All of xccf's Comments + Replies

Good points.

We should try to track the uncertainty in our all-things-considered beliefs, and we should take a portfolio approach.

It's not enough to just track the uncertainty, you also have to have visibility into current resource allocation. The "defer if there's an incentive to do so" idea helps here, because if there's an incentive, that suggests someone with such visibility thinks there is an under-allocation.

And this all-things-considered belief is what guides my research and career decisions.

A few arguments for letting your independent impression guide your research and career decisions instead:

• If everyone in EA follows the strategy of letting their independent impression guide their research and career decisions, our distribution of research and career decisions will look like the aggregate of everyone's independent impressions, which is a decent first approximation for what our all-things-considered belief should be as a community. By contrast, if eve

I think offering funding & advice causes more people to work with you, and the closer they are working with you, the larger the influence your opinion is likely to have on the question of whether they should shut down their project.

I don't think risk goes up linearly with time. Many people quit their PhDs when they aren't a good fit.

Fair enough.

Maybe a pragmatic solution here is to emphasize to people who get a grant to do independent research that they can quit and give back the remainder of their grant at any time?

Sure. Well when the LTFF funds graduate students who aren't even directly focused on improving the long-term future, just to help them advance their careers, I think that sends a strong signal that the LTFF thinks grad school should be the default path. Counterfactually, if grad school is 5-10x the risk of independent research, it seems like you should be 5-10x as hesitant to fund grad students compared to independent researchers. (Assuming for the moment that paternalism is in fact the correct orientation for a grantmaker to have.)

My model for why there's a big discrepancy between what NIH grantmakers will fund and what Fast Grants recipients want to do is that NIH grantmakers adopt a sort of conservative, paternalistic attitude. I don't think this is unique to NIH grantmakers. For example, in your comment you wrote:

we want to avoid funding people for independent research when they might do much better in an organization

The person who applies for a grant knows a lot more about their situation than the grantmaker does: their personal psychology, the nature of their research int... (read more)

The feedback loops in grantmaking aren't great. There's a tendency for everyone to assume that because you control so much money, you must know what you're doing. (I talked to an ex-grantmaker who said that even after noticing and articulating this tendency, he continued to see it operating in himself.) And people who want to get a grant will be extra deferential:

once you become a philanthropist, you never again tell a bad joke… everyone wants to be on your good side. And I think that can be a very toxic environment…

source

So I think it's important ... (read more)

I think you're splitting hairs here--my point is that your "hesitation" doesn't really seem to be justified by the data.

trying to pursue an independent research path will be a really big waste of human capital, and potentially cause some pretty bad experiences

I think this is even more true for graduate school:

• https://www.benkuhn.net/grad/

• https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/bbb_mentalhealth_paper.pdf

Independent research seems superior to graduate school for multiple reasons, but one factor is that the time commitment is much lower.... (read more)

It’s hard to find great grants

Pardon me if this is overly pedantic, but I think you might be missing a map/territory distinction here. "It's hard to find great grants" seems different than "It's hard to find grants we really like". For example, the LTFF managers mentioned multiple times in this post that they're skeptical of funding independent researchers, but this analyst found (based on a limited sample size) that independent researchers outperformed organizations among LTFF grant recipients. Similarly, a poll of Fast Grants recipients found that ... (read more)

Sure. I guess I don't have a lot of faith in your team's ability to do this, since you/people you are funding are already saying things that seem amateurish to me. But I'm not sure that is a big deal.

Perhaps the biggest area of agreement was that one hurdle we would face is getting voters to trust us -- not just that it was a good idea to give money to our platform, but that we wouldn’t steal their money. This requires getting some high-profile backing (from both parties).

Is there any way to create legal infrastructure so that voters could sue if you didn't follow through on your promises? And so that your finances are transparent? Perhaps the legal concept of "escrow" could be useful?

I'm not in favor of funding exclusively based on talent, because I think a lot of the impact of our grants is in how they affect the surrounding field, and low-quality work dilutes the quality of those fields and attracts other low-quality work.

Let's compare the situation of the Long-Term Future Fund evaluating the quality of a grant proposal to that of the academic community evaluating the quality of a published paper. Compared to the LTFF evaluating a grant proposal, the academic community evaluating the quality of a published paper has big advantage... (read more)

I thought this Astral Codex Ten post, explaining how the GOP could benefit from integrating some EA-aligned ideas like prediction markets into its platform, was really interesting. Karl Rove retweeted it here. I don't know how well an anti-classism message would align with EA in its current form though, if Habryka is right that EA is currently "too prestige-seeking".

there are probably lots of people who could be doing useful direct work, but they would require resources and direction that we as a community don't have the capacity for.

