The current version of CEA employs Julia Wise, your wife. Previously Alexey Guzey sent Wise a draft of a post critical of her superior Will MacAskill and a request for confidentiality. Wise accidentally (or “accidentally”) leaked the draft to MacAskill, who then used it to prepare an adversarial public response to the upcoming post rather than to give Guzey feedback ahead of publication as he’d requested. Neither Wise nor MacAskill disclosed this until after the leak was caught because MacAskill publicly responded to parts of the draft which were removed before publication. Wise remains in her role as CEA’s community liaison, where she is the point person for confidential information from people who worry that leaks would provoke adversarial action from powerful community insiders.
Sarah Levin
At one point CEA released a doctored EAG photo with a “Leverage Research” sign edited to be bizarrely blank. (Archive page with doctored photo, original photo.) I assume this was an effort to bury their Leverage association after the fact.
The history of big foundations shows clearly that, after the founder’s death, they revert to the mean and give money mostly to whatever is popular and trendy among clerks and administrators, rather than anything unusual which the donor might’ve cared about. If you look at the money flowing out of e.g. the Ford Foundation, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything which is there because Henry or Edsel Ford thought it was important, rather than because it’s popular among the NGO class who staffs the foundation. See Henry Ford II’s resignation letter.
If you want to accomplish anything more specific than “fund generic charities”—as anyone who accepts the basic tenets of EA obviously should—then creating a perpetual foundation is unwise.
I have personally heard several CFAR employees and contractors use the word “debugging” to describe all psychological practices, including psychological practices done in large groups of community members. These group sessions were fairly common.
In that section of the transcript, the only part that looks false to me is the implication that there was widespread pressure to engage in these group psychology practices, rather than it just being an option that was around. I have heard from people in CFAR who were put under strong personal and professional pressure to engage in *one-on-one* psychological practices which they did not want to do, but these cases were all within the inner ring and AFAIK not widespread. I never heard any stories of people put under pressure to engage in *group* psychological practices they did not want to do.
This looks pretty much right, as a description of how EA has responded tactically to important events and vibe shifts. Nevertheless it doesn’t answer OP’s questions, which I’ll repeat:
What ideas that were considered wrong/low status have been championed here?
What has the movement acknowledged it was wrong about previously?
What new, effective organisations have been started?
Your reply is not about new ideas, or the movement acknowledging it was wrong (except about Bankman-Fried personally, which doesn’t seem like what OP is asking about), or new organizations.
It seems important, to me, that EA’s history over the last two years is instead mainly the story of changes in funding, in popular discourse, and in the social strategy of preexisting institutions. e.g. the FLI pause letter was the start of a significant PR campaign, but all the *ideas* in it would’ve been perfectly familiar to an EA in 2014 (except for “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”, which is a consequence of then-unexpected developments in AI technology rather than of intellectual work by EAs).
IIRC, while most of Alameda’s early staff came from EA, the early investment came largely from Jaan Tallinn, a big Rationalist donor. This was a for-profit investment, not a donation, but I would guess that the overlapping EA/Rationalist social networks made the deal possible.
That said, once Bankman-Fried got big and successful he didn’t lean on Rationalist branding or affiliations at all, and he made a point of directing his “existential risk” funding to biological/pandemic stuff but not AI stuff.
This is a good account of what EA gets from Rationality, and why EAs would be wise to maintain the association with rationality, and possibly also with Rationality.
What does Rationality get from EA, these days? Would Rationalists be wise to maintain the association with EA?
the costs of a bad hire are somewhat bounded, as they can eventually be let go.
This depends a lot on what “eventually” means, specifically. If a bad hire means they stick around for years—or even decades, as happened in the organization of one of my close relatives—then the downside risk is huge.
OTOH my employer is able to fire underperforming people after two or three months, which means we can take chances on people who show potential even if there are some yellow flags. This has paid off enormously, e.g. one of our best people had a history of getting into disruptive arguments in nonprofessional contexts, but we had reason to think this wouldn’t be an issue at our place… and we were right, as it turned out, but if we lacked the ability to fire relatively quickly, then I wouldn’t have rolled those dice.
The best advice I’ve heard for threading this needle is “Hire fast, fire fast”. But firing people is the most unpleasant thing a leader will ever have to do, so a lot of people do it less than they should.
I can readily believe the core claims in this post, and I’m sure it’s a frustrating situation for non-native English speakers. That said, it’s worth keeping in mind that for most professional EA roles, and especially for “thought leadership”, English-language communication ability is one of the most critical skills for doing the job well. It is not a problem that people who grew up practicing this skill will be “overrepresented” in these positions.
There is certainly a cosmic unfairness in this. It’s also unfair that short people will be underrepresented among basketball players, but this does not mean there’s a problem with basketball.
The actions to address this ought to be personal, not structural. It’s worth some effort on the margin for native speakers to understand the experience and situation of non-native speakers—indeed this is one part of “English-language communication ability”. I’m grateful to my foreign friends for explaining many aspects of this to me, it’s helped me in a fair number of professional situations. Things like your talk at an international conference to educate people about this stuff seems like a great idea. And of course most non-native speakers who seek positions in EA (or other international movements) correctly put a great deal of effort into improving their fluency in the lingua franca.
Huh! Retracted. I’m sorry.
