All of Nick Whitaker's Comments + Replies

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).

1
David Mathers
1mo
Fair point. 

Maybe a bit obscure but exporting a sequence from LW or EAF as a PDF would be awesome. 

Sorry I can't provide more specific details about Malaria Consortium either. You might find some helpful stuff in the Givewell reviews

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... (read more)

2
Linck
1y
That's a fair point that the affected communities making their own nets isn't necessarily the most efficient path, but it could be, I don't know. I guess what I wrote there isn't really the all that's potentially problematic with the Malaria Consortium institution, but there are a few other details about how they operate that worry me. Things like how they make distributions in a 2 year interval, and people who want bednets can't get any because they need to wait for another distribution, since there is no longer any bednets being produced locally because the donations made those producers run out of business. This issue alone doesn't necessarily outweigh the benefits of the distributions, so maybe the impact is still net positive. There are a few other issues that I've heard raised on that video as well though Arguably I should look more in depth into how exactly those bed nets operate, and really think everything through. But I don't feel like I have the time or energy, or am smart and knowledgeable enough to be able to do that on my own. Also I'm not sure the detailed information about how those institutions operate will be fully available to me even if I wanted to I feel like ultimately I need to find some person who has the resources to make those assessments, including competency to think through these nuanced complicated problems, and who I feel like I can trust Maybe what I need to do right now is to just save my monthly allocation to altruism and keep accumulating it until I feel like I can make a decent decision of where to put this money I like your point about the word "sustainability" as well. That's probably not the right term to describe what I'm thinking. I used it as the "sustainability" of the impacts and their unfolding remaining a net positive, and not the sustainability of the particular measure that's being taken to help people I guess there's some subjectivity to what "positive impact" means as well. For me I would say my desire in terms

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... (read more)

"Mom, can we have more EA whistleblowers"
"No, we have EA Whistleblowers at home"

EA whistleblowers at home

See here. I'm not sure how EA Funds is pitched to donors. A new fund probably would be better regardless. 

(Adding for context: I had heard EA Funds was being reorganized at one point, which suggested to me it might be looking for a new funding model)

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... (read more)

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.

5
sapphire
1y
I'm sure unless I was just being lied to? I was talking to the film maker directly in the screenshot. We talked in person about this at length as well. I find it pretty hard to understand why CEA would want to exclude Zvi or Zeynep. But I'm pretty sure this happened. I'm aware of a lot of hard to explain behavior. but I gave this example because Im pretty sure I correctly understand what happened and can substantiate the claims.

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. 

  1. I suspect in the status quo, highly engaged, productive EAs who do work like yours do have a certain amount of influence over funding decisions. It certainly seems like most Future Fund regrantors fit into this pool. Obviously I don't mean to imply everyone has the influence they deserve, but I do think this is meaningful when we consider the current state of EA vs a potential new system. 
  2. I worry this attitude also plays int
... (read more)

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
... (read more)

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.

2
Stephen Clare
1y
Thanks, that's helpful to know

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... (read more)

8
james.lucassen
2y
yup sounds like we're on the same page - I think  I steelmanned a little too hard. I agree that the people making these criticisms probably do in fact think that being shot by robots or something would be bad.

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... (read more)

1
niplav
2y
Thanks, corrected

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. 

Very interesting structure. Will investigate incorporating it into our plans in the future.

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... (read more)

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.

4
DirectedEvolution
2y
Thanks very much for the response! It sounds like you're interested both in the quality of the content and in its convenience, visibility, and readership. But it doesn't necessarily need to have the journal-like structure of a blog. The RSS/newsletter would be a way to keep regular readers apprised of new content. But it doesn't necessarily have to be primarily meant to be ingested in chronological (or reverse-chronological) order.

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.

1
AndreFerretti
2y
There is no mention of "Medium" in that page, that's why I asked on the Forum.

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

3
Yitz
2y
I think even "technically flawed" critiques could actually be very useful, because developing arguments against that which are more easily accessible will probably be helpful in the future. (disclaimer I'm currently on a sleeping med making me feel slightly loopy, so apologies if the above doesn't make sense)

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.

9
saulius
2y
I'm curious why do you expect blogging to  "often be done by people who aren't members of the EA community"? Are you advertising this in other places and is this your way of trying to get more people into EA? Do you want long-time members of EA community to apply as well? Sorry if that's too many questions.

Hypotheses: 

  1. We have strong models for how to do a popular blog about progress (Tyler Cowen, Anton Howes, Jason Crawford, etc). We have fewer of those sorts of models for EA.
  2. Progress studies, as it exists, sort of only is blogging, so all intellectual effort is channeled to it. EA encourages people to do lots of other things.
  3. Progress studies is innately better suited for blogging. This seems unlikely to me. But I do believe some subjects (philosophy stands out) are harder to blog about. Related: History seems especially easy to podcast about. 
1
Ramiro
2y
Summarizing it: would you say we are more "foxes", Progress Studies is more "hedgehog"? On the other hand, I'd say that Progress Studies is better suited for "catchy blogging". Perhaps I'm still thinking of it as fox v. hedgehog... but I think content about how the world has improved since the industrial revolution and can keep improving is more likely to get engagement from the avg internet joe than something like "how to do good better? it turns out it's quite hard, and unsurprisingly it costs time and money, indeed"... or you could say that psychological traits predicting interest in Progress (and I am not even considering political implications) are more prevalent than those predicting interest in EA. Having said this, I really like the idea of the contest, it's a very generous incentive to start new blogs... but what's the theory of change here? I'm truly curious about what you'd expect to achieve. For instance, do you think people who are talented and well-positioned to start new influential blogs will do it because of this contest? Or (which is an often neglected positive effect of awards) this will mostly help identify and promote new talented bloggers, who'd otherwise take a long time to be noticed?

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. 

5
Lukas Finnveden
2y
I assume it's fine to prominently link to the EA forum or LW as the place to leave comments? Like e.g. cold takes does.