EA is too reliant on personal connections

sawyer🔸

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Thanks for this post. It fits my experience and reasoning. I suspect that people don't see it as a major problem, yet, because we are still used to think of EA as a "small movement". I suspect this is one of the usual issues in the long-term growth of a movement, either becoming an obstacle for scaling, or threatening the "fidelity" to core principles.

Chi

Many large donors (and donation advisors) do not take general applications. This includes Open Philanthropy (“In general, we expect to identify most giving opportunities via proactive searching and networking”), Longview, REG, CERR, CLR, and the new Longtermism Fund.

Grant manager at CLR here - we take general applications to the CLR Fund and would love to get more of them. Note that our grantmaking is specifically s-risk focused.*

Copy pasting another comment of mine from another post over here:

If you or someone you know are seeking funding to reduce s-risk, please send me a message. If it's for a smaller amount, you can also apply directly to CLR Fund. This is true even if you want funding for a very different type of project than what we've funded in the past.
I work for CLR on s-risk community building and on our CLR Fund, which mostly does small-scale grantmaking, but I might also be able to make large-scale funding for s-risk projects ~in the tens of $ millions (per project) happen. And if you have something more ambitious than that, I'm also always keen to hear it :)

*We also fund things that aren't specifically targeted towards s-risk reduction but still seem beneficial to s-risk reduction. Some of our grants this year that we haven't published yet are such grants. That said, we are often not in the best position to evaluate applications that aren't focused on s-risk even if they would have some s-risk-reducing side effects, especially when these side effects are not clearly spelled out in the application.

sawyer🔸

Thanks Chi, this was definitely a mistake on my part and I will edit the post. I do think that your website's "Get Involved" -> "CLR Fund" might not be the clearest path for people looking for funding, but I also think I should have spent more time looking.

Davidmanheim

The fact that EA is more legible than other philanthropy makes this non-obvious, but I think that EA is less reliant on personal connections or inside connections with powerful people than most other major philanthropy or class of philanthropy. Academic funders are similar, but in place of personal connections they are about scholarly qualifications mostly at elite institutions, and the implicit or explicit training in how to apply to those grants and the ways to appeal to the individuals who evaluate them - which is a different but also problematic failure mode.

In contrast, there is much more openness to non-insiders to build connections, much more openness to feedback, etc. In fact, posting useful and important things to the EA forum is often enough to get attention and potentially get funding. But I agree that people used to other types of credentialing probably sees this as much more exclusionary, albeit mostly based on lack of looking at the community before applying for funds.

Of course, this is based on my personal experience with other philanthropies and funders, and may not generalize. I would be interested in hearing from others who have gotten grants from other foundations about whether they are more or less closed to outsiders, and/or whether the qualifications are more or less difficult to know without inside information and connections to others.

sawyer🔸

Great points, thanks David. I especially like the compare and contrast between personal connections and academic credentials. I think probably you're more experienced with academia and non-EA philanthropy than I am, so your empirical views are different. But I also think that even if EA is better than these other communities, we should still be thinking about (1) keeping it that way, and (2) maybe getting even less reliant. This is part of what I was saying with:

None of this is unique to EA. While I think EA is particularly guilty of some of these issues, in general I could aim this criticism in any direction and hit someone guilty of it. But “everyone else does it” is not in and of itself a reason to accept it. We claim to be doing something really difficult and important, so we should try to be as good as possible.

I think your observations may be counterevidence to anyone saying that EA should become more reliant on personal connections. Since you think (possibly correctly) that other major philanthropy is more reliant on personal connections than EA is, and I assume we agree that EA philanthropy is better than most other major philanthropy.

Chris Leong

I like some of the ideas:

Cohosting events with other movements
Seeding groups in more countries
Projects to bring in skills that EA currently lacks (ie. EA Communications Fellowship, writer's retreat, ect.)

On the other hand:

I think that the author undervalues value alignment and how the natural state is towards one of regression to the norm unless specific action is taken to avoid this
I agree that as EA scales, we will be less able to rely personal relationships, but I see no reason to impose those costs now
I agree that it may affect our reputation in the outside world, but I don't think it's worth increasing the risk of bad hires to attempt to satisfy our critics.

I'm worried about tensions EA being both a social and professional community entails, but I don't have a good solution to this and maybe the status quo is the least bad option?

sawyer🔸

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback Chris!

I think that the author undervalues value alignment and how the natural state is towards one of regression to the norm unless specific action is taken to avoid this

I think there is difference between "value alignment" and "personal connection". I agree that the former is important, and I think the latter is often used (mostly successfully) as a tool to encourage the former. I addressed one aspect of this in the Hiring Managers section.

I agree that as EA scales, we will be less able to rely personal relationships, but I see no reason to impose those costs now

Fair, but I worry that if we're not prepared for this then the costs will be greater, more sudden, and confusing, e.g. people starting to feel that EA is no longer fun or good and not knowing why. I think it's good to be thinking about these things and make the tactical choice to do nothing, rather than leaving "overreliance on personal connections can be bad" out of our strategic arsenal completely.

I agree that it may affect our reputation in the outside world, but I don't think it's worth increasing the risk of bad hires to attempt to satisfy our critics.

