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I resonated with a lot of this, especially prior to 2022. Speaking only for myself, I think a lot of it was downstream of what Ozy Brennan wrote in The Life Goals of Dead People, but I was (unbeknownst to myself) much better at rationalisation than introspection, so it took a long time for me to realise this.

Arguments along these lines are giving me quite a headache aswell. That being said I would like to push back against this line of reasoning a bit:

• According to the same argument, the hypothesis "only I am sentient" beats the hypothesis "all human beings are sentient" approximately 7 billion to 1 in explaining the observed evidence (i.e. the evidence that you are born as yourself). Assuming that "all humans" includes all human beings throughout humanity's history this ration plummets even further. (I am not actually trying to argue that only you are sentient

Welcome Andrei! I've actually mused on this question a lot myself, and I agree it's under-discussed!

What immediately jumps to mind is that this post's argument requires SSA, a view of anthropics (the study of how one should reason about their own existence). Under SSA, you are randomly sampled from a "reference class" of beings. You rightly conclude that under SSA, being born a human is extremely unlikely, so your existence seems to be strong evidence against nonhuman sentience. (This would also imply the sum of artificial and/or future sentience won't be ... (read more)

I wonder if it may be helpful to combine this with a moral parliament tool. Personally, my credence in consequentialism is far lower than 60% (which is the credence used on the linked spreadsheet), and my preferred normative theory is not even considered (Ross’ prima facie duties theory). 

Wonderfully put! 

This post inspired a long back and forth with my nature fan friend. We definitely understand each other better now. She was quite angry with this first post but enjoyed your second one (as did I!). It might just convince her to make an EA Forum account 👀👀

Hi Toby, the CCF is not eligible for UK gift aid, I'm afraid, as it's a US-held fund, so donations are tax-deductible in the US only.
We're actively looking into workarounds. Theoretically, one can give to a giving vehicle eligible for UK gift aid, and that entity could then re-grant to this fund. Anyone interested can contact us at fund@rethinkpriorities.org to discuss options.

I think this is important work, but I want to flag my biggest concern about the process - the imbalance of the backgrounds of the research team and therefore potential for bias. I asked Claude to rank their areas of interest and prior work, and it shows a heavy bent towards Animal Welfare and Global Catastrophic risk.
 

Half of the research team have been strong advocates for Animal Welfare work in the past, while none of the team seems has a special interest in GHD. Half the team was deeply involved in the Animal Moral Weights project itself.

I think th... (read more)

Thanks for your kind words.

On the bad faith/"truth seeking" point, I've also noted some issues in the way "truth seeking" is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/rationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?

I think the effect of using the "truth seeking" terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:

Lying: intentional

Insufficient rigor/evidence/et... (read more)

Huh, I'm a little surprised to hear that, to be honest. To be clear, I mean something more like "visceral"/"rhetorical"/"de facto" convincingness, not whether it purely logically hinges on it.

Also, just thinking of this because I'm reading it right now - if you want to convince more people of your view, a critical review / "rebuttal" of https://www.forethought.org/research/how-to-make-the-future-better might be cool. Would be memetically strong. (I could also imagine reasons why you might not want that, of course).

Over the past 12 years, I almost always avoided applying for any jobs in effective altruism – though they did often seem like dream jobs – because:

1. I was afraid I might not be the best candidate, and if, by chance, I replace the best candidate, my work would not only be a waste but outright harmful. I'm the sort of person who's afraid to drive a car for fear of hurting someone, and the funding allocation can affect the lives of billions or trillions of beings, so any mistakes I could make would vastly outstrip any harm I could do with a car if I tried.
2. That

Oh, I don't think the worry hinges on particular infohazards that aren't public in EA. I'm thinking of a pretty general problem like: "The value of the future from the perspective of your altruistic values, epistemology, and decision theory upon reflection is probably a non-monotonic function of how much you increase wisdom etc. broadly. More 'wisdom' or knowledge for actors who are misaligned with you can be quite bad." And this is at least somewhat borne out by examples like AI movement building, biorisk, and technological progress making factory farming worse.

