Sator's Quick takes

One of the benefits of the EA community is as a social technology where altruistic actions are high status: earning-to-give, pledging and not eating animals are all venerated to varying degrees among the community. 

Pledgers have coordinated to add the orange square emoji to their EA forum profile names (and sometimes in their twitter bio). I like this, as it both helps create an environment where one is might sometimes be forced to think "wow, lots of pledgers here, should I be doing that too?" as well as singling out those deserving of our respect. 

Part of me wonders if 'we' should go further in leveraging this; bestow small status markers on those who make a particularly altruistic sacrifice. 

Unfortunately, there is no kidney emoji, so perhaps those who donate their kidney will need to settle for the kidney bean emoji (🫘). This might seem ridiculous (I am half joking with the kidney beans), but creating neat little ways for those who behave altruistically to reap the status reward might ever so slightly encourage others to collect on the bounty (i.e donate their kidney or save a drowning child) as well as rewarding those who have done the good thing. 

Austin Chen (co founder of Manifold) shared some thoughts on the EA community during a recent interview with a former-EA [see transcript here]

Austin Chen: Whether the, like SBF was committing fraud or not, or something like that, or at is how I thought of at the time and still think of it now. And to unpack that a bit more, I thought like from a like decision theory standpoint, how should the EA move into like itself, try and learn from something like this or like plan on moving forward. And my assessment at the time was that like, probably in response to this, people would be a lot more scared, a lot more like the, weak Doge, image, there's like the Buff Shiba, and like the Shiba, and I think the FTX glory days were like the strong, we're gonna do everything we're gonna save the world. And then now I think, at the time, and it also now, like the way EA has drifted this like more towards the, oh, we're gonna not do a pitch a pr, we're not going to try and make waves. We're gonna protect our like reputation. I view that to be at the time and still now like a huge error.

[00:26:01] Austin Chen: and then another thing that was just like interesting decision theory thing is I think if you abandon people who have, what I viewed as like earnestly try to support you and your movement. if you just turn tail on them, be like, oh yeah, no, actually SBF he was not acting according to our principles and we do not endorse this and we like give up on all of the stuff that, he did.

[00:26:25] Austin Chen: Then when some future billionaire is looking at your movement, what will they think? it's like a, and maybe that's the most like winning ish, like mindset to be like, oh, you're trying to engage with this not just on the merits right here, but like how this will affect like future game theoretic decisions on who works with you.

I think it is good to deter unscrupulous ultra high-net-worth individuals from engaging with EA. I think it was good that various 'EA thought leaders' came out as they did and said something along the lines of "we do not endorse this. Don't commit fraud." 

I'm not entirely sure what Chen thinks the alternative could/should have been. Defend SBF's motives? Say nothing? Either of those approaches seem like the kind of optics-maxing he critiques as being a 'huge error' (only instead of aiming to 'broadly protect reputation' it's 'protect reputation in eyes of billionaires').

It's worth pointing out that Chen has a slightly more sympathetic view of Sam than I do:

[00:27:08] Austin Chen: If I feel like in like cases when things go badly, they will just like not stand by me. 

[00:27:14] Elizabeth: things didn't just go badly. He did them badly and hurt a lot of people. which was not known at the time. I think 

[00:27:23] Austin Chen: I don't know, still debatable, . I don't know how much we should go into the object level here, but everyone made their money back be, yes, some things broke well for that to be able to happen, but like all the, people got 120% of, the value of the crypto holdings at the time, which, is not, 

Richard Ngo has a selection of open-questions in his recent post. One question that caught my eye:

How much censorship is the EA forum doing (e.g. of thought experiments) and why?

I originally created this account to share a thought experiment I suspected might be a little too 'out there' for the moderation team. Indeed, it was briefly redacted and didn't appear in the comment section for a while (it does now). It was, admittedly, a slightly confrontational point and I don't begrudge the moderation team for censoring it. They were patient and transparent in explaining why it was briefly redacted. You can read the comment and probably guess correctly why it was flagged. 

Still, I am curious to hear of other cases like this. My guess is that in most of them, the average forum reader will side with the moderation team.  

LessWrong publishes most of their rejected posts and comments on a separate webpage. I say 'most' as I suspect infohazards are censored from that list. I would be interested to hear the EA forum's moderation team's thoughts on this approach/whether it's something they've considered, should they read this and have time to respond.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   Creating such a page would also allow them to collect on Ngo's bounty, since they would be answer both how much censorship they do and (assuming they attach moderation notes) why