I don't think my suggestions for hiring managers would increase the risk of bad hires. In fact, I think moving away from "my friend is friends with this person" and towards "this person demonstrates that they care deeply about this mission" would decrease the risk of bad hires. (Sorry if this doesn't make sense, but I don't want to go on for too long in a comment.)

Guy Raveh

moving away from "my friend is friends with this person"

I hadn't thought of your post in these explicit terms till now, but now that you write it like that I remember that indeed I've already applied to a program which explicitly asked for a reference the head organizer knows personally.

I was rejected from that program twice, though I obviously can't know if the reason was related, and I may still apply in the future.

sawyer🔸

Explicitly asking for a reference the head organizer knows personally.

That feels pretty bad to me! I can imagine some reason that this would be necessary for some programs, but in general requiring this doesn't seem healthy.

I find the request for references on the EA Funds' application to be a good middle-ground. There's several sentences to it, but the most relevant one is:

References by people who are directly involved in effective altruism and adjacent communities are particularly useful, especially if we are likely to be familiar with their work and thinking.

It's clearly useful to already be in the fund managers' network, but it's also clearly not required. Of course there's always a difference between the policy and the practice, but this is a pretty good public policy from my perspective.

Guy Raveh

I should probably be more precise and say the phrasing was something like "preferably someone who [organizer] knows".

But since this is presented as the better option, I don't think I see much difference between the two, as you'd expect the actual filtering process to favour exactly those people in the organiser's network.

Chris Leong

I think there is difference between "value alignment" and "personal connection"

Agreed. I was responding to:

Hiring managers should post jobs in more places, and be less dismissive of “non-EA” applicants

Although we might be more on the same page than I was thinking as you write:

I’m not saying that we should stop caring about whether candidates and employees understand and care about their organization’s mission. The mistake is assuming that the only people who understand and believe in my organization’s mission are members of the effective altruism community

I guess my position is that there may be some people who don't identify with EA who would be really valuable; but it's also the case that being EA is valuable beyond just caring about the mission in that EAs are likely to have a lot of useful frames.

Fair, but I worry that if we're not prepared for this then the costs will be greater, more sudden, and confusing

I'd be surprised if it changed that fast. Like even if a bunch of additional people joined the community, you'd still know the people that you know.

sawyer🔸

I think the extent to which "member of the EA community" comes along with a certain way of thinking (i.e. "a lot of useful frames") is exaggerated by many people I've heard talk about this sort of thing. I think ~50% of the perceived similarity is better described as similar ways of speaking and knowledge of jargon. I think that there actually not that many people who have fully internalized new ways of thinking that are 1.) very rare outside of EA, and 2.) shared across most EA hiring managers.

Another way to put this would be: I think EA hiring managers often weight "membership in the EA community" significantly more highly than it should be weighted. I think our disagreement is mostly about how much this factor should be weighted.

Fair point on the fast changing thing. I have some thoughts, but they're not very clear and I think what you said is reasonable. One very rough take: Yes you'd still the people you know, but you might go from, "I know 50% of the people in AI alignment" to "I know 10% of the people in AI Alignment" in 3 months, which could be disorienting and demoralizing. So it's more of a relative thing than the absolute number of people you know.

Jeffrey Kursonis

As an outsider slowly trying to scratch my way in…and as a person who was a founder and tight buddy of other founders of a former movement I was in, it is challenging and this post is encouraging. We had this same problem in my previous movement, it’s a normal thing, and it’s just one of those things you have to become aware of and work to overcome by, for example, asking you the author to write a follow-up post on some practical solutions after you’ve had some time to discuss this post with people and get some group-think wisdom going.

One obvious issue is simply that in the search for great new ideas it’s not likely that a small insular group is going to generate enough of them…outside thinking, foreign thinking has to stream in or you get stale and die. Think still water with no flow.

Anytime you can make outsiders feel heard and understood and hopeful of getting in you are doing something of great value. Thank you.

Ramiro

Good point. This made me think that a way to mitigate this problem (instead of trying to "solve" it) is by acknowledging the importance of being open to new acquaintances and of people who serve as "nodes" or "bridges" for different social networks.

Jeffrey Kursonis

Yes and I can say from experience that trying to “fix it” can lead to other problems, for example throwing out the old and forcing in the new…the original organic relationships are very valuable and can’t be artificially replicated…but it’s simply opening up more and that may require infrastructure modifications that add but don’t subtract.

sawyer🔸

Great point about mitigating as opposed to solving. It's possible that my having a "solutions" section wasn't the best framing. I definitely don't think personal connections should be vilified or gotten rid of entirely (if that were even possible), and going too far in this direction would be really bad.

Nathan Young

Broadly, I agree. I think that social connections bringing benefit is a deeply human trait, but I think we can do better.

