This topic seems even more relevant today compared to 2019 when I wrote it. At EAG London I saw an explosion of initiatives and there is even more money that isn't being spent. I've also seen an increase in attention that EA is giving to this problem, both from the leadership and on the forum.
Increase fidelity for better delegation
In 2021 I still like to frame this as a principal-agent problem.
First of all there's the risk of goodharting. One prominent grantmaker recounted to me that back when one prominent org was giving out grants, people would jus...
I have added a note to my RAISE post-mortem, which I'm cross-posting here:
Edit November 2021: there is now the Cambridge AGI Safety Fundamentals course, which promises to be successful. It is enlightening to compare this project with RAISE. Why is that one succeeding while this one did not? I'm quite surprised to find that the answer isn't so much about more funding, more senior people to execute it, more time, etc. They're simply using existing materials instead of creating their own. This makes it orders of magnitude easier to produce the thing, you can ...
...You might feel that this whole section is overly deferential. The OpenPhil staff are not omniscient. They have limited research capacity. As Joy's Law states, "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else."
But unlike in competitive business, I expect those very smart people to inform OpenPhil of their insights. If I did personally have an insight into a new giving opportunity, I would not proceed to donate, I would proceed to write up my thoughts on EA Forum and get feedback. Since there's an existing popular venue for crowdsour
To me, reducing your weirdness is equivalent to defection in a prisoner's dilemma, where the least weird person gets the most reward but the total reward shrinks as the total weirdness shrinks.
Of course you can't just go all-out on weirdness, because the cost you'd incur would be too great. My recommendation is to be slightly more weird than average. Or: be as weird as you perceive you can afford, but not weirder. If everyone did that, we would gradually expand the range of acceptable things outward.
Cause if there is excess funding and less applicants, I'd assume such applicants would also get funding.
I have seen examples of this at EA Funds, but it's not clear to me whether this is being broadly deployed.
Let's interpret "study" as broad as we can: is there not anything that someone can do on their own initiative, and do it better if they have time, that increases their leadership capacity?
I think the biggest constraint for having more people working on EA projects is management and leadership capacity. But those aren't things you can (solely) self-study; you need to practice management and leadership in order to get good at them.
What about those people that already have management and leadership skills, but lack things like:
There is also significant loss caused by moving to a different town, i.e. loss of important connections with friends and family at home, but we're tempted not to count those.
I would train more grantmakers. Not because they're necessarily overburdened but because, if they had more resources per applicant, they could double as mentors.
I suspect there is a significant set of funding applicants that don't meet the bar but would if they received regular high-quality feedback from a grantmaker.
(like myself in 2019)
What would it have taken to do something about this crisis in the first place? Back in 2008, central bankers were under the assumption that the theory of central banking was completely worked out. Academics were mostly talking about details (tweaking the tailor rule basically).
The theory of central banking is already centuries old. What would it have taken for a random individual to overturn that establishment? Including the culture and all the institutional interests of banks etc? Are we sure that no one was trying to do exactly that, anyway?
It seem...
I think your title could be a bit more informative.
Holden's writing seems to follow a hype cycle on the idea of transparency. i.e. first you apply a fresh new idea too radically, you run into it's drawbacks, then you regress to a healthy moderate application of it.
As someone who has felt some of the drawbacks of being outside this "inner ring", I wouldn't complain about the transparency per se. Lack of engagement, maybe, but that turned out to be me.
I'm still waiting for concrete suggestions. I also think your project would be more fruitful if you interviewed these people in person and published the result.
Yes, that would have been sufficient. The "withdraw this post" part seems a bit harsh (and redundant, since editing a post entails "withdrawing" the old version), but not to the point where I'd say anything about it as a mod.
I appreciate your engaging with my comment — it's hard to do mod stuff without coming across as overbearing, but I really value your contributions to the Forum. It's just a struggle to find balance between our more direct commenters and the people who find the Forum's culture intimidating.
I can’t look inside your head, but if the mere thought of something makes you suffer, it probably means it reminds you of something that you are trying to ignore, i.e. trauma.
