All of Ben Kuhn's Comments + Replies

Don't forget Zenefits!

In 2016 an internal legal investigation at Zenefits found the company's licensing was out of compliance and that Conrad had created a browser extension to skirt training requirements for selling insurance in California.^[15] After self-reporting these issues, Zenefits hired an independent third party to do an internal audit of its licensing controls and sent the report to all 50 states.^[16] The California Department of Insurance as well as the Massachusetts Division of Insurance began investigations of their own based on Zenefits' repo

Why do you think people think it's unimportant (rather than, e.g., important but very difficult to achieve due to the age skew issue mentioned in the post)?

I agree that it's downstream of this, but strongly agree with ideopunk that mission alignment is a reasonable requirement to have.* A (perhaps the) major cause of organizations becoming dysfunctional as they grow is that people within the organization act in ways that are good for them, but bad for the organization overall—for example, fudging numbers to make themselves look more successful, ask for more headcount when they don't really need it, doing things that are short-term good but long-term bad (with the assumption that they'll have moved on before t... (read more)

Whoops! Fixed, it was just supposed to point to the same advice-offer post as the first paragraph, to add context :)

In addition to having a lot more on the line, other reasons to expect better of ourselves:

• EA had (at least potential) access to a lot of information that investors may not have, in particular about Alameda's early exodus in 2018.
• EA had much more time to investigate and vet SBF—there's typically a very large premium for investors to move fast during fundraising, to minimize distraction for the CEO/team.

Because of the second point, many professional investors do surprisingly little vetting. For example, SoftBank is pretty widely reputed to be "dumb money;" I... (read more)

Definitely! In this case I appear to have your email so reached out that way, but for anyone else who's reading this comment thread, Forum messages or the email address in the post both work as ways to get in touch!

In the "a case for hope" section, it looks like your example analysis assumes that the "AGI timeline" and "AI safety timeline" are independent random variables, since your equation describes sampling from them independently. Isn't that really unlikely to be true?

Can someone clarify whether I'm interpreting this paragraph correctly?

Effective Ventures (EV) is a federation of organisations and projects working to have a large positive impact in the world. EV was previously known as the Centre for Effective Altruism but the board decided to change the name to avoid confusion with the organisation within EV that goes by the same name.

I think what this means is that the CEA board is drawing a distinction between the CEA legal entity / umbrella organization (which is becoming EV) and the public-facing CEA brand (whi... (read more)

Sorry that was confusing! I was attempting to distinguish:

1. Direct epistemic problems: money causes well-intentioned people to have motivated cognition etc. (the downside flagged by the "optics and epistemics" post)
2. Indirect epistemic problems as a result of the system's info processing being blocked by not-well-intentioned people

I will try to think of a better title!

Since someone just commented privately to me with this confusion, I will state for the record that this commenter seems likely to be impersonating Matt Yglesias, who already has an EA Forum account with the username "Matthew Yglesias." (EDIT: apparently it actually is the same Matt with a different account!)

(Object-level response: I endorse Larks' reply.)

Please note that the Twitter thread linked in the first paragraph starts with a highly factually inaccurate claim. In reality, at EAGxBoston this year there were five talks on global health, six on animal welfare, and four talks and one panel on AI (alignment plus policy). Methodology: I collected these numbers by filtering the official conference app agenda by topic and event type.

I think it's unfortunate that the original tweet got a lot of retweets / quote-tweets and Jeff hasn't made a correction. (There is a reply saying "I should add, friend is not 10... (read more)

This must be somewhat true but FWIW, I think it's probably less true than most outsiders would expect—I don't spend very much personal time on in-country stuff (because I have coworkers who are local to those countries who will do a much better job than I could) and so end up having pretty limited (and random/biased) context on what's going on!

IIRC a lot of people liked this post at the time, but I don't think the critiques stood up well. Looking back 7 years later, I think the critique that Jacob Steinhardt wrote in response (which is not on the EA forum for some reason?) did a much better job of identifying more real and persistent problems:

• Over-focus on “tried and true” and “default” options, which may both reduce actual impact and decrease exploration of new potentially high-value opportunities.
• Over-confident claims coupled with insufficient background research.
• Over-reliance on a small set o

Interesting. It sounds like you're saying that there are many EAs investing tons of time in doing things that are mostly only useful for getting particular roles at 1-2 orgs. I didn't realize that.