My suggestions:

Acknowledge the situation. Yes, we are a community that works a lot on interpersonal networks and we lose information and talent from people who don’t have access to those. We gain the ability to move quickly often without grifters. What are the costs and benefits in lives saved?
Relentlessly build systems that scale. Personal connections are much higher fidelity than submission forms, people you vibe with are usually better employees than random people. But at scale these heuristics break down - there are ideas you’ll miss without submission forms and better candidates who you won’t vibe with. I am attempting to build systems in forecasting question generation and prize generation that don’t require people to know someone to get something done. Superlinear is the org that gets this best in my opinion

Stefan_Schubert

Thanks, I thought this was a thoughtful post. I largely agree with the empirical analysis - that EA relies a lot on personal connections. Normatively, I'm a bit more positive to the current approach, though. For instance, I think it can make it easier to make fast, low-cost decisions. It can also help you find good projects.

sawyer🔸

Thanks Stefan! I agree with those strengths of personal connections, and I think there are many others. I mainly tried to argue that there are negative consequences as well, and that the negatives might outweigh the positives at some level of use. Did any of the problems I mentioned in the post strike you as wrong? (Either you think they don't tend to arise from reliance on personal connections, or you think they're not important problems even if they do arise?)

Pablo

Something that didn't strike me as wrong, but as something worth reflecting more on, is your analysis of the tension between reliance on personal connections and high rates of movement growth. You take this to be a reason for relying on personal connections less, but one may argue it is a reason for growing more slowly.

Another point bearing in mind is that your (correct) observation that many EA orgs do not take general applications may itself be (limited) evidence against your thesis. For example, the Future Fund has made a special effort to test a variety of funding models, and so far they have found that their regranting program (which relies on personal connections) has delivered significantly better results than the open call applications. As the FF team writes,

We thought that maybe there was a range of people who aren't on our radar yet (e.g., tech founder types who have read The Precipice) who would be interested in launching projects in our areas of interest if we had accessible explanations of what we were hoping for, distributed the call widely, and made the funding process easy. But we didn’t really get much of that. Instead, most of the applications we were interested in came from people who were already working in our areas of interest and/or from the effective altruism community. So this part of the experiment performed below our expectations.

Of course, this is by no means decisive evidence, but it lends some support to the hypothesis that EA may be relying significantly on personal connections not because it has neglected alternative models, but because it has tested them and found them wanting.

sawyer🔸

tension between reliance on personal connections and high rates of movement growth. You take this to be a reason for relying on personal connections less, but one may argue it is a reason for growing more slowly.

I completely agree! I think probably some combination is best, and/or it could differ between subcommunities.

Also thanks for pointing out the FTX Future Fund's experience, I'd forgotten about that. I completely agree that this is evidence against my hypothesis, specifically in the case of grantee-grantor relationships.

Vasco Grilo🔸

The 80,000 Hours job board does not take applications, saying, “Due to resource constraints, we are currently unable to process unsolicited requests to list vacancies on this board.”

I think this is no longer true. From here:

We only list roles that we think are among the best opportunities according to our listing criteria. However, we realise that there will be some great opportunities out there that we are not aware of.
If there is a role you think we should be listing on the job board, please send the link (and supporting information if needed) to [email protected], and we will consider it for listing.

Nathan Young

Though this is a costly process and I guess 99% of people who would otherwise submit jobs don’t. Look at the jobs on @effective_jobs that aren’t on the 80k jobs board. Often many are from top tier organisations.

80k is revamping their jobs board, so we’ll see in 6 months. Currently I think the criticism largely stands.

sawyer🔸

Good catch, thanks! I can't find my original quote, so I think this was a recent change. I will edit my post accordingly.

Sharmake

This should become an EA priority over the next decade, because the old model where personal networks that allows us to become efficient don't work above Dunbar's number.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]

Zachary Brown🔸

I don't think this is true. Dunbar's number is a limit on the number of social relationships an individual can cognitively sustain. But the sorts of networks needed to facilitate productive work are different than those needed to sustain fulfilling social relations. If there is a norm that people are willing to productively collaborate with the unknown contact of a known contact, then surely you can sustain a productive community with approx Dunbar's number ^2 people (if each member of my Dunbar-sized community has their own equivalently-sized community with no shared members).

Stefan_Schubert

Dunbar's number has received scholarly criticism.

A widespread and popular belief posits that humans possess a cognitive capacity that is limited to keeping track of and maintaining stable relationships with approximately 150 people. This influential number, ‘Dunbar's number’, originates from an extrapolation of a regression line describing the relationship between relative neocortex size and group size in primates. Here, we test if there is statistical support for this idea. Our analyses on complementary datasets using different methods yield wildly different numbers. Bayesian and generalized least-squares phylogenetic methods generate approximations of average group sizes between 69–109 and 16–42, respectively. However, enormous 95% confidence intervals (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) imply that specifying any one number is futile. A cognitive limit on human group size cannot be derived in this manner.

Comments

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Per Chi's comment, CLR takes general applications to the CLR Fund and would love to get more of them! This was a mistake on my part.

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And I think that claiming these are identical is close to claiming that everything EAs do is more effective than anything non-EAs do, which I think is very wrong.

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Keeping in mind the excellent points from Let's not have a separate "community building" camp

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This is important for other reasons too.

EA is too reliant on personal connections

Evidence that EA is very reliant on personal connections

Why is overreliance on personal connections a problem?

Solutions

Summary, confidence levels, and conclusion