All of ChanaMessinger's Comments + Replies

This was a delight to read! I found the fact that an essay competition in 1837 was a successful activist move really striking!

This is mentioned here, but I want to double down on the value of "asking around about the organization and what the experiences of others were". 

I talked to someone recently in tech about whether there were good ways to find out if working at any given tech organization was right for you, and he said basically no, that it was hard to get an accurate picture, that the resources that had tried to do this in the field (like Blind) added some information but gave warped impressions from who posted there. (That said, from a quick skim, it seems a lot bett... (read more)

I think people do not get karma from the baseline +1 or +2 that comes with making a new comment.

Thank you so much for this!

As the post says above, I’d like to share updates the  team has made on its policies based on the internal review we did following the Time article and Owen’s statement as a manager on the team and the person who oversaw the internal review. (My initial description of the internal review is here). In general, these changes have been progressing prior to knowing the boards’ determinations, though thinking from Zach and the EV legal team has been an important input throughout.
 

Changes 

Overall we spent dozens of hours over multiple calenda... (read more)

I really don't know how the norms of professional investigative journalism work, but I imagine a lot hinges on whether the source of concern / subject of the piece is the repository of a large amount of relevant information about the central claims. 

e.g. the point is "how much work do you need to put in to make sure your claims are accurate" and then sometimes that implies "no need to get replies from the subject of the piece because you can get the information elsewhere" and sometimes that implies "you have to engage a bunch with the subject of the piece because they have relevant information."

The judgement call is on giving time for "right to reply", not for "taking more time to verify claims", right? Those seem kind of different to me.

Yeah, same

Effective giving quick take for giving season

This is quite half-baked because I think my social circle contains not very many E2G folks, but I have a feeling that when EA suddenly came into a lot more funding and the word on the street was that we were “talent constrained, not funding constrained”, some people earning to give ended up pretty jerked around, or at least feeling that way. They may have picked jobs and life plans based on the earn to give model, where it would be years before the plans came to fruition, and in the middle, they lost status and ... (read more)

Am I understanding right that the main win you see here would have been protecting people from risks they took on the basis that Sam was reasonably trustworthy? 

I also feel pretty unsure but curious about whether a vibe of "don't trust Sam / don't trust the money coming through him" would have helped discover or prevent the fraud - if you have a story for how it could have happened (e.g. via as you say people feeling more empowered to say no to him - maybe it would have via been his staff making fewer crazy moves on his behalf / standing up to him more?), I'd be interested. 

Curious if you have examples of this being done well in communities you've been aware of? I might have asked you this before.

I've been part of an EA group where some emotionally honest conversations were had, and I think they were helpful but weren't a big fix. I think a similar group later did a more explicit and formal version and they found it helpful.

Really intrigued by this model of thinking from Predictable Updating about AI Risk.
 

Now, you could argue that either your expectations about this volatility should be compatible with the basic Bayesianism above (such that, e.g., if you think it reasonably like that you’ll have lots of >50% days in future, you should be pretty wary of saying 1% now), or you’re probably messing up. And maybe so. But I wonder about alternative models, too. For example, Katja Grace suggested to me a model where you’re only able to hold some subset of the evidence in yo

I’m Chana, a manager on the Community Health team. This comment is meant to address some of the things Ben says in the post above as well as things other commenters have mentioned, though very likely I won’t have answered all the questions or concerns. 

High level

I agree with some of those commenters that our role is not always clear, and I’m sorry for the difficulties that this causes. Some of this ambiguity is intrinsic to our work, but some is not, and I would like people to have a better sense of what to expect from us, especially as our strat... (read more)

Hi KnitKnack - I’m really sorry to hear you had a bad experience with the CH team, and that it contributed to some especially bad moments in your life. I totally endorse that people should have accurate expectations, which means that they should not expect we’ll always be able to resolve each issue to everyone’s satisfaction. I think that even in worlds where we did everything quote-unquote “right” (in terms of fair treatment of each of the people involved, and the overall safety and functioning of the community), some people would be disappointed in how m... (read more)

we had a stronger community health team with a broad mandate for managing risks, rather than mostly social disputes and PR? Maybe, but CH already had a broad mandate on paper. Given EVF’s current situation, it might be a tall task. And if VCs and accountancies didn’t see FTX’s problems, then a beefed-up CH might not either. Maybe a CH team could do this better independently of CEA

(Context - I was the interim head of the Community Health team for most of this year)

For what it’s worth, as as a team we've been thinking along similar lines (and having similar ... (read more)

Thanks for writing up your views here! I think it might be quite valuable to have more open conversations about what norms there's consensus on and which ones there aren't, which this helps spark.

Thanks for noticing something you thought should happen (or having it flagged to you) and making it happen!

I'd bid for you to explain more what you mean here - but it's your quick take!

Thanks!

