RobertJones

Karma: 238

RobertJones 5 Jun 2023 11:23 UTC
22 points
5 ∶ 0
on: Further defense of the 2% fuzzies/8% EA causes pledge proposal
Firstly, I don’t see any benefit from the proposal. I don’t think the 10% norm forms a major part of EA’s public perception, so I don’t believe tweaking it would make any difference. If anything 2%/8% makes it more weird (not least because it no longer matches the tithing norm). You haven’t made any compelling argument for the reputational advantage to be gained either here or in your previous post, yet alone that this is the most effective way of gaining reputation.
Secondly, I don’t see how you could implement it. GWWC exists because it presents a clear case for its pledge. We’re not in a position to tell people how to allocate their donations, and I suspect that most people who have been convinced by the basic argument for effective giving will then not choose to allocate a fifth of their donations ineffectively for vague reputational reasons.
Thirdly, a major argument of EA is precisely that a huge benefit could be gained simply by reallocating donations from ineffective to effective causes.

RobertJones 23 Dec 2022 10:01 UTC
16 points
3 ∶ 0
on: CEA’s work in 2022
“Our attempts in late 2021 and early 2022 to support top uni groups didn’t pay off as we hoped, and we passed on this strand of work to Open Philanthropy in early 2022.”
“One downside of handing top university support over to Open Philanthropy is that they only supply funding to groups. We are beginning to investigate whether we can provide advice, support, and retreats to top university groups and group organizers of well established groups.”
I’m a bit confused by this pair of points. What was the problem? Why was OP a better fit for this task? How is the support you’re now looking to provide different from the support which didn’t pay off as you had hoped? How will you avoid duplicating work with OP?

RobertJones 16 Dec 2022 9:43 UTC
24 points
4 ∶ 0
on: The US Attorney for the SDNY asked that FTX money be returned to victims. What are the moral and legal consequences to EA?
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but I am only able to advise on the law of England and Wales. I have no particular knowledge of the law of the Bahamas, New York or Delaware. What follows in any case are generic comments: any particular situation will depend on its own facts and you should take specific legal advice.
We have laws to decide what happens in this situation. These laws generally strike a reasonable balance between the interests of the various groups affected, which is necessarily complex given that some people are bound to get burnt in an insolvency. This will be a particularly complex case because of the numerous entities involved and the cross-jurisdictional elements.
There is probably a right answer. Charity trustees must use their funds for their charitable purposes, so unless they are obliged to return the funds, they may well be forbidden from doing so. If funds are returned, they must only returned to a person who can give good receipt for them, and there may be a dispute as to who that person is. I would suggest that no funds be returned until confirmation has been obtained from all relevant jurisdictions, and this may take some time. In particular, it’s unclear to me how the US Attorney for SDNY is getting in on this.
In these circumstances, I would strongly suggest that for now, any funds which might be FTX customer funds or otherwise the proceeds of fraud should be held separately pending confirmation of the position. Where funds have already been disbursed it’s probably unnecessary (and not legally possible) to require the grantees to return them, but having been put on notice that the funds may be the proceeds of fraud, making further disbursements risks an accessory liability (which may attach to the individuals responsible).
If a UK charity is uncertain how to proceed, it may well be worth consulting the Charity Commission. I think particularly it would be worthwhile getting the Charity Commission to approve anything which might look like a voluntary transfer (e.g. if the trustees were minded to comply with a request from a liquidator to return funds without being compelled to do so).

RobertJones 16 Dec 2022 9:04 UTC
13 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
I’m afraid I think this is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it. If you make a grant £X to allow another organisation to buy an asset, the fact that the donee ends up with a valuable asset is obviously an argument in favour of the grant, but you’ve still made a grant for £X. You can’t offset the value of the asset, because it isn’t your asset.
It may be that in making the grant for £X, you’re saving yourself making a series of future grants (in the case the cost of hiring venues for the conferences/retreats), and in that sense it may be financially advantageous, but you still have made a grant of £X, which needs to justified on its merits, just as you would have had to justify the counterfactual series of future grants. Fundamentally what seems to have happened here is that value of the events themselves has been taken for granted, even though they were being very significantly prefunded.

