Short bios of 17 "senior figures" in EA

Kirsten; EA Lifestyles

Short bios of 17 "senior figures" in EA

Kirsten,

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Ben_West🔸

Fwiw I'm on the list and I haven't met everyone else on it even once. Most of the people didn't participate in EA Strategy Fortnight (participation in EA events organized by me being the best marker of seniority, of course).

I think part of the explanation is just that, as Will comments, EA is not that centralized, and so different people interact with different bits of it. My list probably would have been slightly different, as it sounds like yours is.

Nathan Young

I don't think that "having more than 20 people" means it isn't centralised.

Ben_West🔸

My claim was that different people interact with different parts of EA, which seems to mean it's decentralized? Perhaps I'm not using that word the same way you are though?

Jeff Kaufman 🔸

It depends on your conception of how it's centralized, but the person running CEA not having met some of the nominally central figures does push against at least one of "CEA is central" and "all the figures Will listed are central".

OllieRodriguez

It's regrettable that the bio of Ben West doesn't mention his popular yet underrated TikTok account

Kirsten

I swear I didn't know he was a social media star!!

James Herbert

Thanks for writing this, very valuable and it's pretty close to the sort of thing I thought of when I saw MacAskill's line about the potential value of an 'intra-EA magazine'!

Kirsten

Thanks James, between EA Lifestyles and Asterisk Magazine I think we're well on our way!

Jeff Kaufman 🔸

the only “senior figure” to appear on both this list and its Twitter parody

Toby Ord seems to have as well?

Kirsten

Yep, I missed that!

Nathan Young

EA is still in the “group of friends just trying stuff” mindset even though it has far too much power at this point to be operating that way. And so we don’t always have the level of scrutiny or accountability that we should, because people who have been involved since 2014 are like, “Oh him? That’s just Bob. Everyone knows Bob.” But actually we don’t all know Bob anymore because there are like 10,000 of us now, not 100. The rest of Will’s post is about EA can be better about this, and I thought it was pretty good.

Something about this jarrs with me and I don't know what.

Denis

This is a very interesting comment and reaction.

I know what Kirsten means - it does feel like "friends doing stuff" compared to the way some other big movements are run. I didn't read it as being jarring and I don't think it was intended as a massive criticism.

BUT "friends doing stuff" is good. We need to be trying stuff. And friends who know and trust each other and have a network and knowledge and understanding and who talk to each other and come up with ideas of things to try and actually try them: that is great. That is what so many large R&D organisations dream of but can never achieve, because they get stuck in formal structures and rigid policies. The EA movement is still very young, we need this mentality.

The alternative would seem to be to make trying new things harder. I'm not convinced that would be helpful.

The middle ground is probably where at a certain point in scaling up ideas (e.g. based on spend) there could be more scrutiny.

HOWEVER, where I don't necessarily agree with Kirsten (based on my very limited experience) is on the questions of scrutiny or accountability. Having spent my career outside the EA environment, I can honestly say I have never before seen a group of people who more actively seek scrutiny, put there ideas out there and ask people to shoot at them.

I see organisations putting their research or action plans on here and saying "guys, this is what we plan to do - before we start, please tell us anything that you disagree with" and then engaging actively and constructively with all the feedback.

Maybe there are some formal accountability structures missing (because many organisations are like start-ups rather than big companies) - but I don't think you want that to start too early. I can't really comment on this, but I would imagine that most organisations would have some kind of review before investing a lot of money in scaling an idea - but might be happy to give someone $1000 and a few weeks to go and try something.

Kirsten

The way I've written it doesn't sit right, or the dynamic itself?

Nathan Young

I think your representation doesn't seem correct to me, though I can't figure out how it's wrong.

Maybe:

It seems like these are talented people with a lot of experience
It is not surprising they have often been in the movement for a while - trust takes time to build - hence there are fewer candidates
I would like better elites but it's not clear to me how we get them, the process of choosing people who have power is just really difficult.

Joseph Lemien

I think there is also something vaguely similar to the Matthew effect that goes on. I'm not particularly confident in this, and I'm not sure that I fully endorse it.

People who got involved X years ago have gotten a network, specialized skills, and knowledge that is unavailable to others (or at least is harder for others to get). They had the 'first mover advantage.' Over years of attending many conferences (including those that some people get automatic or nearly-automatic admissions to as a result of their employer), retreats, building a reputation, and just random "hallway conversations" an initially small gap has become quite wide.

