Hi, I'm Leilani. I run the org that was brought on to help with Future Forum in the final weeks leading to the event. 

I wanted to verify that no grants were applied for retroactively by Future Forum or Canopy.  All funding was approved prior to the event. All OP funding was also received prior to the event. At no point have we been in debt.

Additionally, we are eternally grateful for the CEA events team  and our volunteers for all their help. It was a stressful and unexpected situation that we would not have  gotten through without them. 

Hi, I'm Patrick Finley. I want to chime in here, because I think there's a number of fairly ridiculous claims below about Future Forum (in addition to the original post). I also think Isaak's response above is overly generous/conservative, and want to share my opinions on just how far the delta is between this post+comments and reality.

I attended Future Forum and it was easily the best conference/event I've been to in Bay Area in the vectors that matter (ie, quality of conversations, people, speakers, new connections, etc) and frankly its not close (I've been to EAGs & others). I don't mean this as a knock to others (the standard at EA&adjacent events seems pretty good), rather this was unusually great. 

The negatives I heard during the event and afterwards were about behind the scenes stuff that didn't seem to affect the actual value to attendees much (including the below). Eg I was at a hotel, and had a nice comfy bus take me to a new venue bc of issues w/ neighborhood. Not sure how this makes the event worse if you're talking about the purpose of the event vs things that don't matter for attendees.

• The event went from idea to reality in like 3 months. Isaak founded a team, fundraised and ran it in that time. IMO it was the most talent dense event I have seen. Isaak was 20 and had moved to the US like 2 months before founding. If your takeaway is "Isaak & team now have a bad reputation", I think you need to re-examine your talent/reputation model.
• "organizer asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work" -- this seems to refer directly to Isaak. I watched most of the talks he mediated, and didn't find this to be true at all. Perhaps this comes from, for example, experienced AI folks not realizing the questions needed to also cater to people new to AI. Something like ~half of FF attendees weren't from an "EA" background.
  • FWIW I know some of the speakers and can personally attest the ones I know claimed to be personally impressed with Isaak. Anyone who's spoken to Isaak knows he's well capable of asking the right questions, and the take that he asked a bunch of dumb and basic questions can be  debunked pretty quickly by talking to him for ~10m.
  • (also IMHO this is kind of an aggressive statement from someone who didn't attend)
• Doing great things tends to involve surprises and constant failures along the way, I think some folks below might be miscalibrated on what that looks like. Neighbors started a big fire, and the FF team moved the 300 person event to a big venue in San Francisco over night. When I heard this it was a massive positive update on the future forum team. That is seriously impressive. 
  • The team pulling all-nighters to make this happen is exactly what building great things looks like -- I'm confident if you polled the volunteers & core team you'd find a majority  answer something like "it was one of the best experiences of my life" (this is a bold claim -- fact check me). Note this is different from an unhealthy culture that tries to work people to death constantly for no good reason.  It's a strong signal that much of the team decided to pull an all-nighter to make the conference great. See https://patrickcollison.com/fast 
• "organizers were so bad, people had to step in to clean up their mess.
  • To me, event bad = the value was poor. ie, people didn't show up, bad speakers, waste of time. This did not happen, and doubt almost anyone who attended would feel it did.
  • Comment below says people stopped showing up after day 1/many people didn't return bc no value. This is not true, perhaps ask folks who attended. It's normal for a conference to not have regular full-capacity attendance the whole time, especially when its 4 days. Future Forum seemed full & busy the entire time throughout to me.
  • Noting the neogenesis house has parties a lot, both before and after Future Forum. Given that data, the neighborhood complaints/police stuff were surprising, and not obvious to predict. Handled shockingly well. (At the time I thought, "eh, I would've seen that coming", now having been to neogenesis many times, I would not have seen that coming -- they have large gatherings a lot without issue. I admit the FF fire was surprising in retrospect)
• Retroactive funding claim seems to be just false without any supporting logic? Unless I'm missing somewhere that might've led one to think there was retroactive funding?
  • Noting I also think retroactive funding when surprises come up is not necessarily some awful thing. If it had been that FF saw a big prob and desperately needed help, I think it makes total sense to help them (ie I think "let it fail" is a terrible approach) -- this is not the same as making it standard to expect bailouts...
• Only gonna slightly chime in on original post's main point -- the whole relationships with funders thing -- aside from like sexual relationships and other things mentioned, it seems pretty normal and good to have orgs build relationships with their funders... ie I don't understand how the Holden<>Atlas thing above is an issue. I'm on board with the whole striving for a good culture thing, but some of these comments to me sound like utopia/not how the world works.
• "Much more that went wrong" -- just texted ~10 friends who went (many are now close friends I met at FF for the first time) and couldn't find any other significant complaints, and all agreed venue change didn't hurt the value to them.