I reckon there is more internal conflict; it’s just not being disclosed. 

‘To me, this isn't some carvout for sexual harassment, it's trying to treat discussion of sexual harassment like I treat everything else.’

This is a thankless endeavour. The topic is too emotionally heated, and the social incentives are too skewed towards what you’ve seen. 

My own view is that the topic of whether there is or isn't a particular problem with sexual harassment in EA has become a distraction. If there are concrete failures, name them and fix them. If there are cl... (read more)

If I understand correctly, your question is whether EA is specifically worse than other organisations, rather than whether being on a par with other organisations is also very bad in this regard?
Because I get the impression that some people simply say that EA is bad, but don’t necessarily rule out the possibility that others are bad too.

I reckon it might be important to know whether the EA is actually performing worse, so the question does seem important to me, because one of the possible answers would be significant. 
(For example, learning more from ... (read more)

I guess you might think "professional EA orgs" or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we're a big chunk of the space :)

Agreed. Fwiw, in EA Survey 2024 data, people currently working at EA orgs are actually significantly more likely to be women or non-binary than those not (36.9% vs 29.1%, p=0.004).

Thanks - I'm curious, how much more convincing would you guess is the case if you were to be completely open about the infohazardous stuff? 1.5x probability of convincing someone? 3x? 10x?

The acceptable baseline amount of sexual harassment in a community that is otherwise steadfastly committed to rejecting the status quo and improving the state of the world, is zero. We are not comparing ourselves to the average workplace or university.

Cool! For other readers, I think the most relevant sections of the sequence to your question here are 4.1.3 "Meta-extrapolation" and 4.1.6 "Capacity-building". They don't go into much concrete detail on backfire risks of "promoting wisdom, cooperativeness, knowledge, etc". But yeah, mostly stuff like infohazards and dual use, plus the unknown unknown downsides we should expect from pessimistic induction. The idea is that:

• The historical mechanisms by which promoting wisdom/cooperativeness/knowledge made things better occurred in the context of fairly non-we

Thanks for great questions! 

This track came directly out of observing that entrepreneurship was a successful career path for many participants in the IAP, without specific marketing to founders, tailored content or cohort groupings. Some have used the IAP as a launchpad into programs like Charity Entrepreneurship or Catalyze Impact, while others have gone straight to founding their own organisations. We expect the same to be true for the Entrepreneurship Track. 

One thing that distinguishes the IAP from many other programs is the broader focus on ... (read more)

Maybe we need to flip this around. Instead of tracking how much funding was allocated to a certain cause area, we should be tracking the expected marginal opportunity in each and comparing those. I.e., what was the expected result of a marginal $1M donated to each cause area on average in, say, a given year?

This does not incentivize for making the allocations secret since the decisions are made based on the current state of the "market" irrespective of any previous allocations.

Going back to the 100 fund managers example, I think I'd much prefer them to ind... (read more)

You said, "The community response to that case was pretty unified," which was my jumping off point.

Let me explain. The steel man of your point is: to understand a problem, you need to understand its magnitude. Yes, agree. Again, as per my edit, I was being glib. Let me be more precise. 

I'll take my events example. I do want to understand base rates. I want all data, data is great! Let's pretend at most events, 10% of attendees are harassed. At my event, I find out it's 40%. Or, in a different example, it's 0.2%. Both of these are important and significant differences. Now, the base rate becomes quite important to understand and investigate. 

Le... (read more)

For example, even if we get AI agents to not book tickets to bullfights, I don't see it as a win from a consequentialist perspective (that's not too controversial a take?).

Why would this be? Ending bullfights may be a small victory in the short term as there are relatively few animals are involved. But still a victory.

However I’d argue  it would be a bigger win in value shifts. As long as people enjoy watching a bull tortured in an arena it’s hard to imagine that they will be very sympathetic to animal welfare ideas. Likewise if a system thinks it’s o... (read more)

I also recommend engaging with RP's new cross-cause work here. Curious to hear takes.

How was the 40% figure calculated?

