Wil Perkins

Soli­dar­ity for those Re­jected from EA Global

• Wil Perkins 23 Feb 2023 4:21 UTC

  65 points

  44 ∶ 16

  on: Con­sider not sleep­ing around within the community

  Surprised at the amount of upvotes on the main post, versus the highly upvoted comments talking about being scared, judged, frustrated, etc.

  Personally I agree strongly with this post and think it’s a more than reasonable proposal. Also, just seems like common sense. I’d imagine there are quite a few people who feel similarly based on the vote count.

  It seems that an extremely large proportion of EAF users are die hard proponents of casual sex and polyamory, which makes this conversation fraught. I’ll also be honest—I get the sense than many defenders of these non-traditional norms within the EA community argue from a stance of emotion and don’t really engage with the idea that promoting polyamory could massively reduce our overall utility as a movement.

  Using language and framing like “what if you replace poly with gay” or “personally this makes me feel…” is not compatible with calculating the utility of a norm in EA. As stated elsewhere our goal is to better the world, not make ourselves happy or help EAs find life partners.

  I understand this is a deeply personal topic but I would appreciate someone laying out a strong case for why polyamory and casual sex in the EA community actually leads to higher utility overall.

  What links here?

  • Patrick Sue Domin's comment on Con­sider not sleep­ing around within the community by Patrick Sue Domin (23 Feb 2023 21:13 UTC; 15 points)

EA is too New & Im­por­tant to Schism

• Wil Perkins 23 Feb 2023 3:58 UTC

  57 points

  29 ∶ 4

  in reply to: Louise Verkin’s comment on: Con­sider not sleep­ing around within the community

  As has been discussed quite commonly elsewhere on this topic, the goal of the effective altruism movement is to improve the world. Not to make effective altruists happy or get them laid/​married etc.

  Yes relationships can be good and help build social ties, but OP clearly isn’t saying people shouldn’t date at all, just that they shouldn’t casually date. I think a trade off of less relationships on the margin for less sexual harassment assault and more women In EA is a fine trade off to make.

  On top of this it’s not healthy to have your entire social support system within EA, and this will help prevent that too.

  What links here?

  • Lauren Maria's comment on A state­ment and an apology by Owen Cotton-Barratt (23 Feb 2023 8:09 UTC; 9 points)

• Wil Perkins 24 Feb 2023 16:29 UTC

  35 points

  24 ∶ 10

  on: Con­sent Isn’t Always Enough

  Thanks for pointing out the nuance here, and I strongly agree with your points. These sorts of issues are as you said extremely corrosive, and make it difficult for outsiders not to have a frustrated and bitter view of the elite in EA.

  Also as has been pointing out, this type of casual disregard of any sort of restriction on relationships disproportionately drives away women, since so many people in powerful positions in EA are men.

  Finally, the optics are awful. I don’t have a strong stance on wokeism per se, but if we get more and more scandals like the TIME article I worry about EAs ability to grow and convince large decision makers. Reputation matters.

• Wil Perkins 18 Jan 2023 2:57 UTC

  32 points

  13 ∶ 1

  on: Do­ing EA Better

  Personally I think this problem boils down to how effective altruism represents itself, and how it is actually governed.

  For instance in my own case, I became interested in effective altruism and started getting more involved in the space with the idea that it was a loose collection of aligned, intelligent people who want to take on the world’s most pressing problems. Over time, I’ve realize that like the post mentions, effective altruism is in fact quite hierarchical and not disposed to giving people a voice based solely on the amount of time and effort they put in the movement.

  Admittedly, this is a pretty naive view to take when going into any social movement.

  While I am sympathetic to the arguments that a small tightly knit group can get things done more quickly and more efficiently, there is a bit of a motte and bailey going on between the leadership of effective altruism and the recruiting efforts. From my perspective a lot of new folks that join the movement are implicitly sold on a dream, commit time and energy, then are not given the voice they feel they’ve earned.

  Whether or not a more democratic system would be more effective, I still think many of the internal problems that have been surfacing recently would be fixed with better communication within effective altruism about how we make decisions and who has influence.

• Wil Perkins 24 Feb 2023 18:50 UTC

  30 points

  14 ∶ 1

  in reply to: justsaying’s comment on: Con­sent Isn’t Always Enough

  Thanks for your input! From my perspective as one of the people talking about “establishing norms,” I can definitely do better to add nuance here.

  As others have mentioned the issue is the blended lines between the professional roles and personal community is tough to navigate. I generally am in favor of classical liberal approaches to personal morality, but I do think that, as Jeff points out, these sorts of things can be other people’s business in a professional setting.