Wrote this bc comments like "X had to step in and clean up their mess" seem incredibly off base. Bringing in help to put out a fire is exactly the right thing to do. Keeping in mind context -- first time event, first time organizing team, incredible talent of attendees, incredibly good speakers, etc, its pretty shocking to me anyone's takeaway could be "wow these guys made a mess and others had to clean it up for them". 

Again, IMO this was the best conference I've been to, but even if it weren't, comparing this as a "mess" to EAG's that have been going on for a long time (ie tons of experience) is kind of an odd take.

Hi, I'm Zeynep! As someone who volunteered at Future Forum I want to give my piece as well. I completely agree with Patrick's response below, the conference was exceptionally good and the majority of attendees from my experience feel the same way. 

Although things did go wrong, as they easily can with any event, a lot of the volunteers worked very hard to fix the situation. This included staying up all night to fix the venue. I would like to highlight that when we found out we had to switch venues, we were given the option to not take part in moving equipment. Many volunteers agreed to help out regardless, and did not back out, and this in itself shows how much value even we as volunteers felt the event had to give. It may look trivial on paper, but staying up all night to move an entire venue is not for the faint of heart. 

Although stress levels were briefly high, everything was handled exceedingly well internally and I was personally told by attendees that they did not feel that the venue change was an issue. As someone who has been to many many many conferences, I would say that the event was a huge success. Everything other than the venue change - from the food to the talks, ran without any hiccups, which is ridiculously impressive when you have witnessed things go very wrong in other events. I firmly think that the entire staff + volunteers deserve a big round of applause. 

Dating conflicts of interest: I generally agree, but I'd like to flag that I think there are no cases mentioned in the post where people are romantically involved who work for each other. If people have some recent case. I'm open to being proved wrong (eg find some specific case of a grantmaker writing a grant to a partner). But I just don't think this happens. Maybe it used to happen in early EA days IDK, but I'd not think this has happened for years, because the reputational harm is great enough that it should incentivize grantmakers to recuse themselves and let an alternate review the application. 

Now, rare exceptions: 

• I disagree that grantmakers who don't have alternate grantmakers they can call in to determine grants from their managed fund should not be allowed to grant to a partner who applies. This amounts to barring romantic partners of people to apply for some grants. Not only do I find it unethical and somewhat arbitrarily controlling ("you and only you, oh romantic partner, is not allowed to apply even though your project may very well be the best"), but this would systematically disadvantage women applicants as majority of EA grantmakers are straight men. It's possible this is a moot point basically, as almost every EA grantmaker could recuse themselves and someone else could do the job. But there are the rare tiny funds like Scott Alexander's regranting program. Should his wife not be allowed to apply? 
• In cases of startups and small projects, people should be allowed to hire and cofound with their romantic partners, and they can keep those positions for as long as it makes sense to them

Simply living with: I disagree that people who work together or for each other should not be housemates, as a mandatory rule. It should be on a case-by-case basis and I think people's incentives are generally aligned so they make the useful choice here. So until I heard something weird I wouldn't even bother looking into it tbh.

That said this is slightly more complex if people have one-off hookups with people. Not really sure what norms should be there. 