The funds we’re donating to are aware of AI’s impact on the world and seem likely to take steps to use AI to improve their outcomes

There is definitely some correlation between current competence and ability to adapt to a changing world, though I suspect that there's also a huge amount of stickiness that undermines this.

All that said, if you think there should be a higher discount, you can apply it, but that doesn’t substantially change the results regarding what goes to AW. Indeed, if you increase the discount to 90%, you

Thanks. I think it's a good thing to get into the open. I appreciate your willingness to discuss it too.

This is a tough topic to discuss and I appreciate you being willing to discuss it on the forum.

I agree. 

In short, often yes.

To clear up a few general points. 

On missing moods. I agree this is horrible. As I've said, I don't think I'm the best person to say this. But if an issue is important, I think it's important to discuss accurately. I wish I were a more gracious, more empathetic, more concise, communicator. 

Methodology:

• John Salter originally claimed the numbers were perhaps 300x off. After discussion (if I understand correctly) he thinks it's more like 2-20x
• Liv Gorton thinks the denominator may be too low and the numerator too large, though I don't currently know

Thoughts on the option of starting AI safety work as a volunteer? There's some good evals that have been made by independent researchers in their own time, and I think 80,000 hours has suggested something like this as a first step to get a job.

In my personal experience a layoff often comes with burnout that can take a while to recover from, and impact may be a welcome excuse to take a break from the zero-sum rat race of job apps and to read some papers and play around with LLMs.

I think getting a job at an AI safety org historically has required exceptional... (read more)

Do you think it would be better for us to talk about this more accurately if we could avoid the pitfalls you see. Like we could acknowledge the specific areas where things are worse but also some where it's better?

And would it be good to compare that against other communities to give some sense of perspective and what might and might not work?

thank you! nudge nudge- 80k nudge nudge 

Hi,

I appreciate you taking time, I know this subject isn't easy for you. It isn't easy for me either. 

I'm really confused by your response. If I ran events, I think hearing baselines would be a thing that would be really important to me. How much people tended to pay, how often they recommended it to friends, what the typical gender balance was and yes, if it was raised, what comparable rates of sexual harassment were. 

You know a lot about event organising. What am I missing here? Why would you not want that information? Surely the first step to ... (read more)

Probably. I imagine if I were better I could discuss this both empathetically and with perfect accuracy. 

But I think almost everywhere this is discussed, the awfulness of it is made clear (including in small ways in this piece). 

I think rarely are there discussions of base rates and comparisons to other communities. 

Do you think the mood of "comparison" is missing from all those other discussions?

"trillions of capital are being flooded into accelerating AI development across industries" fwiw this seems only correct under a very expansive definition of accelerating AI development, e.g. all hyperscaler capex (including non-AI spend and AI inference) was ~$500 billion in 2025

"while a measly $50 million dollars" this seems outdated -- Coefficient Giving’s Technical AI Safety team made 140 million USD in grants in 2025. If you consider all other funding (the UK AISI's founding budget was ~$125M, internal lab speding on technical AI safety, other grantma... (read more)

This isn't a symmetrical issue, but the risk of saying 'EA is no worse or even better than some reference class' in relative terms is sorta kinda like 'sexual harrassment in EA is not that bad' in absolute terms. 

From speaking to some friends it seems like the many minor and occassional major harrassment incidents, and ways EA is unusually bad (e.g. misreading social cues and intense professional/social overlap), these 'not that bad ' issues might be burnout, leaving EA, needing to quite one's job, panic attacks, which doesn't even take into account all those people less able to do good in the world as a result.

As I said in the article I don't intend to discuss specific cases. If you wish to, sadly I'm not going to be of much use.

I agree that even if we were better than baseline it still might be worth doing more. But wouldn't it be worth acknowledging we were better than baseline?

So do you agree with the following "EA may be as good at dealing with harassment as a top american university, but we have higher standards than that"?

So to be clear, you don't hold a position on whether the community actually holds the view that you do?

Like if I found another 10 comments that seem to imply that EA is unusually bad, would you agree that it's a common view?

So maybe you agree that it's common to see poeple imply that at least some aspect of EA is unusually bad. And you think that often to say that EA isn't unusually bad would go poorly in some contexts. 

