Thanks Elizabeth and Timothy for doing this! Lots of valuable ideas in this transcript.
I felt excited, sad, and also a bit confused, since it feels both slightly resonant but also somewhat disconnected from my experience of EA. Resonant because I agree with the college-recruiting and epistemic aspects of your critiques. Disconnected, because while collectively the community doesn’t seem to be going in the direction that I would hope, I do see many individuals in EA leadership positions who I deeply respect and trust to have good individual views and good process and I’m sad you don’t see them (maybe they are people who aren’t at their best online, and mostly aren’t in the Bay).
I am pretty worried about the Forum and social media more broadly. We need better forms of engagement online—like this article + your other critiques. In the last few years, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that EA’s online strategy is not really serving the community well. If I knew what the right strategy was, I would try to nudge it. Regardless I still see lots of good in EA’s work and overall trajectory.
[my critiques] dropped like a stone through water
I dispute this. Maybe you just don’t see the effects yet? It takes a long time for things to take effect, even internally in places you wouldn’t have access to, and even longer for them to be externally visible. Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That’s why I’m pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn’t become apparent to you though.
Personally, I’m still struggling with my own relationship to EA. I’ve been on the EV board for a year+ - an influential role at the most influential meta org—and I don’t understand how to use this role to impact EA. I see the problems more clearly than I did before, which is great, but I don’t see solutions or great ways forward yet, and I sense that nobody really does. We’re mostly working on stuff to stay afloat rather than high level navigation.
Maybe you just don’t see the effects yet? It takes a long time for things to take effect, even internally in places you wouldn’t have access to, and even longer for them to be externally visible. Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That’s why I’m pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn’t become apparent to you though.
I’ve repeatedly had interactions with ~leadership EA that asks me to assume there’s a shadow EA cabal (positive valence) that is both skilled and aligned with my values. Or puts the burden on me to prove it doesn’t exist, which of course I can’t do. And what you’re saying here is close enough to trigger the rant.
I would love for the aligned shadow cabal to be real. I would especially love if the reason I didn’t know how wonderful it was was that it was so hypercompetent I wasn’t worth including, despite the value match. But I’m not going to assume it exists just because I can’t definitively prove otherwise.
If shadow EA wants my approval, it can show me the evidence. If it decides my approval isn’t worth the work, it can accept my disapproval while continuing its more important work. I am being 100% sincere here, I treasure the right to take action without having to reach consensus- but this doesn’t spare you from the consequences of hidden action or reasoning.
I think I actually agree with Lincoln here and think he was saying a different thing than your comment here seems to be oriented around.
I don’t think Lincoln’s comment had much to do with assuming there was a shadow EA cabal that was aligned with your values. He said “your words are having an impact.”
Words having impacts just does actually take time. I updated from stuff Ben Hoffman said, but it did take 3-4 years or something for the update to fully happen (for me in particular), and when I did ~finish updating the amount I was going to update, it wasn’t exactly the way Ben Hoffman wanted. In the first 3 years, it’s not like I can show Ben Hoffman “I am ready for your approval”, or even that I’ve concretely updated any particular way, because it was a slow messy process and it wasn’t like I knew for sure how close to his camp I was going to land.
But, it wouldn’t have been true to say “his critiques dropped like a stone through water”. (Habryka has said they also affected him, and this seems generally to have actually reveberated a lot).
I don’t know whether or not your critiques have landed, but I think it is too soon to judge.
How much are you arguing about wording, vs genuinely believe and would bet money that in 3-5 years my work will have moved EA to something I can live with?
I definitely wouldn’t bet money that EA will have evolved into something you can live with (Neither EA nor the threads of rationality that he affeted evolved into things Ben Hoffman could live with)
But, I do think there is something important about the fact that, despite that, it is inaccurate to say “the critiques dropped like a stone through water” (or, what I interpret that poetry to mean, which is something like “basically nobody listened at all”. I don’t think I misunderstood that part but if I did then I do retract my claim)
The thing I would bet is “your ‘build a lifeboat for some people-like-you to move to somewhere other than EA’ plan will work at least a bit, and, one of the important mechanisms for it working will be those effortful posts you wrote.”
The problem is that Zach does not mention being truth-aligned as one of the core principles that we wants to uphold.
He writes “CEA focuses on scope sensitivity, scout mindset, impartiality, and the recognition of tradeoffs”.
If we take an act like deleting out inconvenient information like the phrase Leverage Research from a photo on the CEA website, it does violate the principle of being truth aligned but not any of the one’s that Zach mentioned.
