All of Kerry_Vaughan's Comments + Replies

It's a fair point that we should treat Alice and Chloe separately and that deanonymizing one need not imply that we should deanonymize the other.

While there are several stylistic things one might disagree with in the post, to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases.

Thanks for writing such an exhaustive post; it can't have been easy.

Yes

It was a short timeline. I don't remember exactly but we told senior leadership and the board quite soon after we decided to start dating.

No, we didn't do anything wrong. Like I said, we followed the policy.

People were upset that we were dating but not because there was some coverup or anything. Some folks had strategic disagreements with me and us dating made that a larger problem.

I think the disagreement here is that we followed the CEA policy and were told explicitly and in writing at the time by the board that our dating had nothing to do with their decision. That doesn't mean staff weren't upset.

My read is that Bostrom had reason to believe that the email would come out either way, and then he elected to get out in front of the probable blowback.

As evidence, here is Émile Torres indicating that they were planning to write something about the email.

That said, it's not entirely clear whether Bostrom knew the email specifically was going to be written about or knew that someone was poking around in the extropian mailing list and then guessed that the email would come out as a result. 

In any case, I think it's unlikely that he posted his apology for the email unprovoked. 

I think CEA has been relatively clear over the past few years that it is not the leader of the EA community. My impression is that they see themselves as downstream of the community's intellectual leaders and the will of the community, broadly construed.

The claim on Twitter is different.

Can you clarify what you think is unfair? Happy to issue a correction.

https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1591508739236188160?t=qL-dGKXar3b7EQ4EHs597Q&s=19

Edit: if anyone else wants to take a stab at explaining why the Twitter thread is unfair given this thread feel free. Would want to issue a correction sooner rather than later.

Will:

One item that should be a part of your reflections in the days and months to come is whether you are fit to be the public face of the effective altruism movement, given your knowledge of Sam's unethical behavior in the past, ties to him going back to 2013, and your history of vouching for Ben Delo, another disgraced crypto billionaire.

The EA community has many excellent people - including many highly capable women - who are uninvolved in this scandal and could step up to serve in this capacity.

I have recently spoken to someone involved who told me that SBF was not just cavalier, but unethical and violated commonsense ethical norms.

Are you in a position to be more specific about what SBF did that this is referring to?

I consider this credible.

It suggests that my categorization of "EA leadership" was probably too broad and that fewer people knew the details of the situation than I believed.

That means there is a question of how many people knew. I am confident that Nick Beckstead and Will MacAskill knew about the broken agreement and other problems at Alameda. I am confident they are not the only ones that knew.

He's now the program manager at a known cult that the EA movement has actively distanced itself from.

If you'd like to investigate whether Leverage was a cult, there are now several additional sources of information available.

 One source is Cathleen's post which is detailed, extensive, and written directly by a former employee. A board member conducted their own investigation into what Leverage could have done better between 2012 and 2019 by conducting interviews with former members of Leverage staff. 

You can also view Leverage's website to learn ... (read more)

I want to clarify the claims I'm making in the Twitter thread.

I am not claiming that EA leadership or members of the FTX Future fund knew Sam was engaging in fraudulent behavior while they were working at FTX Future Fund.

Instead, I am saying that friends of mine in the EA community worked at Alameda Research during the first 6 months of its existence. At the end of that period, many of them suddenly left all at once. In talking about this with people involved, my impression is:

1) The majority of staff at Alameda were unhappy with Sam's leadership of the co... (read more)

It's worth noting that in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, victims were compensated largely by clawing back money previously withdrawn by people with no knowledge that Madoff was operating a Ponzi.

Hopefully, someone with more legal knowledge about this situation can comment, but given that fact, I wouldn't consider clawbacks out of the question.

Hi Ben,

Could you explain what's not practical about these simple steps that you could take:

1) Create an EA Forum policy against sockpuppeting, and apply it retroactively to this case. This might naturally result in deleting the offending posts or adding a notification indicating they are sockpuppets.

2) Remove the encoded names and replace them with numbers per the edit your team made originally.

