RyanCarey's Quick takes

The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.

You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.

Current EA forum

Current Lesswrong

Current Hacker News

Should we fund people for more years at a time? I've heard that various EA organisations and individuals with substantial track records still need to apply for funding one year at a time, because they either are refused longer-term funding, or they perceive they will be.

For example, the LTFF page asks for applications to be "as few as possible", but clarifies that this means "established organizations once a year unless there is a significant reason for submitting multiple applications". Even the largest organisations seem to only receive OpenPhil funding every 2-4 years. For individuals, even if they are highly capable, ~12 months seems to be the norm.

Offering longer (2-5 year) grants would have some obvious benefits:

• Grantees spend less time writing grant applications
• Evaluators spend less time reviewing grant applications
• Grantees plan their activities longer-term

The biggest benefit, though, I think, is that:

• Grantees would have greater career security.

Job security is something people value immensely. This is especially true as you get older (something I've noticed tbh), and would be even moreso for someone trying to raise kids. In the EA economy, many people get by on short-term grants and contracts, and even if they are employed, their organisation might itself not have a very steady stream of income. Overall, I would say that although EA has made significant progress in offering good salaries and great offices, the job stability is still not great. Moreover, career security is a potential blind spot for grantmakers, who generally do have ~permanent employment from a stable employer.

What's more, I think that offering stable income may in many cases be cheaper than improving one's salary and office. Because some people have, for years, never been refused a grant, and would likely return any funds that turn out not to be needed. And despite the low chance of funding being "wasted", they still have to apply annually. In such cases, it seems especially clear that the time savings and talent retention benefits would outweigh any small losses.

Comments on Jacy Reese Anthis' Some Early History of EA (archived version).

Summary: The piece could give the reader the impression that Jacy, Felicifia and THINK played a comparably important role to the Oxford community, Will, and Toby, which is not the case.

I'll follow the chronological structure of Jacy's post, focusing first on 2008-2012, then 2012-2021. Finally, I'll discuss "founders" of EA, and sum up.

2008-2012

Jacy says that EA started as the confluence of four proto-communities: 1) SingInst/rationality, 2) Givewell/OpenPhil, 3) Felicifia, and 4) GWWC/80k (or the broader Oxford community). He also gives honorable mentions to randomistas and other Peter Singer fans. Great - so far I agree.

What is important to note, however, is the contributions that these various groups made. For the first decade of EA, most key community institutions of EA came from (4) - the Oxford community, including GWWC, 80k, and CEA, and secondly from (2), although Givewell seems to me to have been more of a grantmaking entity than a community hub. Although the rationality community provided many key ideas and introduced many key individuals to EA, the institutions that it ran, such as CFAR, were mostly oriented toward its own "rationality" community. 

Finally, Felicifia is discussed at greatest length in the piece, and Jacy clearly has a special affinity to it, based on his history there, as do I. He goes as far as to describe the 2008-12 period as a history of "Felicifia and other proto-EA communities". Although I would love to take credit for the development of EA in this period, I consider Felicifia to have had the third- or fourth-largest role in "founding EA" of groups on this list. I understand its role as roughly analogous to the one currently played (in 2022) by the EA Forum, as compared to those of CEA and OpenPhil: it provides a loose social scaffolding that extends to parts of the world that lack any other EA organisation. It therefore provides some interesting ideas and leads to the discovery of some interesting people, but it is not where most of the work gets done. 

Jacy largely discusses the Felicifia Forum as a key component, rather than the Felicifia group-blog. However, once again, this is not quite what I would focus on. I agree that the Forum contributed a useful social-networking function to EA. However, I suspect we will find that more of the important ideas originated on Seth Baum's Felicifia group-blog and more of the big contributors started there. Overall, I think the emphasis on the blog should be at least as great as that of the forum.