If I would ask Zach whether he thinks releasing the people that CEA bars with nondisclosure agreements about that one episode with Leverage about which we unfortunately don’t know more than that there are nondisclosure agreements, I don’t think he would release them. A sign of being truth-aligned would be to release the information but none of the principles Zach points in the direction of releasing people from the nondisclosure agreements.
Saying that your principle is “impartiality” instead of saying that it is “understanding conflicts of interests and managing them effectively” seems to me like a bad sign.
When talking about kidney donation in the start he celebrates self-chosen sacrifice as example of great ethics. Kidney donation is extreme virtue signaling. I would rather have EA value honesty and accountability than celebrating self-sacrifice. Instead, of celebrating people for taking actions nobody would object to he could have celebrated Ben Hoffman for the courage to speak out about problems at GiveWell and facing social rejection for it.
releasing the people that CEA bars with nondisclosure agreements about that one episode with Leverage about which we unfortunately don’t know more than that there are nondisclosure agreements
I don’t know the details in the Leverage case, but usually the way this sort of non-disclosure works is that both parties in a dispute, including employees, have non-disclosure obligations. But one party isn’t able to release their (ex) employees unilaterally; the other party would need to agree as well.
That is, I suspect the agreements are structured such that CEA releasing people the way you propose (without Leverage also agreeing, which I doubt they would) would be a willful contract violation.
All the involved Leverage employees told me that they would be fine having the thing released, and that it was CEA who wanted to keep things private (this might be inaccurate, this situation sure involves a lot of people saying contradictory things).
I did talk with Geoff Anders about this. He told me that there’s no legal agreement between CEA and Leverage. However, there are Leverage employees that are ex-CEA and thus bound by legal agreement. Geoff himself said, that he would consider it positive for the information to be public but he would not want to pick another fight with CEA by publically talking about what happened.
Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That’s why I’m pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn’t become apparent to you though.
[...]
I don’t see solutions or great ways forward yet, and I sense that nobody really does
That does sound like learned helplessness and that the EA leadership filters people out who would see ways forward.
Let me give you one:
If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more. Given that she has a Patreon the way to give her money is pretty straightforward. If the writing influences what happens in EV board discussions, paying Elizabeth for the value she provides for the board would be straightforward.
If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she’s making an impact.
Paying Elizabeth might not be the solution to all of EA’s problems, but it’s a way to signal priorities. Estimate the value she provides to EA and then pay her for that value and publically publish as EV a writeup that EV thinks that this is the amount of value she provides to EA and was paid by EV.
If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more [...] If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she’s making an impact.
First of all, thank you, love it when people suggest I receive money. Timothy and I have talked about fundraising for a continued podcast. I would strongly prefer most of the funding be crowdfunding, for the reason you say. If we did this it would almost certainly be through Manifund. Signing up for Patreon and noting this as the reason also works, although for my own sanity this will always be a side project.
I should note that my work on EA up through May was covered by a Lightspeed grant, but I don’t consider that EA money.
Yes, giving money in form of a grant might not be the best way to fund good posts as it makes it harder to criticize the entity that funds you and decentralized crowdfunding is better.
Maybe, an EV blog post saying something like:
Currently, we see EA as insight constraint. When funding people directly through grants, they have to think a lot about how to stay in good graces when they voice their feedback.
We think that individuals who donate their 10% for the GivingWhatWeCan, should consider that there are some causes like most of what GiveWell recommends where getting a 1,000,000$ grant from a billionaire is equal to getting a 1000$ from a thousand people, while there are other causes that are harder to fund via grants because it’s important that grant receivers can feel like the can give honest feedback.
Given that we are insight constraint for insight about how to solve the problems within EA, donating via Patreon to writers who provide insight and are better able to do that if they are funded independently without relying on big EA instituations for their funding, is a highly effectful way to donate for those who donate their 10%.
One writer we think has had a nontrivial impact for the better is Elizabeth because we believe X, Y, Z.
If the problem is as lincolnquirk, describes that in general they don’t have much ideas about how to do better and your writing had nontrivial impact by giving ideas about what to do better, that would be the straightforward way forward.
The desire for crowdfunding is less about avoiding bias[1] and more that this is only worth doing if people are listening, and small donors are much better evidence on that question than grants. If EV gave explicit instructions to donate to me it would be more like a grant than spontaneous small donors, although I in general agree people should be looking for opportunities they can beat GiveWell.
ETA: we were planning on waiting on this but since there’s interest I might as well post the fundraiser now.