Can you tell me how the risk of biasing goes both ways? Cos currently I only see one way it can be biased. ie people are often employ slightly hyperbole and sometimes refrain from moderating because it would go poorly. Both of those point in the same direction.

In what circumstance are we going to underrate the harms here?

You're right that strictly, "skeptical we should conclude ¬P" isn't the same as asserting P. But I do think it carries implicit signal: people who push back on a conclusion of ¬P often aren't ambivalent on the point. If you'd written "I don't think we can conclude either way", I'd have agreed with you. That is one of the points of my piece

So I do think your phrasing is evidence of something, even if not a positive claim. And that "something" is the discourse pattern I am pointing at.

To your questions, depends on the person. Definitely some people and contexts where it would go poorly. And yes I do think you're pointing at something that is probably true, but see my other comment, I think the risk of biasing things in these conversations can go both ways.

So you now seem to agree that all comments I pointed at do in fact imply that EA is unusually bad in at least some way.

Now if I could find 10 or 20 such comments, and only 2 or 3 that push back, would you agree there is a general vibe that we imply that EA is unusally bad, even if that's not what we literally believe?

I think that one comment mint have a specific meaning. But if there are 10 or 20 then maybe there is a general view which informs them. In this case, that general view is that EA is in some way unusually bad (or perhaps, to shift slightly, that it's fine to say this, even if we don't believe it).

Hey,

And if someone makes a comment which implies that EA is unusually bad and you replied "actually EA is comparable", do you think that would go well? And if not, do you think this might be biasing how we think about things?

Love this! Thank you! I love the term “epistolary debates”. I have floated using this format with a few people, like David Mathers (who I find fun to talk to, respectful, curious, and full of intellectually stimulating ideas). The EA Forum has the Dialogues feature which is purpose-built for this, but you don’t need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/Discord messages or whatever. 

This format seems to have fallen out of favour, but there was a time on the Internet back in the... (read more)

One thing I'll add which I haven't seen in the comments is some of the vibe of 'EA is unusally bad' is that EA is probably unusually bad in some ways due to the makeup and culture of our community, and less bad in others. Bluntly I think much of this comes down to things like being worse at reading social cues, a high male to female ratio, and a community that is an unusual mix of professional and social network. 

I get the impression from female friends that being in EA means tolerating, for example, a lot more being hit on in unprofessional situation... (read more)

You quote me in this reply and so to clarify, I do think you're misunderstanding my comment. I don't know whether or not EA is uniquely bad. I can speak to my personal experience on this but as I say in the comment, I think there are lots of reasons as to why determining this is really difficult. My comment was intended to point out the issues I have with the approach in the post, not to make a positive case for EA being bad.  

Basically, "we shouldn't conclude from this data that X isn't Y" isn't a claim for "X is Y."

Ok - so if one believes that wild invertebrate lives are net positive, then offsetting with animal welfare interventions means more feed is required, resulting in fewer wild invertebrates (and more deaths from pesticides, but I think this is small compared to the impact on the population of soil invertebrates of farming more land), meaning less utility overall. So this person would prefer an offset that is a scalable way of convincing people to go vegan. Though this may seem contradictory, I think there is a large variation in difficulty of going vegan (ta... (read more)

(I have already read these posts and much prefer them over the post we're commenting on here.)

Thank you, nice hearing it is not just me. 
Still figuring out how to do something about it and what field/context would be most impactful... 
 

I think oftentimes the relevant counterfactual is not "this person would be doing even more impactful work in a highly-impactful area" but "this person would not be working in a high-impact area whatsoever"

One of my comments is cited in the section about there being a wide belief in the EA community, so I can provide my personal perspective, as well as comment more broadly.

