All of Aleks_K's Comments + Replies

You might be interested in looking into the work ControlAI is doing in the UK. They'd probably disagree with your point that the message is "not getting through", given they claim that 100+ Parliamentarians support their campaign. There also have been various debates in parliament, in particular in the Lords in AI safety, where lots of people spoke in support (e.g. this one)

Forethought are not a UK charity, they are a UK-based non-profit company (according to the footer of their website). But I agree that flagging that donations from the UK are not gift-aid eligible/tax deductible (and that US donations are) would be good as it might be surprising to many people.

Maybe I'm just unable to find this information, but it seems the website doesn't give any information on what and who Antrhopoda actually is: No information on what kind of legal entity they are if any, no information on who works there or who is responsible for making grants. This wouldn't make me comfortable at all to make donation.

Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!

A few comments:

• I think many organisations do use their network and things like the HIP database to find candidates. People are still often hired directly without public hiring rounds, and semi-private hiring rounds (reaching out directly to people identified in these ways and only inviting those to apply) are also quite common, but still can be very elaborate (significant lower number of applicants so lower effort for the hiring organisation, but still a similar effort for applicants.

I don't really understand the question here: If an organisation contracts someone to do work for them, they usually agree on a specific amount, either a fixed price or an hourly/daily rate. What are the specifics of your scenario here? Should the amount be conditional on how much funding the organisation receives for that specific work? That seems a quite strange approach to me. Or are you expecting that the contractor commits to doing the work but might not get paid if a grant application is unsuccessful? I don't really think anyone would or should agree to that. The right approach should be to wait with actually hiring the contractor until the organisation has the money to pay for them.

I'm not sure whether it's good or not, but the main reason that it should be allowed is that it is impossible to detect. How will you know what someone's real preferences are?

I don't think you can post 'anonymously' in the sense that there is no account related to your post, you'll always have to create an account, but you can of course use a one-off username and even email address if you want to. However, you can delete your account and then apparently all 'your' posts appear as "[anonymous]" whether you intended this or not. (And in this case, it seems the original poster just created this post with their usual, non-anonymous account, but then deleted their account.)

Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it's fine to take the donation.

While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn't really $20mn expenditure as they'll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).

In the UK, doing this would probably be counted as 'trading' and be subject to corporation tax, there is a common workaround, though, by creating a trading subsidiary that donates to the charity (allowing them to reduce their corporate tax burden). This setup might or might not be suitable for this specific occasion, and there are of course additional efforts involved in creating such a setup that might or might not be worth it.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the main conclusion of this is: You can run an event much cheaper of you find an organisation that has a good event space and collaborates with you, so they charge the 'internal' rather than the commercial rate.

Is this just a guess or do you have information on the actual costs of the event? (Just from their website, they seem to have various sponsors who are likely covering a substantial amount of the costs, and yes, their venue costs might be very low (or even close to zero) because Harvard/MIT are likely not charging them commercial rates, but that doesn't give any info of the actual costs and why they would be lower than EAG costs.)

These academic conferences likely take place at universities which likely won't have any minimum spend requirements (at least for internal events).

Sure, I'm not objecting to policing language in general (there are certainly types of language that are inappropriate) or you making a specific suggestion of (gentle) language policying. (I just disagree with your specific suggestion on this - and I assume others do as well - and my point is that connecting it with you other suggestion - that I think more people will agree with - is suboptimal.)

This post somehow connects two  things for (in my opinion) no good reason:

• Trying to get people to actually bet (which I think is probably a good thing)
• Trying to police people's language by asking them to not use 'I bet' in a non-literal sense (which I think is a bad thing)

I don't really understand why you think the latter is necessary to achieve the former.

As an affiliate, though, not as an employee. (And they seem to have lots of affiliates, so not clear what this actually means.)

While this is a data point that shows that in principle it's currently possible to currently work with the University, GPI has quite a different strategy compared to FHI that aligns significantly more with traditional academia, so it doesn't necessarily prove that it would be currently possible for FHI. 

