All of barkbellowroar's Comments + Replies

It sounds like the Future of Humanity Institute may be permanently shut down. 

Background: FHI went on a hiring freeze/pause back in 2021 with the majority of staff leaving (many left with the spin-off of the Centre for the Governance of AI) and moved to other EA organizations. Since then there has been no public communication regarding its future return, until now... 

The Director, Nick Bostrom, updated the bio section on his website with the following commentary [bolding mine]: 

"...Those were heady years. FHI was a unique place - extremely i

... (read more)
4
BrownHairedEevee
11d
Further evidence: The 80,000 Hours website footer no longer mentions FHI. Until February 2023, the footer contained the following statement: By February 21, that statement was replaced with a paragraph simply stating that 80k is part of EV. The references to GPI, CEA and GWWC were also removed:
2
BrownHairedEevee
1mo
Yeah, it looks like the FHI website's news section hasn't been updated since 2021. Nor are there any publications since 2021.

On a related note to my other comment on this post: 

A lot of organizations are acknowledging the impact of FTX on their work which is important but I would also like to see an EA organization try to evaluate the positive or negative impact switching to longtermism has had on their ability to attract talent, donors etc.

You say you want to diversify assets but Open Phil still holds a commanding 80% of your bottom line - and both orgs have become much more longtermist in recent years. If OP is going to just prop up 80k for the next several years because ... (read more)

a new career service org that caters to the other cause priorities of EA? 

I'm guessing you are familiar with Probably Good?  They are doing almost exactly the thing that you describe here.  They are also accepting donations, and if you want to support them you can do so here.  

Thanks for engaging with this post!   A few thoughts prompted by your comment in case they are helpful:

  • 80k has been interested in longtermism-related causes for many years, including many years in which we’ve seen a lot of growth.  We were interested in longtermism for several years before we received our first grant from Open Philanthropy.  
  • We believe there’s still a lot of need for talent in the problems areas that we focus on, so we don’t think there’s a strong reason for us to shift our focus on that front — at least for t
... (read more)

Equally curious about the push to grow the team if not seeing significant increase in impact, especially given the $2M marketing push this past year.

In 80K’s 2021-2022 Review it mentioned: 

(1) “we seem to be hitting diminishing returns in outreach encouraging more people to apply to advising...” (page 7 under current challenges)

and again 

(2) “overall, we’d guess that 80,000 Hours continued to see diminishing returns to its impact per staff member per year.” (on page 10 under impact evaluation)

What is the strategy/argument for “expand the team” be... (read more)

Thanks for the question. To be clear, we do think growing the team will significantly increase our impact in expectation. 

  • We do see diminishing returns on several areas of investment, but having diminishing returns is consistent with significantly increasing impact.
  • Not all of our impact is captured in these metrics. For example, if we were to hire to increase the quality of our written advice even while maintaining the same number of website engagement hours, we’d expect our impact to increase (though this is of course hard to measure).
  • In our view, in
... (read more)

The Effective Ventures Foundation UK’s Full Accounts for Fiscal Year 2022 has been released via the UK companies house filings (August 30 2023 entry - it won't let me direct link the PDF). 

  • Important to note that as of June 2022 “EV UK is no longer the sole member of EV US and now operate as separate organizations but coordinate per an affiliation agreement (p11).” 
  • It’s noted that Open Philanthropy was, for the 2021/2022 fiscal year, the primary funder for the organization (p8). 
  • EVF (UK&US) had consolidated income of just over £138 millio
... (read more)
3
Jason
4mo
I'm not an accountant, but some of the jump between FY 2021 and FY 2022 may have to do with how EVF US was treated in certain respects? On grantmaking, it appears that almost all of those grants came out of restricted funds (p. 30 / 32nd page of PDF). The reported staff compensation (p. 36 / 38th page of PDF) does suggest the existence of many more staff salaries in the higher reporting bands in 2022 than 2021. However, could EVF US being a subsidiary of EVF UK for the 2022 reports impact this? I skimmed the 990 -- also for FY 2022, which ended in June 2022 -- less carefully, but there is more granularity on some smaller grants if you want it on pp. 33-59. There are also specific salaries for trustees and the five highest paid employees (p. 7). About $8MM in 211 crypto contributions (p. 63) -- a figure that suggests some degree of reliance on donations from the crypto industry (don't know if these are FTX-related or not).

Wytham Abbey soft-launched earlier this year with it's own team, but has now formally been added to EV's list of projects and is accepting workshop applications https://www.wythamabbey.org

Atlas Fellowship has announced it's shutting down its program - see full letter on their site: https://www.atlasfellowship.org  Reasons listed for the decision are 1) funding landscape has changed 2) the programs were less impactful than expected and 3) some staff think they'll have more impact pursuing careers in AI safety. 