While other people have already pointed out that your comparison chart has methodological issues, which I agree with, I don't think this is a crux. While I think communities and spaces can never reach a state where there are no bad actors, or where no one does or experiences harm — I very much don't think this means harm is okay (which I'm sure you agree with), or that our response to hara... (read more)

There is the wider community, and then there is the professional ecosystem. I would put forward the following: at the point where you are reading a detailed account of sexual harassment supported by two independent investigations and a settlement, it is very easy to write a supportive comment. Especially for those with approximately nothing to lose by offering support. The real test isn't "when presented with a publicly documented case that has strong evidence, can you say something nice?" It's "within the professional ecosystem, if instances of potential ... (read more)

These might be kinda similar to things that others have already said, but:

My personal journey was encountering extinction risks first, worrying about those, and then over time thinking in more detail about threat models and consequently broadening the list of things I worried about. I've been assuming that community discourse evolved in the same way: initially based on relatively simple ideas (e.g. omnipotent superintelligence, everyone dies) and then adding more detail and precision and subtlety as people developed those more, which naturally increases th... (read more)

"shockingly terrible", no, that's still not a comparison.

"far worse than anything I've ever seen at any organisation I've ever been in" -- this one is a comparison! (In my defence I hadn't seen titotal's comment when I made mine.)

But here it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to respond to that comparison with "where's your evidence?" or "what about Durham?". It's clear where the comparison is coming from, and it's clear that it's not about base rates, it's about one specific org and a specific thing they did, and it's specific about what standard they're held to. Are you saying that it's the wrong standard?

One overall thought: I wonder if what you're picking up on isn't an implicit belief that EA is uniquely bad, but the reality that people are very invested in EA. The reactions are strong and strongly worded partly because people in this community want this community to be good. They care about it, many are morally scrupulous, they're invested in its health and ability to function, they know the people in it. I don't think they're implicitly thinking "this is so much worse than anything comparable." My guess is that if you asked directly whether EA is worse... (read more)

Only 3 months ago we had a writeup detailing a shockingly terrible response to sexual harrassment by one of the most prominent EA orgs out there. The response is far worse than anything I've ever seen at any organisation I've ever been in. This indicates to me that the environment is nowhere the high standards that should be aimed for. 

Regardless of the actual base rates, the question that matters the most is whether there is room for improvement, and I think it's blindingly obvious that the answer is yes.

You don't think "shockingly terrible" and "far... (read more)

Here are some random thoughts on the topic.

Moderators have a hard job, I think it can't be entirely on moderation to drive the culture of a website. A lot of the work has to be on the users. Starting with moderation issues though, I have a couple ideas:

Clarity: I think moderation benefits from simplicity and clarity. It isn't a good sign when you are taking mod action against someone but can't really explain why because its too difficult or would take too long. I feel like that indicates that the underlying rules/principles aren't really clear or simple en... (read more)

I think the third one most clearly. Doesn't suggest that other communities successfully take sexual harassment seriously, to my eyes.

If you’d like to read some arguments, I argue here that the most cost-effective neartermist interventions are in animal welfare. If you lean longtermist, I argue here that under many EAs’ risk aversion, marginal animal welfare donations still make more sense than marginal AI safety funding. If you’re a pure total utilitarian, I would still argue that direct efforts to improve the future for all sentient beings (future-oriented digital minds/animal welfare work) are plausibly higher EV even than x-risk reduction.

Some notes on OpenAI disproving the Erdős unit distance conjecture (from a non-mathematician):

• First, this is big. A notorious math conjecture being disproved by AI would be sci-fi 10 years ago. In my layman's read, this is plausibly the most prominent math result in the last 12 months -- AI, centaur, human or whatever.
• Second, it rebutted an Erdős conjecture, and I found it curious that the first clear math breakthrough goes against consensus. There are a few potential reads to this: a) this seems to go against the LLMs-are-sycophantic-machine claims; b) ev

Can we stick on whether I am reading them right? Which of the three comments that I quoted do you think doesn't imply that this community is unusually bad here?

I sometimes worry that I'm still super persuadable/impressionable when people with e.g. upper-class British accents or who speak very well or who're affectively agreeable say things vs e.g. American Southerners or more abrasive debaters but... I found this BBC discussion between Lady Hale and Archbishop Williams to be such a heartwarming/encouraging example of how people can disagree with each other on a very contentious/important topic in the most gentle/humble/polite way.

