All of Grayden 🔸's Comments + Replies

I’m not commenting on this change specifically, but as someone who is a long-term EA but not working in EA full-time, I find there are way too many name changes in EA. Name changes are hugely expensive (both in terms of costs, lost brand equity and confusion among ‘customers’) so should not be taken lightly.

I agree except that suitability is only part of the equation. Luck plays a very important role.

I agree and wrote about it here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nnf2GsSq9fhdRCvZj/keynesian-altruism

You narrative talks about the movement switching from earn to give to career-focused. I think that has huge survivorship bias in it. There are now many GWWC pledgers who would not call themselves EA. As the movement became bigger, the career-focused side began to dominate discourse because there’s a lot more to say if you are career-focused and trying to coordinate things rather than if you are head down earning money.

This article has a lot of downvoting (net karma of 39 from 28 votes and 3 disagree votes). Could some of the people who downvoted or disagreed explain their rationale?

You could try putting cash into a separate savings account earmarked for donation. When you are happy that you don’t need it, donate it. (But maybe over a few years for tax efficiency)

Interest rates are much higher, which is partially offset by inflation (it’s real not nominal that matters) but not entirely. Today, US Treasuries have a +1.79% yield over 5 years in real terms, so higher than the -1.28% I mention in the article but still within the long-term range of -1% to +2% that I mention in the article. Importantly, that’s still below real GDP growth expectations, so over time the amount you can buy as a proportion of global wealth declines.

I think all the points still stand albeit the numbers in the example look dated now! Anything you think should be changed?

Surely it’s not a case of either-or. EA exists because we all found that existing charity was not up to scratch, hence we do want EA to take different approaches. However, I think it’s important to also have people from outside EA (but with good value alignment) to provide diversity of thought and make sure there are no blindspots.

Doesn’t CEA know any?

Do you get 1 karma just for posting this comment? 😂

Estonia doesn’t surprise me. It’s very tech-heavy and EA skews heavily to tech people

What were the conditions of the grant? What follow-up was there after the grant was made? Was there a staged payment schedule based on intermediate outputs? If this grant went to a for-profit and no output was produced, can the money be clawed back?

Thanks for the great analysis!

The lack of interest in GHD by the Leaders Forum is often communicated as if GHD should be deprioritised, but I think a fair amount of causation goes the other way. Historically, people promoting GHD have not been invited to the Leaders Forum.

I think it’s similar with engagement. Highly engaged EAs are less likely to support GHD, but that ignores the fact that engagement is defined primarily based on direct work not E2G or careers outside EA, hence people interested in GHD are naturally classified as less engaged even if they are just as committed.

Sure, the claim hides a lot of uncertainties. At a high level the article says “A implies X, Y and Z”, but you can’t possibly derive all of that information from the single number A. Really what’s the article should say is “X, Y and Z are consistent with the value of A”, which is a very different claim.

i don’t specifically disagree with X, Y and Z.

I do think you should hedge more given the tower of assumptions underneath.

The title of the post is simultaneously very confident ("the market implies" and "but not more"), but also somewhat imprecise ("trillions" and "value"). It was not clear to me that the point you were trying to make was that the number was high.

Your use of "but not more" implies you were also trying to assert the point that it was not that high, but I agree with your point above that the market could be even bigger. If you believe it could be much bigger, that seems inconsistent with... (read more)

Your claim is very strong that “the market implies X”, when I think what you mean is that “the share price is consistent with X”.

There are a lot of assumptions stacked up:

• The share price represents the point at which the marginal buyer and marginal seller transact. If you assume both are rational and fundamental, then this represents the NPV of future cash flows for the marginal buyer / seller. Note this is not the same as the median / mean expectation.
• You can use some other market expectations for discount rates etc. to translate that into some possible f

You cannot derive revenue, or the shape of revenue growth, from a stock price. I think what you mean is consensus forecasts that support the current share price. The title of the article is provably incorrect.

Thanks for sharing. It’s a start, but it’s certainly not a proven Theory of Change. For example, Tetlock himself said that nebulous long-term forecasts are hard to do because there’s no feedback loop. Hence, a prediction market on an existential risk will be inherently flawed.

Preventing catastrophic risks, improving global health and improving animal welfare are goals in themselves. At best, forecasting is a meta topic that supports other goals

Thanks for sharing, but nobody on that thread seems to be able to explain it! Most people there, like here, seem very sceptical

You might be right but just to add a datapoint: I was featured in an article in 2016. I don’t regret it but I was careful about (1) the journalist and (2) what I said on the record.

I think forecasting is attractive to many people in EA like myself because EA skews towards curious people from STEM backgrounds who like games. However, I’m yet to see a robust case for it being an effective use of charitable funds (if there is, please point me to it). I’m worried we are not being objective enough and trying to find the facts that support the conclusion rather than the other way round.

Insolvency happens on an entity by entity level. I don’t know which FTX entity gave money to EA orgs (if anyone knows, please say), and whether it went first via the founders personally. I would have thought it’s possible that FTX full repays its creditors, so there is value in the shares, but then FTX’s investors go after the founders personally and they are declared bankrupt.

