirdness as a secondary consideration, but mostly just optimize for a community that’s honest, high-integrity, brave, compassionate, smart, skillful, thoughtful, self-aware, etc. Like, try to make EA actually virtuous, and actively push against incentives to merely seem virtuous in various regards.

  I also think that optimizing against weirdness would be really bad for EAs’ ability to make the world a better place, because I think EA is currently mostly bottlenecked on “vastly insufficient quantities of weird ideas, uncorrelated research directions, low-confidence exploratory attempts to try new things, etc.”

  The ITN framework also points in this direction: “importance, tractability, and neglectedness” is not that far off from “importance, tractability, and weirdness”. You can ditch the weirder and more counter-intuitive ideas, but then you’ll be competing with all the other people in the world who want to do important and tractable things that aren’t socially risky or weird.

  EA already has a massive surplus of people generating weird new ideas

  A surplus relative to what? I think that AI alignment is desperately in need of many weird new ideas, and also in serious need of a lot more honest, substantive public debate of weird and counter-intuitive strategy and governance issues.

  This might just be an object-level disagreement about where EA’s main positive impact is likely to come from, on our respective models of the world. E.g., if you think EA mainly has a positive impact via increasing donations to GiveDirectly, then I buy that EA’s current idea pipeline might be a lot weirder than optimal for that.

EA should blurt

Be wary of en­act­ing norms you think are unethical

• RobBensinger 15 Nov 2022 22:15 UTC

  143 points

  41 ∶ 1

  on: Selec­tive truth-tel­ling: con­cerns about EA lead­er­ship com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

  I agree with the central thrust of this post, and I’m really grateful that you made it. This might be the single biggest thing I want to change about EA leaders’ behavior. And relatedly, I think “be more candid, and less nervous about PR risks” is probably the biggest thing I want to change about rank-and-file EAs’ behavior. Not because the risks are nonexistent, but because trying hard to avoid the risks via not-super-honest tactics tends to cause more harm than benefit. It’s the wrong general policy and mindset.

  Q: Is your approach utilitarian? A: It’s utilitarian flavoured.

  This seems like an unusually good answer to me! I’m impressed, and this updates me positively about Ben Todd’s honesty and precision in answering questions like these.

  I think a good description of EA is “the approach that behaves sort of like utilitarianism, when decisions are sufficiently high-stakes and there aren’t ethical injunctions in play”. I don’t think utilitarianism is true, and it’s obvious that many EAs aren’t utilitarians, and obvious that utilitarianism isn’t required for working on EA cause areas, or for being quantitative, systematic, and rigorous in your moral reasoning, etc. Yet it’s remarkable how often our prescriptions look like the prescriptions of utilitarianism anyway.

  I don’t know of any better compact way of describing EA’s moral perspective than “we endorse role-playing utilitarianism (at least when the stakes are high and there aren’t relevant deontology-ish prohibitions)”. And I think it’s good and wholesome when EAs don’t try to distance themselves from utilitarianism (given how useful it is as a way of summarizing a ton of different moral views we tend to endorse), but also don’t oversimplify our relationship to utilitarianism.

  it raises questions about Will’s unadvertised relationship with a controversial public figure, and one who founded a wildly successful AI Capabilities Research Lab.

  I agree that it was a terrible idea to found OpenAI, and reflects very poorly on Musk (especially given the stated reasoning at the time).

  I think it’s an awful idea to require every EA who’s ever sent text messages to someone in Musk’s reference class (or talked to him at a party, etc.) to publicly disclose the fact that they chatted. I don’t see the point—is the idea that talking to Elon Musk somehow taints you as a person?

  Various MIRI staff have had conversations with Elon Musk in the past, and the idea that this fact is scandalous just sounds silly to me. I’d be more scandalized if EAs didn’t talk to people like Musk, given the opportunity. (Or Bill Gates, or Demis Hassabis, or Barack Obama, etc.)

  On some level I just think your whole framing here—‘oh no, an EA talked to a Controversial Public Figure!’—is misguided. “Controversial” is a statement about what’s popular, not about what’s true or good. I think that the impulse to avoid interacting in any way with people who seem Controversial is the same impulse that’s behind the misguided behavior the rest of your post is talking about. It’s the mindset of cancel culture, of guilt-by-association, of ‘there’s something unwholesome about talking to the Other Side at all, even to try to convince them to come around to doing the right thing’.

