All of TaraMacAulay's Comments + Replies

I think their approach is highly speculative, even if you were to agree with their overall plan. I think Leverage has contributed to EA in the past, and I expect them to continue doing so, but this alone isn't enough to make them a better donation target than orgs like CEA or 80K.

I'm glad they exist, and hope they continue to exist, I just don't think Leverage or Paradigm are the most effective things I could be doing with my money or time. I feel similarly about CFAR. Supporting movement building and long-termism is already meta enough for me.

Interesting. I don't usually conflate "good use" with "most effective use."

Seems like "not a good use" means something like "this project shouldn't be associated with EA."

Whereas "not the most effective use" means something like "this project isn't my best-guess about how to do good, but it's okay to be associated with EA."

Perhaps this is just semantics, but I'm genuinely not sure which sense you intend.

Note: I was previously CEO of CEA, but stepped down from that role about 9 months ago.

I've long been confused about the reputation Leverage has in the EA community. After hearing lots of conflicting reports, both extremely positive and negative, I decided to investigate a little myself. As a result, I've had multiple conversations with Geoff, and attended a training weekend run by Paradigm. I can understand why many people get a poor impression, and question the validity of their early stage research. I think that in the past, Leverage has done a poor job... (read more)

2
Evan_Gaensbauer
6y
As someone whose experience as an outsider from Leverage, who has not done paid for any EA organizations in the past, is similar to Tara's, I can corroborate her impression. I've not been in the Bay Area or had a volunteer or personal association with any EA organizations located there since 2014. Thus, my own investigation was from afar, following the spread-out info on Leverage available online, including past posts regarding Leverage on LW and the EA Forum, and online conversations with former staff, interns and visitors to Leverage Research. The impression I got from what is probably a very different data-set than Tara's is virtually identical. Thus, I endorse as a robust yet fair characterization of Leverage Research. I've also heard from several CFAR workshop alumni myself they found the Paradigm training they received more useful than the CFAR workshop they attended as well. A couple of them also noted their surprise at this impression, given their trepidation knowing Paradigm sprouted from Leverage, what with their past reputation. A confounding factor in these anecdotes would be the CFAR workshops my friends and acquaintances had attended were from a few years ago, in which time those same people revisiting CFAR, and more recent CFAR workshop alumni, remark how different and superior to their earlier workshops CFAR's more recent ones have been. Nonetheless, the impression I've received is nearly unanimous positive experiences at Paradigm workshops from attendees part of the EA movement, competitive in quality with CFAR workshops, which has years of troubleshooting and experience on Paradigm. I want to clarify the CEA has not been alone in movement-building activities, and the CEA itself has ongoing associations with the Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN) and the Effective Altruism Foundation out of the German-speaking EA world on movement-building activities. Paradigm Academy's staff, in seeking to kickstart grassroots movement-building efforts in EA

I don't think that Leverage, Paradigm or related projects are good use of EA time or money

Found this surprising given the positive valence of the rest of the comment. Could you expand a little on why you don't think Leverage et al. are a good use of time/money?

I know it's outside the scope of this writeup, but just wanted to say that I found this really helpful, and I'm looking forward to seeing an evaluation of MIRIs other research.

I'd also be really excited to see more posts about which research pathways you think are most promising in general, and how you compare work on field building, strategy and policy approaches and technical research.

9
Daniel_Dewey
7y
Thanks Tara! I'd like to do more writing of this kind, and I'm thinking about how to prioritize it. It's useful to hear that you'd be excited about those topics in particular.

Another thing I should have mentioned - if you're in a similar position, and are not planning to donate within the next 3 months, but are very likely to do so in the future, you can indicate your support for the project by filling out our feedback form and telling us roughly how much you'd be interested in donating and how you would allocate your donation between the 4 funds. A couple of you have done so already. We plan to take these 'pledged donations' into account when reviewing whether to continue the project.

Thanks for raising this point. We intend to reassess at 3 months, as we think it is prudent to reassess early, rather than risk wasting a year of staff time. We should expect to have some evidence either way, even if it is not definitive, and hope to learn much more if we extend the trial.