RobertJones 16 Dec 2022 8:45 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: The case for transparent spending
“CEA posts an annual update on the forum.”
This seems not to be true? CEA posted annual reviews for 2019 and 2020, but the most recent update post I see is for Q2 2021. Of course that was before the name change, so it was what we would now call an EVF update, but I can’t see that EVF has ever made an equivalent post.
There is also nothing (I can find) more up-to-date on CEA’s own website or EVF’s own website. In fact, the best public source of information about EVF appear to be its statutory filings, which are extremely thorough, but still only run to 30 June 2021 (the filing for ²⁰²¹⁄₂ won’t be due for about 4 months). In a sense, that’s the system working as intended, but it does seem that an organisation commited to transparency might make some information available both more prominently and timelier.

RobertJones 15 Dec 2022 12:34 UTC
40 points
12 ∶ 8
in reply to: ClaireZabel’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
It’s no concern of mine how OP spends its money, but since it’s come up here: I don’t think your cost estimate can be correct.
Firstly, OP doesn’t have the asset, so its resale value is irrelevant to you. It’s all very well to say that proceeds would be used for EVF’s general funding which would funge against OP’s future grants, but (a) there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping EVF from using the proceeds for some specific project which OP wouldn’t otherwise fund and (b) it’s possible to imagine a scenario in which OP ceases to fund EVF and there’s nothing to funge against. It seems to me that OP should just treat it as a grant of £15m (or whatever it was) to EVF. Presumably when you publish a grant report, that’s what it will say.
Secondly, this has been discussed elsewhere, but the cost can’t be a flat few million from EVF’s perspective. Consider for example the case where the project is huge success and the property is held in perpetuity. Ex hypothesi it was a sound grant, but the whole £15m (or whatever) has been expended, plus some further amount for ongoing maintenance.
One possible counterfactual is that EVF buys the property and lets it for income. Gross rental yields in Oxfordshire are 4-5%, so EVF would receive a counterfactual income of at least £600k. In fact a property like that would be difficult to let as is: there are various ways one might generate income from it in practice, including running it as a conference centre for profit, but £600k pa should be an approximate floor on a reasonable commercial income (assuming the sale price to have been fair). By using the property for its own purposes EVF foregoes that income, so the cost to it is at least that much per year, and the total cost will depend on how long it’s held. By definition, the income considered in perpetuity will capitalise at the fair purchase price.
But in fact EVF would never have bought the property for that purpose, for at least two reasons. Firstly, EVF doesn’t endorse investing to give. Secondly, if EVF did want to invest £15m for income, buying a single property in Oxfordshire would not represente a prudent investment strategy. It’s a very niche property and the resale value is going to depend on what purchasers happen to be in the market in the material time. Of course that might work out very favourably, but the opposite possibility is approximately equally likely.
Since in general EVF considers it can do better things with £15m than invest it for 4% yield, the opportunity cost must be higher than £600k pa. In fact EVF should probably know what it’s discount rate is, which would make the calculation straightforward.

RobertJones 11 Dec 2022 12:33 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aleks_K’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
Apart from other considerations, the benefactor would have been liable for c£750k of SDLT, for which EVF can claim a charitable exemption.

RobertJones 11 Dec 2022 12:08 UTC
9 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: MathiasKB’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
In the case of individuals, owning land is commonly better than renting for tax reasons (because you aren’t taxed on the counterfactual rent). Since EVF is a charity, it is tax exempt, so the same logic wouldn’t apply.
It is true of course that this isn’t a flat cost of £15m, but you have to take into account the cost of converting the property (to the extent that the conversions aren’t valuable to a prospective purchaser), the transaction costs (although these are lower than you might think because EVF should benefit from an SLDT exemption) and the maintenance costs (which will be large for a property of that character), in addition to the counterfactual income forgone.
Considered as an investment it suffers from the usual problem of property investment, which is that it’s very lumpy. The exposure is specifically this particular manor house in Oxfordshire, which makes it riskier than a balanced commercial property portfolio.