2012 onwards

Jacy describes how he co-founded THINK in 2012 as the first student network explicitly focused on this emergent community. What he neglects to discuss at this time is that the GWWC and 80k Hours student networks already existed, focusing on effective giving and impactful careers. He also mentions that a forum post dated to 2014 discussed the naming of CEA but fails to note that the events described in the post occurred in 2011, culminating in the name "effective altruism" being selected for that community in December 2011. So steps had already been taken toward having an "EA" moniker and an EA organisation before THINK began.

Co-founders of EA

To wrap things up, let's get to the question of how this history connects to the "co-founding" of EA.

Some people including me have described themselves as “co-founders” of EA. I hesitate to use this term for anyone because this has been a diverse, diffuse convergence of many communities. However, I think insofar as anyone does speak of founders or founding members, it should be acknowledged that dozens of people worked full-time on EA community-building and research since before 2012, and very few ideas in EA have been the responsibility of one or even a small number of thinkers. We should be consistent in the recognition of these contributions.

There may have been more, but only three people come to mind, who have described themselves as co-founders of EA: Will, Toby, and Jacy. For Will and Toby, this makes absolute sense: they were the main ringleaders of the main group (the Oxford community) that started EA, and they founded the main institutions there. The basis for considering Jacy among the founders, however, is that he was around in the early days (as were a couple of hundred others), and that he started one of the three main student groups - the latest, and least-important among them. In my view, it's not a reasonable claim to have made.

Having said that, I agree that it is good to emphasise that as the "founders" of EA, Will and Toby only did a minority - perhaps 20% - of the actual work involved in founding it. Moreover, I think there is a related, interesting question: if Will and Toby had not founded EA, would it have happened otherwise? The groundswell of interest that Jacy describes suggests to me an affirmative answer: a large group of people were already becoming increasingly interested in areas relating to applied utilitarianism, and increasingly connected with one another, via GiveWell, academic utilitarian research, Felicifia, utilitarian Facebook groups, and other mechanisms. I lean toward thinking that something like an EA movement would have happened one way or another, although it's characteristics might have been different.

The FTX crisis through the lens of wikipedia pageviews.

(Relevant: comparing the amounts donated and defrauded by EAs)

1. In the last two weeks, SBF has about about 2M views to his wikipedia page. This absolutely dwarfs the number of pageviews to any major EA previously.

2. Viewing the same graph on a logarithmic scale, we can see that even before the recent crisis, SBF was the best known EA. Second was Moskovitz, and roughly tied at third are Singer and Macaskill.

3. Since the scandal, many people will have heard about effective altruism, in a negative light. It has been accumulating pageviews at about 10x the normal rate. If pageviews are a good guide, then 2% of people who had heard about effective altruism ever would have heard about it in the last two weeks, through the FTX implosion.

4. Interest in "longtermism" has been only weakly affected by the FTX implosion, and "existential risk" not at all.

Given this and the fact that two books and a film are on the way, I think that "effective altruism" doesn't have any brand value anymore is more likely than not to lose all its brand value. Whereas "existential risk"  is far enough removed that it is untainted by these events. "Longtermism" is somewhere in-between.

A case of precocious policy influence, and my pitch for more research on how to get a top policy job.

Last week Lina Khan was appointed as Chair of the FTC, at age 32! How did she get such an elite role? At age 11, she moved to the US from London. In 2014, she studied antitrust topics at the New America Foundation (centre-left think tank). Got a JD from Yale in 2017, and published work relevant to the emerging Hipster Antitrust movement at the same time. In 2018, she worked as a legal fellow at the FTC. In 2020, became an associate professor of law at Columbia. This year - 2021 - she was appointed by Biden.

The FTC chair role is an extraordinary level of success to reach at such a young age. But it kind-of makes sense that she should be able to get such a role: she has elite academic credentials that are highly relevant for the role, has riden the hipster antitrust wave, and has experience of and willingness to work in government.

I think biosec and AI policy EAs could try to emulate this. Specifically, they could try to gather some elite academic credentials, while also engaging with regulatory issues and working for regulators, or more broadly, in the executive branch of goverment. Jason Matheny's success is arguably a related example.

