On being compromised

Strong upvote. I remember when someone I knew was being dragged on the internet, and I found some of the things they'd said really upsetting to me and my moral sensibilities, and I found it really helpful (without it necessarily changing my mind on how bad those things were!) for a friend to help me reflect on how much I had or hadn't yet priced in the selection filter of "find the worst things anyone has ever written or that they've ever done". (Sometimes it's right to judge people on the worst thing they've ever done, but I suspect not often).

Similarly, in the last 8 months of working at an EA org / in the EA community, it's been really helpful to be able to understand what's unusual about the orgs and community, and what's incredibly standard boilerplate (which might be good or bad - lots of normal ways of doing things are stupid) - talking to people from journalism, politics, etc has been great for contextualization.

For some reason, this post about criticisms of the Gates foundation has been really sticking with me.

I am confused by your list of examples. From my perspective more than half of the organizations/people on your list are indeed quite terrible and have caused greatly more harm than good. If people use these examples as reason to be less risk-averse about causing great harm, then I think that would be an update in the wrong direction (indeed, I think the right lesson to learn here is something closer to "the road to hell is paved in good intentions", e.g. yes, if you are ambitious and have strong ethical convictions, it is really important that you remain cognizant that you might instead be causing great harm, and should probably think about that a good amount). 

To go one by one for your list of examples: 

• EU:
  • By my lights the EU seems really quite bad. Their pandemic response alone might be enough to make it go down as one of the worst institutions in history, and their general legal framework is one of the greatest blockers to economic growth in Europe. (This is not an obvious state of affairs, but I am not going to write a whole case against the EU here, which would take a while, and doesn't seem top priority)
• Mother Theresa
  • Indeed, my sense is the ethical commitments of Mother Theresa's clinics were indeed bad enough to cause much more suffering than she prevented. When I last looked into this it seems like she primarily redirected resources that would have gone to more sane efforts.
• Gandhi's (and Nehru's)
  • My guess is Gandhi did actually make the world better
• Cesar Chaves
  • The National Farm Workers Association seems like a pretty terrible organization, and has had a hugely distortive effect on politics and has caused really quite great harm. Farm unions show up all over the place whenever I look into crazy regulations and policies. I haven't looked a ton into the history of this, but my prior here would be that it's quite bad.
• The Vatican.
  • I don't know why I would even have a prior on the Vatican being good for the world. 

So, out of your list of 5 organizations, 4 of them were really very much quite bad for the world, by my lights, and if you were to find yourself to be on track to having a similar balance of good and evil done in your life, I really would encourage you to stop and do something less impactful on the world. 

Like, these are not institutions and individuals that have been "compromised" or "tainted". These are examples that indeed seem to have caused solidly more harm than they have caused good, and we should take them primarily as lessons on what not to do.

I don't think actually ending up net-negative like this is predetermined, and is not a result of just getting unlucky. I think it was ultimately predictable that these people/institutions would end up quite bad for the world, and we can avoid going down a similar path. I do think that involved a good amount of actually modeling the risk and being careful, and being aware of the skulls along the road that is filled with similarly ideologically committed people like us.

Is this trying to make a directional claim? Like people (in the EA community? in idealistic communities?) should on average be less afraid / more accepting of being morally compromised? (On first read, I assume no, it seems like just a descriptive post about the phenomenon). 

FWIW, I think it's worth thinking about the 2 forms of "compromise" separately. (Being associated with something you end up finding morally bad / directly doing something you end up finding morally bad).  I think it's easier and more worthwhile to focus on avoiding the latter, but overall I'm not sure whether I've found a strong tendency that people overdo either of these things. 

Thanks to Nina and Noah there's now a 2x2 of compromises which I've numbered:

The above post is a blend of all four.

I'm having trouble understanding this post. Maybe because I don't have a good sense of what 'being compromised' means, perhaps due to not being a native English speaker. I guess it's similar to 'being cancelled'? (Which to be fair isn't a clearly defined term either).

Also, just as Habryka pointed out, the examples leave me a bit confused about the message of the post. While clearly not your intention, parts of the post read as "Don't feel bad about making mistakes, some horrible organisations/people have made mistakes too!". I guess I just don't understand how some of the examples contribute to the point you want to make with this post.