RobertJones 11 Dec 2022 11:42 UTC
14 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tessa’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
Presumably it would be easy to arrange a conference minibus to shuttle attendees to and from the station. This seems like the least of the project’s problems.

RobertJones 11 Dec 2022 11:26 UTC
9 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: projectionconfusion’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
Yes. It seems very plausible that conferences are good and also that conferences in attractive venues are better, but it seems surprising that this would be the most effective use of the money.

RobertJones 11 Dec 2022 11:14 UTC
13 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Susan II’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
I think the key question is whether the money would counterfactually have been available for another purpose. OCB half-implies it wouldn’t have been by saying that buying the property fulfiled an obligation to the donor, but then I’m confused by the claim “we retain the underlying asset”. If EVF holds the asset subject to an obligation only to use it as a specialist conference centre, it’s unable to realise the value. On the other hand, it would seem surprising if the donation was made on the condition that it must be used to buy the building, but then EVF could do whatever it liked with it (including immediately reselling it).
If EVF is in fact able to resell the building now, then the argument that it was an ear-marked donation is weak, because EVF is making a decision now to hold the asset rather than sell it to raise funds for other EA causes.

RobertJones 26 Nov 2022 15:10 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Clarifications on diminishing returns and risk aversion in giving
A confusion is introduced in the quoted passage by the shift from the personal to the general. You personally cannot lose more than all your assets, because of bankruptcy. But bankruptcy just shifts any further losses to your creditors, so once we shift to thinking about global benefits and harms, the loss is no longer capped in that way.

RobertJones 20 Nov 2022 9:50 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 1
on: Polis (Cluster) Poll: What are our opinions on EA, governance and FTX? (Now with visualisation)
On the object level, there now seem to be two roughly equal clusters. Cluster A are long-termist, consider EA epistemically humble,^[1] don’t think we should blame ourselves for the FTX farrago and are unenthusiastic about democratisation. Cluster B take the opposite positions.
On the meta level:
- It seems a bit concerning that the OP stresses the poll shouldn’t be used to say X% of EAs think Y, but the first item of the report is a list of statements where 60% of respondents either agreed or disagreed.^[2] It seems that it would be easy to take these as consensus positions, when (a) the views of the 220 respondents may not be representative and (b) 60% isn’t much of a consensus. It will be interesting to see, for example, whether people assert that that this poll shows wide support for “EA leaders should be transparent about what they knew about SBF and when”.
- Many of the “majority” statements seem anodyne. For example, it’s not particularly interesting to highlight (as the report does) that most people agree the top team at FTX made poor decisions.
- The report doesn’t do a particularly good job at identifying “statements which make this group unique”. It includes statements which majorities in both groups agree. It highlights the statement, “I don’t believe in longtermism and I don’t feel like I can mention that to other EAs” rather than the more basic, “I think longtermism is true”. It doesn’t clearly identify the difference in views on democratisation: e.g. the disagreement on the statements “There should be a community-elected board in EA”, “‘EA should democratise’, without any detail on how this could happen, or would have prevented FTX, is just an applause light”^[3] or “Democratic and transparent processes of decision making are better for both quality and oversight.”
- The “areas of uncertainty” mostly identifies statements which in retrospect are unclear or inapplicable to most respondents, rather than any fundamental uncertainty. Possibly it would help to distuinguish “pass” from “unsure”, with a “pass” not being counted as an answer at all.
- I can’t understand the graph at all. What are the axes? What are the rings? The graph doesn’t show two clusters. If anything, there’s one cluster in the centre, although that could conceivably be an artifact of the inner circle having a smaller area. How can participants be positioned “close” to statements they agreed, when agreement is 0/1?
- OP says in a comment here that there are now too many statements, but the setup encourages respondents to submit statements. If anything, it seems surprising that 220 respondents only submitted 185 statements. Ideally, the poll would have many more respondents, so this seems to highlight a problem with the system.
1. ^
  The most relevant statement here reads, “I think EA is epistemically humble but external people don’t seem to think so.” It seems likely to me, based on other responses, that the disagreement stems from the first part, but of course a person who believed EA to be universally acknowledged as epistemically humble would also disagree. In retrospect, it would have been better to have “EA is epistemically humble” and “External people don’t consider EA to be epistemically humble” as separate statements.
2. ^
  For some reason “EA should not aim to be a community” is also appearing here although only 55% of respondents disagree.
3. ^
  Of course cluster B does have at least one concrete proposal, namely a community-elected board. It’s just that cluster A thinks that would be bad.

