That is a fair point! I don’t think Zvi et. al are obligated and I’m not like, going to call them fraudster hacks if they’re not interested.
I said this more with the hopes that people frustrated with unaccountable governance would want to seize the mantle of personal responsibility, to show everyone that they are pure and incorruptible and it can be done. My post came across as more of a demand than I meant it to, which I apologize for.
Organizations can distribute their money how they want. My concern here is more “can pillars of the rat community get funding for crappy ideas on the basis of being pillars and having a buddy in grantmaking?” I want to judge EA orgs on their merits and I want to judge Zvi on his merits. If Balsa flops, who do we give less money?
Zvi said on his substack that he would consider this a worthwhile venture if there were a 2% chance of achieving a major federal policy goal. Are there lesser goals that Zvi thinks they can hit at 50% or 90%? If not, then okay. Sometimes that is just how it is and you have to do the low probability, high EV thing. But even if it’s just the 2% thing, I would like Brier scores to update.
So the other concern is track record legibility. There is a lot of deferral among rats, some of it even necessary. Not every person can be a machine learning person. I’ve been reading LW for eight years and plenty of what Vance and Zvi write, but only heard of MetaMed a few months ago looking at Vance’s LinkedIn.
Searching it up on the forums got very thin results. EY endorsed it strongly (which I believe counts as a ding on his track record if anyone is maintaining that anywhere), Alexander advertised it but remained neutral as to whether it was a good idea. So this was a big thing that the community was excited about—and it turned to shit. I believe it turned to shit without enough discussion in the aftermath of why, of what premises people had wrong. I have read the post mortems and found them lacking.
“Can you run a business well?” doesn’t say much about someone’s epistemics, but “Can you identify the best interventions with which to make use of your time?” absolutely does and “Can you win?” absolutely does and the way to see that is how the project empirically performs. This is a fallible test: you can do a good job at the identification and just suck at the business or just be unlucky, but I’m still going to update towards someone being untrustworthy or incompetent based on it.
Other good reasons not to do this: It is extremely plausible that making all your goals legible is inhibitive to policy work. A solution to that might be timed cryptography or an independent keeping track of their goals and reporting the results of the predictions sans what they were predicting. I am aware that this is a non-trivial inconvenience and would respect the founders considerably more if they went for it.
I am also keenly aware that this is a demand for rigor more isolated than the ice caps. I recognize the failure mode where you demand everyone wears their marks on their sleeve, but in practice only the black ones seem to stick over time. I think that’s really bad because then you end up cycling veterans out and replacing them with new people who are no better or worse. Hopefully we can manage to not end up there.
I think I am much more ambivalent than I sounded in my first post, but I wanted to discuss this. Hopefully it doesn’t cause anyone undue stress.
I think Constantin’s postmortem is solid and I appreciate it. She says this:
As she says in the linked thread, Zvi’s postmortem is “quite different.” Constantin discusses the faults of their business strategy, Zvi attributes the failure to people wanting symbolic representation of healthcare rather than healthcare.
Is there truth to Zvi’s position? It is the sort of thing I am inclined to nod my head along with and take him at his word—if Constantin weren’t expressly saying that the issue was legitimate grievances, not signaling. I think her story is more plausible because it seems like less of a deflection and fits my model of the world better. But either way, I think the postmortem should’ve been about why Zvi failed to observe that facet of the world and what he plans to change, not about how the world sucks for having that facet.
I do agree with the quoted comment. A failed start-up is not the end of the world, it doesn’t mean the founder is incompetent, or that they need to step back and let others try.