  If we think that someone is doing the Wrong Thing, then by default we should talk to them and try to convince them to do things differently. EAs should primarily just be advocating for what they think is true and good, in a clear and honest voice, not playing the Six Degrees of PR Contagion game.

  Furthermore, Will’s tweet here about WWOTF implied to me that he didn’t know Elon personally: https://​​twitter.com/​​willmacaskill/​​status/​​1554378994765574144.

  Which part implied that to you? I don’t see Will lying about this, and I don’t see how it matters for the thread whether Will and Elon ever send each other text messages, or whether Will tries to get Elon’s buy-in on a project.

  AFAIK lots of EAs have tried to get Elon to help with (or ditch!) various projects over the years, though I’m unimpressed with the results.

  I was pretty alarmed by this thread from Kerry Vaughan which touches on Ben Delo, a major EA donor prior to SBF with a fraud conviction: https://​​twitter.com/​​KerryLVaughan/​​status/​​1591508697372663810. The implication here is that Ben Delo’s involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards.

  I’d still like more detail about what actually happened there, before I assume Kerry’s account is correct. Various other recent Kerry-claims have turned out to be false or exaggerated, though I can’t say I’m surprised if EAs responded super weirdly to the Ben Delo thing.

• RobBensinger 3 Apr 2024 3:48 UTC

  131 points

  42 ∶ 8

  on: Quick Up­date on Leav­ing the Board of EV

  Here’s a post with me asking the question flat out: Why hasn’t EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?

  This seems like an incredibly obvious first step from my perspective, not something I’d have expected a community like EA to be dragging its heels on years after the fact.

  We’re happy to sink hundreds of hours into fun “criticism of EA” contests, but when the biggest disaster in EA’s history manifests, we aren’t willing to pay even one investigator to review what happened so we can get the facts straight, begin to rebuild trust, and see if there’s anything we should change in response? I feel like I’m in crazytown; what the heck is going on?

• RobBensinger 18 Nov 2022 11:02 UTC

  114 points

  56 ∶ 3

  on: Does Sam make me want to re­nounce the ac­tions of the EA com­mu­nity? No. Does your re­ac­tion? Ab­solutely.

  This has included Will MacAskill and other thought leaders for the grave sin of not magically predicting that someone whose every external action suggested that he wanted to work with us to make the world a better place, would YOLO it and go Bernie Madoff.

  A contingent of EAs (e.g., Oliver Habryka and the early Alameda exodus) seems to have had strongly negative views of SBF well in advance of the FTX fraud coming to light. So I think it’s worthwhile for some EAs to do a postmortem on why some people were super worried and others were (apparently) not worried at all.

  Otherwise, I agree with you that folks have seemed to overreact more than underreact, and that there have been a lot of rushed overconfident claims, and a lot of hindsight-bias-y claims.

• RobBensinger 9 Sep 2023 11:01 UTC

  109 points

  44 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  I’m concerned that our community is both (1) extremely encouraging and tolerant of experimentation and poor, undefined boundaries and (2) very quick to point the finger when any experiment goes wrong.

  Yep, I think this is a big problem.

  More generally, I think a lot of EAs give lip service to the value of people trying weird new ambitious things, “adopt a hits-based approach”, “if you’re never failing then you’re playing it too safe”, etc.; but then we harshly punish visible failures, especially ones that are the least bit weird. In cases like those, I think the main solution is to be more forgiving of failures, rather than to give up on ambitious projects.

  From my perspective, none of this is particularly relevant to what bothers me about Ben’s post and Nonlinear’s response. My biggest concern about Nonlinear is their attempt to pressure people into silence (via lawsuits, bizarre veiled threats, etc.), and “I really wish EAs would experiment more with coercing and threatening each other” is not an example of the kind of experimentalism I’m talking about when I say that EAs should be willing to try and fail at more things (!).

  “Keep EA weird” does not entail “have low ethical standards”. Weirdness is not an excuse for genuinely unethical conduct.