This also suggests a possible research agenda surrounding how people get influential jobs in general. For many talented young EAs, it would be very useful to know. Similar to how Wiblin ran some numbers in 2015 on the chances at a seat in congress given a background at Yale Law, we could ask about the whitehouse, external political appointments (such as FTC commissioner) and the judiciary. Also, this ought to be quite tractable: all the names are in public, e.g. here [Trump years] and here [Obama years], most of the CVs are in the public domain - it just needs doing.

Putting things in perspective: what is and isn't the FTX crisis, for EA?

In thinking about the effect of the FTX crisis on EA, it's easy to fixate on one aspect that is really severely damaged, and then to doomscroll about that, or conversely to focus on an aspect that is more lightly affected, and therefore to think all will be fine across the board. Instead, we should realise that both of these things can be true for different facets of EA. So in this comment, I'll now list some important things that are, in my opinion, badly damaged, and some that aren't, or that might not be.

What in EA is badly damaged:

• The brand “effective altruism”, and maybe to an unrecoverable extent (but note that most new projects have not been naming themselves after EA anyway.)
• The publishability of research on effective altruism (philosophers are now more sceptical about it).
• The “innocence” of EA (EAs appear to have defrauded ~4x what they ever donated). EA, in whatever capacity it continues to exist, will be harshly criticised for this, as it should be, and will have to be much more thick-skinned in future.
• The amount of goodwill among promoters of EA (they have lost funds on FTX, regranters have been embarrassed by the disappearance of promised funds, others have to content with clawbacks.), as well as the level of trust within EA, generally.
• Abundant funding for EA projects that are merely plausibly-good.

What in EA is only damaged mildly, or not at all:

• The rough amount of people who people want to doing good, effectively
• The social network that has been built up around doing good, effectively, (i.e. “the real EA community is the friends we made along the way”)
• The network of major organisations that are working on EA-related problems.
• The knowledge that we have accumulated, through research and otherwise, about how to do good effectively.
• “Existential risk”, as a brand
• The “AI safety” research community in general
• The availability of good amounts of funding for clearly-good EA projects.

What in EA might be badly damaged:

• The viability of “utilitarianism” as a public philosophy, absent changes (although Sam seems to have misapplied utilitarianism, this doesn’t redeem utilitarianism as a public philosophy, because we would also expect it to be applied imperfectly in future, and it is bad that its misapplication can be so catastrophic).
• The current approach to building a community to do good, effectively (it is not clear whether a movement is even the right format for EA, going forward)
• The EA “pitch”. (Can we still promote EA in good conscience? To some of us, the phrase “effective altruism” is now revolting. Does the current pitch still ring true, that joining this community will enable one to act as a stronger force for good? I would guess that many will prefer to pitch more specific things that are of interest to them, e.g. antimalarials, AI safety, whatever.)

Given all of this, what does that say about how big of a deal the FTX crisis is for EA? Well, I think it's the biggest crisis that EA has ever had (modulo the possible issue of AI capabilities advances). What's more, I also can't think of a bigger scandal in the 223-year history of utilitarianism. On the other hand, the FTX crisis is not even the most important change in EA's funding situation, so far. For me, most important was when Moskovitz entered the fold, changing the number of EA billionaires went from zero to one. When I look over the list above, I think that much more of the value of the EA community resides in its institutions and social network than in its brand. The main ways that a substantial chunk of value could be lost is if enough trust or motivation was lost, that it became hard to run projects, or recruit new talent. But I think that even though some goodwill and trust is lost, it can be rebuilt, and people's motivation is intact. And I think that whatever happens to the exact strategy of outreach currently used by the EA community, we will be able to find ways to attract top talent to work on important problems. So my gut feeling would be that maybe 10% of what we’ve created is undone by this crisis. Or that we’re set back by a couple of years, compared to where we would be if FTX was not started. Which is bad, but it's not everything.

Translating EA into Republican. There are dozens of EAs in US party politics, Vox, the Obama admin, Google, and Facebook. Hardly in the Republican party, working for WSJ, appointed for Trump, or working for Palantir. A dozen community groups in places like NYC, SF, Seattle, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Yale. But none in Dallas, Phoenix, Miami, the US Naval Laboratory, the Westpoint Military Academy, etc - the libertarian-leaning GMU economics department being a sole possible exception.

