All of Will Bradshaw's Comments + Replies

Thanks Claire! Are you able to point to some newer opportunities you think are especially promising?

Assuming we're only talking about the post Richard linked (and the user's one recent comment, which is similar), I agree with this.

I didn't say a lot of arms. 😛

But it's a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But I'm not sure they would have even if they were allowed to - that's a pretty huge reputational risk.

I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from "having the vaccine".

It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think that's the earliest reasonable date you could claim that "we had the vaccine". If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, that's when you could start.

(Of course, if you did that you'd presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didn't work out, of which there's no shortage.)

I think you're probably wrong, but I hope you're right.

I'm not sure which, but in one of Will's 80k podcast interviews he discusses the origins of EA and mentions Yudkowsky and LessWrong as one of three key strands (as well as the GWWC crew in Oxford and Holden/GiveWell).

I saw it when it first went up and it was nonymous, though I don't remember what the user name was.

It wasn't anonymous when the post went up, but it became so when the user deactivated their account.

Fair enough re the link!

Cigarettes are called fags in the UK and other commonwealth countries, yeah. I don't think it has any direct connection to the slur.

I'm not aware of "fag" being a common term of endearment among Australians the way "cunt" is, though I might be wrong about that. I think it and "cunt" are in pretty different categories as far as obscene words go, at least in commonwealth countries.

Sorry, this isn't a very strong analogy.

Hanania doesn't criticise anything specific about the bills directly or offer a clear thesis for why they led to a rise in crime. There's no analogy to clubbing seals here. The strong implication imo is that giving more freedom to black people itself led to bad things happening because black people (according to Hanania) have a bad culture. Which is a different and much more offensive (to many) thesis.

(I agree that this is then used as a segue to a pretty insightful and biting critique of conservatives, which is the ... (read more)

Yes, I agree it's used not-that-rarely within the gay community. This is very similar to the n-word situation, and I don't think is very material to whether it's a slur or not.

If a gay person called me a fag, I'd update that they were more edgy than me. If a straight person called me a fag, I'd update that they were a bigot (and/or very socially inept and in need of a talking to).

"fag" feels weirder to me, though I still wouldn't describe it as a slur

Wait what? I can't think of many words that would be more central examples of slurs than that.

Well said; this was my impression as well.

I think you might be using "truth-seeking" a bit differently here from how I and others use it, which might be underlying the disagree-votes you're getting. In particular, I think you might be using "truth-seeking" to refer to an activity (engaging in a particular kind of discourse) rather than an attitude or value, whereas I think it's more typically used to refer to the latter.

I think it's very important to the EA endeavor to adopt a truth-seeking mindset about roughly everything, including (and in some cases especially) about hot-button political issues... (read more)

I also thought the Oakland venue was a very good choice, and was glad the events team chose it again in 2024.

No self-interested person is ever going to point this out because it pisses off the mods and CEA, who ultimately decide whose voices can be heard - collectively, they can quietly ban anyone from the forum / EAG without any evidence, oversight, or due process.

I've heard the claim that the EA Forum is too expensive, repeatedly, on the EA Forum, from diverse users including yourself. If CEA is trying to suppress this claim, they're doing a very bad job of it, and I think it's just silly to claim that making that first claim is liable to get you banned.

By supporting Ozy’s post, Rafael agrees that anyone who reads all the words previously written on the issue belongs to an elite group. The definition of ‘elite’ is ‘a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society’.

I think it's fairly clear that the use of "elite" in that paragraph was a joke.

"How many people die in road accidents" doesn't tell you much about the badness of speeding without the denominator - which in the US is approximately everybody approximately all the time.

This is an excellent comment.

That link doesn't say anything about the Hamas attacks.

Whatever Hamas' plan was, what actually happened included gunning down hundreds of helpless civilians at a music festival and massive, brutal sexual violence against large numbers of women.

This isn't hard. Hamas' Oct 7 attacks were a brutal massacre of innocent civilian life. It's possible to acknowledge that at the same time as strongly condemning Israel's conduct, either in the current war specifically or in their history with Palestinians in general.

I downvoted this comment, even though I'm pretty sympathetic to many of the factual claims it contains: in particular, I don't believe that Israeli civilian or military leadership are doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties. Nevertheless, this comment feels quite out-of-place and vaguely inappropriate to me, given the framing and emotional tone of the OP, which feels much more about explaining one person's feelings and thought processes than an actual attempt to make a strong argument for a specific position.

I also think it's needlessly host... (read more)

The stated reason is the same as Nick's: since the FTX collapse he's been reused from too much board business for staying on the board to make sense:

Since last November, I’ve been recused from the board on all matters associated with FTX and related topics, which has ended up being a large proportion of board business. (This is because the recusal affected not just decisions that were directly related to the collapse of FTX, but also many other decisions for which the way EV UK has been affected by the collapse of FTX was important context.) I know I ini

TIL!

I think this strengthens my confidence in my original comment re: nearly all EA roles being paid under market rate.

Yeah, I agree this is a real and hard case.

Similarly, I think there are roles where the only readily available benchmarks are in academia or the nonprofit sector - in these cases we can assume that those benchmarks are too low, but we don't know by how much, so determining fair compensation is hard. Community building plausibly falls into this bucket.

Interesting. Are there any examples of EA jobs which are more poorly-paid than their private-sector counterparts?

I think this is the great majority of EA jobs that aren't in operations.