In addition to the feedback thing, this seems like a generally very bad dynamic—for instance, in your example, regardless of whether she gets feedback, Sally has now more or less wasted years of graduate schooling.

Top and (sustainably) fast-growing (over a long period of time) are roughly synonymous, but fast-growing is the upstream thing that causes it to be a good learning experience.

Note that billzito didn't specify, but the important number here is userbase or revenue growth, not headcount growth; the former causes the latter, but not vice versa, and rapid headcount growth without corresponding userbase growth is very bad.

People definitely can see rapidly increasing responsibility in less-fast-growing startups, but it's more likely to be because they're over-hir... (read more)

It sounds like you interpreted me as saying that rejecting resumes without feedback doesn't make people sad. I'm not saying that—I agree that it makes people sad (although on a per-person basis it does make people much less sad than rejecting them without feedback during later stages, which is what those points were in support of—having accidentally rejected people without feedback at many different steps, I'm speaking from experience here).

However, my main point is that providing feedback on resume applications is much more costly to the organization, not... (read more)

Note that at least for Rethink Priorities, a human[1] reads through all applications; nobody is rejected just because of their resume. 

I'm a bit confused about the phrasing here because it seems to imply that "Alice's application is read by a human" and "if Alice is rejected it's not just because of her resume" are equivalent, but many resume screen processes (including eg Wave's) involve humans reading all resumes and then rejecting people (just) because of them.

I'm unfamiliar with EA orgs' interview processes, so I'm not sure whether you're talking about lack of feedback when someone fails an interview, or when someone's application is rejected before doing any interviews. It's really important to differentiate these because because providing feedback on someone's initial application is a massively harder problem:

• There are many more applicants (Wave rejects over 50% of applications without speaking to them and this is based on a relatively loose filter)
• Candidates haven't interacted with a human yet, so are more l

I don't have research management experience in particular, but I have a lot of knowledge work (in particular software engineering) management experience.

IMO, giving insufficient positive feedback is a common, and damaging,  blind spot for managers, especially those (like you and me) who expect their reports to derive most of their motivation from being intrinsically excited about their end goal. If unaddressed, it can easily lead to your reports feeling demotivated and like their work is pointless/terrible even when it's mostly good.

People use feedbac... (read more)

Looks like if this doesn't work out, I should at least update my surname...

I note that the framing / example case has changed a lot between your original comment / my reply (making a $5m grant and writing "person X is skeptical of MIRI" in the "cons" column) and this parent comment ("imagine I pointed a gun to your head and... offer you to give you additional information;" "never stopping at [person X thinks that p]"). I'm not arguing for entirely refusing to trust other people or dividing labor, as you implied there. I specifically object to giving weight to other people's top-line views on questions where there's substantial di... (read more)

if you make a decision with large-scale and irreversible effects on the world (e.g. "who should get this $5M grant?") I think it would usually be predictably worse for the world to ignore others' views

Taking into account specific facts or arguments made by other people seems reasonable here. Just writing down e.g. "person X doesn't like MIRI" in the "cons" column of your spreadsheet seems foolish and wrongheaded.

Framing it as "taking others' views into account" or "ignoring others' views" is a big part of the problem, IMO—that language itself directs people towards evaluating the people rather than the arguments, and overall opinions rather than specific facts or claims.

Around 2015-2019 I felt like the main message I got from the EA community was that my judgement was not to be trusted and I should defer, but without explicit instructions how and who to defer to.
...
My interpretation was that my judgement generally was not to be trusted, and if it was not good enough to start new projects myself, I should not make generic career decisions myself, even where the possible downsides were very limited.

I also get a lot of this vibe from (parts of) the EA community, and it drives me a little nuts. Examples:

• Moral uncertainty, giv

I haven't had the opportunity to see this play out over multiple years/companies, so I'm not super well-informed yet, but I think I should have called out this part of my original comment more:

Not to mention various high-impact roles at companies that don't involve formal management at all.

If people think management is their only path to success then sure, you'll end up with everyone trying to be good at management. But if instead of starting from "who fills the new manager role" you start from "how can <person X> have the most impact on the company"... (read more)

I had a hard time answering this and I finally realized that I think it's because it sort of assumes performance is one-dimensional. My experience has been quite far from that: the same engineer who does a crap job on one task can, with a few tweaks to their project queue or work style, crush it at something else. In fact, making that happen is one of the most important parts of my (and all managers') jobs at Wave—we spend a lot of time trying to route people to roles where they can be the most successful.