This is despite the fact that people passing through military academies would be disproportionately more likely to work on technological dangers in the military and public service, while the ease of competitiveness is less than more liberal colleges.

I'm coming to the view that similarly to the serious effort to rework EA ideas to align with Chinese politics and culture, we need to translate EA into Republican, and that this should be a multi-year, multi-person project.

Sam Bankman Fried (~$25B) is currently estimated to be about twice as rich as Dustin Moskovitz (~$13B). The rest of committed EA money is <$10B, so SBF and colleagues constitute close-to, if not half of all EA funds. I don't think people have fully reoriented toward this reality. For example, we should care more about top  talent going to the FTX Foundation, and worry less if OpenPhil won't fund a pet project.

Obviously, crypto is volatile, so this may change!

Getting advice on a job decision, efficiently (five steps)

When using EA considerations to decide between job offers, asking for help is often a good idea, even if those who could provide advice are busy, and their time is valued. This is because advisors can spend minutes of their time to guide years of yours. It's not disrespecting their "valuable" time, if you do it right. I've had some experience as an advisor, both and as an advisee, and I think a safe bet is to follow the following several steps:

1. Make sure you actually have a decision that is will concretely guide months to years of your time, i.e. ask about which offer to take, not which company to apply for.
2. Distill the pros and cons, and neutral attributes of each option down to page or two of text, in a format that permits inline comments (ideally a GDoc). Specifically:
   • To begin with, give a rough characterization of each option, describing it in neutral terms.
   • Do mention non-EA considerations e.g. location preferences, alongside EA-related ones.
   • Remove duplicates. If something is listed as a "pro" for option A, it need not also be listed as a "con" for option B. This helps with conciseness and helps avoid arbitrary double-counting of considerations. If there are many job offers, then simply choose some option A as the baseline, and measure the pros/cons of each other option relative to option A, as in the "three-way comparison example" below.
   • Merge pros/cons that are related to one another. This also helps with conciseness and avoiding arbitrary double-counting
   • Indicate the rough importance of various pros/cons. If  you think some consideration is more important, then you should explicitly mark it as so. You can mark considerations as strong (+++/---) or weak (+/-) if you want.
   • Share it to experts whose time is less valuable before the paramount experts in your field,
3. When advisors ask questions about the detail of your situation, make sure to elaborate these points in the document
4. Make sure the advisors have an opportunity to give you an all-things-considered judgment within the document (to allow for criticism), or privately, in case they are reluctant to share their criticism of some options.
5. To make a decision, don't just add up the considerations in the list. Also, take into account the all-things-considered judgments of advisors (which includes expertise that they may not be able to articulate), as well as your personal instincts (which include self-knowledge that you may not be able to articulate).

Five recruitment ideas.

Here are five ideas, each of which I suspect could improve the flow of EA talent by at least a few percent.

1. A top math professor who takes on students in alignment-relevant topics

A few years ago, this was imperative in CS. Now we have some AIS professors in CS, and a couple in stats, but none in pure math. But some students obsessed with pure math, and interested in AIS, are very bright, yet don't want to drop out of their PhDs. Thus having a top professor could be a good way to catch these people.

2. A new university that could hire people as professors

Because some academics don't want to leave academia.

3. A recruitment ground for politicians. This could involve top law and policy schools, and would be not be explicitly EA -branded.

Because we need more good candidates to support. And some distance between EAs and the politicians we support could help with both epistemic and reputational contamination.

4. Mass scholarships for undergrads at non-elite, non-US high-schools/undergrad, based on testing. This could award thousands of scholarships per year. 

A lot of top scientists study undergrad in their own country, so it would make sense to either fund them to move to a better-connected environment, or to try to reach them in situ. (I think Atlas is higher-touch, and pitched younger than this would be.)