I’m fortunate to have both a long runway and sources of income outside of EA and rationality. One reason I’ve pushed as hard as I have on EA is that I had a rare combination of deep knowledge of and financial independence from EA. If couldn’t do it, who could?
Reading this makes me feel really sad because I’d like to believe it, but I can’t, for all the reasons outlined in the OP.
I could get into more details, but it would be pretty costly for me for (I think) no benefit. The only reason I came back to EA criticism was that talking to Timothy feels wholesome and good, as opposed to the battery acid feeling I get from most discussions of EA.
(Commenting as myself, not representing any org)
Thanks Elizabeth and Timothy for doing this! Lots of valuable ideas in this transcript.
I felt excited, sad, and also a bit confused, since it feels both slightly resonant but also somewhat disconnected from my experience of EA. Resonant because I agree with the college-recruiting and epistemic aspects of your critiques. Disconnected, because while collectively the community doesn’t seem to be going in the direction that I would hope, I do see many individuals in EA leadership positions who I deeply respect and trust to have good individual views and good process and I’m sad you don’t see them (maybe they are people who aren’t at their best online, and mostly aren’t in the Bay).
I am pretty worried about the Forum and social media more broadly. We need better forms of engagement online—like this article + your other critiques. In the last few years, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that EA’s online strategy is not really serving the community well. If I knew what the right strategy was, I would try to nudge it. Regardless I still see lots of good in EA’s work and overall trajectory.
I dispute this. Maybe you just don’t see the effects yet? It takes a long time for things to take effect, even internally in places you wouldn’t have access to, and even longer for them to be externally visible. Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That’s why I’m pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn’t become apparent to you though.
Personally, I’m still struggling with my own relationship to EA. I’ve been on the EV board for a year+ - an influential role at the most influential meta org—and I don’t understand how to use this role to impact EA. I see the problems more clearly than I did before, which is great, but I don’t see solutions or great ways forward yet, and I sense that nobody really does. We’re mostly working on stuff to stay afloat rather than high level navigation.
I liked Zach’s recent talk/Forum post about EA’s commitment to principles first. I hope this is at least a bit hope-inspiring, since I get the sense that a big part of your critique is that EA has lost its principles.
I’ve repeatedly had interactions with ~leadership EA that asks me to assume there’s a shadow EA cabal (positive valence) that is both skilled and aligned with my values. Or puts the burden on me to prove it doesn’t exist, which of course I can’t do. And what you’re saying here is close enough to trigger the rant.
I would love for the aligned shadow cabal to be real. I would especially love if the reason I didn’t know how wonderful it was was that it was so hypercompetent I wasn’t worth including, despite the value match. But I’m not going to assume it exists just because I can’t definitively prove otherwise.
If shadow EA wants my approval, it can show me the evidence. If it decides my approval isn’t worth the work, it can accept my disapproval while continuing its more important work. I am being 100% sincere here, I treasure the right to take action without having to reach consensus- but this doesn’t spare you from the consequences of hidden action or reasoning.
I think I actually agree with Lincoln here and think he was saying a different thing than your comment here seems to be oriented around.
I don’t think Lincoln’s comment had much to do with assuming there was a shadow EA cabal that was aligned with your values. He said “your words are having an impact.”
Words having impacts just does actually take time. I updated from stuff Ben Hoffman said, but it did take 3-4 years or something for the update to fully happen (for me in particular), and when I did ~finish updating the amount I was going to update, it wasn’t exactly the way Ben Hoffman wanted. In the first 3 years, it’s not like I can show Ben Hoffman “I am ready for your approval”, or even that I’ve concretely updated any particular way, because it was a slow messy process and it wasn’t like I knew for sure how close to his camp I was going to land.
But, it wouldn’t have been true to say “his critiques dropped like a stone through water”. (Habryka has said they also affected him, and this seems generally to have actually reveberated a lot).
I don’t know whether or not your critiques have landed, but I think it is too soon to judge.
How much are you arguing about wording, vs genuinely believe and would bet money that in 3-5 years my work will have moved EA to something I can live with?
I definitely wouldn’t bet money that EA will have evolved into something you can live with (Neither EA nor the threads of rationality that he affeted evolved into things Ben Hoffman could live with)
But, I do think there is something important about the fact that, despite that, it is inaccurate to say “the critiques dropped like a stone through water” (or, what I interpret that poetry to mean, which is something like “basically nobody listened at all”. I don’t think I misunderstood that part but if I did then I do retract my claim)
The thing I would bet is “your ‘build a lifeboat for some people-like-you to move to somewhere other than EA’ plan will work at least a bit, and, one of the important mechanisms for it working will be those effortful posts you wrote.”
