All of Matthew Yglesias's Comments + Replies
I understand the various reasons why people can't speak in detail about certain things would I would love to see the issues discussed in "EA and the current funding situation" get revisited in light of the fact that the funding situation has changed a lot. It seems to me that when money became more abundant that didn't just make it easier for certain grant proposals to get approved, but was seen as having big-picture strategic implications. When I go back and read the post, the arguments seem sound to me. But beyond not reflecting knowledge of wrongdoing a...
I think a very relevant question is to ask is how come none of the showy self-criticism contests and red-teaming exercises came up with this? A good amount of time and money and energy were put into such things and if the exercises are not in fact uncovering the big problems lurking in the movement then that suggests some issues
If this comment is more about "how could this have been foreseen", then this comment thread may be relevant. I should note that hindsight bias means that it's much easier to look back and assess problems as obvious and predictable ex post, when powerful investment firms and individuals who also had skin in the game also missed this.
TL;DR:
1) There were entries that were relevant (this one also touches on it briefly)
2) They were specifically mentioned
3) There were comments relevant to this. (notably one of these was apparently deleted because it ...
...I for one didn't take the self-criticism stuff particularly seriously, or consider EA to have scored any points by running the contest? And I thought that seemed too obvious to mention, I guess, that of course scoring diligent self-criticism points is harder than that? Zvi had a longer writeup on a similar take.
I have my own sense of what EA is doing all wrong, but it didn't particularly occur to me to try to write it up for the criticism contest. That was obviously going to be an in-frame thing, and was obviously not going to be able ...
In hindsight they look a bit performative.
There's a related problem with CEA. Their mission is to nurture the EA community, and their sizeable community health team's is to "preserve the EA community's ability to grow and produce value". But the CH team has focused on public relations, diversity, "discussion norms", and crisis-response, while the community became unhealthy for a different reason - FTX. It seems like this team, or some other, needs to take on a wider mandate, that includes monitoring of such issues.
To me the big problem with the Open Phil document is that it’s from 2013 which was a long time ago both in terms of the evolution of EA and in terms of climate policy. Given the volume of public interest in the topic, it’s probably worth investing in an up to date treatment (and one that is kept up to date) that serves as a primer on neglectedness, true existential risk, and other key considerations without coming across as totally oblivious
After going through my first EAG this past weekend, I am left pretty confused about the rationale for the competitive application process.
I know of two main categories of people who seem to have applied and gotten rejected — people very personally invested in EA as a cause but deemed unworthy of networking opportunities, and semi-important DC types who are maybe EA-curious but were deemed insufficiently committed to EA. But I don’t know that I really understand why the event would have been worse if it had featured more people from both of those categories...
From my understanding, it is almost certainly not a question of money. They have the option of making admissions less competitive but increasing the ticket price and then having a competitive process for financial aid, but they do not think that that is a good option.
CEA's concern with allowing a wider range of people into the conference seems to be that they'd take up the time of the people CEA most wants to be at an EAG.
I just want to emphasize this point: "Non-EAs living in DC tend to be pretty impact-oriented and ambitious"
One of the main reasons that DC has a reputation as a bad place to live is that most people find this aspect of DC culture to be annoying and off-putting. And while I disagree with those people, I agree with their judgment that it is a distinctive feature of life here. DC people talk a lot about their jobs. They very sincerely believe their work is important. People who would never in a million years identify as EAs would still tell you (and genuinely...
Here's an argument for an EA billionaire advantage.
Suppose you have a $500 million fortune and an opportunity presents itself for a gamble where you have a 1% chance of taking that to $60 billion but a 99% chance of ending up with nothing. Just in dollars this is positive expected value because $600 million > $500 million. But I think most people would reject that bet due to risk aversion and the declining marginal utility of money.
To a highly motivated EA, though, it looks like a better deal so you're more likely to go for it.
A related issue: Nobody is going to make this an official criticism of longtermism, but I have heard a nonzero amount of backchannel grousing among people who've published books about how well-funded the WWOTF rollout is which I think may generate some resentment/backlash among jealous writers.
