I’m delighted that Zach has agreed to join CEA, and I’m excited for CEA’s future under his leadership.
I think that Zach is an extremely strong leader and manager, who thrives under pressure and cares deeply about building a better world. We dug deep into his strengths and weaknesses, through strategy discussions, work-history interviews, and reference calls. He has many outstanding references from people who have worked closely with him at Open Philanthropy and Effective Ventures US.
Thank you to everyone on the search committee, advisors to the search comm...
Thank you for all of your hard work over many years, Will. I've really valued your ability to slice through strategic movement-buliding questions, your care and clear communication, your positivity, and your ability to simply inspire massive projects off the ground. I think you've done a lot of good. I'm excited for you to look after yourself, reflect on what's next, and keep working towards a better world.
Makes sense! I was thinking of Effectiv Spenden, but I see that that's an ambiguous example. Another public attendee who is doing on-the-ground community building is Kuhan Jeyapragasan (and I think that there were 1-2 others who were invited but can't make it, or aren't public).
Thanks for sharing James! We did invite a few people doing more on-the-ground community building in various university/national groups, and some of them (e.g. Anne Schulze) are attending (note that not all attendees are public). But I'm not sure whether we got the balance right here, maybe we should have invited more such people.
Cheers! I haven't met Anne, does she do community building work alongside her role as a Co-director at Effektiv Spenden? Because I don't think I'd count Effektiv Spenden as a community building organisation, and certainly not in the way I'd count EA Germany as a community building organisation.
[Brief comment, sorry!]
Thanks for those thoughts - we're planning to do some of those (e.g. have people write memos on important topics before the event), and I think we've considered doing all of those things. (Not sure if we made the right decision on how to handle each of these, and not explaining our stance on all of them because of time.)
Re trust: Sorry, that second sentence is rather confusing. What I mean is that: we're not guaranteeing that everyone attending the event is 100% trustworthy. And I hope that the event will allow attendees to understan...
Thank you for all of your hard work in this role, Nick.
When I was still new to leading CEA (and fairly new to management), your advice as active trustee was incredibly useful. I learned a lot from you about how to manage people, and your feedback on our plans was always perceptive. I think that I would have done a much worse job without your advice and support.
I've always found you tirelessly kind, thoughtful, and collaborative, and I've really enjoyed working with you.
I have to say, this really worries me.
I can't speak for other people who filled out the survey but: I agree that orgs should be transparent about their motivations.
The questions asks (basically) "should 80k be more transparent [than it currently is]", and I think I gave a "probably not" type answer, because I think that 80k is already fairly transparent about this (e.g. it's pretty clear when you look at their problem profiles or whatever).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you want EVF to do, but when I go to the page that you linked to I see a list of trustees with bios at the bottom of it. (This doesn't solve the "contact" problem, but it does solve "who they are and what they do".)
My sincere apologies, I had missed that it had been updated! V. Embarrassing. Thankyou for doing that
We received over 400 nominations for the CEA CEO role, and are planning to reach out to over 100 people, roughly one third of whom have not worked in EA orgs before.[1]
I think that EA context is helpful in the role, and it is at least important that people can get up to speed quickly. But outside perspective and experience is also helpful, so we're considering people with different degrees of EA engagement.
At a quick skim, I didn't look into this rigorously.
Thanks! I agree with this post.
I notice that I want to reframe this more positively, as "If you meet someone who is not a good fit for your approach to doing good, you should try to signpost them to communities/organizations that are a better fit". (But maybe that's saying something importantly different from your point?)
This is close to what I am saying, but I might phrase it stronger. For example, a large donor may consistently be a potential fit for your field, but I still believe it's important to be considerate about how far you push them. Similarly, a highly talented individual might require more than just signposting; they also should not be perceived as second-class or unintelligent for having a different viewpoint.
Thanks for the feedback! We're still discussing how we should get community input on visions later on in the process, so I don't yet have a clear answer, sorry. One thing that we've (briefly) discussed is asking candidates (probably anonymously) to share their visions on the Forum, for people to comment on. But there's some disagreement among committee members about whether that would make sense, and it might depend a bit on the visions/candidates, so we don't have firm plans yet.
