I'd recommend asking these questions to your favourite AI or to the facilitators, my understanding is that course facilitators don't use this forum for various reasons, and all of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are great at answering these questions. E.g. here's ChatGPT:
I think you’ve identified a real jump in context, rather than missed some prerequisite reading!
This was originally a post on LessWrong.com, an online community focused on reasoning and decision-making. It does two things: first, illustrates how cognitive biases can feel like reasonable thinking from the inside; second, argues that these concrete illustrations are a better way to teach people about biases than abstract definitions. That second part addresses the original community’s communication habits, which explains the references to “LessWrongians” and makes it feel like a tangent here.
The connection to effective altruism is that trying to help effectively requires assessing our own judgments critically. For example, “I’ve carefully researched this charity and everything supports donating to it” might reflect good research—or selectively seeking favourable evidence. The tables are meant to help us notice that possibility, much as the scout mindset encourages us to examine beliefs we’re attached to. They aren’t proof that any particular belief is biased.
So your interpretation seems right: the main takeaway for this chapter is awareness of cognitive biases. The discussion of communication explains why the author presented them this way. An introductory note distinguishing those two purposes would make its inclusion much clearer.
it seems like cash transfers that improve annual income by 10-30% in the USA have pretty much no effect on wellbeing. Weird. Not sure why yet.
I don't think it's that weird with the above values of η, considering that even in low income countries the effects of cash are significant but not immense, see this previous thread
we fail to appreciate why everyone is so mad at us.
I really don't think FTX is the main reason why everyone is so mad at you (read e.g. The Economist article mentioned, or search for "effective altruism" online), I think this should be taken as an opportunity to clarify other common misconceptions, instead of taking even more blame for being associated with some of the organizations that praised SBF for donating a lot of money to charity or advised him on how to donate it
I'm sad to see that it's now practically unusuable for many (EA) charities and donors.
I don't think this is true for that many. As far as I can see most EA charities and donors privately declined to participate in this pressure campaign against Manifund (and because of that you don't see them posting here), and the ~6 that did participate as far as I know are not funding constrained (edit: and/or have easier ways of receiving donations without the 5% fee), so wouldn't have had much use for Manifund in the first place.
On object-level concerns: Several comments have indeed stated such concerns. I also think that orgs with poor judgement in one area often exhibit poor judgement in other areas, particularly in smaller orgs. It seems reasonable to be concerned that someone who thought it was a good idea to hire someone recently released from prison for financial crimes for a financial/philanthropy role might also not have the foresight to establish safeguards/controls.
This would be a reasonable concern to have, but I think people are not worried about object-level issues because there is no effort to figure out empirical answers to object-level questions. If people were concerned about financial safeguards/controls, they would ask what systems are in place at Manifund, what Ellison is actually responsible and not responsible for, if there is an independent board and what oversight does the board have on their finances and operations, and so on.
I would expect people with object-level concerns to be at least curious about some easily verifiable object-level things.
On the value of reputation: I argued why I believe reputation matters in a previous comment.
Your other comment linked to https://whatweare.substack.com/p/no-one-is-going-to-save-the-ea-brand . The claims in those posts (consistently with other posts from its author) are more in the direction of replacing CEA's leadership than anything about Ellison. A more PR-obsessed movement would either have prevented her from posting these things by forcing a confidentiality/non-disparagement clause in their settlement, or have cancelled CEA leadership several times for various reasons in the past few years. I think both options would have been worse than the status quo.
I would love to live in a world where people looked through and carefully weighed the evidence before drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, that's not how most people outside of EA operate.
I would love for at least people in EA to operate this way, and to me it seems that EAs are not acting this way in this case
I agree that most people draw conclusions on vibes, but I disagree that Ellison moving from a finance executive to a non-executive role at a small charity needs to be a bad vibes event
I am not sure I agree with the characterization of Ellison's role or Manifund's role as inconsequential. I do not know if Ellison is "low-paid" (which is subjective anyway) --- or what her counterfactual job opportunities would be at this point (I doubt Jane Street would re-hire her).
To be clear I really hope her role is not inconsequential, as her talents would otherwise be wasted, but importantly that it's not an executive role at a major organization, and she's not in charge of allocating significant amounts of funds.
As a reference class for other job options, co-conspirator Gary Wang is a staff software engineer at a 3D-imaging company, and Nishad Singh works at an undisclosed AI company in San Francisco
The for profit world seems more interested in effectiveness and in getting results than in canceling unpopular people compared to EA, which I find inefficient, and not the attitude I think is most appropriate to approach the worlds biggest problems.
As others have pointed out, she is (according to Manifund's website) now one of just two employees at an organization that, while certainly smaller than CG, has directed millions of dollars to hundreds of projects.
