Good to see a post that loosely captures my own experience of EAG London and comes up with a concrete idea for something to do about the problem (if a little emotionally presented).
I don't have a strong view on the ideal level of transparency/communication here, but something I want to highlight is: Moving too slowly and cautiously is also a failure mode.
In other words, I want to emphasise how important "this is time consuming, and this time is better spent making more grants/doing something else" can be. Moving fast and breaking things tends to lead to much more obvious, salient problems and so generally attracts a lot more criticism. On the other hand, "Ideally, they should have deployed faster" is not a headline. But if you're as consequentialist as the typical EA is, you should be ~equally worried about not spending money fast enough. Sometimes to help make this failure mode more salient, I imagine a group of chickens in a factory farm just sitting around in agony waiting for us all to get our act together (not the most relevant example in this case, but the idea is try to counteract the salience bias associated with the problems around moving fast). Maybe the best way for e.g. CEA to help these chickens overall is to invest more time reducing "reputational and epistemic risks to EA". Maybe it's to keep trying to get resources out the door according to their best judgements and accepting their predicted levels of failed grants, confused community members, and loss of potentially useful feedback that could come from more external scrutiny. It's not clear to me. But it seems like it could well be the latter. True, "these things have a much higher than average chance of doing harm", but there's also a lot more at stake if they move too slowly.
To be clear: This is not to say FTX/CEA are getting the balance right (and even if they broadly are, your suggestion for them to say something like "this seems plausibly good and we have enough money to throw spaghetti at the wall" still seems good to me). I just wanted to give more prominence to a consideration on the other side of the argument that seems to be relatively neglected in these discussions. So, à la your sidenote: Props to FTX for moving fast.
Hi Jack,
Just a quick response on the CEA’s groups team end.
We are processing many small grants and other forms of support for CB and we do not have the capacity to publish BOTECs on all of them.
However, I can give some brief heuristics that we use in the decision-making.
Institutions like Facebook, Mckinsey, and Goldman spend ~ $1 million per school per year at the institutions they recruit from trying to pull students into lucrative careers that probably at best have a neutral impact on the world. We would love for these students to instead focus on solving the world’s biggest and most important problems.
Based on the current amount available in EA, its projected growth, and the value of getting people working in EA careers, we currently think that spending at least as much as McKinsey does on recruiting pencils out in expected value terms over the course of a student’s career. There are other factors to consider here (i.e. double-counting some expenses) that mean we actually spend significantly less than this. However, as Thomas said - even small chances that dinners could have an effect on career changes make them seem like effective uses of money. (We do have a fair amount of evidence that dinners do in fact have positive effects on groups.)
As for your comment on funding student groups, we haven’t sent money to any group that has not asked for it. It is plausible that one of us encouraged them to ask for more since we do think it is a good use of money and would like groups to think ambitiously. We have a list of common group expenses with some tips at the bottom (including considerations on optics).
Given the current landscape, we think missing out on great people and great opportunities is a huge loss. This is especially true if you think there are heavy tails in the amount of impact individuals have. We have thought a lot about our funding guidelines, and suggestions, and feel comfortable with our current status though we are constantly reviewing and updating as the landscape changes.
We appreciate your concern and are always eager for feedback. If you (or others) want to expand on this post with a more in-depth, comprehensive version of this feedback, we’d be open to responding to this in more depth as well.
(The below is copied from a comment by Max Dalton below and I am adding it here for visibility)
"By the way, we are not planning to spend $50m on groups outreach in the near future. Our groups budget is $5.4m this year.
Also note that our focus university program is passing to Open Philanthropy."
Hi Jessica,
Thanks for outlining your reasoning here, and I'm really excited about the progress EA groups are making around the world.
I could easily be missing something here, but why are we comparing the value of CEA's community building grants to the value of Mckinsey etc?
Isn't the relevant comparison CEA's community building grants vs other EA spending, for example GiveWell's marginally funded programs (around 5x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers)?
