Thanks for all y’all do—sharing stats publicly like this is really helpful.
Any plans for more legible / objective criteria on who is accepted versus rejected?
Also has your team done any reflection on calls to open ea global or create a more community focused, less gated conference?
On another note, this is an extremely good point I haven’t seen brought up much:
“ Of course, those with power can still take action behind the scenes. This combination (has trouble publicly responding, but can secretly respond in powerful ways) is catastrophic for trust building.”
The asymmetrical relationship here is a huge piece of the puzzle I was missing. Thanks for helping me update on this particular issue.
“Around longtermism, there doesn’t seem to be much public organization evaluation or criticism. I think one issue is that many of the potential evaluators are social peers of the people they would be evaluating”
The social tightness and revolving door nature of AI safety certainly creates bad group think dynamics.
However on the longtermist/AI Safety side I think the post misses the fact that these communities barely engage with criticism, even very well written pieces by credentialed folks.
Case in point, a recent sequence of a couple critical posts on deceptive alignment by someone who I know is a very well qualified data scientist/ML researcher:
This post has at best 1-2 thought out comments that actually engage with the subject matter. Compare that to the rest of the LW forum which has thousands of people doomsaying about recent advances in LLM capability just in the last week.
To me the main difference between global health initiatives and the AI Safety / Longtermist crowd isn’t that people are uncomfortable voicing criticism. Instead it seems that global health folks are far more willing to engage and seek out external auditing, whereas AI Safety researchers either ignore or actively discourage dissent due to short timelines.
Glad to hear that. I noticed myself losing focus too—a big part of why I wrote this post.
I wish you luck on your to do list, and as a community builder well… we’ll do our best. :)
Thanks for responding. For what it’s worth I personally think OCB should be permanently resigned from a powerful position in EA, and possibly socially distanced. Strong incentives against that type of behavior, especially right now, are extremely important. I’m disappointed with the response from EVF and think it should be far harsher.
The distinction I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t assume all powerful people in EA are bad apples as a result of this scandal breaking.
I organize part time while also working full time as the head of sales at a tech startup. I really don’t have time to coordinate this type of thing, but if I could contribute a few hours a month here or there I’d be happy to do it.
The problem is most people don’t have the skillset to do sales, build spreadsheets, and identify funds. It takes either an incredibly talented person with a lot of time, or a group with different skills complementing each other.
It’s also the sort of reasoning that has let us get billions of dollars into funding for effective solutions, saved tens of thousands of lives, and created a broad social movement with tremendous impact and impact potential down the road.
The totalizing reasoning of EA does have negative aspects, but I don’t think we should throw out the baby with the bathwater! It is possible to salvage the good parts of the EA framework while maturing the movement. To do that we have to make sure to reduce tribal tensions and work towards understanding.
I understand the frustrations you and others are voicing, but to me I think it’s more a lack of competence and understanding of management/power differentials/social skills from some of the higher level EAs. I highly doubt that the upper echelons of EA are full of malicious sociopaths who are intentionally harming people.
EA has done a lot of good, and people make mistakes often. I do think we need to rectify them and punish bad behavior, but we should try and make sure we don’t alienate the old guard of EA for making mistakes in the socializing/dating world. A lot of people struggle to understand what is okay and what isn’t—I’d rather try and reconcile or educate them than attack each other. That’s the point of this post.
Does that framing make sense to you?
As someone who is a funded community builder part time, it’s extremely difficult to do this kind of work. Community building is extremely competitive to get funding, and running a local group takes a lot out of you. Plus the career/funding situation is precarious and not exactly great for setting up a lucrative career path, so unfortunately I think a lot of people see community building as a temporary position or a means to getting more clout in EA.
This is especially true of university organizers since by the nature of their position, they will only be organizing temporarily.
I’d like the community building movement, especially the paid organizers, to coordinate more. I think that if we could have an annual meetup country by country, perhaps people could coordinate and piece out larger projects—for example a group of 5 paid organizers could pool some funds or work on building an ethics framework together.
EA generally has an issue where people say “if this is a problem, why don’t you go do it?” I think if we focused more on coordinating and letting people solve problems as a group, we could get a lot more done.
Strong agree! The basic framework of EA, using utilitarian EV calculus to have more impact, can be adopted by folks on the left or right. People who are more into social justice and climate change can learn to have better feedback mechanisms to increase impact.
At the same time, conservative religious groups that do a ton of charity could also be led to using more effective interventions. I don’t think the EA framework needs to be politicized.
The problem is there’s a broad movement with many directions. Who gets to pick the direction and why?
I’m used to markdown from other rationalist forums and I guess it just makes it easier for me. Also the editor does incorporate some markdown features like# for headers, but leaves out others. So it’s confusing.
Great comment. I agree that the best way forward is acknowledging that different parts of EA have different values, and making sure community organizers/high status people in the movement are aware and sensitive of that sort of thing.
For instance in my local group, I think if an EA from SF came and started propositioning people for dates/discussing polyamory, that would seriously break our norms. Perhaps having more intentional communication between group organizers could help?
For instance maybe a mandatory meeting once or twice a year for all paid organizers in a nation where people can get and idea of what is kosher where. What are your thoughts here?
I think we can manage to have different enclaves of EA with different norms, that still broadly agree and play nicely with each other. As a community organizer I hope to get a better idea of what different groups value so I can navigate these situations better.
Could you explain a bit more as to what you’re proposing?
Hey Geoffrey, thanks for pointing this out. I agree it seems like you immediately got downvoted hard—I’ve strong agreed to try and correct that a bit.
I broadly agree with you on this, and I’m glad we’re having this conversation. However I think framing it this way is problematic and leads to tribalism. The way I see it the ‘woke takeover’ is really just movements growing up and learning to regulate some of their sharper edges in exchange for more social acceptance and political power.
Different movements do better or worse—New Atheism is an example that was ruined by this modulation. I’m optimistic that EA can learn to become more welcoming and palatable to normal folks on the left and right, while keeping the old guard, if we play our cards right.
The largest divide seems to be the older folks who prize unconventional dating and social norms like polyamory, radical honesty, etc, versus a lot of the more “normal” folks that may be turned off by that sort of thing. For instance leading a local group in Raleigh NC, we have a large number of people that have relatively standard intuitions about sex and relationships.
My biggest goal is learning how to increase their involvement and engagement in EA without turning them off—something we’ve already dealt with a bit from SBF.
Building that middle ground framework will be tough, do you have any ideas here as to where we can start?
Agreed! I suppose what I’m saying is that we make sure to do that active work now before things get too far out of hand.
I’m curious how other movements have managed this issue—do you know of any examples of success here?
Yep I see that divide a bit myself, but I think it’s important not too rely on binary distinctions too much.
My view is that there is a subset of groups/areas within EA that have much of their social lives and identities tied up in the movement. These seem to be the people defending flirting/dating etc.
That being said a lot of them are the old guard, and have done and continue to do a lot of the best work in the movement. I think it’s important we try to find a reasonable compromise and reconcile these differences.
Got it! I guess a live draft and a little link to a page that explains markdown stuff would be nice on the page while you’re writing the post?
Also it seems like some markdown stuff works and some doesn’t like [linking things](in this format)
Is there a collected list of classic forum posts anywhere? I’d like to check it out.