RobertJones 17 Nov 2022 18:30 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Some important questions for the EA Leadership
It seems worth noting that UK employment law has provisions to protect whistleblowers and for this reason (if not others) all UK employers should have whistleblowing policies. I tend to assume that EA orgs based in the UK are compliant with their obligations as employers and therefore do have such policies. Some caution would be needed in setting up additional protections, e.g. since nobody should ever be fired for whistleblowing, why would you have a policy to support people who were?
In practice, I notice two problems. Firstly, management (particularly in small organisations) frequently circumvent policies they experience as bureaucratic restrictions on their ability to manage. Secondly, disgruntled employees seek ways to express what are really personal grievances as blowing the whistle.

RobertJones 17 Nov 2022 9:55 UTC
28 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: S.E. Montgomery’s comment on: Some important questions for the EA Leadership
My reading (and of course I could be completlely wrong) is that SBF wanted to invest in Twitter (he seems to have subsequently pitched the same deal through Michael Grimes), and Will was helping him out. I don’t imagine Will felt it any of his business to advise SBF as to whether or not this was a good move. And I imagine SBF expected the deal to make money, and therefore not to have any cost for his intended giving.
Part of the issue here is that people have been accounting the bulk of SBF’s net worth as “EA money”. If you phrase the question as “Should EA invest in Twitter?” the answer is no. EA should probably also not invest in Robinhood or SRM. If SBF’s assets truly were EA assets, we ought to have liquidated them long ago and either spent them or invested them reasonably. But they weren’t.

RobertJones 17 Nov 2022 9:22 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: skerple’s comment on: Kelsey Piper’s recent interview of SBF
I don’t think so: the “backdoor” refers to the internal accounting system. My reading is that this refers to SBF being able to alter the software to make it display fake figures (whether or not that’s true), and I think that could be accomplished by something like admin access.