  I don’t think we get better boundaries by acting like a failure like this is due to character or lack of integrity instead of bad engineering.

  I think the failures that seem like the biggest deal to me (Nonlinear threatening people and trying to shut down criticism and frighten people) genuinely are matters of character and lack of integrity, not matters of bad engineering. I agree that not all of the failures in Ben’s OP are necessarily related to any character/​integrity issues, and I generally like the lens you’re recommending for most cases; I just don’t think it’s the right lens here.

Out­line of Galef’s “Scout Mind­set”

Have faux-evil EA energy

• RobBensinger 5 Feb 2023 12:23 UTC

  89 points

  51 ∶ 13

  on: Should EVF con­sider ap­point­ing new board mem­bers?

  Removing Claire from the EVF Board because she approved the Wytham Abbey purchase seems tremendously silly to me. FTX is a serious scandal that impacted millions of people; EA projects buying conference venues or offices isn’t.

  Edward Kmett’s take on that topic seems correct to me:

  I look at the building, a building I give myself even odds never to step into, as actually a plausibly solid investment from the standpoint of the cost of running events. I say that as someone who is not paid to care on this front.

  [… A]s someone who has had to organize many conferences in the past, and who watched the utilization of the CFAR space in Bodega Bay, and what Lightcone has been up to, this doesn’t seem anywhere near as beyond the pale to me as it seems to to some.

  What do I mean by that? Well. Lightcone gets something like 75% utilization out of the Hubinger house as an event space today. It also spends a comparable amount of money on an annual basis on the office space they offer in Berkeley where we first met to the cost of a prime rate loan for this property, which happens to match up with the cost of a loan for the Rose Garden Inn, almost to a tee. Looking at the Rose Garden Inn, it is a hot mess in downtown Berkeley, run down, and will need $3.5m worth of repairs or so. When they finish they expect to get about twice the space for about the same operating capital as the WeWork space they have today, and they’d be able to shed the apartments they offer for folks visiting the area, etc. because it’d actually be zoned for people to lay their head down and sleep, so it’s just better than their office space, and it’s suitable as an event location.

  The Abbey is about the same price point as Rose Garden, somewhat fewer rooms, comparable distance to the center of Oxford where there are a bunch of EA orgs running around, somewhat less rundown, they are outsourcing the repair rather than running it in house, but apples to apples it’s pretty damn close. The optics are terrible, but try to find a building in or around Oxford that isn’t 300+ years old and historical in some way.

  Folks say you could buy some big box concrete office, but if you did that you still wouldn’t be able to sleep your attendees. So you’d be subsidizing the hotel industry. Rent out conference halls at hotels? Sure, but now your 40 person event costs $80k. Run 15 of them and you are damn near break even for the year for the “castle”. Relocate the event out into the boonies so you can run a 40 person event for $40k? Now you need to get them there, and it costs $80k again.

  When you rent a hotel’s conference rooms you typically burn $80-$160/​hour in a location like oxford or a populous center like SF or Berkeley. 3 of them is typical for breakouts. That eats up budget fast. But so much of the community building stuff happens in all those little conversations at night, over tea, while walking. It’s not virtual events that get people to change their mind. It’s those in person sessions where you get to hold someone’s attention for 4-5 days at a time, to break them out of their ruts and give them a chance to imagine what could be, and to baste in a sense of community. So yeah, virtual events are way cheaper, but you only convince those who are already convinced, you tend to get surface thoughts, even though you may get them out of more people. I think they are useful, but as an AND not an OR.

  The hotel is going to kick you out of your event space at 5pm, so you aren’t getting your evenings and midnight chats. The virtual venue is going to be f’ing terrible to socialize, you get no feedback when someone turns off their mic and camera and checks out. You lose them and you don’t know why.

  There’s something to be said for a venue you can customize to the needs of your organization, adding more breakout spaces, comfy backjacks for circling, or whatever else fits the vibe of the community you are trying to build, and not having to spend days setting it back up and tearing it back down between events.

• RobBensinger 12 Nov 2022 19:05 UTC

  83 points

  27 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Bryan Grover’s comment on: Some com­ments on re­cent FTX-re­lated events

  I strongly disagree—first, because this is dishonest and dishonorable. And second, because I don’t think EA should try to have an immaculate brand.

