“How many people die in road accidents” doesn’t tell you much about the badness of speeding without the denominator—which in the US is approximately everybody approximately all the time.
Will Bradshaw
Karma: 8,350
Comparing sampling strategies for early detection of stealth biothreats
This is an excellent comment.
Air Sampling for Early Pathogen Detection
Whatever Hamas’ plan was, what actually happened included gunning down hundreds of helpless civilians at a music festival and massive, brutal sexual violence against large numbers of women.
This isn’t hard. Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks were a brutal massacre of innocent civilian life. It’s possible to acknowledge that at the same time as strongly condemning Israel’s conduct, either in the current war specifically or in their history with Palestinians in general.
I downvoted this comment, even though I’m pretty sympathetic to many of the factual claims it contains: in particular, I don’t believe that Israeli civilian or military leadership are doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties. Nevertheless, this comment feels quite out-of-place and vaguely inappropriate to me, given the framing and emotional tone of the OP, which feels much more about explaining one person’s feelings and thought processes than an actual attempt to make a strong argument for a specific position.
I also think it’s needlessly hostile, in a place where compassion and acknowledgement of uncertainty seem particularly important. Calling someone’s views “propaganda talking points” seems like a bad way to start any productive dialogue.
The stated reason is the same as Nick’s: since the FTX collapse he’s been reused from too much board business for staying on the board to make sense:
Since last November, I’ve been recused from the board on all matters associated with FTX and related topics, which has ended up being a large proportion of board business. (This is because the recusal affected not just decisions that were directly related to the collapse of FTX, but also many other decisions for which the way EV UK has been affected by the collapse of FTX was important context.) I know I initially said that I’d wait for there to be more capacity, but trustee recruitment has moved more slowly than I’d anticipated, and with the ongoing recusal I didn’t expect to add much capacity for the foreseeable future, so it felt like a natural time to step down.
TIL!
I think this strengthens my confidence in my original comment re: nearly all EA roles being paid under market rate.
Yeah, I agree this is a real and hard case.
Similarly, I think there are roles where the only readily available benchmarks are in academia or the nonprofit sector—in these cases we can assume that those benchmarks are too low, but we don’t know by how much, so determining fair compensation is hard. Community building plausibly falls into this bucket.
Interesting. Are there any examples of EA jobs which are more poorly-paid than their private-sector counterparts?
I think this is the great majority of EA jobs that aren’t in operations.
In our case (as an EA-adjacent biosecurity org), it’s simultaneously the case that (a) most of our staff are well-paid relative to academic and nonprofit benchmarks, and (b) most of our staff could make much more money working in the private sector. Several of our best (and best-compensated) performers took dramatic pay cuts to work for us. I think this is the norm for EA-adjacent organizations, and is roughly the correct norm to be pursuing.
In discussions of EA compensation, it’s very common to equivocate between “EA jobs are well-paid relative to nonprofit/academic benchmarks”, “EA jobs are well-paid relative to the average person” and “EA-jobs are well-paid relative to for-profit benchmarks”. I think only the last of these is actually cause for concern, and is quite rarely true.
That said, I have seen EA operations roles (primarily at EV orgs) that I think were significantly overpaid, so I’m not going to claim this never happens.
I’m also curious about this. Boston is convenient to me as a Cambridge resident, but I’d guess that holding an event in DC would be more valuable.
I don’t think I agree that CEA shouldn’t be doing cause specific events, and I think that given how the past couple of Bay Area EAGs went this is a pretty natural decision.
But it does seem pretty regrettable that there’ll be no cause-general EAG in the Americas next year.
Another two weeks later, and with no response or acknowledgement from Nonlinear (or even a statement about when they plan to give a response), I’m personally updating moderately towards the view that Nonlinear’s communications around the initial release of this post were more about FUD/DARVO than honesty. I’ve also updated further towards the position that it was right for Ben to post when he did, and that delaying would have been playing into the hands of bad actors. These remain defeasible positions, but I’m not holding my breath.
I think there are practical reasons why it might take longer to prepare a comprehensive public response than the private response they were envisaging for Ben + Lightcone. That said, I also think that there are a lot of non-comprehensive responses that would have taken less time to write while still supporting their version of events, and I think it’s reasonable to update against Nonlinear in their absence.
We’re coming up on two weeks now since this post was published, with no substantive response from Nonlinear (other than this). I think it would be good to get an explicit timeline from Nonlinear on when we can expect to see their promised response. It’s reasonable to ask for folks to reserve judgement for a short time, but not indefinitely. @Kat Woods @Emerson Spartz
I hope this doesn’t seem heartless, but: Given the degree of contested narratives in this affair, can someone not-anonymous with access to Chloe confirm that this account speaks for her?
(i think it probably does, to be clear, but also think it’s worth checking)
Thanks for this. I found the uncited claims about EA’s “reputational collapse” in the OP quite frustrating and appreciated this more data-driven response.
I don’t personally think posting this here is particularly helpful or adds much to the conversation.
I think it’s fairly clear that the use of “elite” in that paragraph was a joke.