Similarly, management is also not one-dimensional: ... (read more)

I'll let Lincoln add his as well, but here are a few things we do that I think are really helpful for this:

1. We've found our bimonthly in-person "offsites" to be extremely important. For new hires, I often see their happiness and productivity increase a lot after their first retreat because it becomes easier and more fun for them to work with their coworkers.
2. Having the right cadence of standing meetings (1-on-1s, team meetings, retrospectives, etc.) becomes much more important since issues are less likely to surface in "hallway" conversations.
3. We try to make

Agree that if you put a lot of weight on the efficient market hypothesis, then starting a company looks bad and probably isn't worth it. Personally, I don't think markets are efficient enough for this to be a dominant consideration (see e.g. my response here for partial justification; not sure it's possible to give a convincing full justification since it seems like a pretty deep worldview divergence between us and the more modest-epistemology-focused wing of the EA movement).

2. For personal work, it's annoying, but not a huge bottleneck—my internet in Jijiga (used in Dan's article) was much worse than anywhere else I've been in Africa. (Ethiopia has a monopoly, state-run telecom that provides among the worst service in the world.) You do have to put in some effort to managing usage (e.g. tracking things that burn network via Little Snitch, caching docs offline, minimizing Docker image size), but it's not terrible.

It is a sufficient bottleneck to reading some blogs that I wrote a simple proxy to strip bloat from web pages while... (read more)

The main outcome metric we try to optimize is currently number of monthly active users, because our business has strong network effects. We can't share exact stats for various reasons, but I am allowed to say that we crossed 1m users in June, and our growth rates are sufficiently high that our current user base is substantially larger than that. We're currently growing more quickly than most well-known fintech companies of similar sizes that I know of.

On EA providing for-profit funding: hard to say. Considerations against:

• Wave looks like a very good investment by non-EA standards, so additional funding from EAs wouldn't have affected our fundraising very much (not sure how much this generalizes to other companies)
• At later stages, this is very capital-intensive, so probably wouldn't make sense except as a thing for eg Open Phil to do with its endowment
• Founding successful companies requires putting a lot of weight on inside-view considerations, a trait that's not particularly compatible with typical EA ep

Cool! With the understanding that these aren't your opinions, I'm going to engage with them anyway bc I think they're interesting. I think for all four of these I agree that they directionally push toward for-profits being less good, but that people overestimate the magnitude of the effect.

For-profit entrepreneurship has built-in incentives that already cause many entrepreneurs to try and implement any promising opportunities. As a result, we'd expect it to be drastically less neglected, or at least drastically less neglected relative to nonprofit opportun

Hmm. This argument seems like it only works if there are no market failures (i.e. ideas where it's possible to capture a decent fraction of the value created), and it seems like most nonprofits address some sort of market failure? (e.g. "people do not understand the benefits of vitamin-fortified food," "vaccination has strong positive externalities"...)

I agree with most of what Lincoln said and would also plug Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets as material on this, if you haven't read it yet :)

Can you elaborate on the "various reasons" that people argue for-profit entrepreneurship is less promising than nonprofit entrepreneurship or provide any pointers on reading material? I haven't run across these arguments.

Great questions!

What are common failure cases/traps to avoid

I don't know about "most common" as I think it varies by company, but the worst one for me was allowing myself to get distracted by problems that were more rewarding in the short term, but less important or leveraged. I wrote a bit about this in Attention is your scarcest resource.

How much should I be directly coding vs "architecting" vs process management

Related to the above, you should never be coding anything that's even remotely urgent (because it'll distract you too much from non-coding probl... (read more)

Sorry for the minimalist website :) A couple clarifications:

• We indeed split our businesses into Sendwave (international money transfer) and Wave (mobile money). Wave.com is the website for the latter.
• The latter currently operates only in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire (stay tuned though).
• In addition to charging no fees for deposits or withdrawals, we charge a flat 1% to send. All in, I believe we're about 80% cheaper than Orange Money for typical transaction sizes.
• We don't provide services to Orange—if you saw the logo on the website it's just because we let ou

Hey Marc, cool that you're thinking about this!

