All of Buck's Comments + Replies

Yeah, I think that might be one reason it isn't done. I personally think that it is probably somewhat important for the community to understand itself better (e.g., the relative progress and growth in different interests/programs/geographies). Especially for people in the community who are community builders, recruiters, founders, etc. I also recognise that it might not be seen as priority for various reasons or risky for other reasons and I haven't thought a lot about it. 

Regardless, if people who have data about the community that they don't want to... (read more)

The situation with person L was deeply tragic. This comment explains some of the actions taken by CEA’s Community Health team as a result of their reports.

Even if most examples are unrelated to EA, if it's true that the Silicon Valley AI community has zero accountability for bad behavior, that seems like it should concern us?

EDIT: I discuss a [high uncertainty] alternative hypothesis in this comment.

I would also be interested in more clarification about how EA relevant the case studies provided might be, to whatever extent this is possible without breaking confidentiality. For example:

We were pressured to sign non-disclosure agreements or “consent statements” in a manipulative “community process”.

this does not sound like the work of CEA Community health team, but it would be an important update if it was, and it would be useful to clarify if it wasn't so people don't jump to the wrong conclusions.

That being said, I think the AI community in the Bay Ar... (read more)

eg, some (much lighter) investigation, followed by:

• denying them power/resources if you are personally in a position to do so
• talking to the offenders if you think they are corrigible and not retributive
  • alternatively, talking to someone in a senior position/position of authority over the offenders who can deliver the message more sternly etc
• (if nonprofit) talking to the nonprofit's board if it's not captured
• (if grad student, and the problems are professional) talking to their advisor if you think the advisor's sympathetic to your concerns
• (if funded by EA fol

fwiw the two videos linked look identical to me (EAG Bay Area 2023, "The current alignment plan, and how we might improve it")

Yeah I noticed a huge difference between EAs and my politically active right wing friends, for whom disingenuous media articles calling you racist are just an occupational hazard. I think especially a lot of younger EA straight out of college are used to affiliating with moral-language coded condemnation and find being the recipient, or adjacent to the recipient, very disorientating. 

How come you think that? Maybe I'm biased from spending lots of time with Charity Entrepreneurship folks but I feel like I know a bunch of talented and entrpreneurial people who could run projects like the ones mentioned above. If anything, I would say neartermist EA has a better (or at least, longer) track record of incubating new projects relative to longtermist EA!

One issue for me is just that EA has radically different standards for what constitutes "impact." If near-term: lots of rigorous RCTs showing positive effect sizes.

 If long-term: literally zero evidence that any long-termist efforts have been positive rather than negative in value, which is a hard enough question to settle even for current-day interventions where we see the results immediately . . .  BUT if you take the enormous liberty of assuming a positive impact (even just slightly above zero), and then assume lots of people in the future, everything has a huge positive impact. 

Buck seems to be consistently missing the point. 

Although leaders may say "I won't judge or punish you if you disagree with me", listeners are probably correct to interpret that as cheap talk. We have abundant evidence from society and history that those in positions of power can and do act against them. A few remarks to the contrary should not convince people they are not at risk.

Someone who genuinely wanted to be open to criticism would recognise and address the fears people have about speaking up. Buck's comment of "the fact that people want to hid... (read more)

My guess is that this new neartermist-only EA would not have the resources to do a bunch of things which EA currently does--it's not clear to me that it would have an actively maintained custom forum, or EAGs, or EA Funds. James Snowden at Open Phil recently started working on grantmaking for neartermist-focused EA community growth, and so there would be at least one dedicated grantmaker trying to make some of this stuff happen. But most of the infrastructure would be gone.

This paragraph feels pretty over the top. When you say "resources" I assume you mean... (read more)

Also worth noting that "all four leading strands of EA — (1) neartermist human-focused stuff, mostly in the developing world, (2) animal welfare, (3) long-term future, and (4) meta — were all major themes in the movement since its relatively early days, including at the very first "EA Summit" in 2013 (see here), and IIRC for at least a few years before then." (Comment by lukeprog)

While I do think I maybe disagree with Buck on the actual costs to people speaking openly, I also think there are pretty big gains in terms of trust and reputation to be had by speaking out openly. In my experience it's a kind of increase-in-variance of how people relate to you, with an overall positive mean, with there definitely being some chance of someone disliking you being open, but there also being a high chance of someone being very interested in supporting you and caring a lot about you not being unfairly punished for speaking true things, and rew... (read more)

Thanks, Buck. It is good to hear about those norms, practices, and limitations among senior EAs, but the standard for what constitutes harassment has to be what a reasonable person in other person's shoes would think. The student or junior EA experiences harm if they believe a refusal will have an adverse effect on their careers, even if the senior EA actually lacks the practical ability to create such an effect.^[1]

The reasonable student or junior EA doesn't know about undocumented (or thinly documented) norms, practices, and limitations among senior EAs. ... (read more)

For what it's worth, my current vote is for immediate suspension in situations if there is credible allegations for anyone in a grantmaking etc capacity where they used such powers in a retaliatory action for rejected romantic or sexual advances. In addition to being illegal, such actions are just so obviously evidence of bad judgement and/or poor self-control that I'd hesitate to consider anyone who acted in such ways a good fit for any significant positions of power. I have not thought the specific question much, but it's very hard for me to imagine any realistic situation where someone with such traits is a good fit for grantmaking. 