However, I think a stronger existence proof for it being possible to work with the University is that FHI managed to do that in some way reasonably for at least 10+ years. (They were established in 2005) - for comparison, GPI is only 5 years old. 

Thanks for pointing out the FHI/GPI mistake, I've corrected that.

I also thought Drexler was still at FHI, but I checked and this doesn't seem to be the case: He's not mentioned  on the team page and his website at FHI has been taken down.

It seems that your comment is mainly about successes  by Bostrom in the (medium to more distant) past, while the post is about experience in the more recent past and expectations for the future. I would say that the expectations for the future are what is relevant to evaluate whether it's a good thing or not for Bostrom to step down as Director (?)

Just mentioning some examples:

Bostrom has succeeded at this, and the group of people (especially the early FHI cast including Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Andrew Snyder Beattie, Owain Evans, and Stuart Arm

If someone attends the event as a journalist, why not have their lanyard show that they are a journalist? This seems like it's a very easy thing to do and something like this is probably pretty standard at large events that are not fully public(?) This would probably solve some of the issues, as people know who they are talking to (and eg organisers of private afterparties could just not let journalists in if they don't want them at their party).

Thanks for writing this post. I strongly agree with the need for more concrete proposals for reform rather than the more broad and more wide ranging (and more controversial) ones raised at other places.

That being said, I'm slightly confused what your proposal here is. It feels like mainly it's "let's think about more concrete proposals?". This feels to me a little bit like the famous "this is an important problems and these are good idea, let's create a committee to think about it ..." approach.

Might be worth noting that OpenPhil is kind of split up in this way already and has two equal co-CEOs for the two areas.

(And I think this at least partially contradicts your point "Longtermists control the flow of money" as the main funding org in EA is split between longtermist and non-longtermist funding with neither of the parts controlling the other.)

I disagree with the concern: In the proposed solution, we are not going to zero community posts, they are just at a different tab or place at the frontpage but clearly accessible. I would actually be in favour of this change even without any of the concerns regarding 'negativity' from community post, it's a minor change to make the forum better readable!

Because I do want to read community posts sometimes and sometimes I might want to read other posts and having two taps that I can choose from depending on which type of post I want to read is a great way to do that.

What route the money takes (not in each individual case and in detail but in the high level) is clearly a question senior leadership should know and sign off, in particular in an organisation as small (in terms of number of staff) as the FTX Foundation. (I don't even know if they had any ops  staff, there is no-one listed here.)

A UK charity can put rules in their governing documents on how to remove trustees. I don't think EVFs governing documents are public, so we probably don't know. 

Recusing themselves from FTX decision-making is significantly weaker than being on leave of absence. The latter implies that they are still part of decision-making for non-FTX related issues which I assume exist. (And technically recusing from decision-making also doesn't mean recusing from discussion, so they could have still been involved in discussions regarding FTX, though I'd assume that they also recused themselves from that). I think it's a significant difference.

I think there are various reasons for not having such a list public:

• It will (literally) create a first tier, second tier, etc of organisations in the effective altruism community, which feels bad/confusing.
• People will associate the organisation the grant is given to with the tier, while it was actually that specific grant that was evaluated.
• The information that are provided publicly for a given grant are likely only a small subset of the information that was used to decide the tier, but people just looking through the list won't know or acknowledge that, l

I think it is also worth checking what the reason was why the inquiries where opened and how this correlates with the outcomes. I only looked at a few but lots of them starts with quite obvious wrongdoings or mistakes by the trustees already and these are of course much more likely to end negatively.

"Multinational" corporations are usually not actually multinational in the sense of having independent entities in different countries, they generally have one main entity (with one CEO) based  in one country that owns various subentities in other countries (the details of this are often of course quite complicated). This is different for EVF which has two independent entities. 

Another possible reason: He (and EA and longtermism) are not actually that interesting for most people.

I think this could have been avoided if more EA orgs, including FHI, had some kind of PR function instead of leaving all the heavy lifting to CEA. I've said as much here.

Bostrom works for Oxford University who have a PR department. From his statement is seems unlikely to me, though that he asked them (or any other PR experts) for advice.

