Sarah Levin

Karma: 420

Sarah Levin 12 Apr 2024 18:38 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Stephen Clare’s comment on: Stephen Clare’s Shortform
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.

Sarah Levin 21 Dec 2023 20:20 UTC
49 points
21 ∶ 7
on: The privilege of native English speakers in reaching high-status, influential positions in EA
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.

Sarah Levin 24 Jun 2023 16:46 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
Huh! Retracted. I’m sorry.

Sarah Levin 23 Jun 2023 21:13 UTC
47 points
15 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
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.

Sarah Levin 23 Jun 2023 19:53 UTC
8 points
4 ∶ 7
on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
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.

Sarah Levin 20 Jun 2023 22:58 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jonny Spicer’s comment on: Jonny Spicer’s Shortform
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.

Sarah Levin 19 Jun 2023 19:45 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jonny Spicer’s comment on: Jonny Spicer’s Shortform
...What on earth does “90% probability, with medium confidence” mean? Do you think it’s 90% likely or not?

Sarah Levin 16 Jun 2023 22:13 UTC
59 points
26 ∶ 1
on: How has FTX’s collapse affected public perception of EA?
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.
What links here?
- How has FTX’s collapse impacted EA? by AnonymousEAForumAccount (17 Oct 2023 17:02 UTC; 239 points)
- AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on Updates on Community Health Survey Results by David_Moss (26 Mar 2024 23:07 UTC; 33 points)

Sarah Levin 16 Apr 2023 1:30 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 0
on: A job matching service for affected FTXFF grantees
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!

Sarah Levin 16 Apr 2023 1:29 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events
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!

Sarah Levin 2 Apr 2023 19:42 UTC
9 points
3 ∶ 2
on: Run Posts By Orgs
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.

Sarah Levin 2 Apr 2023 19:39 UTC
26 points
9 ∶ 6
on: Run Posts By Orgs
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.)

Sarah Levin 11 Mar 2023 0:16 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts
I actually do know the real names of the people who wrote about Brent. It’s one of those “community insiders know who they were but it’s hard to tell from the outside” situations, like the one I described with pre-doxxing Scott Alexander. If the authors had been anonymous for real then I don’t think it would’ve worked anywhere near as well. This approach avoids most of the downsides of actually-unknown-and-unaccountable burner accounts and I do not object to it.

Sarah Levin 10 Mar 2023 18:42 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts
Can you name examples of this working? Because I’ve seen a good number of anonymous public accusations on this forum and I don’t recall any that led to the outcome you describe. I understand this theory of change but it sure doesn’t seem to work that way in real life.
In contrast I know of many cases where backchannel reporting to trusted third parties has led to results. If someone is not willing to speak up publicly, then using whisper networks or official reporting channels has a much better track record compared to making burner accusations on the EA forum. I am somewhat worried about people making an ineffective burner account post and feeling like they’ve done their job when otherwise they would’ve mustered up their courage and told the conference organizer.

Sarah Levin 10 Mar 2023 12:25 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 13
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts
We will also never know about serious issues if people are too afraid to speak up in a way that can be trusted and acted on. Creating a burner account out of fear might be a psychologically understandable reaction (although I suspect its prevalence is overstated), but it is not an effective or tactically appropriate reaction. Burner account accusations get upvotes and public sympathy but they don’t accomplish much else. Actual change requires someone to stick their neck out, whether that might be in a public post or in influential backchannels. There is no substitute for courage.

Sarah Levin 6 Mar 2023 6:14 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: David Johnston’s comment on: Two important recent AI Talks- Gebru and Lazar
There was one incorrect claim (“AI safteyists encourage work at AGI companies”)
“AI safetyists” absolutely do encourage work at AGI companies. To take one of many examples, 80,000 Hours are “AI safetyists”, and their job board currently encourages work at OpenAI, Deepmind, and Anthropic, which are AGI companies.
(I haven’t watched the video.)