So, I think the first question is something like: "Could a reasonable person in the shoes of the lower-status person conclude that rebuffing the overtures of the higher-status person ^[1] could result in a meaningfully adverse impact on their career due to the higher-status person taking improper action?"^[2] 

I think in the vast majority of cases following your three hypotheticals would result in a "no" answer to this question. For instance, most professors have relatively little influence on the operations of other universities, or on the nat... (read more)

Thanks for the nuanced response. FWIW, this seems reasonable to me as well:

I agree that it's important to separate out all of these factors, but I think it's totally reasonable for your assessment of some of these factors to update your assessment of others.

Separately, I think that people are sometimes overconfident in their assessment of some of these factors (e.g. intelligence), because they over-update on signals that seem particularly legible to them (e.g. math accolades), and that this can cause cascading issues with this line of reasoning. But th... (read more)

@Buck – As a hopefully constructive point I think you could have written a comment that served the same function but was less potentially off-putting by clearly separating your critique between a general critique of  critical writing on the EA Forum and critiques of specific people (me or the OP author).

I do update on people when they say things on this forum that I think indicate bad things about their judgment or integrity, as I think I should

I agree! But given this, I think the two things you mention often feel highly correlated, and it's hard for people to actually know that when you make a statement like that, that there's no negative judgement either from you, nor from other readers of your statement. It also feels a bit weird to suggest there's no negative judgement if you also think the forum is a better place without their critical writing?

In gen

Thank you Buck that makes sense :-)

“the content/framing seems not very useful and I am sad about the effect it has on the discourse”

I think we very strongly disagree on this. I think critical posts like this have a very positive effect on  discourse (in EA and elsewhere) and am happy with the framing of this post and a fair amount (although by no means all) of the content. 

I think my belief here is routed in quite strong lifetime experiences in favour of epistemic humility, human overconfidence especially in the domain of doing good, positi... (read more)

I consider this a good outcome--I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause people to feel less incentivized to write posts like this one (or yours) in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).

This was a disappointing comment to read fro... (read more)

I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant.

I think this is somewhat unfair. I think it is unfair to describe this OP as "unpleasant", it seems to be clearly and impartially written and to go out of its way to make it clear it is not picking on individuals. Also I feel like you have cherry picked a post from my post history t... (read more)

Thanks for this, and on reading other comments etc, I was probably overly harsh on you for doing so.

I'd be pretty interested in you laying out in depth why you have basically decides to dismiss these very varied and large set of arguments.(Full disclosure: I don’t agree with all of them, but in general I think there pretty good) A self admitted EA leader posting a response poo-pooing a long thought out criticism with very little argumentation, and mostly criticising it on tangential ToC grounds (which you don't think or want to succeed anyway?) seems like it could be construed to be pretty bad faith and problematic. I don’t normally reply like this, but... (read more)

I think all your specific points are correct, and I also think you totally miss the point of the post.

You say you though about these things a lot. Maybe lots of core EAs have though about these things a lot. But what core EAs have considered or not is completely opaque to us. Not so much because of secrecy, but because opaque ness is the natural state of things. So lots of non core EAs are frustrated about lots of things. We don't know how our community is run or why. 

On top of that, there are actually consequences for complaining or disagreeing too m... (read more)

One irony is that it's often not that hard to change EA orgs' minds. E.g. on the forum suggestion, which is the one that most directly applies to me: you could look at the posts people found most valuable and see if a more democratic voting system better correlates with what people marked as valuable than our current system. I think you could probably do this in a weekend, it might even be faster than writing this article, and it would be substantially more compelling.^[1]

(CEA is actually doing basically this experiment soon, and I'm >2/3 chance the resu... (read more)

I strongly disagree with this response, and find it bizarre.  

I think assessing this post according to a limited number of possible theories of change is incorrect, as influence is often diffuse and hard to predict or measure.  

I agree with freedomandutility's description of this as an "isolated demand for [something like] rigor".
 

There seem to have been a lot of responses to your comment, but there are some points which I don’t see being addressed yet.