I'm not sure if this is answering your first question, but they wouldn't just be CEO for two weeks! Instead we'd design particular work trials to test attributes they would need in the role, set up meetings for them to get to know staff and stakeholders, and give them time and information to begin to develop a vision for CEA.
Re your second question: as we say, this is our ideal but we'd shape things around candidates. We know that this might not work for some candidates, but we think that it would work for others. If it did work out for candidates, it woul...
If they don't trust GW, why would they trust your calculation, which also rests on GW's analysis? Here's a spreadsheet with GW's analysis: I think that the 159,000 figure is just them doing a pretty similar BOTEC to yours, but across all of their top charities (and they seem to have a higher figure for total donations to AMF, not sure what's driving the difference there).
Moreover, GiveWell estimate that "GiveWell-directed donations to our recommended charities between 2009 and 2021 will avert over 159,000 deaths" (accounting for all top charities, not just AMF).
Here's a post from a few months ago where they announced the event. (Maybe this is what Owen wanted to link to.)
I interpreted that as "against exceptionalism" or "place lower credence in EA exceptionalism", but I'm not sure.
You can read a bit more about why we did this here. We handed the funding side off to OP, and we hoped someone else would take on the support side, but no-one did. OP are currently handling funding only, and we would work on support only, which reduces much of the risk of duplication.
I'll ask someone on the groups team to explain more about why we're more optimistic about our approach now.
Hey Ryan, thanks for writing this up - keen to explain this and reflect more.
First, I do think that I could have written this post better: e.g. given the disclaimer about not focusing on FTX up front.
I think that a lot of this is a substantive disagreement about how CEA’s year went, which I think might be driven by a substantive disagreement about what CEA is.[1]
I’m aware that some people (possibly including you) have a model that’s a bit like “CEA is responsible for what happens in the EA community. A big bad thing happened to the EA community, so CE...
Thanks for the response. Out of the four responses to nitpicks, I agree with the first two. I broadly agree about the third, forum quality. I just think that peak post quality is at best a lagging indicator - if you have higher volume and even your best posts are not as good anymore, that would bode very poorly. Ideally, the forum team would consciously trade off between growth and average post quality, and in some cases favouring the latter, e.g. performing interventions that would improve the latter even if they slowed growth. And the fourth, understatem...
Thanks - that’s a good point. We do discuss this in the latter sections of the post, but I think you’re right that we should have mentioned it up front to set expectations.
Re criticism contest, agree that it's a disappointment that that contest didn't surface more criticism of FTX. I also think that overall it drove some meaningful and useful criticism of core EA ideas and institutions, and that's worth highlighting. Not sure if we got the right balance between those two sides in the post.
Hi Larks, as we mentioned in the post (especially the last two sections) we're actively reflecting on what, if anything, we should have done differently around FTX. I'm not yet confident what the conclusion of that will be, so it seemed premature to include it in the mistakes section, but maybe we should have mentioned it still.
Once we're done with our reflection, we'll share more about our takeaways and (if necessary) update our mistakes page etc.
Hi, this is something we’re already exploring, but we are not in a position to say anything just yet.
We've now released a page on our website setting out our approach to moderation and content curation, which relates somewhat to this comment. Please feel free to share any feedback in comments or anonymously.
We've now released a page on our website setting out our approach to moderation and content curation, which partly addresses one of the points raised in this post. Please feel free to share any feedback in comments or anonymously.
Ah cool, yeah agree that democracy is pretty strongly designed around responsibilities to the community, so it's probably better than an unelected board on that dimension.
The final paragraph in the comment I just linked to is about one-meta-level-up. The penultimate and antipenultimate paragraphs are just about the ideal governance structure. Sorry, that's maybe a bit unclear.
Thanks, and to clarify, by decision-makers, do you mean mostly the board or mostly staff? And do you want them to be representative on particular dimensions? Or maybe chosen by a representative process like elections? I expect that we disagree on what the right structure is, but still interested to understand your view.
Would you trust a governing body on the basis of someone you don't even personally know saying that their sense is that it's alright?
