Rockwell
EAGxNYC 2023: Retrospective
If you somehow could convince a research group, not selected for caring a lot about animals, to pursue this question in isolation, I’d predict they’d end up with far less animal-friendly results.
I think this is a possible outcome, but not guaranteed. Most people have been heavily socialized to not care about most animals, either through active disdain or more mundane cognitive dissonance. Being “forced” to really think about other animals and consider their moral weight may swing researchers who are baseline “animal neutral” or even “anti-animal” more than you’d think. Adjacent evidence might be the history of animal farmers or slaughterhouse workers becoming convinced animal killing is wrong through directly engaging in it.
I also want to note that most people would be less surprised if a heavy moral weight is assigned to the species humans are encouraged to form the closest relationships with (dogs, cats). Our baseline discounting of most species is often born from not having relationships with them, not intuitively understanding how they operate because we don’t have those relationships, and/or objectifying them as products. If we lived in a society where beloved companion chickens and carps were the norm, the median moral weight intuition would likely be dramatically different.
Thanks for raising this, Thomas! I agree impact is the goal, rather than community for community’s sake. This particular Forum post was intended to focus on the community as a whole and its size, activity, and vibe, rather than on EA NYC as an organization. We plan to discuss EA NYC’s mission, strategy, and (object-level) achievements more in a future post. There’s a lot to say on that front and I don’t think I’ll do it justice here in a comment. If there are certain details you’d find especially interesting or useful to see in a future post about EA NYC, we’d love to know!
Celebrating Progress: Recent Highlights from the NYC EA Community
While I think I disagree pretty strongly with the idea CEA CH should be disbanded, I would like to see an updated post from the team on what the community should and should not expect from them, with the caveat that they may be somewhat limited in what they can say legally about their scope.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe CEA was operating without in-house legal counsel until about a year ago. This was while engaging in many situations that could have easily led to a defamation suit should they have investigated someone sufficiently resourced and litigious. I think it makes sense their risk tolerance will have shifted while EVF is under Charity Commission investigation post-FTX and with the hiring of attorneys who are making risk assessments and recommendations across programs.
The issue for me is less “are they doing everything I’d like them to do” and more “does the community have appropriate expectations for them,” which is in keeping with the general idea EA projects should make their scopes transparent.
EA NYC is soliciting applications for Board Members! We especially welcome applications submitted by Sunday, September 24, 2023, but rolling applications will also be considered. This is a volunteer position, but crucial in both shaping the strategy of EA NYC and ensuring our sustainability and compliance as an organization. If you have questions, Jacob Eliosoff is the primary point of contact. I think this is a great opportunity for deepened involvement and impact for a range of backgrounds!
These comments are helpful but I’m still having a difficult time zeroing in on a guiding heuristic here. And I feel mildly frustrated by the counterexamples in the same way I do reading “well, they were always nice to me” comments on a post about a bad actor who deeply harmed someone or hearing someone who routinely drives drunk say “well, I’ve never caused an accident.” I think most (but not all) of my list falls into a category something like “fine or tolerable 9 times out of 10, but really bad, messy, or harmful that other 1 time such that it may make those other 9 times less/not worth it.” I’m not sure of the actual probabilities and they definitely vary by bullet point.
In your case in particular, I’ll note that a good chunk of your examples either directly involve Julia or involve you (the spouse of Julia, who I assume had Julia as a sounding board). This seems like a rare situation of being particularly well-positioned to deal with complicated situations. Arguably, if anyone can navigate complicated or risky situations well, it will be a community health professional. I’d assume something like 95% of people will be worse at handling a situation that goes south, and maybe >25% of people will be distinctly bad at it. So what norms should be established that factor in this potential? And how do we universalize in a way that makes the risk clear, promotes open risk analysis, and prevents situations that will get really bad should they get bad?
Jeff Sebo on his work launching multiple EA-aligned programs at NYU that advance and legitimize “fridge” causes, including the Wild Animal Welfare Program and the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program. Jeff is also a great presenter, and many students describe him as their favorite professor.
Thank you, Michel! I’m replying over DM.
Thanks! I’m happy to expound.
