Important Update: I've made some changes to this comment given the feedback by Nuño & Arepo.^[1]  I was originally using strikethroughs, but this seemed to make it very hard to read, so I've instead edited it inline. Thus, the comment now is therefore fairly different from the original one (though I think that's for the better).

On reflection, I think that Nuño and I are very different people, with different backgrounds, experiences with EA, and approaches to communication. This leads to a large 'inferential distance' between us. For example:

Nuño wrote: "I disagree with the EA Forum's approach to life"

They meant: "I have a large number of disagreements with the EA Forum's approach to moderation, curation, aesthetics or cost-effectiveness"

I interpreted: "I have significant issues with the kind of people who run and use the EA Forum"

or

Nuño wrote: "I feel that EA leadership uses worries about the dangers of maximization to constrain the rank and file in a hypocritical way."

They might mean:^[2] "OpenPhil's messaging has been inconsistent with their actions, and they're squandering the potential of the rank and file EA membership"

I interpreted: "OpenPhil staff are deliberately and knowingly deceptive in their communications when making non-maximalist/worldview diversification arguments, and are intentionally using them to maintain control of the community in a malicious way"

I think while some of my interpretations were obviously not what Nuño intended to communicate, I think this is partly due to Nuño's bellicose framings (his words, see Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism footnote-3) which were unhelpful for productive communication on a charged issue. I still maintain that EA is primarily a set of ideas,^[3] not institutions, and it's important to make this distinction when criticising EA organisations (or 'The EA Machine'). In retrospect, I wonder if it should have been titled something like "Unflattering Aspects of how EA is structured" or something like that, which I'd have a lot of agreement with in many respects.

I wasn't sure what to make of this, personally. I appreciate a valued member of the community offering criticism of the establishment/orthodoxy, but some of this just seemed... off to me. I've weakly down-voted, and I'll try to explain some of the reasons why below: 

Nuño's criticism of the EA Forum seems to be:

 i) not worth the cost (which, fair), 

ii) not as lean a web interface as it could be (which is more personal preference than a reason to step away from all EA) 

and iii) overly heavy handed on personal moderation. 

But the examples Nuño gives in the Brief thoughts on CEA’s stewardship of the EA Forum post, especially Sabs, seem to be people being incredibly rude and not contributing to the Forum in helpful or especially truth-seeking ways to me. Nuño does provide some explanation (see the links Arepo provides), but not in the 'Unflattering Aspects' post, and I think that causes confusion. Even in Nuño's comment on another chain, I don't understand summarising their disagreement as "I disagree with the EA Forum's approach to life". Nuño has since changed that phrasing, and I think the new wording is better. 

Still, it seemed like a very odd turn of phrase to use initially, and one that was unproductive to getting their point across, which is one of my other main concerns about the post. To me, some of the language in Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism appeared to me as hostile and not providing much context for readers. For example:^[4] I don't think the Forum is "now more of a vehicle for pushing ideas CEA wants you to know about", I don't think OpenPhil uses "worries about the dangers of maximization to constrain the rank and file in a hypocritical way". I don't think that one needs to "pledge allegiance to the EA machine" in order to be considered an EA. It's just not the EA I've been involved with, and I'm definitely not part of the 'inner circle' and have no special access to OpenPhil's attention or money. I think people will find a very similar criticsm expressed more clearly and helpfully in Michael Plant's What is Effective Altruism? How could it be improved? post. 

There are some parts of the essay where Nuño and I very much agree. I think the points about the leadership not making itself accountable the community are very valid, and a key part of what Third Wave Effective Altruism should be. I think depicting it as a "leadership without consent"  is pointing at something real, and in the comments on Nuño's blog Austin Chen is saying a lot that makes sense. I agree with Nuño that the 'OpenPhil switcheroo' phenomenon is concerning and bad when it happens. Maybe this is just a semantic difference by what Nuño and I mean by 'EA', but to me EA is more than OpenPhil. If tomorrow Dustin decided to wind down OpenPhil in it's entirety, I don't think the arguments in Famine, Affluence, or Morality lose their force, or that factory farming becomes any less of a moral catastrophe, or that we should not act prudently on our duties toward future generations.

Furthermore, while criticising OpenPhil and EA leadership, Nuño appears to claim that these organisations need to do more 'unconstrained' consequentialist reasoning,^[5] whereas my intuition is that many in the community see the failure of SBF/FTX as a case where that form of unconstrained consequentialism went disastrously wrong. While many of you may be very critical of EA leadership and OpenPhil, I suspect many of you will be critiquing that orthodoxy from exactly the opposite direction. This is probably the weakest concern I have with the piece though, especially on reflection.

1. ^{^}

   The edits are still under construction - I'd appreciate everyone's patience while I finish them up.

2. ^{^}

   I'm actually not sure what the right interpretation is

3. ^{^}

   And perhaps the actions they lead to if you buy moral internalism

4. ^{^}

   I think it's likely that Nuño means something very different with this phrasing that I do, but I think the mix of ambiguity/hostility can led these extracts to be read in this way

5. ^{^}

   Not to say that Nuño condones SBF or his actions in any way. I think this is just another case of where someone's choice to get off the 'train to crazy town' can be viewed as another's 'cop-out'.