I mostly agree with your larger point here, especially about the relative importance of FTX, but early Leverage was far more rationalist than it was EA. As of 2013, Leverage staff was >50% Sequences-quoting rationalists, including multiple ex-SIAI and one ex-MetaMed, compared with exactly one person (Mark, who cofounded THINK) who was arguably more of an EA than a rationalist. Leverage taught at CFAR workshops before they held the first EA Summit. Circa 2013 Leverage donors had strong overlap with SIAI/MIRI donors but not with CEA donors. etc.
I think trying to figure out the common thread “explaining datapoints like FTX, Leverage Research, [and] the LaSota crew” won’t yield much of worth because those three things aren’t especially similar to each other, either in their internal workings or in their external effects. “World-scale financial crime,” “cause a nervous breakdown in your employee,” and “stab your landlord with a sword” aren’t similar to each other and I don’t get why you’d expect to find a common cause. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
There’s a separate question of why EAs and rationalists tolerate weirdos, which is more fruitful. But an answer there is also gonna have to explain why they welcome controversial figures like Peter Singer or Eliezer Yudkowsky, and why extremely ideological group houses like
early Toby Ord’s[EDIT: Nope, false] or more recently the Karnofsky/Amodei household exercise such strong intellectual influence in ways that mainstream society wouldn’t accept. And frankly if you took away the tolerance for weirdos there wouldn’t be much left of either movement.
Your “90% confidence interval” of… what, exactly? This looks like a confidence interval over the value of your own subjective probability estimate? And “90% as the mean” of… a bunch of different guesses you’ve taken at your “true” subjective probability? I can’t imagine why anyone would do that but I can’t think what else this could coherently mean…?
If I can be blunt, I suspect you might be repeating probabilistic terms without really tracking their technical meaning, as though you’re just inserting nontechnical hedges. Maybe it’s worth taking the time to reread the map/territory stuff and then run through some calibration practice problems while thinking closely about what you’re doing. Or maybe just use nontechnical hedges more, they work perfectly well for expressing things like this.
...What on earth does “90% probability, with medium confidence” mean? Do you think it’s 90% likely or not?
Great, this is useful data.
Results demonstrated that FTX had decreased satisfaction by 0.5-1 points on a 10-point scale within the EA community, but overall community sentiment remained positive at ~7.5/10
That’s a big drop! In practice I’ve only ever seen this type of satisfaction scale give results between about 7⁄10 through 9.5/10 (which makes sense, right, if my satisfaction with EA is 3⁄10 then I’m probably not sticking around the community and answering member surveys), so that decline is a real big chunk of the scale’s de facto range.
I suppose it’s not surprising that the impact on perception is much bigger inside EA, where there’s (appropriately) been tons of discourse on this, than in the general public.
Looking back five months later, can you say anything about whether this program ended up matching people with new jobs or opportunities, and if so how many? Thanks!
Looking back five months later, can you say anything about whether this program ended up making grants, and if so how much/how many? Thanks!
within the community we’re working towards the same goals: you’re not trying to win a fight, you’re trying to help us all get closer to the truth.
This is an aside, but it’s an important one:
Sometimes we’re fighting! Very often it’s a fight over methods between people who share goals, e.g. fights about whether or not to emphasize unobjectional global health interventions and downplay the weird stuff in official communication. Occasionally it’s a good-faith fight between people with explicit value differences, e.g. fights about whether to serve meat at EA conferences. Sometimes it’s a boring old struggle for power, e.g. SBF’s response to the EAs who attempted to oust him from Alameda in ~2018.
Personally I think that some amount of fighting is critical for any healthy community. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you wish EA didn’t have any fighting. But acting as if this were descriptively true rather than aspirational is clearly incorrect.
As many have noted, this recommendation will usually yield good results when the org responds cooperatively and bad results when the org responds defensively. It is an org’s responsibility to demonstrate that they will respond cooperatively, not a critic’s responsibility to assume. Defensive responses aren’t, like, rare.
To be more concrete, I personally would write to Givewell before posting a critique of their work because they have responded to past critiques with deep technical engagement, blog posts celebrating the critics, large cash prizes, etc. I would not write to CEA before posting a critique of their work because they have responded to exactly this situation by breaking a confidentiality request in order to better prepare an adversarial public response to the critic’s upcoming post. People who aren’t familiar with deep EA lore won’t know all this stuff and shouldn’t be expected to take a leap of faith.
This does mean that posts with half-cocked accusations will get more attention than they deserve. This is certainly a problem! My own preferred solution to this would be to stop trusting unverifiable accusations from burner accounts. Any solution will face tradeoffs.
(For someone in OP’s situation, where he has extensive and long-time knowledge of many key EA figures, and further is protected from most retaliation because he’s married to Julia Wise, who is a very influential community leader, I do indeed think that running critical posts by EA orgs will often be the right decision.)
You pointed out the lack of staff continuity between the present CEA and the subset of then-CEA-now-EV which posted the doctored image, to argue that their behavior does not reflect on the present CEA, so that we have no particular reason to expect sketchy or adversarial comms from the present CEA.
Your argument about lack of staff continuity is valid as a local counterpoint which carries some weight (IMO not an extreme amount of weight, given the social and institutional links between the different orgs siloed under then-CEA-now-EV, but others might reasonably disagree). Nevertheless I object to your conclusion about present CEA, largely because of a separate incident involving present CEA staff. So, I brought up this other incident to explain why.
It’s true that this is also an example of the kind of thing VettedCauses is worried about, but that’s not what made me think of it here.