A perfect example of the dual and sometimes diametrically opposed meanings of "neutrality" in EA: to some it means neutral between cause areas, to some it means neutral in our approach of how to do the most good.
Hi there! Glad to hear you are taking an interest in these questions. I wanted to offer you a few general observations that might be helpful.
arguments against institutions like GiveWell that focus on giving away bednets, that talk about how it ends up making these communities dependent on donations and unable to produce their own bednets.
I think a few different questions might be getting linked together here. One question is the best way to get people an effective public health intervention, like malaria nets. Another is how we can ensure economic developm...
It's a bit undertheorized in this post why people are longtermist, and thus why longtermism now has such a large role in EA. You paraphrase a comment from Buck:
why these longtermists will not be receptive to conventional EA arguments
This suggests a misunderstanding to me. It was these conventional arguments that led EA funders and leaders to longtermism! If EA is a question of how to do the most good, longtermism is simply a widely agreed upon answer.
In fact, per the 2020 Rethink survey, more engagement in EA was associated with more support fo...
"Mom, can we have more EA whistleblowers"
"No, we have EA Whistleblowers at home"
EA whistleblowers at home
I would hope that a majority of the EA community would agree that there aren't good reasons for someone to claim ownership to billions of dollars. Perhaps there are those that disagree.
I would certainly disagree vehemently with this claim, and would hope the majority of EAs also disagree. I might clarify that this isn't about arbitrarily claiming ownership of billions of dollars - it's a question of whether you can earn billions of dollars through mutual exchange consistent with legal rules.
We might believe, as EAs, that it is either a duty or a supe...
Sorry, it’s not clear what the screenshot even implies?
If the film maker asked a person at CEA, ”Do you think X would be a good fit for the documentary” and they said “No, I don’t think so” and gave substantive reasons (“not really having a social impact beyond our circle”) that doesn’t even necessarily imply the single person didn’t want them in the documentary (could be a casual judgement), much less the institution of CEA didn’t want X in the documentary. And given the filmmaker says “might not include Zvi” presumably his inclusion was still up to them!
This is a really confusing post. I think if you are going to make an allegation, you should give a bit more context, and be a bit more specific as to what you are accusing CEA of. Do you mean Zvi Mowshowitz and Zeynep Tufekci? Both seem like well respected people? Are you sure that it wasn’t ultimately at the documentary makers discretion? Are these just off hand remarks by someone who works at CEA?
I understand wanting the impulse to bring things to light, but I have no idea reading this what is going on here.
I replied to this in a longer comment. It was in fact at our discretion, we only received a suggestion from EAIF, and only applied to Zvi. However, I think a bunch of expectations set by communications norms affected how we made our decision, which is the substance of my comment.
Thanks for raising this. I haven't been particularly persuaded by work in that vein but it's certainly worth engaging with.
Central EA organizations should not make any major reforms for 6 months to allow for a period of reflection and avoid hasty decisions
Thank you for this. These are very interesting points. I have two (lightly held) qualms with this that I'm not sure obtain.
My apologies if this proves uncharitable. I interpreted Carla Zoe's classification of this proposal as:
ideas I’m pretty sure about and thus believe we should now hire someone full time to work out different implementation options and implement one of them")
as potentially endorsing grassroots attempts to democratize EA funding without funder buy-in. I do find the general ambiguity frustrating:
...If you are going to make these proposals, please consider:
- Who you are actually asking to change their behavior?
- What actions you would be willing to ta
Yes I think it’s uncharitable to assume that Carla means other people taking control of funds without funder buy in. I think the general hope with a lot of these posts is to convince funders too.
I agree, creating an EA bureaucracy seems like the biggest problem lurking within these proposals
I think it's good that EA Funds are distributed in a technocratic way, rather than a democratic way, although I agree that more transparency would help people at least understand the decision processes behind granting decisions and allow for them to be criticized and improved.
I generally agree with this, though I don't have a strong sense of how good EA Funds grants are. It just seems like a more reasonable grounds for debate than making demands of EA donors in general.
If the money for EA Funds comes from donors who have the impression the fund is allocated in a technocratic way do you still think it is a reasonable compromise for EA Funds to become more democratic? It seems low intergrity for an entity to raise funding after communicating a fairly specific model for how the funding will be used and then change it's mind and spend it on a different program (unless we have made it pretty clear upfront that we might do other programs).
If the suggestion is to start a new fund that does not use existing donations that seems more reasonable to me, but then I don't think that EA Funds has a substantial advantage in doing this over other organisations with similarly competent staff.
Just a note on Jane Street in particular - nobody at Jane Street is making a potentially multi year bet on interest rates with Jane Street money. That's simply not in the category of things that Jane Street trades. If someone at Jane Street wanted to make betting on this a significant part of what they do, they'd have to leave and go elsewhere and find someone to give them at least hundreds of millions of dollars to make the bet.
Jane street even hosted a foom debate between between Hanson and yudkowsky iirc.
(I don’t think this is substantial evidence on the validity of original post)
I reached out in this case, but would welcome people to pitch to me - or other magazines - in the future.
So I definitely think I'm making a rhetorical argument there to make a point.
But I don't think the problem is quite as bad as you imply here: I'm mostly using fire to mean "existential risks in our lifetimes," and I don't think almost any EA critic (save a few) think that would be fine. Maybe I should've stated it more clearly, but this is something most ethical systems (and common sense ethics) seem do agree upon.
