Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
To be stuck inside of Mobile
Karma: 279
discussing whether it was a good idea to invest $580m in Anthropic (HT to someone else for this example). The financial difference is ~30x, the potential impact difference seems much greater still.
There is a write-up specifically on this, that has been reviewed by some people. The author is now holding it back for ~4-6 weeks because they were requested to.
(For onlookers, I think the above comment is a valuable warning but is still pessimistic and speculative.)
Thank you for your incredibly detailed and expert perspective here. This seems very valuable.
There seems to be anxiety and concern about EA funds right now. One thread is here.
Your profile says you are the head of EA funds.
Can you personally make a statement to acknowledge these concerns, say this is being looked into, or anything else substantive? I think this would be helpful.
My guess is that the main reason you are not seeing a lot of communication is that there is not a major problem.
However, if there was a problem, I think the EA institution cannot simply quickly backfill 8 figures of funding by making a formal legal promise, or by delivering a cash transfer in a week’s time.
If there was a plan to implement this backfilling, I think there are a lot of steps upstream to seeing messaging:
The ties mentioned above might create legal or risk management challenges.
The nature of the FTX collapse presents issues with clawbacks, and this has unique legal characteristics.
Separate from legal issues, this sort of commitment or backfilling has to be coordinated at the most senior levels, it probably involves meetings with the two boards, and other stakeholders.
How this could be communicated has to be considered (the Wytham Abbey purchase is going poorly)
There are other possibilities or side actions: CEA probably has other sources of funding, and it might prefer to use those to show diversity.
All of the above should take weeks of time under normal conditions: there’s a legal dependency, an executive/leadership dependency, and then a media/communications dependency. All of these processes are slow, must be done in “serial’, and this is occurring one of the busiest times possible.
CEA has continued its operations, including proactively distributing new funding guidelines in a way that suggests a disciplined, thoughtful rollout.
Hi Jason,
It has been a few days since this answer of yours (and other comments) have appeared. This has caused a little anxiety. This has appeared in several private discussions.
Below is an external, non-sympathetic take. Can you check this content over and give your perspective or reaction?
Here is some public information:
If you look at the its entry on the forum wiki, it is clear that most of CEA’s funding, excluding FTX, is from a major institution in EA.
If you look at the new EV entity, you will find that the board members include people from that EA institution.
If you visit the EA funds website and look at the funding managers, you will almost always find one person from the major EA institution, and that person is often the most senior person on that fund.
Additionally, if you follow staff transitions, you will find that people have moved between CEA and that EA institution.
Lastly, if you watch YouTube videos about EA funds, you will find information that suggests to me one explanation for the role of EA funds (e.g. allows smaller, speculative or exploratory grants, offloads operations costs).
I believe the above is good evidence that CEA serves important, irreplaceable roles for both EA and that EA institution. That EA institution has access to a large amount of funding.
The collapse of EA funds or other CEA entities would be destructive. From the above, I am certain this would not be allowed to happen if it was just required backfilling the $14M of FTX funding, which has additional value in averting harm to grantees and other projects.
There’s several people or entities who did not seek FTX funding or consequential associations with SBF.
I think individuals who did this because they had private negative information, or the ability to perceive FTX or SBF’s enterprises accurately prior to November, should be somewhat rewarded in states of the world where FTX fails due to fraud.
It seems like there are strange and bad community effects if the opposite is true, especially if impact is much more difficult than it seems, funding or status gradients are distorted, and evaluating communication and expertise in a public setting is made further difficult than it already was.
I’m pretty confused by this ontology that includes Peter Singer as a radical.
One of Peter’s historic contributions to human society is increased attention to animal welfare. I know for a fact that he supports thoughtful reduction of suffering, in a way that is not militant or vegan.
Another one of Peter Singer’s contributions is that it seems wrong to let a child die to avoid damaging a suit.
In the past, Peter’s income has exceeded 7 figures USD, he donates large amounts of it, maybe about ⅔, which I think is far from radical. In contrast, Will MacAskill reportedly keeps his spending at about 26K pounds.
For completeness, my understanding is that, as a philosophical principle, Peter supports the choice of parents to end their own child’s severely disabled life, especially or only as an option for those parents who may understand their newborn is suffering[1].
I do not find the above points radical compared to other narratives that I think could be made about EA.
For a number of reasons that are separate and distinct from points made in this comment, I think it would be good to either not make simple negative characterizations of Peter Singer, or to engage much more comprehensively.
I think a lot of low quality discussion will produce more work for certain people, or have consequential effects in ways that some people may not expect.
- ^
If a newborn infant is likely to have a really bad life, then I think we shouldn’t say this life must be preserved no matter what. Now, I’m not in a position to judge which infants are going to have good lives or bad lives. The parents of those children are in the best position to judge, provided they get accurate information on the prospects of their child and the impact the child will have on them and their family as well.