I’m hugely in favour of principles first as I think it builds a more healthy community. However, my concern is that if you try too hard to be cause neutral, you end up artificially constrained. For example, Global Heath and Wellbeing is often a good introduction point to the concept of effectiveness. Then once people are focused on maximisation, it’s easier to introduce Animal Welfare and X-Risk.

When you are a start-up non-profit, it can be hard to find competent people outside your social circle, which is why I created the EA Good Governance Project to make life easier for people.

I think it's important:

1. To put in place good practices (e.g. board meeting without the CEO regularly) BEFORE they are needed.
2. For FUNDERS to ask questions about effective governance and bear responsibility when they get it wrong.

My two cents:

• Most governments heavily subsidise R&D (which is equivalent to a deliberate negative externality), often through tax credits
• The patent system allows companies to extract abnormal profits for 20 years and incentivise a race (even if somebody independently develops the technology, they can’t use it if somebody else has patented it). This system is a deliberate inefficient market
• Corporate R&D tends to be much more short-term and customer-focused. If you come from an academic background, you will be shocked by what is counted as R&

Funding to EA orgs has roughly halved in the last year, so a recession would barely be noticed! More broadly, the point you make is valid. One of the reasons I’ve stayed earning to give is that I’ve never been confident in the stability of EA funding over my future career.

“Donating a kidney results in an over 1300% increase in the risk of kidney disease. A risk-averse interpretation of the data puts the increase in year-to-year mortality after donation upwards of 240%.”
Could you provide these in absolute terms as relative terms are pretty meaningless and rhetoric

Great article. Very concise, clear and actionable!

You raise some good points, so I have removed that point from the main article.

Each one of us only has a single perspective and it’s human nature to assume other people have similar perspectives. EA is a bubble and there are certainly bubbles within the bubble, e.g. I understand Bay Area is very AI focused while London is more plural.

Articles like this that attempt to replace one person’s perspective with hard data are really useful. Thank you.

At EA for Christians, we often interact with people who are altruistic and focused on impact but do not want to associate with EA because of its perceived anti-religion ethos.

On the flip side, since becoming involved with EA for Christians, a number of people have told me they are Christian but keep it quiet for fear it will damage their career prospects.

We should all try to maximise our impact and there’s a good argument for specialisation.

However, I’m concerned by a few things:

• Its not obvious to me that spending more money on yourself will make you better at your job
• There’s a danger of arrogance clouding our judgment, e.g. I don’t think 99% of people in EA should be flying business class
• Donating has value for many people due to the “skin in the game” effect

I appreciate this comment

Highly engaged EAs were much more likely to select research (25.0% vs 15.1%) and much less likely to select earning to give (5.7% vs 15.7%)

are you sure this isn’t just a function of the definition of highly engaged?

Yes! A rather important typo! I’ve now fixed

The Parable of the Good Samaritan seems to lean towards impartiality. Although the injured man was laying in front of the Samaritan (geographic proximity), the Samaritan was considered a foreigner / enemy (no proximity of relationship).

Did the EV US Board consider running an open recruitment process and inviting applications from people outside of their immediate circle? If so, why did it decide against?

Thanks, Ben. This is a really thoughtful post.

I wondered if you had any update on the blurring between EA and longtermism. I‘ve seen a lot of criticism of EA that is really just low quality criticism of longtermism because the conclusions can be weird.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.

For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations:  “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff a... (read more)

I also found these charts a little confusing. A single value for each or a clustered column chart might be clearer

Two quick points:

1. Yes, legal control is the first consideration, but governance requires skill not just value-alignment
2. I think in 2023 the skills you want largely exist within the community; it’s just that (a) people can’t find them easily (hence I founded the EA Good Governance Project) and (b) people need to be willing to appoint outside their clique

Thanks, Ben. I agree with what you are saying. However, I think that on a practical level, what you are arguing for is not what happens. EA boards tend to be filled with people who work full-time in EA roles, not by fully-aligned talent individuals from the private sector (e.g. lawyers, corporate managers) who might be earning to give having followed 80k’s advice 10 years ago

Thanks for this! You might be right about the non-profit vs. for-profit distinction in 'operations' and your point about the COO being 'Operating' rather than 'Operations' is a good one.

Re avoiding managers doing paperwork, I agree with that way of putting it. However, I think EA needs to recognise that management is an entirely different skill. The best researcher at a research organization should definitely not have to handle lots of paperwork, but I'd argue they probably shouldn't be the manager in the first place! Management is a very different skillset that involves people management, financial planning, etc. that are often skills pushed on operations teams by people who shouldn't be managers.

Most organizations do not divide tasks between core and non-core. The ones that do (and are probably most similar to a lot of EA orgs) are professional services ones

Administration definitely sounds less appealing, but maybe it would be more honest and reduce churn?

I don’t work in ops or within an EA org, but my observation from the outside is that the way EA does ops is very weird. Note these are my impressions from the outside so may not be reflective of the truth:

• The term “Operations” is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean “everything back office that the CEO doesn’t care about as long as it’s done. Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
• EA takes highly talented peopl

There are some very competent leaders within EA so I don’t think we should make sweeping assumptions. I think we need to make EA a meritocracy