I kind of wish we could do a reader poll as to community opinion on (1) whether these things are lies and (2) why they think they said these things. I can't tell if I'm really poorly calibrated when I read some of the comments here or if the commenters are a non-representative sample.
I think there's something to what you're saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I'd argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.
Let's say for arguments sake that I'm totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn't that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It's that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant - it's still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that's something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I'd argue it's because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it's because I'm totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I'm having is still useful to begin the conversation.
I downvoted this comment because it's not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn't take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn't relevant to my point.
I think a lot of the folks whose opinion I'm interested are definitely on the EA forum, at least as lurkers -- the folks who are active in EA (and so likely to read stuff here) but still call themselves EA adjacent in polite company :)
Personally, I think disagreements like this fit under the definition of brand confusion, at least as I intended it - if everyone understood that there were EAs who are debating AGI is safe, and others who have already made a decision on that, then someone who spent a lot of time reading about EA/talking about EA/being married to EA leadership wouldn't feel as bad saying "Yeah, I'm EA" just because they disagreed with some other EAs.
Is that a separate reason from the one OP names and the ones in my comment? If EA had an excellent brand, tactical incentives would encourage naming yourself as an EA, not discourage it. It's the intersection of bad brand and/or brand confusion with tactics that leads to this result, not tactics alone, right?
Can I suggest that anyone who wants to dig into whether Amanda/Daniela were lying here head over to this related post, and that comments on this post stay focused on the general idea of EA Adjacency as FTX trauma?
Fully endorse that I think EA is getting a lot of bad comms advice. I think a good comms person would have prepared Antrhopic folks way better, assuming those quotes weren't taken agressively out of context or something.
That said, I am not sure I agree that EA adjacency is mostly ascribable to FTX trauma in the personal PR "project will fail" sense, because I think there are two other explanations of EA adjacency. One, which could be related to FTX trauma, is leadership betrayal. The other is brand confusion.
Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became "EA Adjacent" when Scott Alexander's followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little -- that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values. I then talked to a bunch of EA insiders about it and found the response extremely weak ("I know Scott personally and he's a nice guy," as though people who are nice to their friends can't also be racists and weirdly into monarchy[1]).
Whether you love Scott Alexander or not, what I'm trying to point out is that there is another cause of "EA Adjacency" besides personal brand protection, and it might be leadership betrayal. I had been EA since 2012 in a low-key way when I found out about Scott, and I actively told people I was into EA, and even referenced it in career-related things I was doing as something that was shaping my goals and career choices. I wasn't working in the space, but I hoped to eventually, and I was pretty passionate about it! I tried to promote it to a lot of people! I stopped doing this after talking to CEA's community health team and several other prominent EAs, because of feeling like EA leadership was massively not walking the walk and that this thing I thought was the only community whose values I had ever trusted had sort of betrayed my trust. I went through some serious soul searching after this; it was very emotionally taxing, and I decoupled EA from my identity pretty substantially as a result. Probably healthy, tbh.
I am not sure the extent to which the post-FTX adjacency might be attributed to brand protection and what percent is toward leadership betrayal, but I suspect both could be at play, because many people could have felt betrayed by the fact that EA leadership was well aware of FTX sketchiness and didn't say anything (or weren't aware, but then maybe you'd be betrayed by their incompetence).
Brand confusion: After brand embarrassment and leadership betrayal, I think a 3rd potential explanation for EA adjacency is a sort of brand confusion problem. Here, I think EA is sort of like Christianity -- there's an underlying set of beliefs that almost everyone in the general Christian community agrees with, but different factions can be WILDLY different culturally and ideologically. Unfortunately, only EA insiders are familiar with these distinctions. So right now, acknowledging being an EA is like acknowledging you're a Christian to someone who only knows about Mormons. If you're actually a liberal Episcopalian and don't want to be seen as being a Mormon, maybe you don't have time to get into the fact that yes, technically you are a Christian but not that kind of Christian. I wonder if EA-adjacent folks would be more comfortable acknowledging EA connection if they could identify a connection with only one part or faction of EA, and there was greater clarity in the public eye about the fact that EA is not a monolith.
In terms of what behavior I'd like to see from other EAs and EA-adjacents: If I'm talking to an EA insider, I still say I have issues with parts of EA while acknowledging that I have a ton of shared values and work in the space. If someone is mocking EA as an outsider, I am actually MORE likely to admit connection and shared values with EA, because I usually think they are focusing on the wrong problems.
To be clear, I think my post could apply to your review, as my post reflects a general concern that when doing charity evaluations people often don't have sufficient context to know if they're accurately assessing cost effectiveness or general purpose. But I haven't followed Sinergia closely so I have no idea the extent to which it is in fact applicable to Sinergia -- I'd need to be an insider to know that.