I’ve tried categorizing the public attendee list by their area of meta EA work. There are many different ways to categorize and this is just one version I put together quickly. It looks something like:
Funding
Fundraising
Grantmaking
Programming
Events
Education
Advising
Growth and Strategy
Service providers (Not included in the public list)
Comms (Not included in the public list)
Incubation
Community Health
Field-building
High-level meta EA
OP, CEA, EVF, LessWrong
“On the ground” meta EA (Not included in the public list)
Regional organizations
Professional organizations
University groups
Kuhan checks this last box but also has a cause-specific bent
While the people listed make critical decisions regarding resource allocation, granting, setting strategic directions, or providing critical infrastructure, their experience is fundamentally different from those who are directly involved in “on the ground” organizations. Vaidehi writes that “issues pertinent to the community need to have meaningful, two way, sustained engagement with the community.” “On the ground” organizations likely do this among the most of any orgs in the EA ecosystem.
I think the perspective of the wider breadth of “on the ground” community leaders is important, but I’ll speak to regional EA organizations, as that’s what I know best:
Before the FTX collapse, there was a heavy emphasis on making community building a long-term and sustainable career path. As a result, there are now dozens of people working professionally and often full-time on meta EA regional organizations (MEAROs).[1] By and large, we are a team of sorts: we’re in regular communication with each other, we have a shared and evolving sense of what MEAROs are and can be, and our strategic approaches intertwine and are mutually reinforcing. We essentially function as extended colleagues in a niche profession that feels very distinct to me from even other “on the ground” meta-EA community building (such as professional or uni groups). I don’t think anyone on the attendee list has run a MEARO, and certainly not in 2023.
There is a distinct zeitgeist among MEAROs. Consistently, I’ve been amazed how MEARO leaders seem to independently land on the same conclusions and strategic directions as our peers across the globe, “multiple discovery” if you will. This zeitgeist is not captured in larger EA discourse, from the Forum to conversations I have with non-MEARO community leaders. And this MERAO zeitgeist is evolving rapidly, such that it looks very different from even four months ago. As a result, I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been intimately involved in MEAROs in the past 3-6 months can represent our general shared perspective.
This shared perspective is born out of three main ingredients:
“On the ground” intensive feedback loops: We are engaging directly with community members at all stages of the funnel—across EA causes and professions—understanding their concerns, aspirations, and challenges in real time. This provides a richness of information on everything from how people are finding EA, to reactions to current events, to what HEAs see as their biggest needs from community builders. Think of us as carrying out unofficial and constant surveying on everything you’d want the broader EA community’s feedback on.
High-level EA org feedback: EA orgs and projects from throughout the ecosystem consistently correspond and collaborate with MEAROs in a way that provides us with a decently holistic and up-to-date understanding of where EA is and where it is headed.
MEARO-level strategy: It is our job to think about what MEAROs are and what they should be to achieve maximum impact. We arguably have the most mental bandwidth for this task of anyone in EA and, again, this is shifting dramatically as the EA community and the causes we care about rapidly change.
I think segments of #1 and #3 are captured by some of the publicly listed attendees, and I imagine the attendees have an equally good or even substantially better experience of #2, but it is the unique perspective that the combination of the three enables that I’m referencing.
At an event focused on meta coordination, it seems really important to have the perspective of those engaging constantly and deeply with “the EA masses,” immersed in regional strategy, and among the best able to shape the future of EA perception as the on-the-ground representatives of EA to thousands of people worldwide.
I talked this through with @James Herbert a bit and we discussed three possible cruxes here:
Are the people in the public attendee list doing different work from MEARO leaders?
For example, have they directly done things listed in Patrick’s comment, or advised hundreds of regular people in their geographic region?
If they have, how long is that knowledge valid?
For example, EA looks very different in September 2023 than it did in September 2022, and that changes the nature of some aspects of MEARO leadership more than others.
Does directly doing the type of work involved in operating a MEARO give you a different set of knowledge that is useful in contexts like the Mera Coordination Forum?
I hope the above gestures at why I think the answer is “yes” and believe most other MEARO leaders are likely to agree.
- ^
Yes, I totally just coined this acronym.
Chiming in just to second James. There are dozens of us operating large regional meta EA organizations and I don’t see anyone representative of that perspective on the public list. I think it would be extremely valuable to have at least one leader from the CBG organizations present, ideally nominated by other CBGs such that they could represent our collective “on the ground” perspective. I’m happy to write a full list of why I think this perspective is valuable and not covered by the (also very valuable) perspectives in the public attendee list, if that would be useful.
Thank you for listing these out; I think it’s helpful to show that there are a range of work trial options with different levels of intensity and potential sacrifice on the part of the prospective employee.