The simplest example in my mind is to imagine someone who had been involved in EA since 2014-2019 recommending that you upskill by taking a workshop from CFAR, or that you attend an EAG. But CFAR doesn't offer workshops anymore, so that option for training/upskilling/networking is literally not available anymore, and you likely won't get accepted to EAG if you don't look impressive enough (according to particular criteria).

Jeff Kaufman 🔸

you likely won't get accepted to EAG if you don't look impressive enough

While I think this sort of true, reading the linked article might give you the impression the bar is much higher than it is?

I know many people who've recently been accepted to EA conferences with much less impressive or EA-relevant backgrounds. If it were just this I would say that it's hard to make a perfect process and there will always be some false positives and false negatives.

But:

There's something important missing from their description of their experience. They wrote, responding Amy, the head of the CEA Events team, "from our conversation, I came to understand that there is a distinct reason that could be pointed to for my rejection from EAG" but then they don't disclose that reason and, citing privacy, neither will Amy.

Joseph Lemien

Yeah, admissions is complicated. And writing "you likely won't get accepted to EAG if you don't look impressive enough" is a vast simplification. In reality I imagine that it is some nebulous combination of traditional impressiveness, EA-specific impressiveness, and potential future contribution (all from the perspective of the admissions team). But like many things in life, I'm guessing that the decisions often come down to judgement calls, rather than strict and clear decision tree.

In a vague parallel to university admissions, there isn't a simply standard or algorithm (such as "a function of high school grades and standardized test scores"), and instead it is really a judgement call for each individual applicant. In another parallel to university admissions, sometimes the star trombone player is graduating and the school really needs a good trombone player. I imagine similarly, there are priorities for EA conferences that aren't transparent/visible to the public: maybe the person doing X will be resigning soon, so there is a big push to nurture more talent doing X to find a replacement.

Sol3:2

-12

I do think it's kind of insane to keep recruiting for posts like the CEO of CEA & trustees for EVF from within the same small set of long-term EAs who have all known each for at least 10 years, but does anyone seriously think this will change? I don't.

MaxDalton

We received over 400 nominations for the CEA CEO role, and are planning to reach out to over 100 people, roughly one third of whom have not worked in EA orgs before.^[1]

I think that EA context is helpful in the role, and it is at least important that people can get up to speed quickly. But outside perspective and experience is also helpful, so we're considering people with different degrees of EA engagement.

^{^}
At a quick skim, I didn't look into this rigorously.

Jason

Could you re-post this on your quick takes (fka shortform) or somewhere? Right now it's hidden behind a collapsed post with -22 karma. This is a good update that deserves to be seen!

Kirsten

That's a great update, thanks Max!

Kirsten

Knowing a lot about EA community dynamics would definitely help you in those roles, but so would other qualities. I'm really hoping that we get a more balanced group of people in these roles over the next year or so. Maybe some of them will have been around for ten years and some for ten months.

Matt Goodman

-13

thankyou! I keep pointing out that EVF doesn't have anything on their website about who their trustees are, and this isn't good for transparency.

As much as I appreciate this post, it seems to have followed the same process I have - asked 'ok who actually are these senior figures?', and realised that for some, there's not much info out there, and then gathered what little there is on google search and linkedin.

It would be great if the lesser-known EVF trustees could describe, in their own words, who they are, what they do, and how someone could contact them.

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MaxDalton

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you want EVF to do, but when I go to the page that you linked to I see a list of trustees with bios at the bottom of it. (This doesn't solve the "contact" problem, but it does solve "who they are and what they do".)

Matt Goodman

My sincere apologies, I had missed that it had been updated! V. Embarrassing. Thankyou for doing that

David M

-9

Based on the other comments Matt links to, it looks to me like his "who they are" refers to providing a bio, not just a name.

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MaxDalton

There are bios on that page.

Comments

Denis

^{^}

At a quick skim, I didn't look into this rigorously.

Short bios of 17 "senior figures" in EA

Short bios of 17 "senior figures" in EA

Who are these “senior figures”?

Effective Ventures UK Trustees:

Effective Ventures US Trustees:

CEOs/Directors:

Other:

Why does EA have senior figures that lots of us have never heard of?

What’s going on with EA power dynamics over the next few months?