I imagine this could be one of the highest-leverage places to apply additional resources and direction though. People who are applying for funding for independent projects are people who desire to operate autonomously and execute on their own vision. So I imagine they'd require much less direction than marginal employees at an EA organization, for instance.

I also think there's an epi... (read more)

I see. That suggests you think the LTFF would have much more room for funding with some not-super-large changes to your processes, such as encouraging applicants to submit multiple project proposals, or doing calls with applicants to talk about other projects they could do, or modifications to their original proposal which would make it more appealing to you.

We received 129 applications this round, desk rejected 33 of them, and are evaluating the remaining 96. Looking at our preliminary evaluations, I’d guess we’ll fund 20 - 30 of these.

I keep hearing that there is "plenty of money for AI safety" and things like that. But by the reversal test, don't these numbers imply you think that most LTFF applicants could do more good earning to give? (Assuming they can make at least the hourly wage they requested on their application in the private sector.)

If they request a grant with a wage of $X/hr, and you reject... (read more)

However, I'm not sure in practice there is very much we can directly do about the issue.

Maybe it's worth pointing out that the OP doesn't ask us to do anything other than "stand with the Asian diaspora", which doesn't seem very hard. (I'm reminded of that relationship cliche where one partner tells the other partner about a problem they have, and their partner responds by trying to solve the problem, when all that was really desired was a sympathetic ear.)

I stand with the Asian diaspora. Even if the shooting was not motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, ... (read more)

Well put. Sadly, the horse race/popularity contest is more dramatic, more interesting, and easier to follow than important policy details. And the more polarized our discussion becomes, the easier it is to rationalize a focus on "making sure the good guys win" over figuring out policy details which might change our view regarding what it is good to do, or even who the good guys are.

In terms of concrete solutions, I wonder if the best approach is satirizing excessive meta-ness. (One possible example of how this might be done: "How will voters react to Cli... (read more)

In my experience, when I Facebook message or email EAs I have met in person, bringing up conversation topics I think are substantially higher value than the median topic we would probably wander into during casual chitchat at a party, my message is ignored a large fraction of the time. I don't think this is specific to EAs, I think people are just really flakey when it comes to responding to messages. But it is demoralizing and IMO it destroys a lot of the value of the EA network.

I guess what I'm saying is, maybe keep your expectations low for sending peo... (read more)

I feel very conflicted about this.

On the one hand, we don't want researchers at Google to feel any reluctance to blow the whistle on ethical issues with Google's AI algorithms.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that the original founders of the AI ethics group were the right people for the job--you mentioned radicalization; one of them responded with "You can go fuck yourself" when asked a question about the ethics of political violence.  The new ethics head says "what I’d like to do is have people have [the conversation about AI ethics] in a more d... (read more)

I think the Center for Election Science, an EA organization that advocates approval voting, could be an effective anti-polarization organization.  There seems to be widespread dissatisfaction with the 2-party system, and I believe it's contributing significantly to polarization.

There's something rather delightful about money being matched from Republican and Democrat donors in order to fund an organization which aims to get rid of the 2-party system :)

The idea of fat-tailed distribution of impact of interventions might be a better alternative to this maybe?

That sounds harder to misinterpret, yeah.

That's a good point, it's not a connection I've heard people make before but it does make sense.

I'm a bit concerned that the message "you can do 80% of the good with only 20% of the donation" could be misinterpreted:

• I associate the Pareto principle with saving time and money.  EA isn't really a movement about getting people to decrease the amount of time and money they spend on charity though, if anything probably the opposite.
• To put it another way, the top opportunities identified by EA still have room for more funding.  So the mental motion I w

Was  the "at least one EA" someone in a position of influence?

Not really.

most of his current work seems either opposed to or orthogonal to common EA positions.

I think you have to be careful here, because if someone's work is "opposed" to a common EA position, it's possible that they disagree on facts related to that position but they are still motivated by doing the most good.  It plays into the feedback loop I was talking about in the other comment.  If you disagree with someone a lot, and you don't think you will be able to change their mind, you might not want to invest the time in exploring that disagreement.

I think you should feel free to participate in politics as an individual, but I'm pretty uncomfortable with the EA movement developing an official ideology in an organic and ad-hoc way. It seems easy for a feedback loop to form where an ideology becomes associated with a particular group, and people who disagree with the ideology leave the group, and that strengthens the association. I know an online forum roughly as erudite as the EA forum where this happened in the opposite direction, and the majority of the participants (I believe) are voting for... (read more)

What do you predict would happen to someone like that? Would you expect them to be fired if they held a position at an EA org? Barred from attending EA Global?  Shunned by people in their local group?