  Indeed, I suspect that part of what went wrong in the FTX case is that EA was optimizing too hard for having an immaculate brand, at the expense of optimizing for honesty, integrity, open discussion of what we actually believe, etc. I don’t think this is the only thing that was going on, but it would help explain why people with concerns about SBF/​FTX kept quiet about those concerns. Because they either were worried about sullying EA’s name, or they were worried about social punishment from others who didn’t want EA’s name sullied.

  IMO, trying super hard to never have your brand’s name sullied, at the expense of ordinary moral goals like “be honest”, tends to sully one’s brand far more than if you’d just ignored the brand and prioritized other concerns. Especially insofar as the people you’re trying to appeal to are very smart, informed, careful thinkers; you might be able to trick the Median Voter that EA is cool via a shallow PR campaign and attempts to strategically manipulate the narrative, but you’ll have a far harder time tricking the sorts of extremely smart, educated, morally scrupulous people who EA is actually mostly trying to recruit and persuade.

  And this is especially especially true insofar as you’re trying to get a huge diffuse community to all play along with your fake narrative! It’s not as though you can send out a memo to all EAs to dissemble in a specific way that furthers your narrative; the memo will just leak and cause more harm than good. EA needs to give up on this “have an immaculate brand” mirage and shift its mindset toward goals more like “exemplify real virtues”, “focus on the object level”, and “specialize in the niche of being The Group That Speaks Truth Even When It’s Uncomfortable”. You won’t win over everyone that way, but you’ll win more of the battles that matter, and that are actually winnable.

  What links here?

  • RobBensinger's comment on IMPCO, don’t in­jure your­self by re­turn­ing FTXFF money for ser­vices you already provided by EliezerYudkowsky (12 Nov 2022 20:00 UTC; 38 points)

• RobBensinger 11 Nov 2022 5:42 UTC

  83 points

  29 ∶ 12

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: The FTX Fu­ture Fund team has resigned

  A couple of hours ago, I tweeted:

  Given SBF’s EA-ness and strong embeddedness within EA, I support the idea of making it an EA cause area to pay back people he effectively stole money from and used in EA (until that’s done), if he stole money from people and SBF + normal legal channels don’t suffice to return it.

  It doesn’t strike me as appropriate for AMF to take money under the understanding it would go to combating malaria, and then divert that money to random crypto people instead.

  But it strikes me as appropriate for the larger EA community to undo any harms like this that the community caused, at least if the conditions above hold, including if that means giving less to AMF, MIRI, etc. next year.

  (MIRI didn’t receive any money from FTX AFAIK, and I have no idea whether AMF did; I’m just using them as examples of EA orgs. Diverting some donations from us to some pay-people-back fund would make sense if the above conditions hold, IMO, regardless of which specific EA orgs counterfactually lose money as a result. Because the point is to undo a harm caused by EAs, not to punish recipient orgs or undo every specific humanitarian benefit that occurred.)

  Reimbursing people for the money spent within the EA ecosystem (if the above conditions hold) might take years, but it strikes me as doable, and much more obviously “our job” than trying to undo all harm FTX caused.

  That said:

  IF SBF has effectively crippled EA’s reputation -- We need to strike back and shift the narrative, otherwise this movement might be dead overnight. Think about how severely this will limit the amount of $ donated effectively in future

  This strikes me as unreasonable and panicky, and also as weirdly manipulative. The reason we should help people we harmed is because it’s the right thing to do, not because we need to “shift the narrative”.

  One could argue for the EA community returning every dollar ever received from FTX-aligned sources . . . but I’m just not sure how much even that would move the needle of public opinion.

  I have the same objection here. If the facts shake out such that FTX indeed effectively stole money from people, and gave that money to EA projects, and no other channels suffice to reimburse the people who were stolen from, then as a community we should make it a priority to pay them back over time, up to the amount that was stolen from them and used by us.

  I don’t know how likely it is that all those conditions will hold, but if they do hold, we should respond even if it’s useless for PR purposes and happens way too late to go viral on Twitter or whatever—because it’s the right thing to do. The reason to go fast would be because the victims will be more harmed if they’re parted from their money longer, not because going fast has better optics.