I think you're reading some of them right, and many of them wrong, because you seem to continue to be equating "EA's performance on this issue makes me sad" and "EA's performance on this issue is worse than peers". Some people believe both for sure! But you keep including people saying the first thing as if they're saying the second. "Currently about half of the comments disagreeing here seem to espouse the view that the community is bad." -- again not distinguishing between "bad" and "worse".

Honestly my guess would be that most people don't have a clear c... (read more)

Okay, thank you. I aim to take a look at these evals and hopefully learn something and maybe give some useful feedback.

And one more point which maybe is obvious but just to get it out there.

Sure, but these are hard to account for. I agree it's better to adjust the model when it's possible, but you'll still be left with a model that has a tonne of uncertainty.

I agree that a large amount of uncertainty will persist, but I suppose we should aim to do the modeling and adjustments is mean zero. E.g., we'd put in a large adjustment for 'potential non-counter... (read more)

Hey,

I found lots and lots of comments, but to me it is so obvious that these people implicitly believe this that I struggle to argue the point. What about the comments on this article? 

Thanks for questioning the common narrative even though it's awkward!

I'm pretty skeptical that we should conclude from this data that EA isn't unusually bad. 

What we can do is look at the responses to the incidents that do get raised, and the experiences of victims, and judge whether or not they live up to the standards we want to see in a group that ta

Thanks!

Sorry to turn this into an infinitely extended thread, but I wanted to post yet more data, namely CloudFlare's recent write up of their chance to work with Project Glasswing.

They do not provide numbers on bugs/vulnerabilities found, but they do provide some interesting commentary. Like others, they note that where Mythos stands out is in its ability to actually put together working exploits, and they elaborate on the value of this: proof-of-concept exploits are obviously worth reviewing; they are far less likely to be false positives.

They talk about the in... (read more)

The example you gave is about marginal cost-effectiveness (we spend "$1 on ads").  I agree that then, in this abstract/idealized case, you should spend the $1 on ads. I think all the uncertainty you would realistically have makes it less obvious, though.

But average cost-effectiveness would be more like, we spent $1,000,000 on an organization that did a bunch of different activities, and we think that led to $1,500,000 counterfactually going to charity. This seems good on average, but there's a further question of whether we should give another $1 to t... (read more)

I agree that animal welfare is underfunded, but who is this post trying to convince? If funders should fund the most cost-effective interventions or cause areas, then the argument needs to be made on the merits, which are not covered here. Animals don't just automatically win because there is lots of animal suffering today (unless maybe you are a fairly near-termist negative utilitarian).

I disagree. The community response to that case was pretty unified. Were there any comments saying that the organisation behaved well? So while it may tell us things about the specific organisation, I don't think it should cause us negatively update us on the community. 

Do you think that mosts orgs are like the org in that case?

As an aside, do you thin that EA is unusually bad here? Or would you expect this kind of thing to happen in many orgs/workplaces, but be unacceptable there too?

I think of this situation as analogous waking up in the cabin of a truck that's careening down a major road. Of course you're going to grab the wheel, just because no-one else has done so yet.

It is extremely difficult to determine base rates for something like sexual harassment, because it's an offence that allows for ambiguity and plausible deniability, because there's room for retaliation, etc, and it will strongly depend on how much people trust the bodies they are reporting to. 

What we can do is look at the responses to the incidents that do get raised, and the experiences of victims, and judge whether or not they live up to the standards we want to see in a group that takes sexual harrasment seriously. I do not think the grades are ve... (read more)

>Palisade, Apollo, METR, MATS, Tarbell 
For other readers who thought, "Wait, are those not getting CG funding?" Almost all of those orgs have been funded by CG, most within the last year. Maybe not at the level Scott's talking about though.

No idea -- I don't have nearly enough to go off of. Curious what you learn, though.

I'm not really convinced by your evidence that there's a widespread belief that EA is worse than other communities. Your first quote clearly says this, I grant. The other quotes seem to me to all be saying something more like "this community has this problem", and "I wish this community was better / had hoped that it would be better", without saying "we are worse than relevant comparisons", much less "we are worse than relevant comparisons because of intrinsic aspects of our culture".