I think the main issue with this is that this creates some kind of official 'membership' of EA which comes with tonnes of issues. (How do you decide who gets in? Who decides and how that/if people get thrown out? (Would SBF still in this?) Is there a transparent process for this? What kind of obligations do people part of it have (in terms of keeping conversations private for example)? Can you leave voluntarily and are there any repercussions if you do?, ...)

3. can be answered from publicly available information: It's not the latest version. On https://ftx.tghp.co.uk/our-grants/ it says "last updated June 2022", while the latest version of the actual website states to have been updated in September (and also has a higher overall grant amount).

When the building (it's not a castle) was bought (in early 2021), the name of the organisation that bought it was CEA. The change at some point after that to Effective Ventures. It's unclear how much governance-wise a separate 'umbrella CEA' existed to a 'core CEA' at the point of the purchase, but even now, CEA does not seem to have a board separate from Effective Ventures, and it's ultimately the same people that hare fully responsible and it's legally the same organisation that people donated to (unclear what kind of restrictions could put on their dona... (read more)

I'd also guess that this is the case, but it helps create the confusion that CEA is involved.

This might be because  Owen is (at least according to CEA's website) part of CEA's 'team' as a strategic advisor and trustee of CEA UK. It's not obvious (at least not obvious enough to avoid confusion) in which capacity Owen is speaking here and assuming that's in relation to one of his roles at CEA is not that farfetched (even if it might not be correct).

Also, CEA is not distinct from EV, they are a project/brand of EV, but legally fully part of it. (There is no such thing as a 'fiscal sponsor' in UK law.)  It's unclear to me how much CEA have their own governance structure.

Most of the costs of running conferences don't come from the cost of the (pure real estate) costs of the property. (You'd still incur lots of the $2,000 if you run an event at Wytham Abbey, the only bits that you aren't paying for are the pure capital costs for the property, part of the profit margin and costs for times the venue is otherwise empty.)

What I'm wondering is why the benifactor gave the money for the building to EV rather than buying the building themselves and just allow EV to use it for free. This would likely have avoided all the optics issues and I guess would have had some other advantages.

Your analasis ignores that the prices you quote contain a lot more than the pure real estate costs, but also running costs, that Wytham Abbey of course would also have to incure, such as:

• Mainenance, renovations, etc (this can be quite a lot for an old and listed building)
• Utilities, etc. (Again, this is a large old space not built to modern standards and this is probably quite high)
• Costs for IT equipment that needs to be regularly replaced, furniture that needs to be replace ocasionally, any kind of office supplies etc provided
• Council tax
• Costs for cle

Seems quite implausible to me that this would have happened and unclear if it would have been good. (Assuming "larger EA community" implies more than private conversations between a few people. )

Are you talking about the board of the FTX Future Fund or about the team working there? Because the board solely consisted of FTX/Almeda people. 

The EA community as a whole doesn't have any rights as it's not a legal person.  Grant receivers don't have legal rights to get any information on grant providers, but it is common to do some kind of due diligence, the only thing they can do is not accept grants if they don't get information (and this happens sometimes). The same is true for investors in private companies, by the way, there is no obligation to provide information, but they of course they just won't invest if they don't get the information they need.

If you are talking about moral rights instead of legal rights this is of course a very different thing and highly debatable.

Thanks for this take. This is one of the best takes on the issue I've read on here. I particularly agree with the point that 'investing' into FTX has significantly more risk for the EA community than for the institutional investors that did invest. One small thing to add on this point is that - while there were a group of investors that did invest in FTX - there were likely also various potential investors that decided not to invest after some due diligence, we just don't know of them.

Okay, I think that's fair. I would have preferred, though, if they would have been more transparent about this to the people the FTX Foundation had been supporting.

The assets of the Good Ventures Foundation (who Open Phil is recommending their grants to) are a matter of public record (albeit delayed). They had more than $3bn in June 2020.

I mean the short answer to this is very simple: Because the people funding the foundation didn't want to (or couldn't) put their money into the foundation.

The more interesting question is why the FTX Foundation team were happy with this setup. It would be interesting to hear from them on this.