Seems like there's room in the ecosystem for a weekly update on AI that does a lot of contextualization / here's where we are on ongoing benchmarks. I'm familiar with:
 

• a weekly newsletter on AI media (that has a section on important developments that I like)
• Jack Clark's substack which I haven't read much of but seems more about going in depth on new developments (though does have a "Why this matters" section. Also I love this post in particular for the way it talks about humility and confusion.
• Doing Westminster Better on UK politics and AI / EA, which

Some added context on the 80k podcasts:

At the beginning of the Jan Leike episode, Rob says:

Two quick notes before that:

We’ve had a lot of AI episodes in a row lately, so those of you who aren’t that interested in AI or perhaps just aren’t in a position to work on it, might be wondering if this is an all AI show now.

But don’t unsubscribe because we’re working on plenty of non-AI episodes that I think you’ll love — over the next year we plan to do roughly half our episodes on AI and AI-relevant topics, and half on things that have nothing to do with AI.

What

I liked this!

I appreciated that for the claim I was most skeptical of: "There’s also the basic intuition that more people with new expertise working on a hard problem just seems better", my skepticism was anticipated and discussed.

For me one of the most important things is:

Patch the gaps that others won’t cover

• E.g., if more academics start doing prosaic alignment work, then ‘big-if-true’ theoretical work may become more valuable, or high-quality work on digital sentience. 
• There’s probably predictable ‘market failures’ in any discipline – work that isn

I really loved this! I have basically no knowledge of the underlying context, but I think this symmary gave me a feel for how detailed and complicated this is (reality has a lot of detail and a lot of societies for air conditioning engineers!), a bit of the actual science, as well as some of the players involved and their incentives.

It's helpful and interesting to look at what small scientific communities are like as analogues for EA research groups.

From Astral Codex Ten

FRI called back a few XPT forecasters in May 2023 to see if any of them wanted to change their minds, but they mostly didn’t.

I really like this concept of epistemic probation - I agree also on the challenges of making it private and exiting such a state. Making exiting criticism-heavy periods easier probably makes it easier to levy in the first place (since you know that it is escapable).

Did you mean for the second paragraph of the quoted section to be in the quote section? 

Thanks so much for this, I really enjoyed it! I really like this format and would enjoy seeing more of it.

This isn't the point, and there's likely so much behind each vignette that we don't see, but I so wish for some of these folks that they are able to find e.g. people/mentors who encourage their "dumb questions", people who want to talk about consciousness, people who can help figure out what to do with doomer-y thoughts, maybe telling aggregators of information about some of the things listed (community health is one for some topics including some case... (read more)

Right, right, I think on some level this is very unintuitive, and I appreciate you helping me wrap my mind around it - even secret information is not a problem as long as people are not lying about their updates (though if all updates are secret there's obviously much less to update on)

I appreciate the reminder that "these people have done more research" is itself a piece of information that others can update on, and that the mystery of why they haven't isn't solved. (Just to ELI5, we're assuming no secret information, right?)

I suppose this is very similar to "are you growing as a movement because you're convincing people or via selection effects" and if you know the difference you can update more confidently on how right you are (or at least how persuasive you are).

I tried for a while to find where I think Oliver Habryka talked about this, but didn't find it. If someone else finds it, let me know!

I want to just appreciate the description you’ve given of interaction responsibility, and pointing out the dual tensions. 

On the one hand, wanting to act but feeling worried that by merely getting involved you open yourself up to criticism, thereby imposing a tax on acting even when you think you would counterfactually make the situation better (something I think EA as a concept is correctly really opposed to in theory). 

On the other hand, consequences matter, and if in fact your actions cause others who would have done a better job not to act, a... (read more)

The forum naming conversation feels like an example of something that’s been coming up a lot that I don’t have a crisp way of talking about, which is the difference between “this is an EA thing” as a speech act and “this is an EA thing” as a description. I’m supportive of orgs and projects not branding themselves EA because they don’t want to or want to scope out a different part of the world of possible projects or don’t identify as EA. But I’m also worried about being descriptively deceptive (even unintentionally), by saying “oh, this website isn’t reall... (read more)

I'm certainly not an expert in institutional design, but for what it's worth, it feels really non-obvious to me that:

It seems harder for a decentralised movement to centralise than it is for a centralised movement to decentralise. So, trying to be as centralised as possible at the moment preserves option value.

Like, I think projects find it pretty hard to escape the sense that they're "EA" even when they want to (as you point out), and I think it's pretty easy to decide you want to be part of EV or want to take your cues from the relevant OP team and do wh... (read more)

Thanks for this! Very interesting. 

I do want to say something stronger here, where "competence" sounds like technical ability or something, but I also mean a broader conception of competence that includes "is especially clear thinking here / has fewer biases here / etc"

Trust is a two-argument function

I'm sure this must have been said before, but I couldn't find it on the forum, LW or google

I'd like to talk more about trusting X in domain Y or on Z metric rather than trusting them in general. People/orgs/etc have strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, and I think this granularity is more precise and is a helpful reminder to avoid the halo and horn effects, and calibrates us better on trust.