Sarah Levin 8 Feb 2023 19:34 UTC
37 points
12 ∶ 1
on: Why People Use Burner Accounts: A Commentary on Blacklists, the EA “Inner Circle”, and Funding
Ultimately, my overall point is that one reason for using a burner account (like in my case) is that if you don’t belong to the “inner circle” of funders and grantees, then I believe that different rules apply to you. And if you want to join that inner circle, you need not question grants by directly emailing OP. And once you’re inside the inner circle, but you want to criticise grants, you must use a burner account or risk being de-funded or blacklisted.
Thank you for a good description of what this feels like . But I have to ask… do you still “want to join that inner circle” after all this? Because this reads like your defense of using a burner account is that it preserves your chance to enter/remain in an inner ring which you believe to be deeply unethical. Which would be bad! Don’t do that! Normally I don’t go around demanding that people must be willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good if they want to be taken seriously but this is literally a forum for self-declared altruists.
Several times I’ve received lucrative offers and overtures from sources (including one EA fund) that seemed corrupt in ways that resemble how you think your funder is corrupt. Each time my reaction has been “I’ve gotta end this relationship ASAP. This will be used to pressure me into going along with corruption. Better to remove their power over me on my terms.” This was clearly correct in hindsight; it saved me and my team from some entanglements that would have made it harder to pursue our mission, and also it left me free to talk about the bad stuff I saw as much as I want to. While I did pass up a lot of money for myself and my organization, we’re doing fine now. None of this was some crazy-advanced Sun Tzu maneuver; it’s common knowledge that refusing dirty money is the right thing to do but you have to pass up money to do it.
I dunno, a lot of these burner account accusations just strike me as trying to provoke a fight that the poster themselves lacks the courage and conviction to actually participate in, and I have very little patience for “let’s you and him fight”. I assume that the point of posting this stuff is to advocate for some sort of change, but that can’t happen unless specific people lead the charge. And if you’re not willing to bear any costs at all, then why should anyone else pick up your banner? Even if I wanted to, how would I lead the charge against “my friend who I won’t name got the impression that someone else who I won’t name did something bad, based on circumstantial evidence that you can’t check”? Questions of right and wrong aside, this plan just won’t work, you can’t actually lead from the rear like this.
Given your stated beliefs, your moral duty is to either become a “troublemaker” even if the risk to your career is real or else cut yourself off from the dirty money and go do something that’s not compromised. Personally I’ve usually chosen the latter option when I’ve faced similar dilemmas but I have a ton of respect for good-faith troublemakers.
What links here?
- The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts by Sarah Levin (9 Mar 2023 22:53 UTC; 63 points)

Sarah Levin 8 Feb 2023 9:15 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Quadratic Reciprocity’s comment on: Quadratic Reciprocity’s Shortform
Yeah, pseudonyms are great. There’s been recent debates about people using one-off burner accounts to make accusations, but those don’t reflect at all on the merits of using durable pseudonyms for general conversation.
The degree of reputation and accountability that durable pseudonyms provide might be less than using a wallet name, but it’s still substantial, and in practice it’s a perfectly sufficient foundation for good discourse.

Sarah Levin 7 Feb 2023 23:04 UTC
36 points
16 ∶ 1
in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: The number of burner accounts is too damn high
This is true. Another reason I think public fears of professional retaliation are overstated is that “I’m afraid of professional retaliation” is generally taken as a legitimate reason to hide, whereas lots of other fears are not, and so many other fears get justified in terms that will be well-received. Like, if saying “I’m posting anonymously because I’m afraid of being looked at funny” is seen as cowardly but saying “I’m posting anonymously because I’m afraid of professional retaliation” is seen as sympathetic, then I expect both types of people will claim to fear professional retaliation.
(I do think EA institutions have a totally-normal-for-white-collar-professional degree of retaliation for not toeing the line. I just think the discourse here overweights how much of it comes from, like, posts on this forum, whereas all the cases I know about were because of more substantive causes like materially supporting a disfavored institution, or normal bureaucratic power struggles, or something.)
What links here?
- Sarah Levin's comment on The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts by Sarah Levin (10 Mar 2023 12:25 UTC; 1 point)

Sarah Levin 9 Jan 2023 21:15 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sabs’s comment on: Investing in pandemic prevention is essential to defend against future outbreaks (Williams & MacAskill, 2022)
In most of the USA and Europe, the smallpox vaccine is currently widely available as part of the response to monkeypox, which is countered by the same vaccine. Local policy varies; in some cities the vaccine is available to everyone now that the available supply far outstrips demand, while in other cities it is still available only to anyone who claims to engage in particular sexual behavior, to hold particular sexual identities, and/or to be employed in particular professions (AFAIK all the vaccine clinics accept self-report on sexual matters).
It seems to me that getting the smallpox vaccine now, while there’s no pressure on the stockpiles or the clinics, is both prosocial and individually beneficial. I’ve gotten it myself.