The problem is that Zach does not mention being truth-aligned as one of the core principles that we wants to uphold.
He writes “CEA focuses on scope sensitivity, scout mindset, impartiality, and the recognition of tradeoffs”.
If we take an act like deleting out inconvenient information like the phrase Leverage Research from a photo on the CEA website, it does violate the principle of being truth aligned but not any of the one’s that Zach mentioned.
If I would ask Zach whether he thinks releasing the people that CEA bars with nondisclosure agreements about that one episode with Leverage about which we unfortunately don’t know more than that there are nondisclosure agreements, I don’t think he would release them. A sign of being truth-aligned would be to release the information but none of the principles Zach points in the direction of releasing people from the nondisclosure agreements.
Saying that your principle is “impartiality” instead of saying that it is “understanding conflicts of interests and managing them effectively” seems to me like a bad sign.
When talking about kidney donation in the start he celebrates self-chosen sacrifice as example of great ethics. Kidney donation is extreme virtue signaling. I would rather have EA value honesty and accountability than celebrating self-sacrifice. Instead, of celebrating people for taking actions nobody would object to he could have celebrated Ben Hoffman for the courage to speak out about problems at GiveWell and facing social rejection for it.
I don’t know the details in the Leverage case, but usually the way this sort of non-disclosure works is that both parties in a dispute, including employees, have non-disclosure obligations. But one party isn’t able to release their (ex) employees unilaterally; the other party would need to agree as well.
That is, I suspect the agreements are structured such that CEA releasing people the way you propose (without Leverage also agreeing, which I doubt they would) would be a willful contract violation.
All the involved Leverage employees told me that they would be fine having the thing released, and that it was CEA who wanted to keep things private (this might be inaccurate, this situation sure involves a lot of people saying contradictory things).
I did talk with Geoff Anders about this. He told me that there’s no legal agreement between CEA and Leverage. However, there are Leverage employees that are ex-CEA and thus bound by legal agreement. Geoff himself said, that he would consider it positive for the information to be public but he would not want to pick another fight with CEA by publically talking about what happened.
That does sound like learned helplessness and that the EA leadership filters people out who would see ways forward.
Let me give you one:
If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more. Given that she has a Patreon the way to give her money is pretty straightforward. If the writing influences what happens in EV board discussions, paying Elizabeth for the value she provides for the board would be straightforward.
If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she’s making an impact.
Paying Elizabeth might not be the solution to all of EA’s problems, but it’s a way to signal priorities. Estimate the value she provides to EA and then pay her for that value and publically publish as EV a writeup that EV thinks that this is the amount of value she provides to EA and was paid by EV.
First of all, thank you, love it when people suggest I receive money. Timothy and I have talked about fundraising for a continued podcast. I would strongly prefer most of the funding be crowdfunding, for the reason you say. If we did this it would almost certainly be through Manifund. Signing up for Patreon and noting this as the reason also works, although for my own sanity this will always be a side project.
I should note that my work on EA up through May was covered by a Lightspeed grant, but I don’t consider that EA money.
Yes, giving money in form of a grant might not be the best way to fund good posts as it makes it harder to criticize the entity that funds you and decentralized crowdfunding is better.
Maybe, an EV blog post saying something like:
If the problem is as lincolnquirk, describes that in general they don’t have much ideas about how to do better and your writing had nontrivial impact by giving ideas about what to do better, that would be the straightforward way forward.
The desire for crowdfunding is less about avoiding bias[1] and more that this is only worth doing if people are listening, and small donors are much better evidence on that question than grants. If EV gave explicit instructions to donate to me it would be more like a grant than spontaneous small donors, although I in general agree people should be looking for opportunities they can beat GiveWell.
ETA: we were planning on waiting on this but since there’s interest I might as well post the fundraiser now.
I’m fortunate to have both a long runway and sources of income outside of EA and rationality. One reason I’ve pushed as hard as I have on EA is that I had a rare combination of deep knowledge of and financial independence from EA. If couldn’t do it, who could?
Reading this makes me feel really sad because I’d like to believe it, but I can’t, for all the reasons outlined in the OP.
I could get into more details, but it would be pretty costly for me for (I think) no benefit. The only reason I came back to EA criticism was that talking to Timothy feels wholesome and good, as opposed to the battery acid feeling I get from most discussions of EA.
Why do you think that this is the case?