If CEA is getting funding from non-EA sources, however, this query would be irrelevant.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts :)
I'm obviously not speaking for Jessica here, but I think the reason the comparison is relevant is that the high spend by Goldman ect suggests that spending a lot on recruitment at unis is effective.
If this is the case, which I think is also supported by the success of well funded groups with full or part time organisers, and that EA is in an adversarial relationship to with these large firms, which I think is large true, then it makes sense for EA to spend similar amounts of money trying to attract students.
The relvent comparison is then comparing the value of the marginal student recurited with malaria nets ect.
Thanks Nathan, that would make a lot of sense, and motivates the conversation about whether CEA can realisticly attract as many people through advertising as Goldman etc.
I guess the question is then whether:
a) Goldman's activities are actually effective at attracting students; and
b) This is a relevant baseline prior for the types of activities that local EA groups undertake with CEA's funding (e.g. dinners for EA scholars students)
I'm surprised to see CEA making such a strong claim. I think we should have strong priors against this stance, and I don't think I've seen CEA publish conclusive evidence in the opposite direction.
Firstly, note that these three companies come from very different sectors of the economy and do very different things.
Secondly, even if you assign high credence to the problems with these firms, it seems like there is a fair bit of uncertainty in each case, and you are proposing a quite harsh upper bound - 'probably at best neutral'.
Thirdly, each of these are (broadly) free market firms, who exist only because they are able to persuade people to continue using their services. It's always possible that they are systematically mistaken, and that CEA really does understand social network advertising, management consulting, trading and banking better than these customers... but I think our prior should be a little more modest than this. Usually when people want to buy something it is because they want that thing and think it will be useful for them.
Finally, there are in fact for each of these firms a bunch of concrete benefits they provide. Rarely do I see these explicitly weighed in the calculus against the problems:
It's possible that these has been some explicit analysis of these firms to support your very strong statement. I searched on the forum for 'McKinsey' to try to find it, but at least the first page or so of results were generally positive references - e.g. people quoting their work on climate change, or positively referencing how they would address a problem. 80k does have an old article with some cursory analysis of the harms of finance, but the analysis is seriously flawed, and it doesn't cover Management Consulting or Social Networks at all.
Curious if you disagree with Jessica's key claim, which is "McKinsey << EA for impact"? I agree Jessica is overstating the case for "McKinsey <= 0", but seems like best-case for McKinsey is still order(s) of magnitude less impact than EA.
Subpoints:
Agree we should usually avoid saying poorly-justified things when it's not a necessary feature of the argument, as it could turn off smart people who would otherwise agree.
Sorry, I was trying to get a quick response to this post and I made a stronger claim than I intended. I was trying to say that I think that EA careers are doing much more good than the ones mentioned on average and so spending money is a good bet here. I wasn’t intending to make a definitive judgment about the overall social impact of those other careers, though I know my wording suggests that. I also generally want to note that this element was a personal claim and not necessarily a CEA endorsed one.
This was a great comment and thoughtful reply and the top comment was great too.
Looking at the other threads generated from the top comment, it looks like tiny turns of phrase in that top comment, produced (unreasonably) large amounts of discussion.
I think we all learned a valuable lesson about the importance of clarity and precision when commenting on the EA forum.