I think this is generally correct, but not sure "living with" is clear enough, given that I don't necessarily have any problem with a boss and employee living in the same group house, if they aren't dating. (I'd imagine there could be some weird power dynamics for votes on house rules, etc. but I don't think it's necessarily an ethical problem, and hope that adults could work out how to deal with that.)

I think stuff failing is usually not as bad as it seems, and most of the reputational harm would have fallen on the organisers (who deserved it). On the other hand there are substantial risks to creating a perception that poorly executed things will be bailed out.

So from an outside view (I don't know much about the event itself) I say they should have let it fail.

(EDIT: to be clear, in light of the new comments about the Future Forum: I think bailouts are often bad, if the Future Forum wasn't actually bailed out then great. )

Re 1: it wasn't really an EA-branded event though, I think.

OP agreed to fund CEA's work on this retroactively.

From the page I linked, it seems OP agreed to recompensate the Future Forum and not CEA (although the Future Forum may have paid CEA for their time).

I have some hindsight bias in hearing the event was a disaster with...

• Many people who showing up on Day 1 then not showing up on Day 2, 3, or 4 because it didn't seem to be a good use of their time.
• No forethought about potential noise complaints in a quiet neighbourhood with a nearby country club and stuck-up rich people.
• Volunteers being pressured into working through the night to move equipment between venues.
• The main organiser asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work with many people in the audience reportedly cringing.
• And much more that went wrong.

So I believe it'd be better for organisers to plan more, stick to their budget, and not use their strong grantor connections to get bailed out.

I'm just going on your description, but what would you have liked CEA and/or OP to do differently?

I'm not sure what the best solution is, nor do I want to spend hours thinking about this based on the limited information I have. 

My comment addresses strong and unfair connections and using the bailing out of this event in particular (which gives me some reason to believe other projects that have gone into debt have been bailed out because of strong grantor-grantee relationships). 

I would have personally filed for bankruptcy and not made use of connections to get bailed out.

Here's an example of a past case where a troll (who also trolled other online communities) made up multiple sock-puppet accounts, and assorted lies about sources for various arguments trashing AI safety, e.g. claiming to have been at events they were not and heard bad things, inventing nonexistent experts who supposedly rejected various claims, creating fake testimonials of badness, smearing people who discovered the deception, etc. 

I agree with the second paragraph of this comment.

Regarding the third paragraph,

In this post, the poster writes "Therefore, I feel comfortable questioning these grants using burner accounts," which suggests in fact that they do have multiple burner accounts.

In my specific case,

1. I acknowledged in the post that I previously used a burner two years ago for whose password I did not save (due it being a burner) and therefore found myself logged out of. I would have used the same burner otherwise.
2. I could flip this around and say that I don't have other active burners because fact that my next bullet-point in the post was "I'll do some of that now" with me proceeding to comment on recent grants in the same post under the same burner instead of making a different post with a different burner.
3. The use of the plural term "burner accounts" is me talking about burner accounts in the abstract rather than me saying I have multiple burner accounts.

routinely fired for the kind of relationship

In the case you cite, they were fired for not disclosing the relationship. My understanding is the way this normally works is that you to tell HR, and then the company figures out how to move people around so that neither is in a position to unfairly affect the other's work at the company.

(To give a non-central example, when my wife (then-fiancee) and I worked in a kitchen I reported to the head cook even in cases when my wife would normally have been my supervisor.)

The problem goes beyond guardrails. Any attempts to reduce these conflicts of interest would have to contend with the extremely insular social scene in Berkeley. Since grantmakers frequently do not interact with many people outside of EA, and everyone in EA might end up applying for a grant from Open Phil, guardrails would significantly disrupt the social lives of grantmakers.

Let's not forget that you can not just improperly favor romantic partners, but also just friends. The idea of stopping Open Phil from making grants to organizations where employees are close friends with (other) grantmakers is almost laughable because of how insular the social scene is--but that's not at all normal for a grantmaking organization.

Even if Open Phil grantmakers separated themselves from the rest of the community, anyone who ever wanted to potentially become a grantmaker would have to do so as well because the community is so small. What if you become a grantmaker and your friend or romantic partner ends up applying for a grant?

