All of Kirsten's Comments + Replies
This is entirely consistent with two other applications I know of from 2023, both of which were funded but experienced severe delays and poor/absent/straightforwardly unprofessional communication
Yes, this is consistent with my experience too. Bad calibration of expected timelines, unresponsiveness to (two) emails asking for updates or if they needed anything (over one month), and something I would also qualify as somewhat disrespectful: they asked for additional information that was already available in the initial application.
For me it means that they probably didn't read through completely before asking for more, besides the application being less than a dozen sentences long, one of them being "here are the relevant links" which contained all th...
I had a similar experience with 4 months of wait (uncalibrated grant decision timelines on the website) and unresponsiveness to email with LTFF, and I know a couple of people who had similar problems. I also found it pretty "disrespectful".
Its hard to understand why a) they wouldn't list the empirical grant timelines on their website, and b) why they would have to be so long.
If I'm truly stuck on a task - no matter how hard I try, my focus always slides off of it - I set a timer for 10 minutes. During those 10 minutes I give myself free licence to either work on that one task, or just sit in my chair. I often spend a few minutes noticing a variety of feelings. Eventually I often hit a thought like, "Well, I wish I could make progress on this, but I don't really even know what to do. How would I even start?" or "I want to do so much more but I'm just exhausted; I'm at my limit" or "I'm not sure this task is even that useful." That is generally the thought that gets me unstuck.
Okay, sorry for misreading, the poll makes much more sense now! I've edited the first part of my comment at it doesn't make much sense
As a government employee, I have a duty to speak candidly internally and not to share restricted information externally. I suspect most organisations have weaker but similar norms about the difference between how you speak to colleagues and externals.
My first question would be: is the particular suicide hotline you're looking at currently turning people away/making people wait a long time because of lack of volunteers? If so, every extra person could be very valuable.
If not, you might be replacing a less skilled volunteer. The question then becomes, how often would you save a life when they wouldn't? That's a hard question and it's not easy for me to know the answer, but it's probably not every night. Lots of people call a hotline with their mind already made up one way or the other.
What’s more, in areas that use primarily observational data there’s a really big gap between fields in how often papers even try to use causal inference methods and how hard they work to show that their identifying assumptions hold.
Just highlighting this paragraph because I think it's extremely important. As a policymaker, the vast majority of research I see from think tanks etc include poorly justified assumptions. It's become one of the first things I look for now, in part because it's an easy prompt for me to spot a wide range of issues.
Thanks for sharing your story, and for your family's sacrifice for the sake of those who need it most
You're right about the effort involved, but when these are real people who you are discussing deanonymizing in order to try to stop them from getting jobs, you should make the effort.
Well all three key figures at Nonlinear are also real people, and they got deanonymized by Ben Pace's highly critical post, which had the likely effect (unless challenged) of stopping Nonlinear from doing its work, and of stigmatizing its leaders.
So, I don't understand the double standard, where those subject to false allegations don't enjoy anonymity, and those making the false allegations do get to enjoy anonymity.
I raised some awkward questions, without offering any answers, conclusions, or recommendations.
I don't feel like you raised discussion with no preference for what the community decided. When I gave my answer, which many people seem to agree with, your response was to question whether that's REALLY what the EA community wants. I think it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that you're just asking a question when you clearly have a preference for how people answer!
Whistleblower anonymity should remain protected in the vast majority of situations, including this one, imo
Whistleblower protection is necessary when Abe provides evidence that Bill harmed Cindy; otherwise, Abe lacks incentive to help Cindy. It is less important when Abe defends himself against harm caused by Bill.
How would you define the set of circumstances that are not in the "vast majority"? My initial reaction is vaguely along the lines of: lack of good faith + clear falsity of at least the main thrust of the accusation + lack of substantial mistreatment of the psuedonymous person by their target. But how does one judge the good faith of a psuedonym?
Even if the whistleblowers seem to be making serial false allegations against former employers?
Does EA really want to be a community where people can make false allegations with total impunity and no accountability?
Doesn't that incentivize false allegations?
Before Ben's post, I had heard some good things and many bad things about Nonlinear, to the point that I was trying to figure out who their board members were in case I needed to raise concerns about one or both of the co-founders (I failed to figure it out because they weren't a registered charity and didn't have their board members listed on their website either).
Can I suggest you make this a new top-level post and link to it here? It sounds like you've been thinking about it a lot, and I think continued discussion would probably be better in its own post rather than here (although your original comment makes sense here for sure!)
Yes, I meant some combination of this + this was not a good place to publish that allegation, which again imo harms the accuser if it's true. No worries at all Joel!
Yes, that's what I mean. If a friend of mine confided in me about something really bad that had happened to her, I wouldn't want to publish it 2/3 of the way down a post about my own drama, even if she said it was okay - and especially wouldn't then tell people not to believe her. But obviously I wasn't sitting in on the conversation and there might be important context I'm missing. It just seems really wrong to me.