3) Change the word "doxing" to "deanonymizing" in the following sentence from the Guide to Norms (since the behavior you intend to prohibit is not doxing):

Doxing —

The obvious thing to do in that case is to disclose this in a comment somewhere.

Also, this defense doesn't work for his efforts to promote his own anonymous posts from his public account.

I disagree with that interpretation especially given the context of Cathleen’s post. It includes lengthy discussions of poor and bizarre behavior by members of the EA community toward Leverage/Paradigm staff.

I think reading Cathleen’s post and then re-adding her name is either an intentional violation of her wishes or, at a minimum, shows a reckless disregard for her request for privacy.

In any case, I don’t think this issue is central. The original comment already was doxing given the context, which includes the “question” to which it was a reply, the post... (read more)

Hi Ben,

Another question I wanted to ask is whether the EA Forum has rules against creating sock puppet accounts. This is defined as follows:

Wikipedia: “Online, it came to be used to refer to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person.”

Urban dictionary: “A false identity adopted by trolls and other malcontents to support their own postings.”

I ask because it appears to me that the poster acted deceptively in managing their multiple anonymous accounts by (1) using a se... (read more)

If you list your organizational affiliation on LinkedIn (and if you are indeed correct that Paradigm Academy was not trying to be a cover for Leverage Research that shielded it from public scrutiny), then I don't think you get to complain when someone quickly googles you and finds your LinkedIn profile.

First, as I noted in my response to Ben, some of the information included in the doxing was from the poster's personal knowledge and not from the people's LinkedIn profiles. Thus, you can't defend the doxing by saying that the information was publicly ... (read more)

The degree to which public presentation is likely to strengthen your feedback loops seems to depend quite a lot on the state of the field that you are investigating. In highly functional fields like those found in modern physics, it seems quite likely to be helpful. In less functional fields or those with fewer relevant researchers, this seems less helpful.

To my mind, one strong consideration in favor of publicly presenting your research if you're working in a less functional field is that even if you're right, causing future researchers to build on your w... (read more)

That said, I just want to point out that (at least as far as I understand it), there is a significant collection of people within and around EA who think that Leverage is a uniquely awful organization which suffered a multilevel failure extremely reminiscent of your run-of-the mill cult (not just for those who left it, but also for many people who are still in it), which soft-core threatens members to avoid negative publicity, exerts psychological control on members in ways that seem scary and evil. This is context that I think some people reading the ster

Instead I would specifically look at its output and approach to external engagement: if they're not publishing research I would take that as a strong negative signal for the project. Likewise, in participating in a research project I would want to ensure that we were writing publicly and opening our work to engaged and critical feedback.

I'm curious about why your conclusion is about the importance of public engagement instead of about the importance (and difficulty) of setting up good feedback loops for research.

It seems to me that it is possible to hav... (read more)

I wanted to add a brief comment about EA Ventures.

I think this piece does a fair job of presenting the relevant facts about the project and why it did not ultimately succeed. However, the tone of the piece seems to suggest that something untoward was happening with the project in a way that seems quite unfair to me.

For example, you say:

Personally, I (and others) suspect the main reason EAV failed is that it did not actually have committed funding in place.

That this was a big part of the issue with the project is correct, but also, the lack of committed... (read more)

This post is great and I really admire you for posting it.

Very enlightening and useful post for understanding not only life sciences, but other areas of science funding as well.

One of the most straightforward and useful introductions to MIRIs work that I've read.

This post highlighted an important problem that would have taken much longer to address otherwise. I would point to this post as an example of how to hold powerful people accountable in a way that is fair and reasonable.

(Disclosure: I worked for CEA when this post was published)

I've read some of the work from the historical case studies project and it seems like a project that has the potential to be extremely useful for anyone interested in movement building. I did a comparatively shallow dive into the Neoliberal movement a while ago and found it very useful for my own thinking about movement building and this project seems like it is of substantially better quality. 

In fact, I'm surprised no one started a project of reviewing historical movement-building cases until now.