Ratio of descriptive: "this is how things are" to normative: "shape up"

To add to folks disagreeing with the "size of numbers", from my perspective:

Most respondents to Rethink's survey hadn't encountered EA. Of those who had (233), only 18 (1.1% of total respondents) referred to FTX/SBF explicitly or obliquely when asked what they think effective altruism means or where and when they first heard of it.

I think that number is importantly 7.7% of all the people who had heard of EA, which seems not that small to me (though way smaller than my immersed-all-the-time-in-meta/FTX-stuff brain might have generated on its own when that was where my head was at).
 

For collecting thoughts on the concept of "epistemic hazards" - contexts in which you should expect your epistemics to be worse. not fleshed out yet. Interested in if this has already been written about, I assume so, maybe in a different framing.

From Habryka: "Confidentiality and obscurity feel like they worsen the relevant dynamics a lot, since they prevent other people from sanity-checking your takes (though this is also much more broadly applicable). For example, being involved in crimes makes it much harder to get outside feedback on your decisions, si... (read more)

I like the point of waves within cause areas! Though I suspect there would be a lot of disagreement - e.g. people who kept up with the x-risk approach even as WWOTF was getting a lot of attention.

I like the distinction between overreacting and underreacting as being "in the world" vs. "memes" - another way of saying this is something like "object level reality" vs. "social reality".

If the longtermism wave is real, then that was pretty about social reality, at least within EA, and changed how money was spent and things people said (as I understand it, I wasn't really socially involved at the time). 

So to the extent that this is about "what's happening to EA" I think there's clearly a third wave here, where people are running and getting funded ... (read more)

I'd be interested in more thoughts if you have them on evidence or predictions one could have made ahead of time that would distinguish this model from other (like maybe a lot of what's going on is youth and will evaporate over time (youth still has to be mediated by things like what you describe, but as an example).

Also, my understanding is that SBF wasn't very insecure? Does that affect your model or is the point that the leader / norm setter doesn't have to be?

Yeah, I'm confused about this. Seems like some amount of "collapsing social uncertainty" is very good for healthy community dynamics, and too much (like having a live ranking of where you stand) would be wildly bad. I don't think I currently have a precise way of cutting these things. My current best guess is that the more you push to make the work descriptive, the better, and the more it becomes normative and "shape up!"-oriented, the worse, but it's hard to know exactly what ratio of descriptive:normative you're accomplishing via any given attempt at transparency or common knowledge creation.

I strongly resonate with this; I think this dynamic also selects for people who are open-minded in a particular way (which I broadly think is great!), so you're going to get more of it than usual.

Thanks for writing this! I'm not sure how I'd feel if orgs I worked for went more in this direction, but I did find myself nodding along to a bunch of parts (though not all) of what you wrote.

One thing I'm curious about is you have thoughts on avoiding a "nitpick" culture, where every perk or line item becomes a big discussion among leadership or an org, or the org broadly - that seems to me like a big downside of moving in this direction.

Just because, things I especially liked:

1.

We should try to be especially virtuous whenever we find ourselves setting a

I don't know if this is right, but I take Lincoln to be (a bit implicitly but I see it throughout the post) taking the default cultural norm as a pretty strong starting point, and aiming to vary from that when you have a good reason (I imagine because variations from what's normal is what sends the most salient messages), rather than think about what a perk is from first principles, which explains the dishwashing and toilet cleaning.

Reminds me of C.S. Lewis's view on modesty

The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modest

Thanks for this! I feel like I have a bunch of thoughts swirling in my head as a result of reading this :)

Again quick take: would be interested in more discussion on (conditional on there being any board members) takes on what a good ratio of funders to non funders is in different situations.

I haven't thought hard about this yet, so this is just a quick take: I'm broadly enthused but don't feel convinced that experts have actual reason to get engaged. Can you flesh that out more?

But "everyone knows"!

A dynamic I keep seeing is that it feels hard to whistleblow or report concerns or make a bid for more EA attention on things that "everyone knows", because it feels like there's no one to tell who doesn't already know. It’s easy to think that surely this is priced in to everyone's decision making. Some reasons to do it anyway:

• You might be wrong about what “everyone” knows - maybe everyone in your social circle does, but not outside. I see this a lot in Bay gossip vs. London gossip - what "everyone knows" is very different in those two

Fwiw, I think we have different perspectives here - outside of epistemics, everything on that list is there precisely because we think it’s a potential source of some of the biggest risks. It’s not always clear where risks are going to come from, so we look at a wide range of things, but we are in fact trying to be on the lookout for those big risks. Thanks for flagging it doesn’t seem like we are; I’m not sure if this comes from miscommunication or a disagreement about where big risks come from.

Maybe another place of discrepancy is that we primarily think... (read more)