We were also concerned that it might be difficult to raise sufficient funds to really test if this idea is worthwhile given that the vast majority of giving, even within the EA-sphere, occurs towards the end of the calendar year. One successful outcome for this project wo... (read more)

5
TaraMacAulay
7y
Another thing I should have mentioned - if you're in a similar position, and are not planning to donate within the next 3 months, but are very likely to do so in the future, you can indicate your support for the project by filling out our feedback form and telling us roughly how much you'd be interested in donating and how you would allocate your donation between the 4 funds. A couple of you have done so already. We plan to take these 'pledged donations' into account when reviewing whether to continue the project.

The EA Funds are now live and accepting donations. You can read about the Far Future fund here.

We plan to send quarterly updates to all EA Funds donors detailing the total size of the fund and details of any grants made in the period. We will also publish grant reports on the EA Funds website and will keep an updated grant history on the fund description page, much in the same manner as Open Phil. We plan to publish a more detailed review of the project in 3 months, at which time we will reassess, and possibly make significant changes to the current iteration of the funds.

While the EA Giving Group DAF (EAGG) will continue to run, we suspect that ma... (read more)

4
HaydnBelfield
7y
Peter's question was one I asked in the previous post as well. I'm pleased with this answer, thanks Tara.

Hi AGB, you are correct on both counts - the linked budget is for CEA UK only, and the $3.1M figure is enough to allow us to end 2017 with at least 12 months of reserves.

The reason that we’re raising more than the total projected spend for 2017 is that we are hoping to build up our reserves to ensure we do not need to fundraise mid-year. We aim to maintain a minimum of 12 months of reserves, in line with recommended best practices for non-profits. Prior to the start of this fundraiser, we had planned let our reserves fall far below this limit towards the ... (read more)

Great post - identifying experts and, in particular, comparing expertise between similar candidates is exceptionally difficult, using even a rough model seems likely to greatly improve our ability to undertake this task.

While it seems possible to make some progress on the problem of independently assessing expertise, I want to stress that we should still expect to fail if we proceed to do so entirely independently, without consulting a domain expert - Great! - now we have a simpler problem - how do we identify the best domain expert who can help us build ... (read more)

3
RomeoStevens
8y
The method of observing experts and turning their heuristics into a simple scale is well supported in the forecasting literature (don't have a quick cite handy unfortunately).
0
tyleralterman
8y
Indeed: tacit experts. The way I assess this now is basically by looking at indirect signs around the potential tacit expert (e.g., achievements is a good one, as is evidence of them having made costly tradeoffs in the past to develop their expertise (a weaker sign).) If anyone develops tools for directly assessing tacit experts, please let me know. I'd also be very interested if anyone has ideas for how to learn the skills of tacit experts, once you've identified them.
0
tyleralterman
8y
Ah! This sounds like a great feedback mechanism for one's expert assessment abilities. I'm going to steal this. =)
0
tyleralterman
8y
+1 - you definitely want to use more signs than the ones I mentioned above to be confident that you have identified sufficient marker of expertise. The ones listed above are only intended to be necessary markers. A good way of generating markers beyond the necessary ones: think about a few people who you can confidently say are experts. What do they have in common? (Please send me any cool markers you've come up with! My own list has over 30 now, and it doesn't seem like ceiling has been hit.)
1
tyleralterman
8y
Right, I should have mentioned this. Your job is much, much easier if you can identify a solid "seed" expert in the domain with a few caveats: * If the seed expert becomes your primary input to expertise identification, you should be confident that their expertise checks are good. I'm tempted to think that the skill of domain-specific expertise identification correlates strongly with expertise in that domain, but not perfectly. This will be especially true in fields where there are lots of persuaders who have learned how to mimic signs of expertise. * Keep domain-specific expertise base-rates in mind, as mentioned above. In domains where the expertise base-rate is low (e.g., sociology), you will need to run many more expertise checks on the seed expert than usual, and will have a harder time finding a passable expert in the first place. * In fields where results are not easily verifiable (e.g., sociology again), it will be more difficult to identify a seed expert. Also, these seed experts will often have a hard time identifying revolutionary forms of expertise, since they might look like crackpots. (As opposed to, say, math, where there are cases of people who prima facie look like crackpots being nonetheless hired as professors, since their results are reliably verifiable.) * In fields with high variance, you may be able to find a passable seed expert who cannot consistently identify experts who are much, much better than they are. * In fields with poorly networked knowledge, seed experts will be much less helpful. I can imagine this being the case for fields like massage therapy, where I expert there to be fewer journals and conferences.