A very important difference from CG is that Manifund does not decide where the funds go, but is a grantmaking platform where donors themselves are deciding what to fund. Ellison is not deciding who gets millions (as a CG grantmaker would) but is facilitating donations to projects that donors want to fund, so while hopefully it's a very consequential role here influence and power over the funding landscape is much more minor.
At any rate, Manifund being small may limit the damage, but that's a separate question from whether the decision was defensible.
I don't think it's that separate: I mentioned it because I think it would be a bad choice at a much larger org while still being a good choice at manifund.
Meta note: In many ways, EA entails doing math for good. Naturally, it attracts a lot of quantitative-minded people some of whom are less qualitatively inclined. IMO, this sometimes leads people to miss the ways in which PR can be impact-relevant.
I agree, but I also think EAs are way overconfident in trying to predict what would make good PR or bad PR, and don't have great track record in this field. If anyone will care about this at all, I think it's as likely as anything that it will be seen as Ellison trying to rehabilitate her image after her sentence.
Are you going through the CEA Intro Program by any chance? https://www.effectivealtruism.org/courses/introductory-program
I'd recommend asking these questions to your favourite AI or to the facilitators, my understanding is that course facilitators don't use this forum for various reasons, and all of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are great at answering these questions. E.g. here's ChatGPT:
Thanks so much for this post!
I know much less about this than you do, but some quick thoughts:
Is that really the convention? I thought the convention was to assume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoelastic_utility with a η between 1.2 and 1.5?
I don't think it's that weird with the above values of η, considering that even in low income countries the effects of cash are significant but not immense, see this previous thread
I really don't think FTX is the main reason why everyone is so mad at you (read e.g. The Economist article mentioned, or search for "effective altruism" online), I think this should be taken as an opportunity to clarify other common misconceptions, instead of taking even more blame for being associated with some of the organizations that praised SBF for donating a lot of money to charity or advised him on how to donate it
You might be interested in Most* small probabilities aren't pascalian , I think a better example is looking both ways before crossing the street
Giving What We Can also did not receive anything close to $1.2 billion in donations in 2024 or $2 billion in 2025, that's the total money moved by the whole ~EA-ish effective giving ecosystem (mostly Coefficient Giving and GiveWell), you can read more here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T7CKswFYSgjePAwZh/updates-on-the-effective-giving-ecosystem-2026
The "$15 Billion per year" seems to be from Wired and based on Ransohoff's estimate of ~$150B in pledged amounts from Anthropic times ~10%
I don't think this is true for that many. As far as I can see most EA charities and donors privately declined to participate in this pressure campaign against Manifund (and because of that you don't see them posting here), and the ~6 that did participate as far as I know are not funding constrained (edit: and/or have easier ways of receiving donations without the 5% fee), so wouldn't have had much use for Manifund in the first place.
Yeah I think the substack post is wrong, copied the comment there
As far as I know this is not true, the article you link to doesn't make that claim, and I'm not sure where it got the $15B from
Thanks for the reply,
This would be a reasonable concern to have, but I think people are not worried about object-level issues because there is no effort to figure out empirical answers to object-level questions.
If people were concerned about financial safeguards/controls, they would ask what systems are in place at Manifund, what Ellison is actually responsible and not responsible for, if there is an independent board and what oversight does the board have on their finances and operations, and so on.
I would expect people with object-level concerns to be at least curious about some easily verifiable object-level things.
Your other comment linked to https://whatweare.substack.com/p/no-one-is-going-to-save-the-ea-brand . The claims in those posts (consistently with other posts from its author) are more in the direction of replacing CEA's leadership than anything about Ellison. A more PR-obsessed movement would either have prevented her from posting these things by forcing a confidentiality/non-disparagement clause in their settlement, or have cancelled CEA leadership several times for various reasons in the past few years. I think both options would have been worse than the status quo.
To be clear I really hope her role is not inconsequential, as her talents would otherwise be wasted, but importantly that it's not an executive role at a major organization, and she's not in charge of allocating significant amounts of funds.
As a reference class for other job options, co-conspirator Gary Wang is a staff software engineer at a 3D-imaging company, and Nishad Singh works at an undisclosed AI company in San Francisco
The for profit world seems more interested in effectiveness and in getting results than in canceling unpopular people compared to EA, which I find inefficient, and not the attitude I think is most appropriate to approach the worlds biggest problems.
A very important difference from CG is that Manifund does not decide where the funds go, but is a grantmaking platform where donors themselves are deciding what to fund. Ellison is not deciding who gets millions (as a CG grantmaker would) but is facilitating donations to projects that donors want to fund, so while hopefully it's a very consequential role here influence and power over the funding landscape is much more minor.
I don't think it's that separate: I mentioned it because I think it would be a bad choice at a much larger org while still being a good choice at manifund.
I agree, but I also think EAs are way overconfident in trying to predict what would make good PR or bad PR, and don't have great track record in this field.
If anyone will care about this at all, I think it's as likely as anything that it will be seen as Ellison trying to rehabilitate her image after her sentence.