5. Internship & scholarship programs for German and Australian medical programs to transition into biosecurity.

Germany and Australia give school-leavers a singular score that determines what university programs they can enter, and medical programs are the most competitive, so a ton of EAs from those countries are medical undergrads. We could lean into this. Probably some other countries are the same.

(Edit, 2022: a sixth idea would be to start a teaching-focused university, and to offer scholarships to that same school. It's unclear how one would compete against existing universities, so one option would be to teach a short two year associate-degree, from which students would transfer into regular universities, as with Deep Springs College. But this might decrease the density of EAs at other top schools, which might be net bad. Another option - offer merit-based scholarships, predominantly to international students who have fewer opportunities.)

EA Highschool Outreach Org (see Catherine's and Buck's posts, my comment on EA teachers)

Running a literal school would be awesome, but seems too consuming of time and organisational resources to do right now.Assuming we did want to do that eventually, what could be a suitable smaller step? Founding an organisation with vetted staff, working full-time on promoting analytical and altruistic thinking to high-schoolers - professionalising in this way increases the safety and reputability of  these programs. Its activities should be targeted to top schools, and could include, in increasing order of duration:

1. One-off outreach talks at top schools
2. Summer programs in more countries, and in more subjects, and with more of an altruistic bent (i.e. variations on SPARC and Eurosparc)
3. Recurring classes in things like philosophy, econ, and EA. Teaching by visitors could be arranged by liaising to school teachers, similarly to how external teachers are brought in for chess classes.
4. After-school, or weekend, programs for interested students

I'm not confident this would go well, given the various reports from Catherine's recap and Buck's further theorising. But targeting the right students, and bringing the right speakers, gives it a chance of success. If you get to (3-4), all is going well, and the number of interested teachers and students are rising, it would be very natural for the org to scale into a school proper.

People often tell me that they encountered EA because they were Googling "How do I choose where to donate?", "How do I choose a high-impact career?" and so on. Has anyone considered writing up answers to these topics as WikiHow instructionals? It seems like it could attract a pretty good amount of traffic to EA research and the EA community in general.

SBF's views on utilitarianism

After hearing about his defrauding FTX, like everyone else, I wondered why he did it. I haven't met Sam in over five years, but one thing that I can do is take a look at his old Felicifia comments. At that time, back in 2012, Sam identified as an act utilitarian, and said that he would only follow rules (such as abstaining from theft) only if and when there was a real risk of getting caught. You can see this in the following pair of quotes.

Quote #1. Regarding the Parfit's Hiker thought experiment, he said:

I'm not sure I understand what the paradox is here. Fundamentally if you are going to donate the money to THL and he's going to buy lots of cigarettes with it it's clearly in an act utilitarian's interest to keep the money as long as this doesn't have consequences down the road, so you won't actually give it to him if he drives you. He might predict this and thus not give you the ride, but then your mistake was letting Paul know that you're an act utilitarian, not in being one. Perhaps this was because you've done this before, but then not giving him money the previous time was possibly not the correct decision according to act utilitarianism, because although you can do better things with the money than he can, you might run in to problems later if you keep in. Similarly, I could go around stealing money from people because I can spend the money in a more utilitarian way than they can, but that wouldn't be the utilitarian thing to do because I was leaving out of my calculation the fact that I may end up in jail if I do so.

Quote #2. Regarding act vs rule utilitarianism, he said:

I completely agree that in practice following rules can be a good idea. Even though stealing might sometimes be justified in the abstract, in practice it basically never is because it breaks a rule that society cares a lot about and so comes with lots of consequences like jail. That being said, I think that you should, in the end, be an act utilitarian, even if you often think like a rule utilitarian; here what you're doing is basically saying that society puts up disincentives for braking rules and those should be included in the act utilitarian calculation, but sometimes they're big enough that a rule utilitarian calculation approximates it pretty well in a much simpler fashion. 