  Imagine you rely on an EA grant for your job/​livelihood, or work at an EA organization. You work extremely hard but don’t manage to get you grant renewed or get fired. Then you find out that someone else in a similar role slept with a grantmaker or a grantmaker’s friend, and won the grant over you.

  How would that make you feel? Would you still feel it isn’t your business?

Smug­gled as­sump­tions in “de­clin­ing epistemic qual­ity”

• Wil Perkins 8 Feb 2023 17:28 UTC

  28 points

  12 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Soli­dar­ity for those Re­jected from EA Global

  I agree that nobody is trying to evaluate my worth as a person with this admission, perhaps I should’ve phrased things more carefully. For what it’s worth I do think I’d be highly impactful at the conference, but my skillset is outside the scope of what I’m trying to get at in this post.

  No matter how many carefully crafted rebuttals and distinctions people make, the fact remains that I have spent years of my life working to improve my impact, and then have not gotten accepted into a conference that’s focused on people with high impact.

  I do appreciate you and Lizka trying to soften the blow, but I want to emphasize that it’s a blow nonetheless. Even if I take what you both are saying as a given (that it’s a judgment on my usefulness and not me as a person) the rejection is still difficult to handle. It’s basically saying that my skillset, career, work I’ve done, etc, is not important or impactful enough to make a difference at EAG.

  All that being said, it’s a whole different ballgame discussing this coldly and rationally, versus being in the seat and dealing with the emotions. I applaud you for being able to fully separate the rejection from your own worth, but that’s not realistic for me and I would guess for most people it isn’t realistic either.

• Wil Perkins 8 Feb 2023 13:53 UTC

  25 points

  8 ∶ 0

  in reply to: timunderwood’s comment on: The num­ber of burner ac­counts is too damn high

  Could you explain why you and your wife think inviting coworkers to a BDSM party is not a problem? I am genuinely curious for your perspective.

• Wil Perkins 16 Feb 2023 23:43 UTC

  24 points

  5 ∶ 0

  on: Tran­si­tion­ing to an ad­vi­sory role

  I’m beyond impressed with your decision, and with the honesty and vulnerability you’ve expressed in writing this post. I know it’s extremely difficult to admit weakness, especially in a leadership role, but as you said it sounds like the right decision.

  I hope your next role is fulfilling for you, and thank you for all the great work you’ve done!

• Wil Perkins 24 Feb 2023 14:10 UTC

  22 points

  8 ∶ 1

  on: Who is Un­com­fortable Cri­tiquing Who, Around EA?

  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.

• Wil Perkins 24 Feb 2023 13:52 UTC

  20 points

  13 ∶ 3

  on: Who is Un­com­fortable Cri­tiquing Who, Around EA?

  “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:

  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​RTkatYxJWvXR4Qbyd/​​deceptive-alignment-is-less-than-1-likely-by-default#comments

  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.

• Wil Perkins 21 Feb 2023 3:28 UTC

  19 points

  9 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Robi Rahman’s comment on: A state­ment and an apology

  This is not the same thing as a hierarchy. There’s no middle management, no corporate ladder you have to climb, and (as far as I’ve seen) no office politics you have to wade through before you can reach the top of an organization or receive your grant funding

  Seems like you’re confusing hierarchy with ‘formal corporate hierarchy.’ There is what I would call an informal hierarchy in EA. Most of your post seems to agree with that so frankly I’m a bit confused as to your point?

  One of the reasons this type of setup is so problematic is that informal hierarchies pretend to be open while secretly keeping power tight. In that way it can be far worse than other organizations you list.

Help writ­ing a His­tory of Effec­tive Altru­ism?

• Wil Perkins 23 Feb 2023 18:20 UTC

  16 points

  4 ∶ 3

  in reply to: tomrowlands’s comment on: EA is too New & Im­por­tant to Schism

  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?

• Wil Perkins 23 Feb 2023 14:00 UTC

  16 points

  7 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Patrick Sue Domin’s comment on: Con­sider not sleep­ing around within the community

  I agree with you here. I didn’t realize how dearly people held the ability to sleep around within the community. I do worry that this setup creates bad incentives where people who want casual sex are far more highly motivated to go out to in person events, which means a disproportionate number of any local groups may have quite a few people seeking casual sex.

  This is a very bad state of affairs for trying to grow the movement, especially if we want more “normal” people or women.

• Wil Perkins 23 Feb 2023 18:03 UTC

  15 points

  7 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: EA is too New & Im­por­tant to Schism

  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.

• Wil Perkins 23 Feb 2023 18:23 UTC

  14 points

  6 ∶ 2

  in reply to: tomrowlands’s comment on: EA is too New & Im­por­tant to Schism

  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.

  Optimize for light, rather than heat.

• Wil Perkins 24 Feb 2023 14:12 UTC

  13 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: EA Global in 2022 and plans for 2023

  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?