Assuming that this is indeed the case, I would further speculate that you are ignoring this memory or unpalatable insight because you subconsciously expect that thinking of it would disturb you to the point of getting in the way of whatever you would prefer to be doing, like idk, whatever your daily pursuits are.
The solution then, given these assumptions, would be to set aside some ti...
(lots of downvotes, so where are all the comments?)
I want to reward you for bringing up the topic of power dynamics in EA. Those exist, like in any community, but especially in EA there seems to be a strong current of denying the fact that EA's are constrained by their selfish incentives like everyone else. It requires heroism to go against that current.
But by just insinuating and not delivering any concrete evidence or constructive suggestions for change, you haven't really done your homework. I advise you to withdraw this post, cut out half the narrative crap, add some evidence and a model, make a recommendation, then repost it.
I advise you to withdraw this post, cut out half the narrative crap, add some evidence and a model, make a recommendation, then repost it.
Moderator here!
This looks like it was intended to be tough love, but it's also a mild-to-moderate case of "unnecessary rudeness".
Let's try to stay polite in our comments, especially when the issue at stake is "I think your post is unclear" rather than "I think this post will hurt people" or "I think this thing you want people to donate to is a scam".
What does "cancelling" mean, concretely? I don't imagine the websites will be closed down. What will we lose?
Off the top of my head: The ability to host conferences without angry protesters in front, the chance to be mentioned in a favorable manner by a mainstream major news outlet and willingness of high profile people to associate with EA. Look up what EA intellectuals thought in the near past about why it would be unwise for EA to make too much noise outside the Overton window. This is still valid, except now the Overton has begun to shift at an increasing pace.
Note that this is not meant to be an endorsement of EA aligning with or paying lip service to political trends. I personally believe an increase of enforced epistemic biases to be an existential threat to the core values of EA.
I've been trying to figure out why cancel culture is so powerful. If only ~7% of people identify as pro social justice, why are social media platforms so freely bending to their will? Surely it's not out of the goodness of their hearts, what is the commercial motive? I don't buy the idea that it is simply a marketing stunt. Afaict a pro-SJ stance does not make a company look much more favorable at this point.
But then I found this:
...Re exercise: I worry that putting myself in a catabolic state (by exercising particularly hard) I temporarily increase my risk. Also by being at the gym around sweaty strangers. Is this worry justified?
I like this model but I think a more interesting example can be made with different variables.
Imagine x and y are actually both good things. You could then claim that a common pattern is for people to be pushing back and forth between x and y. But meanwhile, we may not be at the Frontier at all if you add z. So let's work on z instead!
In that sense, maybe we are never truly at the frontier, all variables considered.
Related to this line of thinking: affordance widths
If you take this model a step further, it suggests working on whatever the most tractable problem is that others are spending resources on, regardless of its impact, because that will maximally free up energy for other causes.
Sounds like something someone should simulate to see if this effect is strong enough to take into account.
[Our] research group is investigating the most promising giving opportunities among mental health interventions in lower and middle-income countries.
Any reason why you're focusing on interventions that target mental health directly and explicitly, instead of any intervention that might increase happiness indirectly (like bednets)?
Can we come up with a list of existing pieces of art that come close to this? I don't expect good ideas to come from first principles, but there might be some type of art out there that is non-cringy and conveys elements of EA thinking properly.
I'll start with Schindler's list, and especially this scene, where the protagonist breaks down while calculating just how many more lives he could have saved if he had sold his car, his jewelry, etc.
Okay, you've convinced me that a US based EA organisation should consider raising their wages to attract top talent.
This data does make me doubt the wisdom of basing non-local activities in the US, but that is another matter.
It does provide clarity, and I can imagine that there are unfortunate cases where those entry level salaries aren't enough.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I think this problem would be best resolved simply by asking how much an applicant needs, instead of raising wages accross the board. The latter would cause all kinds of problems. It would worsen the already latent center/periphery divide in EA by increasing inequality, it would make it harder for new organisations to compete, it would reduce the net amount of people that we can employ, etc etc.
But I
...The latter seems substantially better than the former by my lights (well, substituting 'across the board' for 'let the market set prices'.)
