Just wanted to point out that Peter and you seem to mention two different classes of behaviors. While the behaviors you mention certainly create a more unwelcoming environment to women and shouldn’t be welcome in EA environmens, I don’t think they would meet the (legal ?) definition of sexual harassment and may not be the types of actions Peter had in mind.
Tsunayoshi
Karma: 696
IANAL, so I will just quote another government website, but I would be very surprised if accusation 1 holds any water. This was not difficult to find at all; also it seems a bit odd to first admit to not understanding what “legal authority” means but bringing the accusation forth anyway.
″ A charity can pay a trustee for the supply of any goods or services over and above normal trustee duties. The decision to do this must be made by those trustees who will not benefit. [...].
Examples of goods or services that may be provided by a trustee in return for payment under the power in the Charities Act include:
the delivery of a lecture
a piece of research work...
the occasional use of a trustee’s premises or facilities
it would be trivial for one of the staff to say so.
It seems unreasonable to expect a reply from staff to a forum post within 3 hours, let alone to one that is fairly accusatory in tone. Also, many people will downvote and explain their reasoning later when they have more time in the evening.
I will also reiterate my earlier comment that we should establish norms of contacting organisations with such accusations before they are published, unless good reasons exist not do so.
I tried to comment on the page https://ai-risk-discussions.org/perspectives/test-before-deploying, but instead got an error message telling me to use the contact mail.
I really enjoyed this post. Small note: The links in the “If you found this post interesting, you might also like” section are not working.
I intensively skimmed the first suggested article “Technology is not Values Neutral. Ending the reign of nihilistic design”, and found the analysis mostly lucid and free of political buzzwords. There’s definitely a lot worth engaging with there. Similarly to what you write however, I got a sense of unjustified optimism in the proposed solution, which centers around analyzing second and third order effects of technology during their development. Unfortunately, the article does not appear to acknowledge that predicting such societal effects seems really hard, as evidenced by the observation that people in the past have anecdotically been usually wrong about the sociatal effects of technologies, and that there is no consensus even on the current effects of e.g. social media on society.
To people who found themselves agreeing with this post, I encourage applying it in practice when you actually do encounter first posts (if they obey forum norms). Take this post which was a first post for the author and consider whether people could have been a little kinder with their downvotes. (To be frank, I am a little bitter about my similar experience, so I am a bit sensitive to expressed but not lived norms of welcoming new post writers).
That seems right.
This seems inaccurate. Yes, the original letter says that the grant has been approved. I am not too familiar with how these grants usually go, but the wording of the letter seems similar to what our local EA group received for our grant application, i.e. your grant has been approved, now fill out some due diligence forms please. I can imagine that people familiar with grantmaking are of the understanding that approving a grant does not entail an unconditional agreement that the grant will be paid out.
That is, SND was very likely aware that there was still a due diligence process to come. If the FAQ is to be believed, SND misrepresented their political positions, and thus they cannot complain about failing the due diligence step.
While Nathan’s suggestion is certainly framed very positively, people might object that sometimes the only way to change a system where power is highly concentrated at the top is to use anger about current news as a coordination mechanism to demand immediate change. Once attention invariably fades away, it becomes more difficult to enact bottom up changes.
Or to put it differently: often slowing down discussions really is an attempt at shutting them down (“we will form a committee to look into your complaints”). That’s why I think that even though I agreed with the decision to collect all Bostrom discussion in one post, it’s important to honestly signal to people that their complaints are read and taken seriously.
It’s definitely right to look at historical and other social context to explain current and past attitudes towards discrimination as explanations. A utilitarian framework is probably not the right approach, nor most other ethics systems. I doubt there was ever a time in the modern era where attitudes were consistent, and there’s loads of social conditioning going on. I don’t think many women felt angry in the 19th century when their heads of government were (almost?) invariably men, because “that’s just how things are” and nobody else was getting angry about it anyway.
My favorite example of current discrimination that totally flies under the radar of the collective ire is height discrimination. 6 of 46 US presidents[1] have been of below average height, a result this extreme or more has less than a 0.005 chance occuring due to randomness (i.e. your chances of becoming president are 2 orders of magnitudes lower if you are short). This is not totally unknown, occasionally there’s a paper or article about height advantages, but people perceive it as a mere curiosity. Personally speaking as a short guy, this absolutely fails to anger me either.
1: https://www.thoughtco.com/shortest-presidents-4144573
This argument seems to be fair to apply towards CEA’s funding decisions as they influence the community, but I do not think I as a self described EA have more justification to decide over bed net distribution than the people of Kenya who are directly affected.