FWIW, my belief, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, is more like: EA hand... (read more)

I want  to make sure we're talking about the same thing here.  I'd be want to know the cost-effectiveness in terms "for each $1 we spend to promote giving" (via starting new orgs or doing more fundraising) "how much do we raise in truly counterfactual donations to the most effective charities" and I'd want this to be net of any donations or effective work that might be crowded out.  

E.g., suppose Joe lives in the USA and earns $100k per year. Without our spending Joe,  would not give anything to charity and would also not be doing socia... (read more)

I think the absence of particular harms is easy to overlook, in all sorts of areas, especially in a space focused on identifying tractable problems, so I wouldn't update the same way based on lack of positive discussion. I'll happily go on the record and say (as a woman) that I've had much, much better experiences in male-dominated EA spaces than male-dominated non-EA spaces.

I think I probably agree yes, though I am a bit uncertain about how hard the marginal gains are past some point. 

Do you think most forum commenters think that EA is doing better than many universities and workplaces? Like do you think they share your view of a significantly higher standard? Do you think if someone commented "we are doing as well as many other communities, but we have more to do" they would upvote and agree with that?

The Current Landscape: The current State-of-the-Art (SOTA) in function-based screening relies heavily on sophisticated machine learning models, such as Transformers and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), trained on massive genomic databases. These tools excel at analyzing sequence text to identify familiar structural homologies or dangerous functional motifs. By screening digital intent at the order stage, these models provide a highly effective defense against known biological threats and their immediate variants.

The Frontier Challenge: However, as synthesis cap... (read more)

I think so, yes. Part of why, for example, I was and am critical of CEA's leadership's response to the recent sexual harassment report is because I believe we as a community generally are often capable of and desirous of achieving a higher standard than top universities and workplaces, which I think you believe too, based on the data in this post! My guess is that we're fundamentally on the same page, but I don't want to assume this. 
 

So to clarify rather than the number being 300x too low, you think it might be somewhere between 2 - 20x too low? 

And you're saying that you wouldn't be surprised if there were 1000 annual individual incidents among the 3000 or so EA women. 

I'm pretty skeptical that we should conclude from this data that EA isn't unusually bad

Can we move to a position where we are more uncertain on EA's badness? And where we discuss it in those more uncertain terms?

On the second point, what is a more accurate estimate of the EA rate, in your view?

If it's average future that still could justify a 1x bar, depending on what we're averaging over.

I don't think it does. It's conceptually coherent for an organization to have a very high average cost-effectiveness while also having a marginal cost-effectiveness below 1x. For this reason, I don't think you should have a "bar" for average cost-effectiveness. (You might be making the point that if the average cost-effectiveness is above 1, then you are better off making the grant than burning the money, and so it clears a bar in that sense, but it's not clear... (read more)

Re 2 vs 3 - I didn't want to have to literally whip a calculator out and crunch some stats before making a comment so I just put a squiggly.

Re 100, I think you're absolutely right. I think I'm off by an order of magnitude or two. I wouldn't be surprised if there were around 1000 individual incidents, but then I'd only expect a few % to be reported and for them to be grouped together. Tbh, I kinda scimmed the post and didn't read it throughly enough before commenting :S 
 

I don’t usually watch vegan documentaries anymore because they make me really sad, but I’m glad I made an exception here. I think the question of how human relationships work when people end up on opposite sides of a moral divide is really important, and you told such a compelling story.

I think this documentary is different because it’s aimed at people who already believe that animal exploitation is wrong and it explores how to live and engage with the world while knowing this reality which is somethimg a lot of people who went vegan at some point had to contend with. 

While I intend to discuss this with Pete directly, my general objection is that commenters don't discuss this as if EA is seeking to have a much higher bar and failing. They mostly discuss it as if EA is unusually bad.

If there is general agreement that EA has a much higher bar I would expect to see widely upvoted comments saying how much better EA is than comparable spaces even as it still has work to do. I don't see that.