FYI I would have upvoted this if not for the final paragraph
I consider this to be a pretty weak argument, so it doesn't contribute much to my priors, which although weak (and so the particulars of a company matter much more), are probably centered near neutral on net welfare effects (in the short to medium term). I think a large share of goods people buy and things they do are harmful to themselves or others before even considering the loss of income/time as a result, or worse for them than the things they compete with. It's enough that I wouldn't have a prior strongly in favour of what profitable companies are doing being good for us. Here are reasons pushing towards neutral or negative impacts:
I do think it's plausible McKinsey and Goldman have done and do more good than harm for humans in the short term, based on the arguments you give, but I don't have a strong view either way. It could depend largely on whether raising people's consumption levels makes them better off overall (and how much) in the places where people are most affected by these companies. Measures of well-being do seem to positively correlate with income/wealth/consumption at the individual level, and I'd guess also at the aggregate level for developing countries, but I'd guess not for developed countries, or at best weakly so. There are negative externalities for increasing an individual's income on others' life satisfaction, although it's possible a large share is due to rescaling, not actually thinking your life is worse absolutely than otherwise. See:
Some companies may also contribute to relative inequality or even counterfactually make the median or poor person absolutely poorer through their political activities.
The categories of things I'm optimistic about for human welfare in the short to medium term are:
I'm neutral to optimistic about these (possibly neutral because they just replace cheaper versions of themselves that would be just as good):
I'm about neutral and pretty uncertain about screen-based entertainment (TV, movies, video games), and recreational substances that aren't extremely addictive or harmful (alcohol, marijuana).
I'm pessimistic about:
There are also a lot of externalities that act at least equally on humans, like carbon emissions, promotion of ethnic violence, or erosion of privacy. Those are all examples off the top of my head for Facebook specifically.
I upvoted Larks' comment, but like you I think this particular argument, "people buy from these firms", is weak.
Ok. Lark’s response seems correct.
But surely, the spirit of the original comment is correct too.
No matter which worldview you have, the value of a top leader moving into EA is overwhelmingly larger than the the social value of the same leader “rowing” in these companies.
Also, at the risk of getting into politics (and really your standard internet argument) gesturing at “free market” is really complicated. You don’t need to take the view of Matt Stoller or something to notice that the benefits of these companies can be provided by other actors. The success of these companies and their resources that allow recruitment with 7 figure campus centres probably has a root source different than pure social value.
The implication that this statement requires CEA to have a strong model of these companies seems unfair. Several senior EAs, who we won’t consider activists or ideological, have deep experiences in these or similar companies. They have opinions that are consistent with the parent comment’s statement. (Being too explicit here has downsides.)
I think the main crux here is that even if Jessica/CEA agrees that the sign of the impact is positive, it still falls in the neutral bracket because on the CEA worldview the impact is roughly negligible relative to the programs that they are excited about.
If you disagree with this maybe you agree with the weaker claim of the impact being comparatively negligible weighted by the resources these companies consume? (there's some kind of nuance to 'consuming resources' in profitable companies, but I guess this is more gesturing at a leaving value on the table framing as opposed to just is the organisation locally net negative or positive.
Do you think people are better off overall than otherwise because of Facebook (and social media generally)? You may have made important connections on Facebook, but many people probably invest less in each connection and have shallower relationships because of social media, and my guess is that mental health is generally worse because of social media (I think there was an RCT on getting people to quit social media, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple studies. I don't have them offhand). I'd guess social media is basically addictive for a lot of people, so people often aren't making well-informed decisions about how much to use, and it's easy for it to be net negative despite widespread use. People joining social media pressures others to join, too, making it more costly to not be on it, so FB creates a problem (induces fear of missing out) and offers a solution to it. Cancel culture, bubbles/echo chambers, the spread of misinformation, and polarization may also be aggravated by social media.
That being said, maybe FB was really important for the growth of the EA community. I mostly got into EA through FB initially, although it's not where I was first exposed to EA. If we think the EA community is important enough, then this plausibly dominates. And, of course, it's where Open Phil's funding came from, but that seems to be historical luck, not really anything special about Facebook, except the growth of its market cap.
On the other hand, FB accelerated the development of AI capabilities, e.g. PyTorch was primarily built by FB. But maybe we should also consider this to be only weakly related to FB's role in social media, and more related to the fact that it's just a large tech company.