In our case (as an EA-adjacent biosecurity org), it's simultaneously the case that (a) most of our staff are well-paid relative to academic and nonprofit benchmarks, and (b) most of our staff could make much more money working in the private sector. Several of our best (and best-compensated) performers took dramatic pay cuts to work for us. I think this is the norm for EA-ad... (read more)

I'm also curious about this. Boston is convenient to me as a Cambridge resident, but I'd guess that holding an event in DC would be more valuable.

I don't think I agree that CEA shouldn't be doing cause specific events, and I think that given how the past couple of Bay Area EAGs went this is a pretty natural decision.

But it does seem pretty regrettable that there'll be no cause-general EAG in the Americas next year.

Another two weeks later, and with no response or acknowledgement from Nonlinear (or even a statement about when they plan to give a response), I'm personally updating moderately towards the view that Nonlinear's communications around the initial release of this post were more about FUD/DARVO than honesty. I've also updated further towards the position that it was right for Ben to post when he did, and that delaying would have been playing into the hands of bad actors. These remain defeasible positions, but I'm not holding my breath.

I think there are practical reasons why it might take longer to prepare a comprehensive public response than the private response they were envisaging for Ben + Lightcone. That said, I also think that there are a lot of non-comprehensive responses that would have taken less time to write while still supporting their version of events, and I think it's reasonable to update against Nonlinear in their absence.

We're coming up on two weeks now since this post was published, with no substantive response from Nonlinear (other than this). I think it would be good to get an explicit timeline from Nonlinear on when we can expect to see their promised response. It's reasonable to ask for folks to reserve judgement for a short time, but not indefinitely. @Kat Woods @Emerson Spartz 

I hope this doesn't seem heartless, but: Given the degree of contested narratives in this affair, can someone not-anonymous with access to Chloe confirm that this account speaks for her?

(i think it probably does, to be clear, but also think it's worth checking)

Thanks for this. I found the uncited claims about EA's "reputational collapse" in the OP quite frustrating and appreciated this more data-driven response.

I don't personally think posting this here is particularly helpful or adds much to the conversation.

Thanks for clarifying, I agree category #3 is the most dicey of the three.

How do you see these trials as differing from standard probation? Is it that the chance of a no-hire at the end is higher? Or the length? Or something else?

In general, I think it is helpful in discussing work trials if people (including the OP) distinguished between three different things that are commonly called work trials:

• Take-home trial tasks / timed online tests, which typically take somewhere in the region of 2-8 hours and are designed to be doable on a weekend or otherwise without work disruption.
• Short (usually 1-3-day) work trials prior to receiving a job offer. This is what I usually think of as being referred to by the term "work trial". While it's technically true that these "interruption of regula

One thing I'm confused about: Emerson is the one making threats, so how do I update on the rest of the Nonlinear team?

I was also uncertain about this, but Kat's comment above seems to indicate (though not outright say) that she supports the threat to sue.

Yeah, this seems right.

Most of the allegations in the OP seem comfortably out-of-distribution to me. (Unless the distribution includes FTX & Leverage, but we know how those went.)

I agree with this, and think it could have been a terrible day for EA if stuff like this surfaced later in a world where Nonlinear had become more influential. But thankfully* we're not in that world.

(* Thankfully assuming the allegations are broadly true etc etc.)

Thanks, I think taking the time to make this stronger phrasing publicly is quite valuable (and seems to match what everyone else is saying so far). It's important that we not engage in guilt-by-association.

Whatever its legitimate uses, defamation law is also an extremely useful cudgel that bad actors can, and very frequently do, use to protect their reputations from true accusations. The cost in money, time and risk of going through a defamation trial is such that threats of such can very easily intimidate would-be truth-tellers into silence, especially when the people making the threat have a history of retaliation. Making such threats even when the case for defamation seems highly dubious (as here), should shift us toward believing that we are in the defam... (read more)

I don't really see the "terrible day for EA" part? Maybe you think Nonlinear is more integral to EA as a whole than I do. To me it seems like an allegation of bad behaviour on the part of a notable but relatively minor actor in the space, that doesn't seem to particularly reflect a broader pattern.

Could be! I might end up with egg on my face here, in which case I will do my best to admit it. That said, my most important claim is my last: if you wanted me and others to truly withhold judgement, you really shouldn't have threatened to sue.

My thoughts, for those who want them:

• I don't have much sympathy for those demanding a good reason why the post wasn't delayed. While I'm generally quite pro sharing posts with orgs, I think it's quite important that this doesn't give the org the right to delay or prevent the posting. This goes double given the belief of both the author and their witnesses that Nonlinear is not acting in good faith.
• There seem to be enough uncontested/incontestable claims made in this post for me to feel comfortable recommending that junior folks in the community stay away f

The world is as it is, now. Tomorrow, it will be a little different. Some of that difference will be because of things you did, or didn't do.

The differences you make could be inside you, in things you've learned or decisions you've made. They could be things you've written or made, known only to you as yet, but ready to propagate through the world on your command. Or they could already be out there, in the world, jumping from person to person, a chain of effects starting with you but much larger than you, feeding into the great chaotic system that is the w... (read more)

Yeah, I also don't report despite continuing to make my pledge donations. It doesn't feel like a core part of the pledge to me.

This comment helped clarify my feelings here. It's not that the new style is bad, really - it's unremarkably fine, and after a while I'll probably stop noticing it. It's that the old Forum was a really unusually beautiful website, and throwing that away feels quite sad to me.

The functional/structural changes in the redesign seem good. I feel sad about the typographical changes.

The old Forum had a really nice, distinctive "bookish" style that I thought was classy, pleasant to read, and also somehow calming? The new design feels more crowded to me, and also more generic.