  What links here?

  • RobBensinger's comment on IMPCO, don’t in­jure your­self by re­turn­ing FTXFF money for ser­vices you already provided by EliezerYudkowsky (12 Nov 2022 20:38 UTC; 4 points)

• RobBensinger 12 Sep 2023 22:05 UTC

  82 points

  29 ∶ 3

  in reply to: chloe’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”.

  [...]

  She kept insisting that I’m saying that because I’m being silly and worry too much and that buying weed is really easy, everybody does it.

  😬 There’s a ton of awful stuff here, but these two parts really jumped out at me. Trying to push past someone’s boundaries by imposing a narrative about the type of person they are (‘but you’re the type of person who loves doing X!’ ‘you’re only saying no because you’re the type of person who worries too much’) is really unsettling behavior.

  I’ll flag that this is an old remembered anecdote, and those can be unreliable, and I haven’t heard Emerson or Kat’s version of events. But it updates me, because Chloe seems like a pretty good source and this puzzle piece seems congruent with the other puzzle pieces.

  E.g., the vibe here matches something that creeped me out a lot about Kat’s text message to Alice in the OP, which is the apparent attempt to corner/​railroad Alice into agreement via a bunch of threats and strongly imposed frames, followed immediately by Kat repeatedly stating as fact that Alice will of course agree with Kat: “[we] expect you will do the same moving forward”, “Sounds like you’ve come to the same conclusion”, “It sounds like we’re now on the same page about this”.

  

  Working and living with Nonlinear had me forget who I was, and lose more self worth than I had ever lost in my life. I wasn’t able to read books anymore, nor keep my focus in meetings for longer than 2 minutes, I couldn’t process my own thoughts or anything that took more than a few minutes of paying attention.

  😢 Jesus.

• RobBensinger 5 Apr 2024 1:29 UTC

  81 points

  9 ∶ 0

  in reply to: RobBensinger’s comment on: Quick Up­date on Leav­ing the Board of EV

  Update Apr. 4: I’ve now spoken with another EA who was involved in EA’s response to the FTX implosion. To summarize what they said to me:

  • They thought that the lack of an investigation was primarily due to general time constraints and various exogenous logistical difficulties. At the time, they thought that setting up a team who could overcome the various difficulties would be extremely hard for mundane reasons such as:

    • thorough, even-handed investigations into sensitive topics are very hard to do (especially if you start out low-context);

    • this is especially true when they are vaguely scoped and potentially involve a large number of people across a number of different organizations;

    • “professional investigators” (like law firms) aren’t very well-suited to do the kind of investigation that would actually be helpful;

    • legal counsels were generally strongly advising people against talking about FTX stuff in general;

    • various old confidentiality agreements would make it difficult to discuss what happened in some relevant instances (e.g. meetings that had Chatham House Rules);

    • it would be hard to guarantee confidentiality in the investigation when info might be subpoenaed or something like that;

    • and a general plethora of individually-surmountable but collectively-highly-challenging obstacles.

  • They flagged that at the time, most people involved were already in an exceptionally busy and difficult time, and so had less bandwidth for additional projects than usual.

  • A caveat here is that the EV board did block some people from speaking publicly during the initial investigation into EV’s legal situation. That investigation ended back in the summer of 2023.

  • Julia Wise and Ozzie Gooen wrote on the EA Forum that this is a potentially useful project for someone to take on, which as far as this person knew isn’t something any EA leadership did or would try to stop, and the impression of the person I spoke to was that Julia and Ozzie indeed tried to investigate what reforms should happen, though the person I spoke to didn’t follow that situation closely.

  • The person I spoke to didn’t want to put words in the mouth of EA leaders, and their information is mostly from ~1 year ago and might be out of date. But to the extent some people aren’t currently champing at the bit to make this happen, their impression (with respect to the EA leaders they have interacted with relatively extensively) is that this has little to do with a desire to protect the reputation of EA or of individual EAs.