James, thanks for highlighting the potential role that marketing could play in super-charging the efforts of EA organisations.  I fully share and support your sentiment.  There is a good reason why the biggest and most commercially successful brands and companies are already rigorously deploying the full strategic marketing toolkit.  They know what effect strong integrated marketing has on the bottom line.  So why are our organisations not making use of the same proven skills and competencies in support of all the positive change we wan... (read more)

I agree that often "EA is unusually bad" isn't grounded in data (often instead in first person accounts, although I'd note that if we assume reporting infrastructure won't capture things well, that's actually where most of the signal lives). I'm pretty skeptical that we should conclude from this data that EA isn't unusually bad. 

Others have made similar points but just at a high level, my concerns when comparing to the other data (e.g. Title IX) would be that we are biasing both the numerator and denominator of the reporting rate in a way that biases ... (read more)

Well put. And as I said in my response I also think the women in other spaces argument could equally cut in the other direction - if we assume harassment is done by men to women, there are more men per woman in EA than comparable spaces. 

I think this is a great point directionally, but hard to make the maths work for the numbers you've suggested.

Like, for there to be 100x more incidents of interpersonal misconduct than are reported to CH... well, there'd need to be 1000s of incidents! And there are only a few thousand EAs. It could be that the rate is in the tens of percent, but I'd find that surprising.

Ditto your adjustment for women: to get a 3x adjustment given the amount of women in other spaces:

• If the other spaces are 50% women, i.e. representative of gen. pop., then EA would need to

Thank you. It was quite a lot of work to get the piece into a good shape. 

I'm guessing you'd need to bump up your estimate by ~100x or so

This seems way too high. I can see a case for 5x. I would be shocked to find out that in total EA HR depts receive 100x as many complaints as CH. 

The factor of 3 thing is less clear. I think I can see an argument in the other direction: if it’s due to the number of badly behaved men, and in some ways EA might compare even more favourably to the university contexts. This feels like the sort of thing that one shou... (read more)

Thanks for questioning the common narrative even though it's awkward!  I think it's great you delayed until things got less heated. 

I think one big question is whether you'd also need to consider all the complaints made to all the HR departments in EA and not just CEA's CH team. I imagine you're only going to CH if it's someone from some workplace besides your own, and that you'd go to your manager / HR team if it was someone you actually work with. If that's right, you might also need to talk to the people who run groups / coworking spaces. &nbs... (read more)

Our current Vietnam Hub will end around mid-july (after the EA Summit Vietnam), so we expect to head to our next location around mid-late July! With the poll closing at the end of May, we should have the next location decided pretty soon after the poll closes, so hopefully early June. 

This is/was largely about fundraising, which seems pretty dependent on this, especially in EA/startup spaces. One potential funder specifically passed because of this. I'm sympathetic to this direction, because as a funder (resource allocator) you need some way of evaluating cost/benefit/risk/expected-payoff, and the exercise itself can be pretty useful for better calibration (even if still not precise enough to be action-guiding).

I guess a better framing for this lesson would be "I should have compromised to get the resources I needed to execute my vision, because otherwise the chance my vision succeeds is significantly worse". Not all compromises are worth it of course, but this one probably was!

Yeah, totally, I wondered the same thing. Am I seeing the tip of the iceberg and the other 90% of the time spent is all behind the scenes? Could totally be possible, but is that really the best way to do things?

I really want to see stricter moderation of online spaces to maintain respect, kindness, and psychological safety, as much as possible. I think this would mean mods often intervening in cases they don’t normally now (not just on the EA Forum, elsewhere too). I want mods to be less hands-off in that way. I think the end result is online spaces would ... (read more)

So in your head you are aiming for a significantly higher bar than top universities and workplaces?

Thank you, David, that’s very generous of you. I just want to say that you were, to me, definitely the best commenter I talked to on the EA Forum. Although it can also kinda be fun to spar a bit over intellectual topics, thinking back now, I worry whether I was too harsh with you at times. Maybe sparring can sometimes get too heated, and if I ever fail to treat someone with kindness and empathy and respect, that’s wrong and my fault.

I feel a bit guilty and regretful to hear you say you’ve found arguing with me stressful. I definitely don’t want to make som... (read more)