Lots of people on this forum have struggled with the feeling of being compromised. Since FTX. Or Leverage. Or Guzey. Or Thiel. Or Singer. Or Mill or whatever.[4] But this is the normal course of a life, including highly moral lives.... But the greater part of it being normal is that all action incurs risk, including moral risk.

It's not correct to say that action deserves criticism, but maybe correct to say that action receives criticism. The relevant distinction to make is why the action brought criticism on it, and that is different case-by-case. The criticism of SBF is because of alleged action that involves financial fraud over billions of dollars. The criticism of Singer with regard to his book Practical Ethics is because of distortion of his views on euthanasia. The criticism of Thiel with regard to his financial support of MIRI is because of disagreements over his financial priorities. And I could go on. Some of those people have done other things deserving or receiving criticism. The point is that whether something receives criticism doesn't tell you much about whether it deserves criticism. While these folks all risk criticism, they don't all deserve it, at least not for the actions you suggested with your links.

Thanks for writing this. It isn't exactly in the same line, but when I examine my career, I believe I have done more harm than good. It was writing Losing My Religions that really firmed up that conclusion.  I hope posts like these -- and the fascinating discussion -- help others to do more good than harm. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ 

Great post and from a personal practical perspective this realisation can be so freeing and lifegiving

Recognising this compromise and asking to be freed from the guilt, shame and paralysis it can bring, then being drawn back into a life of (hopefully) loving action is a key part of my life. 

"We have sinned through what we have done, and through what we have failed to do... Through ignorance, through weakness and through our own deliberate fault. We are truly sorry.... Forgive yourself, forgive others."

Say that you are compromised if it is easy for someone to shame you.
...
Lots of people on this forum have struggled with the feeling of being compromised. Since FTX. Or Leverage. Or Guzey. Or Thiel. Or Singer. Or Mill or whatever.^[4]
...

You will make mistakes, and people will rightly hold you to them.^[7] It will feel terrible.

I'm confused why you're including Guzey and Thiel in this list. It doesn't seem like Guzey's critique is a mistake that he should "feel terrible" about (although I only did a quick skim), and Torres mentions Thiel exactly once in that article:

Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who once gave the keynote address at an EA conference, has donated large sums of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission to save humanity from superintelligent machines is deeply intertwined with longtermist values.

As someone who only recently got involved with EA (I read some books in early 2022, then took an in-depth EA course last summer), I've been watching this and have a few general thoughts on what I've seen & what I think about EA going forward (Not just as an ideology but as a community). Sorry if this seems a bit off-topic since I can't say I feel particularly 'compromised'.

Personally, I was not surprised that FTX collapsed & was a fraudulent organization. I had been following the crypto space for a few years and SBF was an incredibly obvious con man in my view. I didn't even know that Future Fund was part of FTX until the situation blew up and I was like "oh great" when I heard EA come up in the news. 

I was rather disappointed in EA leadership for not being more cautious about SBF intrusion into the space. When someone shows up from an industry well-known for fraud and instantly becomes a meaningful % of overall movement funding, someone has to do an in-depth audit before distributing goodwill.

However, I think the way the EA community reacted to the situation on this forum was positive. I also think that leadership going through this experience will substantially reduce the likelihood of a similar (or worse) thing happening again in the future (both near and long term) since they will enforce much stronger regulations. It may have been good for EA to suffer a disaster that rattled everyone but has not destroyed the movement.

Overall, I was generally pleased with how most of the community responded (I think the infighting narrative was overblown). Going forward, I'm happy to describe myself as an Effective Altruist, and I think that we've got a bright future ahead. In fact, I think EA is likely to be more positively impactful than much of the rest of the trillion-dollar global nonprofit industry.

To people who have been beating themselves up about it: It wasn't your fault, don't beat yourselves up about it. I have seen most people react very intelligently and understand this for what it was: A major failure of leadership & regulations, and an opportunity to ensure that it doesn't happen again while also not getting derailed from the strong philosophical basis that EA has.