  • Rather, their impression is that for a lot of top EA leaders, this whole thing is a lot less interesting, because those EAs think they know what happened (and that it’s not that interesting). So the choice is like “should I pour in a ton of energy to try to set up this investigation that will struggle to get off the ground to learn kinda boring stuff I already know?” And maybe they are underrating how interesting others would find it, but that made the whole idea not so important-seeming (at least in the early days after FTX’s collapse, relative to all the other urgent and confusing things swirling around in the wake of the collapse) from their perspective.

  I vouch for this person as generally honest and well-intentioned. I update from the above that community leaders are probably less resistant to doing some kind of fact-finding inquiry than I thought. I’m hoping that this take is correct, since it suggests to me that it might not be too hard to get an SBF postmortem to happen now that the trial and the EV legal investigation are both over (and now that we’re all talking about the subject in the first place).

  If the take above isn’t correct, then hopefully my sharing it will cause others to chime in with further objections, and I can zigzag my way to understanding what actually happened!

  I shared the above summary with Oliver Habryka, and he said:

  Hmm, I definitely don’t buy the “this has little to do with EA leadership desire to protect their reputation”. A lot of the reason for the high standards is for PR reasons.

  I think people are like “Oh man, doing a good job here seems really hard, since doing it badly seems like it would be really costly reputation-wise. But if someone did want to put in the heroic effort to do a good enough job to not have many downsides, then yeah, I would be in favor of that. But that seems so hard to do that I don’t really expect it to happen.”

  Like, the primary thing that seems to me the mistake is the standard to which any such investigation is being held to before people consider it net-positive.

  I’ll also share Ozzie Gooen’s Twitter take from a few days ago:

  My quick guess (likely to be wrong!)

  • There are really only a few people “on top” of EA.

  • This would have essentially been “these top people investigating each other, and documenting that for others in the community”

  • These people don’t care that much about being trusted in the community. They fund the community and have power

  • the EA community really doesn’t have much power over the funders/​leaders.

  • These people generally feel like they understand the problem well enough.

  And, some corrections to my earlier posts about this:

  • I said that “there was a narrow investigation into legal risk to Effective Ventures last year”, which I think may have overstated the narrowness of the investigation a bit. My understanding is that the investigation’s main goal was to reduce EV’s legal exposure, but to that end the investigation covered a somewhat wider range of topics (possibly including things like COI policies), including things that might touch on broader EA mistakes and possible improvements. But it’s hard to be sure about any of this because details of the investigation’s scope and outcomes weren’t shared, and it doesn’t sound like they will be.

  • I said that Julia Wise had “been calling for the existence of such an investigation”; Julia clarifies on social media, “I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly.”

    • Specifically, Julia Wise, Ozzie Gooen, and Sam Donald co-wrote a November 2023 blog post that listed “comprehensive investigation into FTX<>EA connections /​ problems” as one of four “projects and programs we’d like to see”, saying “these projects are promising, but they’re sizable or ongoing projects that we don’t have the capacity to carry out”. They also included this idea in a list of Further Possible Projects on EA Reform.

  What links here?

  • Why hasn’t EA done an SBF in­ves­ti­ga­tion and post­mortem? by RobBensinger (1 Apr 2024 2:28 UTC; 166 points)
  • RobBensinger's comment on Why hasn’t EA done an SBF in­ves­ti­ga­tion and post­mortem? by RobBensinger (3 Apr 2024 3:40 UTC; 34 points)
  • RobBensinger's comment on Why hasn’t EA done an SBF in­ves­ti­ga­tion and post­mortem? by RobBensinger (5 Apr 2024 1:37 UTC; 9 points)

“Ex­is­ten­tial risk from AI” sur­vey results

• RobBensinger 13 Nov 2022 0:47 UTC

  80 points

  29 ∶ 8

  in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: A per­sonal state­ment on FTX

  It could have easily been the most consequential thing EAs have ever done and there has—to my knowledge- never been a thorough EA debate that signalled that this would be a good idea.

  I don’t think EAs should necessary require a community-wide debate before making major decisions, including investment decisions; sometimes decisions should be made fast, and often decisions don’t benefit a ton from “the whole community weighs in” over “twenty smart advisors weighed in”.

  But regardless, seems interesting and useful for EAs to debate this topic so we can form more models of this part of the strategy space—maybe we should be doing more to positively affect the world’s public fora. And I’d personally love to know more about Will’s reasoning re Twitter.