There are also multiple counterfactuals we could consider: no Facebook + people spend less time on social media, and no Facebook + people spend about as much time on social media (possibly on one similar to FB, or whatever other options there are now). In the first case, I think it's hard to make a balanced argument for FB being robustly net positive. In the second case, the impact is closer to 0, from either direction, and it's harder to evaluate its sign. Then there's the counterfactual impact of FB getting a more productive hire, or one who is otherwise more valued by FB.
I think McKinsey and Goldman would have other firms step into their spaces if they weren't around.
I don't think this is persuasive. I think most actions people take either increase or decrease x-risk, and you should start with a ~50% prior for which side of neutrality a specific action is on (though not clearly true; see discussion here). I agree there's some commonsensical notions that economic growth is good, including for the LT future, but I personally find arguments in the opposite direction to be slightly stronger. Your own comment to an earlier post is one interesting item on the list of arguments I'd muster in that direction.
Ahh, interesting argument! I wasn't thinking about the argument that these firms might (e.g.) slightly accelerate economic growth, which might then cause an increase in x-risk (if safety is not equivalently accelerated). In general I feel sufficiently unclear about such considerations - like maybe literally 50:50 equipoise is a reasonable prior - that I am loath to let them overwhelm a more concrete short-term impact story in our cost-benefit analysis, in the absence of a clear causal link to a long run impact in the opposite direction, as you suggest in the article.
In this case I think my argument still goes through, because the claim I'm objecting to is so strong - that there is in some sense a >50% probability that every reasonable scenario has all three firms being negative.
Thanks Jessica, this is helpful, and I really appreciate the speed at which you replied.
A couple of things that might be quick to answer and also helpful:
Overall, CEA is planning to spend ~$1.5mil on uni group support in 2022 across ~75 campuses, which is a lot less than $1mil/campus. :)
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
Indeed :-) I had understood from this post (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FjDpyJNnzK8teSu4J/) that this was the destination, though, so the current rate of spending would be less relevant than having good heuristics before we get to that scale.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if you're not actually going to be behind a really 'move the needle' amount of campus spending.
Just as a casual observation, I would much rather hire someone who had done a couple of years at McKinsey than someone coming straight out of undergrad with no work experience. So I'm not sure that diverting talented EAs from McKinsey (or similar) is necessarily best in the long run for expected impact. No EA organization can compete with the ability of McK to train up a new hire with a wide array of generally useful skills in a short amount of time.
I think the key point here is that it is unsually easy to recuirt EAs at uni compared to when they're at McKinsey. I think it's unclear if a) among the the best things for a student to do is go to McKinsey and b) how much less likely it is that an EA student goes to McKinsey. I think it's pretty unlikely going to McKinsey is the best thing to do, but I also think that EA student groups have a realtively small effect on how often students go into elite coporate jobs (a bad thing from my perspective) at least in software engineering.
I'm not sure how clear it is that it's much better for people to hear about EA at university, especially given there is a lot more outreach and onboarding at the university level than for professionals.
Hi, thanks for your comment.
While it's reasonable not to be able to provide an impact estimate for every specific small grant, I think there are some other things that could increase transparency and accountability, for example:
That's really interesting to me because I'm currently thinking about potential recruitment efforts at CS departments for AI safety roles. I couldn't immediately find a source for the numbers you mention, do you remember where you got them from?
I also couldn't find much information on campus recruitment expenses for top firms. However, according to the US National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), in 2018 average cost-per-hire from US universities was $6,110.
FAANG and other top tier employers are likely to spend much more than the average.
For each of the companies, if you look at publicly available websites for the campus recruiting centre for one of the HYPS schools for these companies, and just look at the roster of public facing “ambassadors”, who have significant skills and earning counterfactual (so fully burdened cost may be over 200K per head) it’s clear it’s a 7 figure budget for them once you include operations, physical offices, management and other oversight (which won’t appear on the PL per se).
1 mil is the low end.
I can’t immediately pull up a link here as I am on mobile.