Peter Thiel spoke at the EA Summit in 2014 I think, what happened to him? I heard at least one EA say we should kick him out.

First, I want to say I'm glad you're voting for Joe and I hope you will tell all your Pennsylvanian friends to do the same. Nevertheless I think there are a few key considerations around EA getting involved in politics on a movement level that your comment misses.

I also want to note that I find it odd that post got downvoted (possibly for being explicitly partisan?) vs posts like this, which don't explicitly claim to be partisan / engaging in politics but I think are actually extremely political.

That post relates to a case where politics go... (read more)

This sounds like a very promising initiative. However, you're asking for advice, so I'll try and identify potential problems.

The platform would collect money from donors to both campaigns; let’s say for example that Harris donors give us $10 million and Pence donors give us $8 million. We would send matching amounts ($8 million on each side) to charity and donate the remaining amount to the political campaign that raised more ($2 million to Harris).

When I pretend I'm a Republican evaluating this proposal, I think: "If the campai... (read more)

Maybe have staff members who are respected members of both parties?

Or set up individual wealthy donors who are planning to donate roughly the same amount with one another and have them place money in escrow?

Some more considerations:

• If you have a bad experience dating EAs, that might cause you to sour on the EA movement. (Personally, after getting rejected by some EAs, part of my brain pointed out "hey you're putting a lot of effort into this EA thing and it doesn't seem to be helping where survival or reproduction are concerned." Since this isn't something I want my brain to think, I no longer ask EAs out.)
• There's also the possibility of general awkwardness that could interfere with professional relationships.
• For heterosexual dat

One problem with making a list like this: People already get mad at EA for saying that their favorite trendy cause is ineffective. I'm somewhat sympathetic to this: Even if I don't think [super trendy cause] is the most important cause, I'm usually glad people are working on it, and I don't want to discourage them (if the likely result of me discouraging them is that they switch to playing video games or something). It's also bad from a public relations point of view for EA to be seen as existing in opposition to trendy causes.

Therefore, if anyone makes a list like this, I suggest you stick to obscure causes.

EDIT: I want to highlight this take by someone who's much more knowledgable than I am; you should probably read it before reading my comment.

First, the immediate stakes are far lower - in the Cultural Revolution, "counter-revolutionary revisionists" were sent cross-country to re-education camps, tortured, killed, even eaten. As far as I am aware, none of these things have happened recently in America to public figures (or made-public-by-Twitter figures) as a result of the sort of backlash you discuss.

This hasn't happened yet, and probab... (read more)

Secondly, effective altruists are disproportionately employed at companies like Google and Facebook. The policies of social media giants can influence discourse norms on the Web and therefore society as a whole. While EAs working at tech giants may not have enough power within the organizational hierarchy to make a meaningful difference, it’s something worth considering. Another way in this vein that EAs could make a difference is by creating or popularizing discussion platforms that promote rational argumentation and mutual understanding instead of

increasing the presence of public service broadcasting

I don't know how well that would work in the US--it seems that existing public service broadcasters (PBS and NPR) are perceived as biased by American conservatives.

A related idea I've seen is media companies which sell cancellation insurance (archive). The idea being that this is a business model which incentivizes obtaining the trust and respect of as many people as possible, as opposed to inspiring a smaller number of true believers to share/subscribe. One advantage of this idea is it does... (read more)

Maybe you could choose to only vote in a party's primary if you also precommit to voting for your chosen candidate in the general election if they win the primary.

I think if you're in a blue state like California, it generally makes sense to register as Republican to vote in the Republican primary, because there will be fewer California Republicans voting in that primary, but California still contributes the same number of electoral college votes?

I think a good way to explore potential downsides of this proposal, and also potentially reduce the taboo around genetic enhancement, would be to steelman the concerns of people who are reflexively opposed to it.

For example, how likely is it that talking about genes more (e.g. the genetic basis of intelligence) will cause people to associate moral value with genes or feel contempt for those are genetically unlucky? You could do psychology experiments where you tell participants that X% of variation in some trait is genetic and see how that affects their a... (read more)

I also hope your faith in Bennett is well-placed, that whatever mix of vices led him to write vile antisemitic ridicule on an email list called 'morning hate' in 2016 bear little relevance to the man he was when with Leverage in ~~2018, or the man he is now.