RobertJones 9 Oct 2022 3:22 UTC
16 points
4 ∶ 1
on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
I am also confused by the suggested outcomes, e.g. I don’t see how Russian victory could be either analagous to Kosovo or accurately described as “breakaway succeeds”, since Putin has now abandoned the pretence of seeking to support DPR/LPR as independent states. I would suggest the following are rough possible outcomes:
1. Russia, Ukraine and most other states cease to exist following widespread nuclear war.
2. Russia annexes Ukraine.
3. Russia annexes Ukraine east of the Dnipro, establishes a puppet state in the remainder.
4. Russia holds (and Ukraine cedes) the territory it has already annexed. Likely unstable.
5. War reaches stalemate, but continues indefinitely. Strictly speaking not an outcome, as the war will end eventually, but I’m envisaging these as outcomes within the next few years.
6. Independent Donbas with security guaranteed by Russia? Previously seemed to be a possible outcome, but not sure how we could get there from here.
7. Restoration of the ante bellum status quo. Likely unstable, as we’ve just seen.
8. Russia withdraws from eastern Ukraine; Ukraine cedes Crimea.
9. Russia withdraws from all of Ukraine.
I think it’s clear that at the start of the war, Ukraine would have viewed 7 and certainly 8 as victories, but now only views 9 as a victory. Russia is hard to read, but I would guess that something like 3 was the initial war aim and that they would now be content with 4.
The question is, is there a deal there? E.g. would the belligerents settle for 7? At present, I think the answer is a firm no from both sides, so the war continues. Both sides currently believe they can do better on the battlefield than the best deal they could achieve by a negotiated peace and the war will continue until that is not the case.
The question at hand is, can Putin improve his position by using a nuclear weapon? This I think is where OP goes wrong. 1 is not a good outcome for Putin, but Putin calculates just as we do that the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine has a high probability of leading to an escalation sprial and then outcome 1. Another possibility would be that Russia folds in the face of NATO escalation, in which case outcome 9 occurs, which is also bad for Putin.
The only “good” possibility is that NATO declines to respond, but that would likely only be the case if the nuclear weapon use were relatively inconsequential. But if it was inconsequential, it would also fail to alter the course of the war.
Also, Putin is probably genuine (though mistaken) in considering Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia, and he likely wouldn’t want to nuke sites he considers culturally important to Russia. Ruling over the smouldering ruins of Kyiv is probably not an outcome he favours.
What is said by OP, is that Putin personally wouldn’t survive outcome 9, but why should this be? He successfully ruled Russia without Crimea for many years. Either he rules Russia with a hand of iron or he doesn’t. If he does, he can survive withdrawing to the internationally recognised border. If he doesn’t, he’s probably toast already. Either way, he isn’t actually improving his position by using a nuclear weapon.
In conclusion, I don’t think there is a rational use case for nuclear weapons here. The risk is that Putin may behave irrationally, and for that reason I put the risk at around 5%. I concur in OP’s calculations after that point.
Outside view: OP says <10% chance Putin would accept losing without first going nuclear, but also says, “there appears to be a widespread assumption in the West, shared by Ukrainian leaders, that Ukraine is winning and that Putin will grudgingly accept “Vietnam”.” There is no sufficient reason for OP to prefer his own analysis to that of Western and Ukrainian leaders.

RobertJones 18 Sep 2022 21:20 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Public reports are now optional for EA Funds grantees
I don’t for a moment think that you are a con artist. I suspect that (a) the amounts involved are all small, (b) you genuinely believe that all the grants are effective, (c) mostly you’re right but (d) occasionally, in ordinary human frailty, your judgment errs. If that’s right, then no real harm is done, but I have no way of verifying any of that, because you don’t (as far as I can see) disclose any information at all about the unreported grants.
I have to say also that you sound like you’re saying that you refuse to comply with the law, but as far as I can see, Effective Ventures does in fact comply with the law and publishes a list of its grantees (save for individuals and those receiving grants of less than £25k) within its Trustees’ Report. But that seems to create a different problem, because the post above ought to make clear that organisations seeking grants in excess of £25k will not be able to remain anonymous, because the grant will be dislosed in the annual accounts (although I believe there is a “serious prejudice” exception).

RobertJones 19 Aug 2022 23:15 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Public reports are now optional for EA Funds grantees
Well, I think in the past the managers might use it to fund things that they thought were good but didn’t fit with the main GiveWell recommendations, but now that GiveWell have the “All Funds” option I’m not sure what would differentiate that from GHDF; it may be that it’s just a presentational difference. I’m 85% sure that the GHDF grants are exactly those which are displayed in the GiveWell spreadsheet as having been made via GHDF, but I’m just slightly worried by the notice that payout reports are optional.

RobertJones 19 Aug 2022 15:12 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Public reports are now optional for EA Funds grantees
Just FYI, I personally don’t donate to LTFF, so while I have some general concern that charitable funds should be spent in an accountable way and that GWWC donors should feel comfortable with how their money is being spent, my personal concern is with GHDF. If the issue of public reports being optional applies only or mostly to LTFF and EAIF, perhaps that could be clarified?
Luke Freeman did recently email me offering to chat, so I guess I could ask him. I think I can personally solve the problem by redirecting my donations to GiveWell, but I can’t be the only person who’s troubled by this.