This is also just an example of how growing and diversifying the EA funding base can be useful even if EA is not on the whole funding constrained ... a longtermist superpac that raised $1 million each from 12 different rich guys who got rich in different ways would arguably be more credible than one with a single donor.
Similarly, I’d heard of Peter Singer as a result of campus controversies over his (alleged) views on disability long before I heard anything else about him. But it was actually learning about that controversy that prompted me to go see him speak some time in 2001 or so and I was surprised by what I heard.
Candidates for office, by law, get a more favorable rate on TV ads than superpacs do.
So up to the legal limit, a direct donation to a candidate is more valuable.
The first obvious answer is that most students simply haven’t been reached yet. If true, we may need to massively boost (high-quality) student outreach, making sure that every student who could be sympathetic towards EA ideas finds out about EA.
This is my bias as a media guy, but to me this survey actually suggests the opposite of the need to "massively boost (high-quality) student outreach" — if there is a large bloc of students who are sympathetic to EA but have never heard of it, what's needed is really just greater prominence in mass media. If you just...
This is an excellent post, one slightly subtle point about the political dynamics that I think it misses is the circumstances around BoldPAC's investment in Salinas.
BoldPAC is the superpac for Hispanic House Democrats. It happens to be the case that in the 2022 election cycle there is a Hispanic state legislator (Andrea Salinas) living in a blue-leaning open US House of Representatives seat. It also happens to be the case that given the ups and downs of the political cycle, this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the c...
Where to even start here? Nearly every fact in this post is wrong, the interpretation of events is backwards, and the conclusion is contrarian, wrong and frankly fairly ugly.
It's not a heavily Hispanic area or anything
OR-6 contains the most populated areas of three counties in western OR with the highest Hispanic populations (map from wikipedia). It also contains towns like Woodburn, which is 57% Hispanic or Latino.
By the way, Rep. Salinas and Rep. Leon are actually both Latina, and I believe both are the children of immigrant farm workers. That's a su...
I share this "outdated, rather than foundational" concern. I think it is possible that what is really called for here is human editorial attention rather than algorithms and sorting tools. Someone or someones to read through tons of old stuff and make some Best Of collections.
The flip side is that grift can be an opportunity. Suppose a bunch of members of congress decide EA donors are easy marks and they can get a bunch of money in exchange for backing some weird pandemic prevention bill they don’t even slightly care about or believe in. Well then the bill passes and that’s a good outcome.
That seems like a quite distinct case than what Ben is worrying about - more like a standard commercial interaction, 'buying' pandemic prevention. If I buy a pizza, it makes little difference to me if the cashier is deeply aligned with my dietary and health objectives - all I care about is that he got the toppings right. It is not from the benevolence of the pizza guy that we expect our dinner, but from his regard to his own interest. I think grift would be more like a politician writing a speech to cater to EA donors and then voting for exactly the same things they intended to anyway.
Agree that the Guarding Against Pandemics prevention policies are probably the most constructive thing to push. If you're talking to a Republican who's disinclined to spend money, tell them they should pay for it by clawing-back unspent state Covid relief funds.
I would just add to this that it’s worth taking a few minutes to really think if there is anyone you might possibly know who lives in the district — or even a second-degree connection like a friend’s sister who you’ve never met. “Relational” communications are much more high-impact than calling strangers if it’s at all possible to find someone you have any connection with.
If you're wondering who you might know in Oregon, you can search your Facebook friends by location:
Search for Oregon (or Salem) in the normal FB search bar, then go to People. You can also select to see "Friends of Friends".
I assume that will miss a few, so it's probably worth also actively thinking about your network, but this is probably a good low-effort first start.
Edit: Actually they need to live in district 6. The biggest city in that district is Salem as far as I can tell. Here's a map.
I took OP's point here to be that this logic looks suspiciously like the kind of rationalizations EA got its start criticizing in other areas.
"Why do they throw these fancy gala fundraising dinners instead of being more frugal and giving more money t... (read more)
Hmm, I think of the "classic EA" case for GiveWell over Charity Navigator as precisely based on an awareness that bad optics around "overhead", CEO pay, fundraising, etc., aren't necessarily bad uses of funds, and we should instead look at what the organization ultimately achieves.