Probably not - I understand if this doesn't update you much. I would suggest that you look at public records on what our board members do/have done, and see if you think that suggests that they would hold us accountable for this sort of thing. I admit that's a costly thing to do. I would also suggest that you look at what CEA has done, especially during the most recent (most relevant) periods - this post highlight...
Coming back to this, I'm not sure that I have tonnes to add here: I think you're right that saying that would probably deter people. I think generally in such cases we'd drop the second clause (just say "we're not currently working on that", without the "but we might in the future"), to decrease this effect.
I am also aware of some post-2019 instances where we put off people from working in an area. I think that this was mostly inadvertent, but still a significant mistake. If you're open to DMing me about the instance you're thinking of, I'd be ...
My sense is that the board is likely to remain fairly stable, and fairly consistently interested in this.
I also don't really see why democracy is better on the front of "checking that an org consistently follows through on what it says it's going to do": all of your arguments about board members would also seem like they could apply to any electorate. There might be other benefts of a democracy, of course (though I personally think that community democracy would be the wrong governance structure for CEA, for reasons stated elsewhere).
On 1), there is a specific board member assigned to assessing CEA's performance (which would include this). I agree that 2) is somewhat missing.
I'm not aware of a policy on term limits for the Effective Ventures board, and can't speak for them.
Coming back to pay off this IOU.
Some points:
Thanks for sharing your reasons here! I definitely don't think that this problem fully fixes this problem, and it's helpful to hear how it's falling short. Some reactions to your points:
I'm busy with EAG prep, so I can't respond properly right now, but I wanted to note that I think the comment thread above (Guy's original comment + Joshua's) doesn't quite capture how I'm thinking about CEA's relationship to the community or to representativeness, though I can see why you're taking these things from what I wrote.
I'm aware of the form, and trying to think honestly about why I haven't used it/don't feel very motivated to. I think there's a few reasons:
Oh I should have said, I'm on holiday for the next week, so I won't be responding to replies in these threads for that period, hope that's ok!
Thanks - I think you're right that the EA hive mind would also find some interesting things!
Re the % that should produce public evaluations: I feel pretty unsure. I think it's important that organizations that are 1) trying to demonstrate with a lot of rigor that they're extremely cost-effective, and 2) asking for lots of public donations should probably do public evaluations. Maybe my best guess is that most other orgs shouldn't do this, but should have other governance and feedback mechanisms? And then maybe the first type of organizations are like 20% of total EA orgs, and ~50% of current donations (numbers totally made up).
Thanks! I think that a lot of this is an area for the board more than for me (I'll flag this thread to them for input, but obviously they might not reply). I and the board are tracking how we can best scale governance (and aware that it might be hard to do this just with the current board), and we've also considered the ombudsman model (and not yet rejected it, though I think that many versions of it might not really change things too much - I think the board do care about CEA following through on its responsibilites to the community).
Re the EA twitter acc...
I think the board do care about CEA following through on its responsibilites to the community
I hope that's true, but there are at least two problems with that:
As far as I can see, only democratic mechanisms guarantee accountability that stays stable over time.
I think the board do care about CEA following through on its responsibilites to the community
I’m glad this is something the board cares about. That said, I think the board will have difficulty keeping CEA accountable for those responsibilities without 1) a specific board member being explicitly assigned this and 2) an explicit list of what those responsibilities so that CEA, its board, and the community all have the same understanding (and so non-obvious things, like the Twitter account, don’t get missed).
Related to CEA’s board: does CEA have any policies ...
Maybe I was a bit casual saying that "we try not to announce plans publicly".
We've definitely updated in this direction since 2019, but I think that our current communications probably allow people to coordinate relatively well with us.
Let's look program-by-program:
Honestly, I kind of agree! I think your piece is good, but I think there hasn't been enough really high-quality and well-presented criticism of longtermism from an EA perspective. (If I've missed anything, please let me know, but I've asked around a bit already.)
[Just speaking for myself based on being a member of the hiring committee, without running this take past anyone else.]
I do think that Zach was in our top 5-10 most promising people at the start of the process. So I think that directionally the update is that we spent too much time/energy on this process, since the outcome wasn't that surprising.
However, I'm not sure if we should have spent that much less time/energy:
- In general I think that this is a really crucial hire, and finding someone marg
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