I’m unsure what part of my comment you are replying to. I’m happy to own up to valuing “being right over optics/politics”. I’m OK if you became aggressive or even hostile, through making good inferences about me.
However, many of the things you said are confusing to me. I don’t know how the blog post on “PR”/”reputation” is relevant. Also, I agree with Matt Yglesias (I’m in touch with him!).
Importantly, I think it would be good for you to be aware of how your writing in your comment might present to some people.
Your comment begins with “my intuitions differ some here…” which implies I share these the views you are opposing below your comment. This seems confirmed throughout, e.g. “My thinking used to be a lot closer to yours and the thinking of the quoted Slack participants”.
If I tried to reply, I think I would have be obligated to refute or deal with the the associations you imply for me, which include “ally with a semi-fascist”, “violating American morality”, “little discussion of deontological safeguards”, “nip [my] own immoral behavior in the bud”.
I don’t think the following idea is in the article, much less my comment: “You don’t just replace “our great virtue is being right” with “our focus is being right” because it sounds better.”
I don’t think you intended this, but I think some people would find this strange and somewhat offensive.
I actually found your reply interesting and filled with content. I think you have interesting opinions to share.
I edited this in. Thank you!
Editorial/Speculation/Personal comments:
This article might be good and satisfying to many people because it gives a plausible sense of what happened in EA related to SBF, and what EA leaders might have known. The article goes beyond the “press releases” we have seen, does not come from an EA source, and is somewhat authoritative.
Rob Wiblin appears quite a few times and is quoted. In my opinion, he is right and most EAs and regular people would agree with him. New Yorker articles include details to suggest a sense of intimacy and understanding, but the associated narrative is not always substantive or true. This style is what Wiblin is reacting to.
Gideon-Lewis makes some characterizations that don’t seem that insightful. As in his last piece, Gideon-Lewis maintains an odd sense of surprise that a large movement with billions of dollars, and a history of dealing with bad actors, has an “inner circle”.
Gideon-Lewis has had great access to senior EAs, and inside documents. After weeks of work, there is not that much that he shows he has uncovered, that isn’t available after a few conversations or even just available publicly on the EA forum.
“Insider EA content” in Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s recent New Yorker article
Writing to onlookers:
What Jason said about EA orgs adding or changing its board to have 2-3 non-EA board members, especially to an organization with 4 directors, is something you might do to an organization after a major crisis such as misconduct by the management, or a major pivot, maybe after a massive funding change.
To calibrate and give intuition, if we were talking about an employee, not an organization, the magnitude of this change would be like being put on a PIP, being demoted, or moved to another department involuntarily. If you were changing the board this way and done poorly (or sometimes well) many executives or staff would consider leaving.
The issue at hand is changing board, from the close network containing the CEO and often close friends. Yes, independent governance is often nil and the CEO often dominates decisions in the modal (almost all really) start-up as well as most small nonprofits. This happens everywhere, including smaller organizations in EA. I’m 80% sure this was how GiveWell was built.
Nil governance could be bad or good, but the advice being discussed here is far too basic. If there actually was misconduct on the level of FTX fraud, this advice be easily co-opted. For example, Tyler Shultz was the relative of a Theranos board member and extensively explained the outright fraud to his board member relative, and was ignored. SBF could have constructed a performative board to dominate as well.
The level of discussion being given to this on the EA forum is low and risks cargo culting (wasting time working on processes that need true management ability to be effective), or create systemic issues, e.g. “Matthew effects” ( board members become a currency, orgs that can attract them to win the game of funding).
There is unlikely to be unusually high base rate of fraud in current respected EA organizations. Ultimately, the limiting issue in EA is management and talent, and people have worked on this for a long time. Some reactions can be counterproductive.
Hi Jason,
I think my example gives intuition well for why conflict of interest and de jure constraints can be bad. There is no further subtext.
As an aside, because of where we are, and the ideas in your other comments, I want to say, on the subject of lawyers
or other ideas about institutions, I do not share anything like Habryka’s aesthetics which you spent a lot of time pushing back on. I am not from California and I did not come through an EA club at some HYPS school. I’m grateful for your discussions on this and other legal matters.
I trust your intentions and your ideas seem extremely valuable
It would be good to get a description with deep understanding or causal relationships for how a larger board, board quality, or governance in general would have prevented the FTX collapse, especially in a deceptive environment, like FTX, where low quality efforts can be coopted. Famously, such cooption probably happened at Theranos.
I’d add that organizations should aim to have at least one—preferably two or even three—board members who are not “full-time” EAs.
Just as importantly, it would be good to have a detailed understanding of how boards would be involved in improving EA org operation.
Diversity of perspectives is important
It’s an important way to mitigate the risk of groupthink that is inevitable in any tightly-knit community.