The standard econ-101 story for this is (in caricature) that markets tend to efficiently allocate scarce resources, and you generally make things worse overall if you try to meddle in them (although you can anoint particular beneficiaries).
The mix of strategies to soft-suppress (i.e. short of frank collusion/oligospony) salaries below market rate will probably be worse than not doing so - the usual p...
30 was just an arbitrary number. Is London still hard to live in for 60? Mind that the suggestion is to raise salaries from 75k to 100k. I can't imagine many cases where 75k is prohibitive, except for those that feel a need to be competitive with their peers from industry (which, fwiw, is not something I outright disapprove of)
We should probably operationalize this argument with actual data instead of reasoning from availability.
Given the numbers that we have in mind, these examples are all very specific to the US.
Medical expenses don't get much past $2k per year in most European countries. The only place where cost of living is prohibitively high past a ~$30k income, is San Francisco.
I'm not arguing against the idea that some people exist that should be given the $150k that is needed to unlock their talents. I'm arguing that this group of people might be very small, and concentrated in your bubble.
I think that's the crux of the argument. If a majority of senio...
a lot of resentment would emerge
To the extent that this would cause resentment, I'd interpret that as a perception of a higher counterfactual, which means that the execution wasn't done well.
It's unclear to me what you mean with privilege. I'm trying to imagine a situation where making 75k is not enough for a low-privilege person, but I can't think of any. AFAIK 75k is an extremely high wage. I know a CEO of a bank that makes that.
Toonalfrink, I'm hesitant to provide a concrete definition of privilege because it's definitely an amorphous thing. That being said, since I know it does mean very different things in different countries, so I should have provided some context in my examples:
Employer Location: US major metropolitan city
Entry level salary/benefits: $35k; competitive health insurance; no 401k/403b (retirement fund) match; no maternity leave
Looking briefly as US dept of Education data, the median American student loan debt burden for those with a bachelor's deg...
Don't advertise the wage on the ad. Ask candidates how much they need to be satisfied, then give them that amount or the amount that they are economically worth to you, whichever is lower. Discourage employees from disclosing how much they make.
I find this highly problematic. Candidates who need money more (e.g. those with dependents) will assume a non-profit job won’t pay enough in the first place, and won’t even apply.
It’s also worth noting that we live in a historical context where discouraging employees from disclosing how much they make has been a strategy to suppress wages, often discriminatorily. (See here for why Open Cages has taken the opposite approach and embraced salary transparency.)
In preventing wage dissatisfaction, I think it's better to look at perceived counterfactuals. This can come from being used to a certain wage, or a certain counterfactual wage being very obvious to you. Or it can come from your peers making a certain wage.
You seem to assume something like "people don't like to accept a wage that is lower than they can get". I suggest replacing that with "people don't like to accept a wage that is lower than they feel they can get".
I know some people that are deliberately keeping their income frozen at 15k so they won't get
...I sometimes think about seeking funding outside of EA to increase the amount of available EA funding.
But I never made serious work of it. I have no idea what is available, or where to look. Governments? Foundations? With which ones does an Xrisk project have a chance? What's a good strategy for applying to them?
I'd be very happy if someone dived into this.
You forgot ibogaine, which seems to be the most compelling example. According to lots of anecdotes across the internet, it reliably cures decades old addictions to heroin in a single sitting.
Still I don't think psychedelic use is necessarily a good thing. It makes people more open to experience, which for some will be a door to madness. See for example Scott Alexander's writings about it
You forgot ibogaine, which seems to be the most compelling example.
Psilocybin has also been very promising for treating addictions, including longstanding tobacco addiction (Johnson et al. 2017) and alcoholism (Bogenschutz et al. 2015).
It makes people more open to experience, which for some will be a door to madness.
Definitely agree that psychedelic use isn't for everyone.
Note, however, that the Openness result didn't replicate. Here's more detail on one failure to replicate: https://www.enthea.net/griffiths-2017-2.html
(More research needed, as always.)
Another consideration comes to mind: climate change is currently taking up a large amount of attention from competent altruistic people. If the issue were to be solved or its urgency reduced, some of those resources might flow into EA causes.
fwiw, I personally give it >75% probability that we will be able to survive at least until next round
The hotel did apply.