(Comment is mostly cross-posted comment from Nuño's blog.)

In "Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism", you write:

Third, I feel that EA leadership uses worries about the dangers of maximization to constrain the rank and file in a hypocritical way. If I want to do something cool and risky on my own, I have to beware of the “unilateralist curse” and “build consensus”. But if Open Philanthropy donates $30M to OpenAI, pulls a not-so-well-understood policy advocacy lever that contributed to the US overshooting inflation in 2021, funds Anthropic¹³ while Anthropic’s President and the CEO of Open Philanthropy were married, and romantic relationships are common between Open Philanthropy officers and grantees, that is ¿an exercise in good judgment? ¿a good ex-ante bet? ¿assortative mating? ¿presumably none of my business?

I think the claim that Open Philanthropy is hypocritical re: the unilateralist's curse doesn't quite make sense to me. To explain why, consider the following two scenarios.

Scenario 1: you and 999 other people smart, thoughtful people have a button. You know there's 1000 people with such a button. If anyone presses the button, all mosquitoes will disappear.

Scenario 2: you and you alone have a button. You know that you're the only person with such a button. If you press the button, all mosquitoes will disappear.

The unilateralist's curse applies to Scenario 1 but *not* Scenario 2. That's because, in Scenario 1, your estimate of the counterfactual impact of pressing the button should be your estimate of the expected utility of all mosquitoes disappearing, *conditioned on no one else pressing the button*. In Scenario 2, where no one else has the button, your estimate of the counterfactual impact of pressing the button should be your estimate of the (unconditional) expected utility of all mosquitoes disappearing.

So, at least the way I understand the term, the unilateralist's curse refers to the fact that taking a unilateral action is worse than it naively appears, *if other people also have the option of taking the unilateral action*.

This relates to Open Philanthropy because, at the time of buying the OpenAI board seat, Dustin was one of the only billionaires approaching philanthropy with an EA mindset (maybe the only?). So he was sort of the only one with the "button" of having this option, in the sense of having considered the option and having the money to pay for it. So for him it just made sense to evaluate whether or not this action was net positive in expectation.

Now consider the case of an EA who is considering launching an organization with a potentially large negative downside, where the EA doesn't have some truly special resource or ability. (E.g., AI advocacy with inflammatory tactics -- think DxE for AI.) Many people could have started this organization, but no one did. And so, when deciding whether this org would be net positive, you have to condition on this observation.

I disagree with the EA Forum's approach to life

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Thanks for referring to these blog posts!

I've (so far) read the first post and love it! But when I was working full-time on trying to improve grantmaking in EA (with GiveWiki, aggregating the wisdom of donors), you mostly advised me against it. (And I am actually mostly back to ETG now.) Was that because you weren't convinced by GiveWiki's approach to decentralizing grantmaking or because you saw little hope of it succeeding? Or something else? (I mean, please answer from your current perspective; no need to try to remember last summer.)

FWIW, the "deals and fairness agreement" section of this blogpost by Karnofsky seems to agree about (or at least discuss) trade between different worldviews :

It also raises the possibility that such “agents” might make deals or agreements with each other for the sake of mutual benefit and/or fairness.

Methods for coming up with fairness agreements could end up making use of a number of other ideas that have been proposed for making allocations between different agents and/or different incommensurable goods, such as allocating according to minimax relative concession; allocating in order to maximize variance-normalized value; and allocating in a way that tries to account for (and balance out) the allocations of other philanthropists (for example, if we found two worldviews equally appealing but learned that 99% of the world’s philanthropy was effectively using one of them, this would seem to be an argument – which could have a “fairness agreement” flavor – for allocating resources disproportionately to the more “neglected” view). The “total value at stake” idea mentioned above could also be implemented as a form of fairness agreement. We feel quite unsettled in our current take on how best to practically identify deals and “fairness agreements”; we could imagine putting quite a bit more work and discussion into this question.

Different worldviews are discussed as being incommensurable here (under which maximizing expected choice-worthiness doesn't work). My understanding though is that the (somewhat implicit but more reasonable) assumption being made is that under any given worldview, philanthropy in that worldview's preferred cause area will always win out in utility calculations, which makes sort of deals proposed in "A flaw in a simple version of worldview diversification" not possible/useful. 

My thinking about EAforum over the years has typically been "Jesus, why on earth would they people deliberately set things like that" and then maybe a couple months later, maybe a couple years later, I start to notice a possible explanation, and I'm like "oooooooooooohhhhhh, actually, that might make a lot of sense, I wish I had noticed that immediately".

Large multi-human systems tend to be pretty complicated and counterintuitive, but it becomes way, way more so when most of the people are extremely thoughtful. Plus, the system changes in complicated and unprecedented ways as the world changes around it, or as someone here or there discovered a game-changing detail about the world, meaning that EAforum is entering uncharted territory and tearing down Schelling fences rather frequently.