I work for Wave, we build mobile money systems in Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, and hopefully soon other countries. Here are some thoughts on these interventions based on Wave's experience:

Interventions 1-2 (creating accounts): I think for most people that don't use mobile money, in countries where mobile money is available, "not having an account" is not the main blocker. It's more likely to be something like

• They don't live near enough to an agent
• Mobile money charges fees that is too high given the typical amounts

Some of your "conservative" parameter estimates are surprising to me.

For instance, your conservative estimate of the effect of diminishing marginal returns is 2% per year or 10% over 5y. If (say) the total pool of EA-aligned funds grows by 50% over the next 5 years due to additional donors joining—which seems extremely plausible—it seems like that should make the marginal opportunity much more than 10% less good.

You also wrote

we’ll stick with 5% as a conservative estimate for real expected returns on index fund investing

but used 7% as your conservative estimate in the spreadsheet and in the bottom-line estimates you reported.

I'm looking forward to CEA having a great 2020 under hopefully much more stable and certain leadership!

I’d welcome feedback on these plans via this form or in the comments, especially if you think there’s something that we’re missing or could be doing better.

This is weakly held since I don't have any context on what's going on internally with CEA right now.

That said: of the items listed in your summary of goals, it looks like about 80% of them involve inward-facing initiatives (hiring, spinoffs, process improvements, str... (read more)

Hmm. You're betting based on whether the fatalities exceed the mean of Justin's implied prior, but the prior is really heavy-tailed, so it's not actually clear that your bet is positive EV for him. (e.g., "1:1 odds that you're off by an order of magnitude" would be a terrible bet for Justion because he has 2/3 credence that there will be no pandemic at all).

Justin's credence for P(a particular person gets it | it goes world scale pandemic) should also be heavy-tailed, since the spread of infections is a preferential attac... (read more)

Oops. I searched for the title of the link before posting, but didn't read the titles carefully enough to find duplicates that edited the title. Should have put more weight on my prior that this would already have been posted :)

I'm guessing that they assumed we were exaggerating the numbers in order to make them more interested in working with us. The fact that you're so ready to call anyone who lies about user numbers a "scammer" may itself be part of the cultural difference here :)

Examples (mostly from Senegal since that's where I have the most experience, caveat that these are generalizations, all of them could be confounded by other stuff, the world is complicated, etc.):

• Most Senegalese companies seem to place a much stronger emphasis on bureaucracy and paperwork.
• When interacting with potential business partners in East Africa, we eventually realized that when we told them our user/transaction numbers, they often assumed that we were lying unless the claim was endorsed by someone they had a trusted connection to.
• In the US, we

Broadly agree, but:

You might end up making more impact if you started a startup in your own country, and just earned-to-give your earnings to GiveWell / EA organizations. This is because I think there are very few startups that benefit the poorest of the poor, since the poorest people don't even have access to basic needs.

Can't you just provide people basic needs then though? Many of Wave's clients have no smartphone and can't read. Low-cost Android phones (e.g. Tecno Mobile) probably provided a lot of value to people who previously did... (read more)

I imagine that there a large fraction of EAs who expect to be more productive in direct work than in an ETG role. But I'm not too clear why we should believe that. The skills and manpower needed by EA organizations appear to be a small subset of the total careers that the world needs, and it would seem an odd coincidence if the comparative advantage of people who believe in EA happens to overlap heavily with the needs of EA organizations. Remember that EA principles suggest that you should donate to approximately one charity (i.e. the current best one

If you're really worried about value drift, you might be able to use a bank account that requires two signatures to withdraw funds, and add a second signatory whom you trust to enforce your precommitment to donate?

I haven't actually tried to do this, but I know businesses sometimes have this type of control on their accounts, and it might be available to consumers too.

Whoops, sorry about the quotes--I was writing quickly and intended them to denote that I was using "solve" in an imprecise way, not attributing the word to you, but that is obviously not how it reads. Edited.

These theoretical claims seem quite weak/incomplete.

• In practice, autocrats' time horizons are highly finite, so I don't think a theoretical mutual-cooperation equilibrium is very relevant. (At minimum, the autocrat will eventually die.)
• All your suggestions about oligarchy improving the tyranny of the majority / collective action problems only apply to actions that are in the oligarchy's interests. You haven't made any case that the important instances of these problems are in an oligarchy's interests to solve, and it doesn't seem likely to me.

What's the shift you think it would imply in animal advocacy?