[epistemic status: my imprecise summaries of previous attempts]
Well, I guess it depends on what you want to get out of them. I think they can be useful as epistemic tools in the right situation: They tend to work better if they are focused on empirical questions, and they can be help by forcing the collaborators to narrow down broad statements like “democratic decision making is good/bad for organisations”. It’s probably unrealistic however to expect that the collaborators will change their minds completely and arrive at a shared conclusion.
They might also be good for building community trust. My instinct is that it would be really helpful in the current situation if the two sides see that their arguments are being engaged with reasonably by the other side. (see this ac on transgender children transitioning, nobody in the comments expresses anger at the author holding opposite views)
Would it be a good norm that people contact organizations they plan to criticise before publishing such posts? I can only think of this as beneficial when the post is based on not easily verifiable, private information. While it is legitimate to use such information as basis for criticism, there are usually two sides to a story.
For some related context: In the past GiveWell used to solicit external reviews by experts of their work, but has since discontinued the practice. Some of their reasons are (I can imagine similar reasons applying to other orgs):
“There is a question around who counts as a “qualified” individual for conducting such an evaluation, since we believe that there are no other organizations whose work is highly similar to GiveWell’s.”
“Given the time investment these sorts of activities require on our part, we’re hesitant to go forward with one until we feel confident that we are working with the right person in the right way and that the research they’re evaluating will be representative of our work for some time to come.”
We could pester Scott Alexander to do another, EA themed, adversarial collaboration contest.
We should encourage and possibly fund adversarial collaborations on controversial issues in EA.
Thanks for the reply! I had not considered how easily game-able some selection criteria based on worldviews would be. Given that on some issues the worldview of EA orgs is fairly uniform, and the competition for those roles, it is very conceivable that some people would game the system!
I should however note that the correlation between opinions on different matters should apriori be stronger than the correlation between these opinions and e.g. gender. I.e. I would wager that the median religious EA differs more from the median EA in their worldview than the median woman differs from the median EA.
Your point about unknown unknowns is valid. However, it must be balanced against known unknowns, i.e. when an organization knows that its personnel is imbalanced in some characteristic that is known or likely to influence how people perform their job. It is e.g. fairly standard to hire a mix of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists for data science roles, since these majors are known to emphasize slightly different skills.
I must say that my vague sense is that for most roles the backgrounds that influence how people perform in a role are fairly well known because the domain of the work is relatively fixed.
Exceptions are jobs where you really want decisions to be anticorrelated and where the domain is constantly changing, like maybe an analyst at a venture fund. I am not certain at all however, and if people disagree would very much like links to papers or blog posts detailing to such examples.
A study should be conducted that records and analyses the reactions and impressions of people when first encountering EA. Special attention should be paid to reactions of underrepresented groups such as groups based on demographics (age, race, gender, etc.), worldview (politics, religion, etc.) or background (socio economic status, major etc.).
In general, there is no reason to expect the Atlas’ founders to spend money needlessly. Nobody is suspecting that they are spending it on themselves (excepting the alleged expensive table), and just like enterprises I expect them to be at least trying to use their resources in the most efficient way possible.
You raise imho valid arguments. To address some of your points:
I guess the Atlas Foundation is going off a model where impact is heavy tailed, in which it makes sense to spend what seems disproportionate resources on attracting the most talented. In such a model, attracting a fellow from the 99th “potential impact” percentile rather than 10 fellows from the 95th percentile would still be worth spending some marginal 45k for, even though it sounds excessive.
“From friends who are Atlas Fellows, they said many Atlas Fellows do not require the scholarship as their parents earn a lot and can already pay for college.” If true, this is evidence in favor of offering them such a ludicrous amount of money. They do not really need the money, so the marginal value is reduced and you need to offer more money to entice such potential students (or think of other benefits). And an unfortunate fact of life seems to be that a person’s financial earnings are highly correlated with those of their parents. Taking earnings as a proxy for potential impact means that a program like the Atlas Fellowship should also consider privileged students as people worth attracting.
And maybe that’s just me, but some of the phrasing comes off as somewhat combative (on the other hand I am aware that many people here think we should state our opinions more directly). As an example, the question in the title: “why do high schoolers need $50k each?” is not really truthful and sounds rhetorical, because nobody has claimed that the applicants need that money, just like high frequency traders do not need high compensation but still firms pay that amount to hire them.
I would usually not go around tone-policing, but I think it would be beneficial in controversial times like this to remember that as **a community we wanted to move away **from evaluating charitable initiatives based on how they sound and instead evaluate them on their results. In that vein, I do not think that it is helpful to quote rumoured single sentences by founders without any context (“not believing in budgets”) and without actually engaging with that sentence. The founders do not owe us accountability of private sentences that they might have uttered at some point.
Hits based giving means that Open Phil should not police the furniture of their grantees, and I am also unsure whether the way they manage inventory is indeed of public interest, as they are not soliciting donations from the public at the moment.