Epistemic status: These are exactly part of the non-performative speech I talk about here. Think about what value these actually add, if I put little effort into the post, why should you trust me saying otherwise? I might have pulled this out of my ass and claim to have spent a year thinking about these things, or I might have spent a year thinking about it and still be uncertain. I obviously think it's worth reading and believe in it. But you need to skim and decide yourself.
I'm writing this as a short awareness raiser of a few concepts that were touched upon in a recent PhilosophyTube Video (see below) which explores the concepts of System Design through the lens of transgender treatment in the NHS. I recommend it for anyone who would like to really grok what the rest of this post is talking about, as Abigail has a knack for Brechtian conveyance of concepts beyond mere definitions.
The TL;DR; I'd like you to take away from this post and the video are
I'll expound on these points a bit more below the video.
Abigail uses her experience of fighting through the complain-swamp of the NHS to illustrate the institutional techniques of
In the EA world, in my experience, this looks like the following:
One example could be the discussion after "democratizing risk" which might(?) to my non-insider eyes have influenced the red-team exercises and was widely debated....but only in a theoretical manner. Like this post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within and some of the comments note, EA tends to have aversion to putting institutional safeguards into place and prefers to run things on a trust basis. What all of the responses to crisis and continued existence of bad practices highlight is that there are no real attempts to do anything and instead contests are held, which are nice, but in the end are...contests. Games held at the discretion of the same culture, to cherry-pick whatever is convenient to appear acting, while not really changing anything. And to call out one person and organisation in particular, I found it quite rich that EY derided the red teaming contest and hinted at his own rich set of EA criticism while continually profiting of a system of intransparency, hype and lack of accountability to anyone with MIRI.
Which serves as a nice segue into the next topic that Abigail touches on in the video: what is the real purpose of institutions? She discusses Stafford Beers perspective of the purpose of an institution being what an institution does. MIRI, to continue the example, provides cushy job with little to no tangible output or interaction with the wider research community to its members - the output of the group would fail any institutional review. Given this and the fact that to date there is not even a clear definition of the problem the group is meant to solve published in a way that has found acceptance or critique in the wider research community (outside of hype machines like OpenAI and Anthropic where OH HEY LOOK, SBF lead a 500e6$ series B round just a while ago), applying the principle would then hint that until we see further evidence, the point of MIRI is exactly this job providing.
Now, what does EA do? And here I think, EA (in a wider sense) does a lot: if we count GiveWell, the communities actual giving preferences etc. it provides a lot of money flowing to worthwhile causes - like the LIONS club, the rotary club or similar humanitarian social associations. And I think that is a perfectly fine thing to be - the next elites social club, where you can network and find business partners while doing something for the community. Perfectly fine. EA in the narrower sense (i.e. the longtermist and more distinct work) is a bit different though. There, the main focus appears to be...growing the movement, educating and developing the culture and doing ever more cause prioritization...to the degree of losing touch with actually doing much that the broader world would consider impactful, and being under scrutiny even before the FTX topic broke. I served as a facilitator for an impact seminar, and a good chunk of my group mirrored the criticisms lanced in Emile Torres https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk article. If EA/longtermism isn't a utilitarian justification for continued wealth inequality,focus on growth now at the cost of seriously addressing climate change and general techno-optimism, then it's doing a poor job at communicating this. Saying EA isn't utilitarian as Will did in his twitter thread isn't worth much if the institutional actions and systems aren't in place to prove this through action. If the world keeps thinking you are a basic utilitarian who will, to paraphrase SBF "bet the earth for a 51% chance on a second one", then maybe there's something in your reasoning and actions that makes them think that.
Which brings me to pointing out non-performative speech in three posts that triggered me into writing this:
First of all, I want to make clear: I'm not shitting on any of these people. I think it's good of will to say some personal stuff even while not having processed enough for an official statement. I think it's good that somebody spells out "fraud is bad actually" for those that need it, and evhub says all the right things. And I welcome people expressing emotions - including disgust. And I fully expect all three of the people I will directly speak towards to already be thinking about what I will say - I assume they are smart people, nice people, and I don't want to attack them.
What this section is about that these personal statements are not enough and a call to the community to not stop at accepting or performing personal statements, denouncing fraud and feeling disgust. Instead, we should demand to actually do something and do so ourselves.
If we check 80khours "about us" section, we find the "our mistakes section, a favourite symbol of good EAs - but what I'm missing is mission statements, legal charter, some form of commitment to an accountability process.
Likewise on effective ventures website: no charter linked, nothing about how we can trust them through institutional mechanisms. I hope Rob feels disgusted enough to not just "trust less across the board" but to use his position to lobby for institutional safeguards and accountability.
Same for Will and Evan: you hold influence in your respective institutions (especially Will). I hope you (and the community) aren't just satisfied with feeling personally betrayed and your communities and institutions threatened by it, I hope you will actually do things to change the system that enabled this.
Evan, while I can understand how nice it is not to work under deadline pressure and constant scrutiny the extremely opaque and doomsday-culty way that MIRI, OpenAI and it's recent imitators operate by are part of the problem.
As for Will, I hope that it won't take you months to realize that the guidelines, principles etc. you link are completely empty of mechanisms to enforce and be verified. That whether you think SBF acted withing EA principles or not, there was nothing to seriously challenge him: he was a rich dude doing "philantropic" things and for those with capital (be it social or otherwise), there are no control mechanisms being recommended by anything you cited in that thread, nor in any of the EA material I read in the years I've hung out with my local EA group (the call for a better governance norm post goes into more detail here).
I have been in sporting associations, student associations and open source collectives which were much younger and smaller than EA but had more of these structures - formalized ways of distributing decision making power, of deciding who may or may not associate themselves with the organisation or movement, of electing their official and in-official representatives and leaders and removing bad actors and of keeping track of provenance and availability of committed resources. This stuff isn't rocket science, and for a group that values introspection and carefulness as much as EA/longtermists, these things need to be developed.
Which brings us to the final section: how can we avoid non-performative speech? How can we avoid a big debate on this forum, or in the halls of Trajan House, that results in a firm letter opposing doing bad in the name of EA and urging, URGING members of the community to please not do bad things?
Well, I'm biased and a single person, but if you want my opinion (and you made it through the post so I guess you either do or are collecting arguments for criticism [that I welcome]), the most important things are
I want to emphasize: I've been hanging out with EAs for most of my adult life now. Most of you all are lovely people. Evan, Will, Rob, despite being singled out in this post are lovely people trying their hardest. But the one thing that drives me insane is the tendency to pontificate and philosophize about accountability, when most of the charities and associations are not run by their communities, and make no effort to encourage to be run by their communities. Even some Protestants and Catholics have figured out how to do democratic self governance by now by voting in their dioceses and equivalent communities and some are even starting to put accountability and prevention mechanisms into their system. I like the good parts of EA too much and respect the intelligence of the people in this movement too to accept "it's a young movement" as an excuse to do worse than these century old, conservative institutions.
"Doing Good Better" - well, then let's do Good, better.
