Severin

• SeverinApr 26, 2023, 10:32 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  Yep, I agree with that point—being untrustworthy and underresourced are definitely not the same thing.

• SeverinApr 25, 2023, 11:34 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  I partially agree.

  I love that definition of elites, and can definitely see how it corresponds to to how money, power, and intellectual leadership in EA revolves around the ancient core orgs like CEA, OpenPhil, and 80k.

  However, the sections of Doing EA Better that called for more accountability structures in EA left me a bit frightened. The current ways don’t seem ideal, but I think there are innumerable ways how formalization of power can make institutions more rather than less molochian, and only a few that actually significantly improve the way things are done. Specifically, i see two types of avenues for formalizing power in EA that would essentially make things worse:

  1. Professional(TM) EA might turn into the outer facade of what is actually still run by the now harder to reach and harder to get into traditional elite. That’s the concern I already pointed towards in the post above.

  2. The other way things could go wrong was if we built something akin to modern-day democratic nation states: Giant sluggish egregores of paperwork that reliably produce bad compromises nobody would ever have agreed to from first principles, via a process that is so time-consuming and ensnaring to our tribal instincts that nobody has energy left to have the important truth-seeking debates that could actually solve the problems at hand.

  Personally, the types of solutions I’m most excited about are ones that enable thousands of people to coordinate decentralizedly around the same shared goal without having to vote or debate everything out. I think there are some organizations out there that have solved information flows and resource allocation way more efficiently than not only hierarchical technocratic organizations like traditional corporations, socialist economies, or the central parts of present-day EA, but also more efficiently than modern democracies.

  For example, in regards to collective decisionmaking, I’m pretty excited about some things that happen in new social movements, the organizations that Frederic Laloux described (see above, or directly on https://​​reinventingorganizationswiki.com/​​en/​​cases/​​), or the Burning Man community.

  A decisionmaking process that seems to work in these types of decentralized organizations is the Advice Process. It is akin to how many things are already done in EA, and might deserve to be the explicit ideal we aspire to.

  Here’s a short description written by Burning Nest, a UK-based Burning Man-style event:

  “The general principle is that anyone should be able to make any decision regarding Burning Nest.

  Before a decision is made, you must ask advice from those who will be impacted by that decision, and those who are experts on that subject.

  Assuming that you follow this process, and honestly try to listen to the advice of others, that advice is yours to evaluate and the decision yours to make.”

  Of course, this ideal gets a bit complicated if astronomical stakes, infohazards, the unilateralist’s curse, and the fact that EA is spread out over a variety of continents and legal entities enter the gameboard.

  I don’t have a clear answer yet for how to make EA at large more Advice Process-ey, and maybe what we currently have actually is the best we can get. But, I’m currently bringing the way EA Berlin works closer and closer to this. And as I’ve already learned, this works way better when people trust each other, and when they trust me to trust them. The Advice Process is basically built on top of the types of high-trust networks that can only emerge if people with similar values are also allowed to interact in non-professional ways.

  Therefore, if we optimize away from making the personal/​professional overlap work, we might rob ourselves of the possibility to implement mechanisms like the Advice Process that might help us solve a bunch of our coordination problems, but require large high-trust networks to work effectively. Other social movements have innovated on decisionmaking processes before EA. It would just be too sad if we wouldn’t hold ourselves to higher standards here than copying the established and outdated management practices of pre-startup era 20th century corporations.

  What links here?

  • Severin T. Seehrich's comment on EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors by Severin T. Seehrich (LessWrong; Apr 25, 2023, 11:37 PM; 1 point)

• SeverinApr 25, 2023, 10:17 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: z’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  “How does your last point fit in there though?”

  On second thought, I covered anything that’s immediately relevant to this topic in section 2.2, which I quickly expanded from the Facebook post this is based on. So yea, 3. should probably be a different EA Forum post entirely. Sorry for my messy reasoning here.
  
  I’ll add more object-level discussion of 3. under Kaj Sotala’s comment.

EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

Effec­tive An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy meetup @ProVeg In­cu­ba­tor (Please RSVP)

Fake Meat—Real Talk 2: (How) can we weigh the suffer­ing of differ­ent species? (Please RSVP)

Monthly EA Ber­lin Meetup @Teamwork

• SeverinMar 23, 2023, 11:38 AM

  30 points

  10 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: My takes on the FTX situ­a­tion will (mostly) be cold, not hot

  Thanks for writing this up. I agree with most of these points. However, not with the last one:

  I think we should see “EA community building” as less valuable than before, if only because one of the biggest seeming success stories now seems to be a harm story. I think this concern applies to community building for specific issues as well.