The marginal per-EA cost of supplying runway is probably lower with shared overhead and low COL like that.
It's about $7500 per person per year
As a potential grant recipient (not in this round) I might be biased, but I feel like there is a clear answer to this. No one is able to level up without criticism, and the quality of your decisions will often be bottlenecked by the amount of feedback you receive.
Negative feedback isn't inherently painful. This is only true if there is an alief that failure is not acceptable. Of course the truth is that failure is necessary for progress, and if you truly understand this, negative feedback feels good. Even if it's in bad faith.
Given that grantmakers are ess
...I think on a post with 100+ comments the quality of decisions is more likely to be bottlenecked by the quality of feedback than the quantity. Being able to explain why you think something is a bad idea usually results in higher quality feedback, which I think will result in better decisions than just getting a lot of quick intuition-based feedback.
For this specific post, I probably won't add a summary because my guess is that in this specific case the size of the beneficial effect doesn't justify the cost.
I still think you should write it. This looks like an important bit of information, but not worth the read, and I estimate a summary would increase the amount of readers fivefold.
To be clear, I'm quite glad you attempted the model and I agree there's no need to apologize for it.
I'd like to push back slightly against the notion of "apologizing" for writing something that others found hard to understand. The EA Forum should be a place to try out different kinds of content, and even if some experiments don't work out, it's generally good that experiments happen.
(That said, if you're feeling apologetic, there's also no problem with apologizing! I just want others who see this to know that it's okay when a post doesn't work out.)
I imagine EA's getting into all sorts of fields and industries while staying in the community, and this seems so valuable that it makes me second-guess the hotel.
People don't stay in the community because, if you're not involved professionally, there's not much left to gain. We should change that.
I think part of why Y Combinator is so successful is because funding so many startups has allowed them to build a big dataset for what factors do & don't predict success. Maybe this could become part of the EA Hotel's mission as well.
Good idea. It will be somewhat tricky since we don't have the luxury of measuring success in monetary terms, but we should certainly brainstorm about this at some point.
Thank you.
With the hotel, I see a bunch of little hints that it's not worth my time to attempt an in-depth evaluation of the hotel's leaders. E.g. the focus on low rent, which seems like a popular meme among average and below average EAs in the bay area, yet the EAs whose judgment I most respect act as if rent is a relatively small issue.
Your posts suggests that there is some class of EA's that is a lot more competent than everyone else, which means that what everyone else is doing doesn't matter all that much. While I haven't met ...
I have burned out slightly, but this has happened every 6 months or so for the past 5 years, so it's probably not caused by the hotel.
At the very least, I agree that one coherent thread is more healthy and something to strive for, but in choosing a thread you might want to be aware of the various stakeholders and their incentives. I find that counting myself and my needs into my moral framework makes my moral framework more robust.
I'd argue that humans would actually be better understood as an aggregate of agents, each with their own utility function. In your case, these agents might cooperate so well that your internal experience is that you're just one agent, but that's certainly not a human universal.
I would rather not. This would pressure people into goodharting their projects for legibility, which is one of the things our setup is supposed to prevent.
(tldr: an agent is legible if a principal can easily monitor them, but it limits their options to what is easy for the principal to measure, which might reduce performance)
Quite a few of our guests are not even on this list, but this doesn't mean they're sitting around doing nothing all day. They're doing illegible work that is hard or even impossible to evaluate at a distance. I put a few...
I realise that I've been implicitly assuming this is true, which made me resist optimizing for impressions. Doing that I could no longer convince myself that I was acting altruistically. The awful and hard to accept reality is that you sometimes do have to convince people in order for your work to be supported.
1. Does RAISE/the Hotel have a standardized way to measure the progress of people self-studying AI? If so, especially if it's been vetted by AI risk organizations, it seems like that would go a long ways towards resolving this issue.
Not yet, but it's certainly a project that is on our radar. We also want to find ways to measure innate talent, so that people can tell earlier whether AIS research would be a good fit for them.
I do think it affects their behavior, I just refuse to let it affect mine more than is strictly necessary, because I think it's a negative sum game.
As a not-student with self-funding who is looking for things to try, is this board also for me?