Act utilitarianism is notoriously a form of morality that comes without guard-rails. In order to avoid taking harmful actions, an act utilitarian has to remember to calculate, and then to calculate correctly. (Whereas rules are often easier to remember and to properly apply.) The thing is that even if, for a minute, we assume act utilitarianism, it seems clear that somewhere along the line to defrauding $8B, the stakes have become large enough that you need to do a utility calculation, and it's hard to envisage how the magnitude of destruction wrought by the (not so unlikely) FTX crisis would not render his fraudulent actions negative EV. Maybe he became deluded about his changes of success, and simply mis-calculated, although this seems unlikely.

Alternatively, maybe over the course of the last decade, he became a nihilist. Some may speculate that he was corrupted by the worlds of crypto and finance. Maybe he continued to identify as utilitarian, but practiced it only occasionally - for instance, maybe when the uncertainties were large, he papered over them by choosing a myopically selfish decision.  But really, it all just seems very unclear. Even in Kelsey's interview, I can't tell whether he was disavowing all of morality, or only the rule-following business-ethics variety. And one can't know when he is telling the truth anyway. So I don't feel confident that this is going to be any clearer over time, either.

Affector & Effector Roles as Task Y?

Longtermist EA seems relatively strong at thinking about how to do good, and raising funds for doing so, but relatively weak in affector organs, that tell us what's going on in the world, and effector organs that influence the world. Three examples of ways that EAs can actually influence behaviour are:

- working in & advising US nat sec

- working in UK & EU governments, in regulation

- working in & advising AI companies

But I expect this is not enough, and our (a/e)ffector organs are bottlenecking our impact. To be clear, it's not that these roles aren't mentally stimulating - they are. It's just that their impact lies primarily in implementing ideas, and uncovering practical considerations, rather than in an Ivory tower's pure, deep thinking.

The world is quickly becoming polarised between US and China, and this means that certain (a/e)ffector organs may be even more neglected than the others. We may want to promote: i) work as a diplomat ii) working at diplomat-adjacent think tanks, such as the Asia Society, iii) working at relevant UN bodies, relating to disarmament and bioweapon control, iv) working at UN-adjacent bodies that seek to pressure disarmament etc. These roles often reside in large entities that can accept hundreds or thousands of new staff at a wide range of skill levels, and so perhaps many people who are currently “earning to give” should move into these “affector” or “effector” roles (as well as those mentioned above, in other relevant parts of national governments). I'm also curious whether 80,000 Hours has considered diplomatic roles - I couldn't find much on a cursory search.

See also: Teaching as Task Y?

High impact teachers? (Teaching as Task Y). More recent thoughts at EA Highschool Outreach Org. See also An EA teaching pathway?

The typical view, here, on high-school outreach seems to be that:

1. High-school outreach has been somewhat effective, uncovering one highly capable do-gooder per 10-100 exceptional students.
2. But people aren't treating it with the requisite degree of sensitivity: they don't think enough about what parents think, they talk about "converting people", and there have been bad events of unprofessional behaviour.

So I think high-school outreach should be done, but done differently. Involving some teachers would be useful step toward professionalisation (separating the outreach from the rationalist community would be another). 

But (1) also suggests that teaching at a school for gifted children could be a priority activity in itself. The argument is if a teacher can inspire a bright student to try to do good in their career, then the student might be manifold more effective than the teacher themselves would have been, if they had tried to work directly on the world's problems. And students at such schools are exceptional enough (Z>2) that this could happen many times throughout a teacher's career.

This does not mean that teaching is the best way to reach talented do-gooders. But it doesn't have to be, because it could attract some EAs who who wouldn't suit outreach paths. It leads to stable and respected employment, involves interpersonal contact that can be meaningful, and so on (at least, some interactions with teachers were quite meaningful to me, well before EA entered my picture).

I've said that teachers could help professionalise summer schools, and inspire students. I also think that a new high school for gifted altruists could be a high-priority. It could gather talented altruistic students together, so that they have more social support, and better meet their curricular needs (e.g. econ, programming, philosophy, research). I expect that such a school could attract great talent. It would be staffed with pretty talented at knowledgeable teachers. It would be advised by some professors at top schools. If necessary, by funding scholarships, it could grow its student based arbitrarily. Maybe a really promising project.