Does it matter that she wanted me to share this? Are you going to say that she shouldn't be allowed to do it because you wouldn't want to do it?
Sorry that was an error! I didn't know how else to see who had found it helpful on mobile, but I meant to untap it after I had checked
"she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized ... She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her."
And then you publish it for the first time telling everyone not to believe her???
If what you describe is actually what she told you, how dare you use it for your own gain here? What a cruel and bizarre thing to do
While it's generally poor form to attempt to de-anonymize stories, since it's at issue here it seems potentially worth it. It seems like this could be Kat's description of Kat's experience of Ben, which she (clearly) consents to sharing.
Isn't the implication that the (EDIT: alleged) victim gave consent for Kat to share anonymously?
She asked me to share this and is grateful I did.
I think you might have misunderstood what I was trying to convey. I wasn't telling people not to believe her. I was telling people that if they heard the full story, there would be debate about whether what happened to her was bad/as bad as she made it out to be.
I for one think that what happened to her was very bad. But I predict ~50% of EAs would disagree.
If we're thinking of it as "ideally I'd like 75% of the money to go here, 20% here, etc" we could just give people 100 votes each and give money to the top 3?
That makes sense to me, and matches with what I see in the post. I find the title a little surprising/misleading compared to what you've said here
I totally agree that cash transfers are an incredible way to transform people's lives! What kind of evidence do we have about cash transfers being able to "end extreme poverty"? I always thought they helped improve people's lives for a few years.
I wrote about every mention, but some were summaries rather than direct copies and pastes, which I thought was straightforward for readers.
For example when I say, "He devotes several pages to talking about Peter Singer, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill, and the early version of 80,000 Hours Will was promoting on his visit to Harvard", I mean there were many mentions of effective altruism on those pages!
I also include sections of the book that talk about effective altruism without using that exact phrase.
I don't think there are any I didn't either quote or summarise, but I only read it once, so I could have missed some
I didn't really understand that SBF quote to be honest! What was he referring to - the conflict he caused?
I see it most often in online spaces, like the comments of a forum or Facebook post, but I've seen it happen irl as well (for example, some women are discussing negative experiences related to being a woman and a man starts discussing another related topic before they've finished)
I've seen a lot of claims that "x distracts from y" come up as a request to stay on topic. Sometimes a group of people will be having a conversation about something (let's say AI ethics) and someone else will show up and start talking about something different (let's say AI safety). If they make a habit of this, it can make it really difficult to make any progress in your conversation (about AI ethics), and you might reasonably ask peoples to stop changing the subject
I appreciate you doing this Ben. I had some very vague concerns, as did several acquaintances I spoke to over the last couple years. My default move would be to share concerns with a charity's trustees, so I tried to look up Nonlinear's in case I or someone else would need to contact them, but I found out they weren't registered as a charity and I didn't have any other way of finding out if there was anyone overseeing Kat and Emerson in any meaningful sense.
I do think that the majority of EA organisations have either a non-profit or for-profit board, or ar...
I'd love to hear novelist and YouTuber John Green talk about how he decided to start fundraising for Partners in Health's maternity hospital, his campaign to reduce the cost of TB vaccines and tests, and his thoughts on EA
Oh wow, I have so many!
-I eat meat, because animal welfare isn't a top priority for me, although I very much support better lives for farm animals
-I spend money on a bunch of things that other people might not prioritise. I have separate donation and spending money budgets, and my spending money budget is relatively liberal (eg my husband and baby son and I live in a 3 bedroom house in London)
-I'm a big fan of bureaucracy and following the rules, way more than the average EA
For me, this is a substantive post. Nonlinear do a lot of "meta" EA work so their business practices and future matter to me
It was not remotely enough time to actually rebut all of the false claims and we told him so. We assumed that would be the first of many calls - it would take at least a week to clear things up - and then he just surprised us by posting.
Did he interview them about the specific claims he was making, and give them the opportunity to present counter-evidence? That's the issue.
A generic interview, without the Nonlinear people knowing the details of his allegations, isn't relevant, and doesn't count as 'fact-checking'. (If that's what he did)
My positive experience seems very different from what is reported here.
Are you implying that you don't believe what's reported here, because it's very different, or something else?
No one is stopping Nonlinear from presenting any arguments. It's a standard Forum norm that people can post at any time - there's never been any requirement to give an organisation extra time to prepare. It can be courteous.
I can imagine a first step would be it being offered as an option to mothers. Many late term abortions happen with wanted babies after a serious diagnosis.
However this post doesn't seem to talk about the main drug used for late abortions in the UK? So I'm sceptical. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng140/chapter/Recommendations#medical-abortion-after-236-weeks