Frankly, this recent governance thread on the forum, has traits that, from the outside, seem to reflect local online trends instead of substance. This can produce “the wrong hill to climb”, wasting effort, disillusioning people, or be coopted.
To give a concrete sense of this issue, there is currently a post on the EA forum from an EA org looking for board members.
One of the commentators does object level work orthogonal to EA efforts, and seems to be one of the few people who understood to some degree the risks of FTX, and did not seek FTX funding or associations. Another commentor is a longtime EA, associated with the org, and like almost everyone else, did less to avoid FTX funding.
The person who avoided FTX gave a detailed comment that added in depth considerations to changing governance, and mentioned creating a novel new think tank.
On the other hand, the person more associated with the organization, gave a fairly generic positive comment. This is the response to the two comments.
In the past, I’m lucky to have had to chance to speak to Ozzie, who is one of the strongest and most principled people in EA, about his view of increasing board activity. If I understood and recall correctly, like him I imagined using boards as a device to seat and empower talent and provide institutional governance.
However, much of the response to these ideas about boards was negative from other people, including senior people. The general view is that boards can be negative and easy to poorly executed. I think I now agree with both views.
(Not necessarily on the above project) I believe in theory, if it was net positive for impact, Peter, Marcus and Abraham would agree, and even use resources that don’t directly improve Rethink Priorities, to help start a new think tank or other entity. In fact, as an EA, I would feel obligated to do so, if on balance it made sense.
I could easily see such actions being opposed by an outside, muscular, board member who has other visions for Rethink Priorities, who won’t understand or care about the considerations. This might not be absolutely wrong, but would alter the EA landscape in complicated ways.
This seems great and I appreciate your contributions.
It seems tough, but it would be useful if you or someone else shared information about this. This content could be academic legal content, or just as importantly public articles or statements from senior people working on non-profit boards that confirms this
Respectfully, I’ve talked with many lawyers of great quality, including on the board I was involved in. Overall, I’m worried of the substance or practicalities about this thread. I expect that most board members and officers and will just “round down” and obey the instructions in the documents they signed, which seemed quite unequivocal to me about conflicts.
On the object level, one complication is that like many, my non-profit was registered as both a 401k in the US, and also a charity in the UK. Things like layering on jurisdictions or other things probably increase the issues in practice, and seem impractical to attend to.
Other issues involve board dynamics (that increases with the activity of the board, that you principledly aim to increase). Based on my experiences, I think principled but “de jure” violations can be weaponized by opposing factions on a board.
The board member I spoke to at Rethink Priorities, was not at all the most junior board member, and clearly expressed concern about the conflict themselves. As mentioned above, the issue with advising was because the idea involved the creation of a new think tank, which seems like a clear conflict. This could be under the umbrella of Rethink Priorities, or not. The considerations about which way to do this are immensely complicated, and probably only understood by a small group of people with an enormous amount of context.
In the past, I spoke to a Rethink Priorities board member about a project idea that nominally competed with RP (it was a certain kind of think tank). The board member and I then discussed the idea. This project idea was actually given by a respected Rethink staff member prior to this meeting.
The above seems good and seems like what we want. I think it is possible because we believe we are aligned in goals, and share trust and values.
As many know, board members are nominally legally obligated to maximize the interests of the non-profits they are working in, not the interests of EA or the EA cause area the organization works in.
In theory, changing the board could result in people who see things differently and act differently. It’s not impossible a very impressive and strong board would change norms.
I think written above is understood already. In the case of RP, I don’t think this is a real danger. I wanted to say the above. Not everything in EA is unexceptional.
The drop is not real and probably due to a large number of pending grants being renewed but not yet announced on the Open Phil website.
There is also some lumpiness of funding (multi year grants announced in one year) but it is more minor.
Hot spaces
You can create hot spaces with certain looser norms than the rest of the forum. Then you can direct discussions, people to those spaces.
The strategy of using these spaces are useful because:
This gives a natural outlet to heated discussions, and the explicit looser norms can make the discussions healthier
It pulls out heated discussion from other spaces, so they are less disruptive
The space gives knobs and levers for moderators
You can control how visible these spaces are for the public, e.g. possibly in the way “community” tags have different visibility
You can announce that it is open for X days, will be closed in X days
You can adjust and edit the norms and discussion inside of it as you go
Making these spaces and setting these boundaries also expresses agency, control and vision for the moderator. Expression of this is healthy and builds respect and further agency.
If you want to do this, these hot spaces can be made in many different ways, e.g. posts, threads, sections, tags. Probably some thought about the form it could take is useful. Further planning beyond designing the space is usually less rewarding.
I think you would care about this specific investment if you had more context (or at least I expect that you believe you would deserve to understand the argument). In some sense, this proves Jonas right.