So my point is that critics do agree dying of an existential risk would be bad, but are unfortunately falling into a bit of parochial disc...
I believe that EA could tone down the free books by 5-10% but I am pretty skeptical that the books program is super overboard.
I have 50+ books I've gotten at events over the past few years (when I was in college), mostly politics/econ/phil stuff the complete works of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, Myth of the Rational Voter, Elephant in the Brain, Three Languages of Politics, etc (all physical books). Bill Gates' book has been given out as a free PDF recently.
So I don't think EA is a major outlier here. I also like that there are some slightly less "EA books" in the mix like the Scout Mindset and The AI Does Not Hate You.
I think it's not free books per se, but free books related to phrases "here's what's really important", "this is how to think about morality" that are problematic in the context of the Bible comparison
Hello, thank you so much for your thoughtful piece. I am sorry about the missed email-these have been busy weeks, and it was never my intention to ignore you. You make really interesting points and I appreciate the engagement. Like any new project, we know there are still issues to work out. We recognize that this is an imperfect incentive structure, and we do welcome the feedback. We intend to learn from, iterate, and experiment during this process. That being said, even while imperfect, we believe the incentive structure created by the prize is better th...
Thanks for adding this. Just as a point of clarification:
Another model is to use many small grants. But there's less splashy publicity. It would also be harder to allocate smaller prizes, so many would go to existing EAs or their friends. That has a different theory of impact and seems less virtuous.
We are also making a few small grants to capture good, known writers in EA and on its margins. We view both models as worthwhile.
We don't have any precise guidance on this. From our rules:
While blogs should generally explore these ideas, not every post needs to be on-topic to qualify. (Your foremost goal is to write an interesting and thought-provoking blog!)
Hopefully that helps. If you want a heuristic, aim for 50% of your content to connect to the topics enumerated in the Rules section of our website. Of course, related content will be especially important in the judging process.
Thanks for these comments.
In the future different types of rewards could probably improve results of initiatives like this.
We're likely going to announce subsequent prizes as this project develops. "Best critique of longtermism" will probably be the first. Please let me know if you have any ideas.
Giving many small rewards with little uncertainty for the recipients, would result in many people trying blogging, without so many adverse selection effects.
This is what we are doing through our grant making program. Feel free to refer people to nickwhitaker@effec...
We strongly recommend that your blog has some form of RSS/newsletter. This makes it easier for people to find and read (and much easier for us to judge).
At the same time, I love and generally encourage the idea of building a website around the content along the lines you describe, for the reasons you enumerate. This is the big downside of Substack.
We're pluralists here (and on most things): One incredible, timeless post could win the prize. A constant stream of interesting thoughts could also win. As a heuristic, I think 2 longer posts a month (>500 words) or 4 shorter posts a month is a good blogging pace.
Are you advertising this in other places and is this your way of trying to get more people into EA?
Yes, much of the advertising/outreach targets people who know what EA is (and have generally positive feelings about it) but don't consider themselves members of the community.
Do you want long-time members of EA community to apply as well?
Yes, we're excited long-time members to apply, especially if they are writing in a way that is accessible to wider audiences. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean writing simplistic or introductory posts, just ones that are accessible to a wider audience. Cold Takes is a great example of this.
Sure! First I'll say that I'm an editor on Works in Progress and we're always excited to read interesting pitches from EAs. We might also consider building more small magazines. I've heard rumblings of a few projects in this space. Eventually, I'd like (me or someone else) to develop relationships with editors at traditional outlets to help EA writers (hopefully some of whom emerge in the Blog Prize) pitch them. Young Voices is a fascinating model here. Feel free to reach out to discuss plans along these lines further.
Thanks for sharing this Vaidehi.
I'd be curious how the team decided on the $100,000 prize amount
Yes, this is a serious amount of money. That said, writing a good blog takes a lot of time, and note that the expected value for any particular blogger will be relatively low. If 100 bloggers apply (which we expect to be a lower bound given the traction), it's $5k for the work of a part-time job over a year. Obviously, Cowen using the same number makes it a bit of a Shelling Point and the number has some viral appeal as well.
But we also want to convey how ...
That said, writing a good blog takes a lot of time, and note that the expected value for any particular blogger will be relatively low. If 100 bloggers apply (which we expect to be a lower bound given the traction), it's $5k for the work of a part-time job over a year.
I worry that this creates a weird dynamic. Only people who are financially well-off already can afford to invest a lot of time for a small probability to win a lot of money. These are normally not the people who need money the most. And if these people started blogging because of the money, t...
I see them as compliments! I expect blogging encouraged by the prize will on average require less context to read, and will often be done by people who aren't members of the EA community. I hope that as authors and readers think more about these topics, they will find their way here.
Hypotheses:
Good to hear that you are writing on LessWrong. We are all big fans. But one of our guiding principles for this project has been to incentivize getting content in venues where they get beyond a core in-group. From the outside, it's easy to see LW as for rationalists (and EA Forums only for EAs). Standard blogs feel more neutral to outsiders. And while standard blogs don't require a different tone and context assumptions, they often have them. So we view blogging and LW (and similar venues) as complementary but distinct things.
So we ask that qualifying blogs are not on LessWrong, though crossposting every post would be permissible. And I would also encourage others to do prizes for LessWrong posts, etc.
If they mostly care about AI timelines, subsidize some markets on it. Funding platforms and research doesn’t seem particularly useful here (as opposed to much more direct research).