I think that's referring to something else (see the comment above his response). I completely understand the reasons for not releasing all submitted proposals to the public. 

I'm  asking for the final results of the round - simply, which projects were funded? This doesn't seem unreasonable to ask, as most foundations usually do release some information about who and what they fund. Also FTX feels like it's modeled a bit on YCombinator and they definitely release a list of startups funded each cycle. It's good for transparency, but even more so for helping future applicants get a sense of what a particular funding body wants to invest in. 

4
aogara
2y
Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures fast grants program also releases the funded project with a short summary of their work. Seems like a very good idea, though maybe not the highest priority for the FTX team right now.

 (short answer) more security, more features and the consolidation of a lot of existing but disconnected infrastructure tools... which could strengthen movement coordination, increase collaboration and calibration and sustain longterm engagement with the community. 

Just like you can't catch rain with a sieve, you can miss a lot of value with a fragmented ecosystem.

(longer answer

An intranet would subsume under one platform a lot of current tools like... event sign-ons, the forum, EA hub's directory, facebook groups, job/internship boards, t... (read more)

3
Chris Leong
2y
If you write a post on this I would read it. Two minor comments: * It's possible to create a central hub platform without making it an intranet * I'm skeptical of the security benefits given how open EA is (vs. a normal company)

Build an intranet for the effective altruism community 

Effective Altruism, Empowering Exceptional People

If effective altruism is going to be "the last social movement the world needs" it will need to operate differently from past movements in order to last longer and reach more people. Given that coordination is a crucial element for success within a distributed global network, a movement intranet could improve coordination on projects, funding and research and build a greater sense of community. An intranet would also help the movement (1) consolidat... (read more)

4
Chris Leong
2y
What's the advantage of an intranet vs. a website with registration?

Build an Infrastructure Organization for The EA Movement (TEAM) 

Effective Altruism, Empowering Exceptional People

Many high impact organizations in effective altruism have expressed issues with sourcing operations talent which takes time away from the key programs these charities provide, reducing overall impact. An infrastructure organization could provide operational support and build valuable tools that would alleviate the burden from these meta charities and streamline processes across organizations to improve movement coordination. This organizati... (read more)

Reframe U.S. college EA chapters as an alternative to Greek life

Values and Reflective Processes, Empowering Exceptional People, Effective Altruism

Following the model of Alpha Phi Omega, the largest coed service fraternity in the U.S. with ~335 chapters and 400,000 alumni, reframing EA chapters as social organizations may help with recruitment and retention. It could also encourage a broader range of activities for chapters to run throughout the year including things like hosting workshops for other students on how to think about careers, hosting film scree... (read more)

Publish an EA-inspired magazine like Time Magazine's "Time for Kids" (TFK)

Empowering Exceptional People, Values and Reflective Processes,  Effective Altruism

Time for Kids has almost 2 million subscribers and has been used by educators for over 25 years to introduce elementary students to issues in science, history and civic engagement, while empowering students to take action and have a positive impact on the world. An EA-oriented magazine could do something similar by introducing students to topics like current pressing issues, relevant career pathwa... (read more)

One thing that jumped out at me as I read your post is the several references you make to the EA movement’s engagement with past critics - and by “EA movement” I mean William MacAskill - which to me reads as an underlying issue, and possibly the explanation for the point you appear to be making, in that the movement no longer responds to critics. 

One of my favorite modern aphorisms (which, regrettably, I can’t recall who I heard it from) is, “I hate Lord of the Rings…. but it’s still a billion dollar franchise.” The point being that every idea (be it ... (read more)

MacAskill was definitely a major voice in the beginning of the movement, as expected, given his help founding it and his book Doing Good Better - but all movements (much like startups) must face that first “crisis” of being able to support itself without needing the founder’s daily involvement in putting out small fires, or in this case, engaging with every new (or old) criticism that comes in.

Originally it was Toby handling all the media attention etc. - transferring this onto Will, because Toby didn't want to do it any more, was a deliberate strategy. Th... (read more)

1
NicholasKross
2y
The LOTR analogy was intriguing to me, thank you!

I agree with Linch, it was difficult to follow your train of thought… but I still found it worth reading to the end. 

It feels like you (the OP) had three distinct streams of thought intertwined; (a) the parts about Glen Weyl, (b) the general point that movements tend to stop engaging with critics, and then (c) using EA as your example for (b). This piece may have flowed better if you just cut out the parts about Glen Weyl -I for one had no idea who this was because I don’t engage on those other forums you mentioned. It doesn’t add much to your main point or reflections on the EA movement, and feels like a bit of a distraction from them. (this is just meant as friendly feedback, take it or leave it).