If I imagine being someone who is new-ish to EA, who wants to do good in the world and is considering making donations my plan for impact, I imagine that I really have two questions here:

1. Is donating an effective way to do good in the world given the amount of money committed to EA causes?
2. Will other people in the EA community like and respect me if I focus on donating money?

I think question 2) understandably matters to people, but it's a bit uncouth to say it out loud (which is why I'm trying to state it explicitly).

In the earliest days of EA, the answ... (read more)

I think I still don't quite get why this seems implausible. (For what it's worth, I think your view is pretty mainstream, so I'm asking about it more to understand how people are thinking about AI and not as any kind of criticism of the post or the parenthetical.)

It seems clear to me that an AI weapon could exist. AI systems designed to autonomously identify and destroy targets seem like a particularly clear example. A ban which distinguishes that technology from nearby civilian technology doesn't seem much more difficult than distinguishing biological wea... (read more)

This isn't central to the post, but I'm interested in this parenthetical:

(To clarify - the BWC is an arms control treaty that prohibits bioweapons; it is unlikely that we’ll see anything similar with AI (i.e. a complete ban of any “AI weapons”, whatever this means.)

At first glance, a ban on AI weapons research or AI research with military uses seems pretty plausible to me. For example, one could ban research on lethal autonomous weapons systems and research devoted to creating an AGI without banning, e.g., the use of machine learning for image classification or text generation.

Can you say more about why this seems implausible from your point of view?

I think the consensus around impact certificates was that they seemed like a good idea and yet the idea never really took off.

In the world where changes to the survey explain the drop, I'd expect to see a similar number of people click through to the survey (especially in 2019) but a lower completion rate. Do you happen to have data on the completion rate by year?

If the number of people visiting the survey has dropped, then that seems consistent with the hypothesis that the drop is explained by the movement shrinking unless the increased time cost of completing the survey was made very clear upfront in 2019 and 2020.

From context, that appears to be an incomplete list of metrics selected as positive counterexamples. I assumed there are others as well.

You probably already agree with this, but I think lower survey participation should make you think it's more likely that the effective altruism community is shrinking than you did before seeing that evidence.

If you as an individual or CEA as an institution have any metrics you track to determine whether effective altruism is growing or shrinking, I'd find it interesting to know more about what they are.

I am well aware of the general reticence about mass media and the preference for a high fidelity model of spreading the ideas of effective altruism. However, I think that (1) the misrepresentation risks are less acute in the narrower effective-giving space and (2) some coverage —even if it is a bit off-target— can often be better than no coverage when you are launching a new organization.

I want to express some general support for being less concerned about fidelity when spreading ideas like effective giving.

Something that I didn't discuss in the article... (read more)

I work at Leverage Research as the Program Manager for our Early Stage Science research.

So I’m curious if intellectual progress which is dependent on physical tools is really that much different. I’d naively expect your results to translate to math as well.

This is an interesting point, and it's useful to know that your experience indicates there might be a similar phenomenon in math.

My initial reaction is that I wouldn’t expect models of early stage science to straightforwardly apply to mathematics because observations are central to scientific inquiry and don’t appear to have a straightforward analogue in the mathematical case (observatio

Hi edoarad,

Some off the bat skepticism. It seems a priori that the research on early stage science is motivated by early stage research directions and tools in Psychology. I'm wary of motivated reasoning when coming to conclusions regarding the resulting models in early stage, especially as it seems to me that this kind of research (like historical research) is very malleable and can be inadvertently argued to almost any conclusions one is initially inclined to.

What's your take on it?

Thanks for the question. This seems like the right kind of thing t

Hey Milan,

I'm Kerry and I'm the program manager for our early stage science research.

We've already been engaging with some of the progress studies folks (we've attended some of their meetups and members of our team know some of the people involved). I haven't talked to any of the folks working on metascience since taking on this position, but I used to work at the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures) who are funders in the space, so I know a bit about the area. Plus, some of our initial research has involved gaining some familiarity with the academic re