I would be very interested in seeing another similarly detailed response from an ‘EA leader’ whose work focusses on community building/community health Put on top as this got quite long, rationale below, but first:

I think at least a goal of the post is to get community input (I’ve seen in many previous forum posts) to determine the best suggestions without claiming to have all the answers. Quoted from the original post (intro to 'Sug... (read more)

Some things that I might come to regret about my comment:

• I think it's plausible that it's bad for me to refer to disagreeing with arguments without explaining why.
• I've realized that some commenters might not have seen these arguments before, which makes me think that there is more of an opportunity for me to explain why I think these arguments are wrong. (EDIT I'm less worried about this now, because other commenters have weighed in making most of the object-level criticisms I would have made.)
• I was not very transparent about my goal with this comment, whi

Relatedly, I think a short follow-up piece listing 5-10 proposed specific action items tailored to people in different roles in the community would be helpful. For example, I have the roles of (1) low-five-figure donor, and (2) active forum participant. Other people have roles like student, worker in an object-level organization, worker in a meta organization, object-level org leader, meta org leader, larger donor, etc.  People in different roles have different abilities (and limitations) in moving a reform effort forward.

I think "I didn't walk away w... (read more)

"If elites haven't already thought of/decided to implement these ideas, they're probably not very good. I won't explain why. " 

"Posting your thoughts on the EA Forum is complaining, but I think you will fail if you try to do anything different. I won't explain why, but I will be patronising." 

"Meaningful organisational change  comes from the top down, and you should be more polite in requesting it. I doubt it'll do anything, though." 

Do you see any similarities between your response here and the problems highlighted by the original post... (read more)

If that's your goal, I think you should try harder to understand why core org EAs currently don't agree with your suggestions, and try to address their cruxes. For this ToC, "upvotes on the EA Forum" is a useless metric--all you should care about is persuading a few people who have already thought about this all a lot. I don't think that your post here is very well optimized for this ToC. 

... I think the arguments it makes are weak (and I've been thinking about these arguments for years, so it would be a bit surprising if there was a big update from t

I strongly downvoted this response.

The response says that EA will not change "people in EA roles [will] ... choose not to", that making constructive critiques is a waste of time "[not a] productive ways to channel your energy" and that the critique should have been better "I wish that posts like this were clearer" "you should try harder" "[maybe try] politely suggesting".

This response seems to be putting all the burden of making progress in EA onto those  trying to constructively critique the movement, those who are putting their limited spare time in... (read more)

I think that's particularly true of some of the calls for democratization. The Cynic's Golden Rule ("He who has the gold, makes the rules") has substantial truth both in the EA world and in almost all charitable movements. In the end, if the people with the money aren't happy with the idea of random EAs spending their money, it just isn't going to happen. And to the extent there is a hint of cutting off or rejecting donors, that would lead to a much smaller EA to the extent it was followed. In actuality, it wouldn't be -- someone is going to take the donor... (read more)

Interesting that another commenter has the opposite view, and criticises this post for being persuasive instead of explanatory!

May just be disagreement but I think it might be a result of a bias of readers to focus on framing instead of engaging with object level views, when it comes to criticisms.

I think it’s fairly easy for readers to place ideas on a spectrum and identify trade offs when reading criticisms, if they choose to engage properly.

I think the best way to read criticisms is to steelman as you read, particularly via asking whether you’d sympathise with a weaker version of the claim, and via the reversal test.

I think this comment reads as though it’s almost entirely the authors’ responsibility to convince other EAs and EA orgs that certain interventions would help maximise impact, and that it is barely the responsibility of EAs and EA orgs to actively seek out and consider interventions which might help them maximise impact. I disagree with this kind of view.

I think the criticism of the theory of change here is a good example of an isolated demand for rigour (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/), which I feel EAs often apply when it comes to criticisms.

It’s entirely reasonable to express your views on an issue on the EA forum for discussion and consideration, rather than immediately going directly to relevant stakeholders and lobbying for change. I think this is what almost every EA Forum post does and I have never before seen these posts criticised as ‘complaining’.

One thing I think this comment ignores is just how many of the suggestions are cultural, and thus do need broad communal buy in, which I assume is why they sent this publicly. Whilst they are busy, I'd be pretty disappointed if the core EAs didn't read this and take the ideas seriously (ive tried tagging dome on twitter), and if you're correct that presenting such a detailed set of ideas on the forum is not enough to get core EAs to take the ideas seriously I'd be concerned about where there was places for people to get their ideas taken seriously. I'm luc... (read more)

Your first comment sounded like you're criticizing CEA for their allocation of resources. Your second reply now sounds more like you're criticzing funders (like Open Phil) for not increasing CEA's budget. (Or maybe CEA for not asking for a funding increase more aggressively.) I guess the main thing you're saying  is that you find it hard to believe everyone is acting optimally if we have to cut back on EAGs in these ways, given that money isn't that tight in the EA movement as a whole.