  If anything, I think the dangers and pitfalls of optimization you mention warrant different community building, not less. Specifically, I see two potential dangers to pulling resources out of community building:

  1. Funded community builders would possibly have even stronger incentives to prioritize community growth over sustainable planning, accountability infrastructure, and community health. To my knowledge, CEA’s past funding policy incentivized community builders to goodhart on acquiring new talent and funds, at the cost of building sustainable network and structural capital, and at the cost of fostering constructive community norms and practices. As long as one avoided to visibly damage the EA brand or turn the very most talented individuals off, it just was financially unreasonable to pay much attention to these things.
     In other words, the financial incentives so far may have forced community builders into becoming the hard-core utilitarians you are concerned about. And accordingly, they were forced to be role models of hard-core utilitarianism for those they built community for. This may have contributed to EA orthodoxy pre-FTX collapse, where it seemed to me that hard-core utilitarianism was generally considered synonymous to value-alignedness/​high status.
     I don’t expect this problem to get better if the bar for getting/​remaining funded as a community builder gets higher—unless the metrics change significantly.

  2. Access to informal networks would become even more crucial than it already is. If we take money out of community building, we apply optimization pressure away from welcomingness/​having low entry barriers to the community. Even more of EA’s onboarding and mentorship than is already the case will be tied to informal networks. Junior community members will experience even stronger pressure to try and get invited to the right parties, impress the right people, to become friends and lovers with those who have money and power.

  Accordingly, I suspect that the actual answer here is more professionalization, and into a different direction. Specifically:

  • Turning EA community building from a career stepstone into a long-term career, with proper training, financial security, and everything. (CEA already thought of this of course; I don’t find the relevant post.)

  • Having more (and more professionalized) community health infrastructure in national and local groups. For example, point people that community members actually know and can talk to in-person.
    CEA’s community health team is important, and for all I know, they are doing a fairly impressive job. But I think the bar for reaching out to community health people could be much lower than it currently is. For many community members, CEA’s team are just strangers on the internet, and I suspect that all too many new community members (i.e. those most vulnerable to power abuse/​harassment/​peer pressure) haven’t heard of them in the first place.

  • Creating stronger accountability structures in national and local groups, like a board of directors that oversees larger local groups’ work without being directly involved in it. (For example, EA Munich recently switched to a board structure, and we are working on that in Berlin ourselves.)
    For this to happen, we would need more experienced and committed people in community building. While technically, a board of directors can be staffed by volunteers entirely, withdrawing funding and prestige from EA community building will make it more difficult to get the necessary number of sufficiently experienced and committed people enrolled.

  Thoughts, disagreement?

  (Disclaimer on conflict of interest: I’m currently EA Berlin’s Community Coordinator and fundraising to turn that into a paid role.)

Monthly EA Ber­lin Meetup @Teamwork

• SeverinMar 11, 2023, 4:30 PM

  15 points

  8 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Severin’s comment on: How my com­mu­nity suc­cess­fully re­duced sex­ual misconduct

  A hedging I’d add: ”...unless these people know each other from outside the boardgame club”.

• SeverinMar 11, 2023, 4:29 PM

  46 points

  19 ∶ 3

  on: How my com­mu­nity suc­cess­fully re­duced sex­ual misconduct

  “We established a policy that established members, especially members of the executive, were to refrain from hitting on or sleeping with people in their first year at the society.”
  
  This sounds super reasonable for EA, too. How would you enforce/​communicate this?

• SeverinMar 11, 2023, 2:40 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

  Full disclosure, because without it, this post would be a bit phony: I haven’t always followed this policy within EA or outside, and took just one or two weeks from first thinking it might be good to implement it in EA to writing this post.

  In general, if I write about community dynamics, assume that I think about them this thoroughly not because I’m extraordinary virtuous and clear-sighted in regards to people stuff, but because I’m sometimes socially a bit clumsy and all these models and methods help me function at a level that just comes naturally to others. The question guiding my posts on community dynamics is generally something like: “What would I-from-ten-years-ago have needed to know to not make the same mistakes I did?”