In addition, many grants are socially evaluated at least partially, in my experience. Grantmakers have sometimes asked me what I think of people applying for grants, for example. This process will obviously favor friends of friends.

As such, the only way to fully remove conflicts of interest is likely to entail significant disruptions to the entire EA social scene (the one that involves everyone living/partying/working with the same very small group of people). I think that would be warranted, but that's another post and I recognize I haven't justified it fully here.

These dynamics are one reason (certainly not the only one) why I turned down an offer to be a part time grantmaker, choose not to live in Berkeley, and generally avoid dating within EA. Even if I cannot unilaterally remove these problems, I can avoid being part of them.

1. I should have made this clearer. My claim (also informed other anecdotes that I should have shared) is that people are put on blacklists for trivial reasons (eg, I don't like what this person said, they seem too "woke", they spoke badly about a friend of mine one time) but camouflaged under someone having "weak epistemics" or not being "truth-seeking enough".
2. I'm not sure as I haven't ever made a blacklist or seen other people's blacklists. A blacklist to me seems something that either has (1) no reason or (2) a very weak reason - maybe that's camouflaged in something else (perhaps in rationalist language as described in Point #1).

Thank you for a good description of what this feels like . But I have to ask… do you still “want to join that inner circle” after all this? Because this reads like your defense of using a burner account is that it preserves your chance to enter/remain in an inner ring which you believe to be deeply unethical.

Anonymity is not useful solely for preserving the option to join the critiqued group. It can also help buffer against reprisal from the critiqued group.  

See Ben Hoffman on this (a): 

"Ayn Rand is the only writer I've seen get both these points right jointly:

1. There's no benefit to joining the inner ring except discovering that their insinuated benefit does not exist.
2. Ignoring inner rings is refusing to protect oneself against a dangerous adversary."

Thanks Sarah, you crystallised a bit of what was floating around in my mind on this topic. This sentance could be considered a bit emotive and persuasive  for this forum, but I loved it ;).

"Normally I don’t go around demanding that people must be willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good if they want to be taken seriously but this is literally a forum for self-declared altruists."

Sorry Constellation is not a secret exclusive office (I've been invited and I'm incredibly miscellaneous and from New Zealand). It's a WeWork and from my understanding it doesn't accept more applications because it's full. 

Constellation isn't located in a WeWork. The Lightcone Offices are located in a WeWork. Constellation doesn't really have an application process IIRC, the Lightcone Offices accepts applications (though we are also likely to shut down in March).

The second half of Point 4 seems like a jumble of words I can't figure out the meaning or relevance of. Am I missing something?
 
It says, if I understand correctly, that you don't know what circling is, you would rather die than do it with people you dislike, that's why people shouldn't be invited to rationality retreats, and you don't know what rationality retreats involve, but (you assume?) they involve circling.

People who are agreement-downvoting this: if you don't agree with part of the comment, please write a reply explaining what you disagree with before downvoting. I see this has many downvotes but I can't tell what part everyone is objecting to.

I think you're conflating Lightcone Office (in WeWork, does have applications but I think did pause at one point because of space issues, run by LessWrong/Lightcone team, houses mostly lesser known orgs and independents) with Constellation (a few blocks away, run by Redwood Research, houses several major orgs)

It's also full of insinuation and implication and "X may mean Y [which is damning]" in a way that's attempting to get the benefit of "X = Y" without having to actually demonstrate it.

In my opinion, "you have to use a burner account to put forth this kind of 'thinking' and 'reasoning' and 'argument'" is actually a point in EA culture's favor.

I'm not describing this post as a response to the other post.

I initially wrote at the top of this post that,

I wanted to offer a different perspective on this post ...

and I believe that this warranted a separate post. In no way was this meant to be a rebuttal of all the arguments made there. I apologise for the confusion.

At the top of the post, I've now clarified that I'm offering a different perspective (to add to the public discourse) and that this made more sense to me as a post than a comment and NOT a rebuttal.

Naaah that's what main is for :P