I was thinking more in the category of #3. To be clear, I don’t think probationary employment is necessarily a bad thing. What I have seen though is a growing norm of work trials of one to three months. This seems to hit a particularly problematic middle ground of requiring a candidate to leave other employment and failing to guarantee medium-term job security. I think this is bad for a number of reasons, including making it less likely that employed people will apply for positions and consequently limiting the skilled applicant pool. It also creates a culture of precarity that I don’t think should be a requirement for someone securing their “dream job” in EA.
To respond to the other points:
Many startups start from someone’s living room. LessWrong was built in the Event Horizon living room. This was great, I don’t think it hurt anyone, and it also helped the organization survive through the pandemic, which I think was quite good.
I’m glad this went well for LessWrong! Sometimes, however, people discover their beloved roommate is a very bad coworker and it leads to a major blowup. I think this should be treated similarly to family business ventures: you and your brother or you and your spouse might work phenomenally together professionally, or it might destroy your family and end your marriage.
Another important distinction here might be the difference between a stable living situation predating a new shared project vs. an existing organization’s staff deciding to live together or pressuring new employees to live with other employees.
Either way, I think there is a risk that a discussion about an important campaign strategy turns into an argument about whose turn it is to wash the dishes.
I also find this kind of dicey, though at least in Lightcone’s case I think it’s definitely worth it, and I know of many other cases where it seems likely worth it. We own a large event venue, and we are currently offering one employee free housing in exchange for being on-call for things that happen in the night. This seems like a fair trade to me and very standard (one of the sections of our hotel is indeed explicitly zoned as a “care-taker unit” for this exact purpose).
I previously worked in a professional space where living onsite was an extremely common part of the job. Sometimes, it was great! Other times, it was horrible! Among the issues: hesitation to quit because it would mean lost housing, difficulty establishing work-life balance, invasion of privacy, decreased sense of agency and increased sense of reliance on and control by the employer, and many more.
This seems really quite a lot too micromanagey to me. I agree that there should be COI mechanisms in place, but this seems like it’s really trying to enforce norms on parts of people’s lives that really are their business.
I think this is a weird one for an employer/organization to try to enforce. But I think on an individual level thinking “how important is it for me to date this person my partner directly funds?” or “maybe my coworker should review my metamour’s grant application instead of me” makes a lot of sense.
Oof, there’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll keep it short: All of these subculture norms are also present on university campuses. I would think—and hope—that that wouldn’t lead you to endorsing professor-student relationships or psychedelic use during faculty meetings. You can have your BDSM and your LSD and your separate, professional workplace.
I agree with all of this and maybe should have written it as “X with a grantee” to reflect the power differential and consequent responsibility differential.
I don’t understand this. There exist many long-term contracting relationships that Lightcone engages in. Seems totally fine to me. Also, many people prefer to be grant recipients instead of employees, those come with totally different relationship dynamics.
Just to hopefully quickly clarify this point in particular: There is a legal distinction between full-time employees and contractors that has legal implications, and I think EA orgs somewhat frequently misclassify. It’s totally possible Lightcone has long-term contractor or grant recipient relationships that are fully above board and happy for all involved; however, I know some organizations do not. This can be a cost-saving mechanism for the organization that comes at the expense of not just their adherence to employment law, but also security for their team (e.g. everything from eligibility for benefits, to increased individual tax burden, to ineligibility for unemployment compensation).
An Incomplete List of Things I Think EAs Probably Shouldn’t Do
It is entirely dependent on the type of investigation and the laws of the municipality. Regarding trespass, often investigators will be employed by the facility they are investigating and onsite as part of their employment, while documenting conditions on camera. Increasingly, drone footage is used.
I think it is dangerous and harmful to make a blanket and public statement accusing a large number of orgs/individuals of illegal activity.
For those downvoting, is the disagreement factual, i.e. you believe animal orgs are routinely engaging in illegal activity? Or something else?
I agree and I point to that more so as evidence that even in environments that are likely to foster a moral disconnect (in contrast to researchers steeped in moral analysis) increased concern for animals is still a common enough outcome that it’s an observable phenomenon.
(I’m not sure if there’s good data on how likely working on an animal farm or in a slaughterhouse is to convince you that killing animals is bad. I would be interested in research that shows how these experiences reshape people’s views and I would expect increased cognitive dissonance and emotional detachment to be a more common outcome.)