Perhaps it'd be helpful for Bennett to publish a critique of alt-right ideas in Palladium Magazine?

• In Bennett's statement on Medium, he says now that he's Catholic, he condemns the views he espoused. If that's true, he should be glad to publish a piece which reduces their

communal violence seems to be common in post-colonial contexts, where many borders have been drawn in disregard to geographic grouping of social groups.

Hmmm, would this reasoning also imply that immigration restrictions could reduce communal violence in some cases? If putting people of different social groups in the same country tends to cause conflict.

Ozy also wrote a response to this article which agrees with some of your points:

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/a-response-to-making-discussions-in-ea-groups-inclusive/

There are non-political ways to address this, such as better contraceptives like Vasalgel.

EA already has semi-official positions on intractable political issues like immigration. If stable two-parent families are indeed an effective way to prevent child abuse, I don't see why we shouldn't have a semi-official position on promoting those as well. It could help address conservative underrepresentation in the EA movement. I think if some positions are taken publicly on both sides, that increases our credibility as an independent source of truth. ... (read more)

"Obviously we can't say this is all causal - in general all good properties are correlated, so it's likely there are shared genetic etc. causes."

Possible causal mechanism:

Through infanticide, males can eliminate the offspring of their competition and get the female back to full baby-making capacity faster

Can you provide a reliable source supporting the claim that the UK legal system does not allow the accused access to all evidence?

I did some research of my own, and from what I can gather, it seems the provision you refer to is mostly about not letting the public know the name of the alleged victim. I find it hard to believe that the accused sometimes does not know the name of the alleged victim in the UK legal system.

FIRE has some discussion on their website if you search for "cross-examine" here. Maybe you can provide legal background on how this situation differs from a college disciplinary hearing.

But I'm less interested in legal technicalities and more interested in what the best policies for Effective Altruism are. There's a decent chance this is the end of Jacy's career as an EA. It's important for CEA to wield its power in this area responsibly.

I'm not saying Jacy should definitely be allowed to cross-examine witnesses. I'... (read more)

Two of FIRE's conditions request that victims of sexual assault must face their assailant in order to have any hope of justice.

If I'm not mistaken, only one condition requires this ("Right to face accuser and witness"). I don't see how the "Access to all evidence" condition requires this.

You seem to have strong feelings about this. I think these are complex issues that deserve careful consideration. Here in the US, the right to confront witnesses is a guarantee provided by the Sixth Amendment to our constitution. I'd want a good understanding of why it's there before being confident in its removal.

Very few teenagers are formally accused of sexual misconduct, and even fewer expelled from a university following an accusation.

I searched for information on how Brown University handles sexual misconduct and quickly found two cases of judges siding with students who felt they were treated unfairly by Brown University tribunals.

A federal judge has reinstated a Brown University student after finding that the Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., improperly judged him responsible for sexual misconduct.

...

"After the preliminary injunction, this Court wa

I don't think it's clear from this post which steps weren't voluntary, and I don't think we should make assumptions.

I'm familiar with a specific case in this area where CEA's response seemed excessive to me. And I've heard of CEA employees, people who were middle-of-the-road politically, who began to tire of CEA's excessive concern for its public image and the public image of the EA movement.

But the thing is that excessive concern for public image might not be a bad idea in this day and age. People have written books about this.

He has himself agreed to step back from the EA community more generally, and to step back from public life in general, which would be an odd move if these were minor misdemeanours.

Not necessarily, in the current cultural milieu.

I think enforcement of this stuff is very uneven and depends a lot on your social circle. Some social circles are underzealous in their enforcement, others overzealous. Given purity spiral dynamics which seem present in the animal rights movement, it seems possible their enforcement is overzealous.

Thanks for the info.

The way I'm reading these excerpts, only one refers to an alienating conversation of the sort discussed in Making Discussions Inclusive (the one about the "somewhat sexist" comment).
The other three seem like complaints about the "vibe", which feels like a separate issue. (Not saying there's nothing to do, just that Making Discussions Inclusive doesn't obviously offer suggestions.) Indeed, there could even be a tradeoff: Reading posts like Making Discussions Inclusive makes me less inclined to talk ... (read more)

My intent was to point out that you can make the slippery slope argument in either direction. I wasn't trying to claim it was more compelling in one direction or the other.

If you believe EA has Epistemic Honor, that argument works in both directions too: "Because EA has Epistemic Honor, any rules we make will be reasonable, and we won't push people out just for having an unfashionable viewpoint."

I do think slippery slope arguments have some merit, and group tendencies can be self-reinforcing. Birds of feather flock together. Because ... (read more)