• SeverinMar 10, 2023, 1:44 PM

  4 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Xavier_ORourke’s comment on: Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

  Yep, I’m with Xavier here. The rule incentivizes community builders a bit to not make EA their only social bubble (which is inherently good I think). And it is not without workarounds, all of which cushion the addressed problem.

  For example, it encourages local community builders to hand over event facilitation to others more often. And if the rule is publicly known, participants can take a break from events that one leader leads to get around the rule. If participants don’t know the rule, they’d get informed about its existence when they hit on an organizer. In either case, the consequence of even intentionally working around the rule would be taking it slow.

• SeverinMar 10, 2023, 1:37 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Amber Dawn’s comment on: Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

  Yup, “don’t hit on people who don’t hit on me first.” is a weaker rule I already decided to adhere to in EA before I started thinking about the one outlined in this post. Independent of power, it just seems utterly necessary to manage the gender imbalance.

• SeverinMar 10, 2023, 1:31 PM

  4 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Manuel Allgaier’s comment on: Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

  Yep, the problem this particular rule tries to fix is that of perceived power imbalance and all the troubles that come with it.

  It is an imperfect proxy for sure, but non-proxy rules like “No dating if there is a perceived power imbalance.” are very, very prone to tempt people into motivated reasoning. It can get very hard for humans to evaluate their power imbalance with Alice when oh damn are these freckles cute. False beliefs, from the inside, feel not like beliefs, but like the truth. Because of that, I wouldn’t trust anyone with power who would trust themselves with power.

  Note also that while “Bob has power over Alice’s career” is a significant component of how power works in EA, power in humans has many more subtle nuances than factual access to resources. Even without explicit concerns like “If I don’t do what Bob wants, Bob will make my career progression harder.”, power is shiny and overpowering and does all kinds of funny things to our monkey brains. See for example how our brains automatically adjust what we consider good fashion choices to who we deem popular in our particular subcultural bubble, how we mold our habits by them, etc.

  For a more crass example, the 20th century had its wealthy share of spiritual leaders with sex scandals. Though e.g. Osho had no power over his followers’ real-world careers, they worshipped him like a demigod. I think it goes without question that it would be if not impossible at least outstandingly difficult for him to have a truly consensual relationship with one of his followers. Because there’s no true “yes” without an easy “no”, and there’s no easy “no” if the prophet himself calls you to his quarters.

  (Which is of course very sad and inconvenient for Osho and requirement to adhere to this rule might have turned him off guruing completely, because the list of documented 20th century female gurus is short.)

Fake Meat and Real Talk 1 - Are We All Gonna Die? Yud­kowsky and the Dangers of AI (Please RSVP)

• SeverinMar 8, 2023, 3:57 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: z’s comment on: Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

  I know that the rule is non-negotiable for people who facilitate retreats under the AuthRev brand.
  
  AuthRev is rather influential in the (especially north american) AR scene, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the rule seeped out further from there. I’m not well-networked enough there to know the details. And even if I could, I don’t think I’d want to share the saucy stories that lead to people adjusting the timelines upward and downward until they found their current form.

Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

• SeverinMar 8, 2023, 12:47 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SoniaAlbrecht 🔸’s comment on: So­ni­aAlbrecht’s Shortform

  Thanks a lot! Yep, a question I always ask myself in EA’s diversity discussions is “Which kind of diversity are we talking about?”

  A LessWrong post on the topic you might like if you didn’t read it yet is Kaj Sotala’s “You can never be universally inclusive”.

• SeverinMar 8, 2023, 12:09 AM

  16 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Sev­erin’s Shortform

  Don’t ask what EA can do for you, ask what you can do for EA.

  An obvious-in-hindsight statement I recently heard from a friend:

  “If I’d believe that me being around was net negative for EA, I’d leave the community.”

  While this makes complete sense in theory, it is emotionally difficult to commit to it if most of your friends are in EA. This makes it hard for us to evaluate our impact on the community properly. Motivated reasoning is a thing.

  So, it may be wothwhile for us to occasionally reflect on the following questions:

  • If I were to look back in ten years and find that my presence, in hindsight, was bad for EA. What were the reasons?

  • Who could I ask for an honest evaluation of which bits of my behavior serve the cause, and which harm it?

  • If I were to decide that my presence harms the community. How would I get my social needs met anyways?