So what I meant when I said Vetted Causes' review could be an example of this pattern is that it appears you are doing reviews of strategies and organizations without being either extremely experienced at that strategy or extremely familiar with the organization's potentially private intentions. I have no idea if in fact Sinergia or the other organizations you have reviewed have private intentions that are different from their publicly stated goals -- I'm raising that as a possibility for any charity, as a factor that makes evaluating strategy difficult. Of course, if you in fact have an enormous amount of campaigning experience and access to Sinergia's private strategy documents, please do correct my misapprehension!
While I think you're last question is reasonable due to the direction of the conversation, I'm nevertheless not going to answer it, because it takes us off the topic of this post and into criticism/discussion of the content of your review in particular (as opposed to the general principle I am trying to focus on with this post: that sometimes organizations have non-publicly shareable strategies, and that makes accurately evaluating them challenging or impossible).
Yeah that's a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this.
That said, it doesn't really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise -- I'm pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don't know how I'd advise other people who aren't in that position.
In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I'm not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns...
I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn't be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn't really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness.
I kind of wish we could do a reader poll as to community opinion on (1) whether these things are lies and (2) why they think they said these things. I can't tell if I'm really poorly calibrated when I read some of the comments here or if the commenters are a non-representative sample.
Cool, I adjusted my vote, thanks for addressing.
I think there's something to what you're saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I'd argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.
Let's say for arguments sake that I'm totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn't that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It's that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant - it's still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that's something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I'd argue it's because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it's because I'm totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I'm having is still useful to begin the conversation.
Obviously, I don't think my opinion is based on factual errors, but that's neither here nor there.
I downvoted this comment because it's not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn't take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn't relevant to my point.
I think a lot of the folks whose opinion I'm interested are definitely on the EA forum, at least as lurkers -- the folks who are active in EA (and so likely to read stuff here) but still call themselves EA adjacent in polite company :)
Personally, I think disagreements like this fit under the definition of brand confusion, at least as I intended it - if everyone understood that there were EAs who are debating AGI is safe, and others who have already made a decision on that, then someone who spent a lot of time reading about EA/talking about EA/being married to EA leadership wouldn't feel as bad saying "Yeah, I'm EA" just because they disagreed with some other EAs.
Is that a separate reason from the one OP names and the ones in my comment? If EA had an excellent brand, tactical incentives would encourage naming yourself as an EA, not discourage it. It's the intersection of bad brand and/or brand confusion with tactics that leads to this result, not tactics alone, right?
I have mixed feelings about this but since the point isn't critical to the intention of my comment I'm happy to strike it.
Can I suggest that anyone who wants to dig into whether Amanda/Daniela were lying here head over to this related post, and that comments on this post stay focused on the general idea of EA Adjacency as FTX trauma?
Fully endorse that I think EA is getting a lot of bad comms advice. I think a good comms person would have prepared Antrhopic folks way better, assuming those quotes weren't taken agressively out of context or something.
That said, I am not sure I agree that EA adjacency is mostly ascribable to FTX trauma in the personal PR "project will fail" sense, because I think there are two other explanations of EA adjacency. One, which could be related to FTX trauma, is leadership betrayal. The other is brand confusion.
Leadership betrayal: My reasoning is anecdotal, because I went through EA adjacency before it was cool. Personally, I became "EA Adjacent" when Scott Alexander's followers attacked a journalist for daring to scare him a little -- that prompted me to look into him a bit, at which point I found a lot of weird race IQ, Nazis-on-reddit, and neo-reactionary BS that went against my values. I then talked to a bunch of EA insiders about it and found the response extremely weak ("I know Scott personally and he's a nice guy," as though people who are nice to their friends can't also be racists
and weirdly into monarchy[1]).Whether you love Scott Alexander or not, what I'm trying to point out is that there is another cause of "EA Adjacency" besides personal brand protection, and it might be leadership betrayal. I had been EA since 2012 in a low-key way when I found out about Scott, and I actively told people I was into EA, and even referenced it in career-related things I was doing as something that was shaping my goals and career choices. I wasn't working in the space, but I hoped to eventually, and I was pretty passionate about it! I tried to promote it to a lot of people! I stopped doing this after talking to CEA's community health team and several other prominent EAs, because of feeling like EA leadership was massively not walking the walk and that this thing I thought was the only community whose values I had ever trusted had sort of betrayed my trust. I went through some serious soul searching after this; it was very emotionally taxing, and I decoupled EA from my identity pretty substantially as a result. Probably healthy, tbh.
I am not sure the extent to which the post-FTX adjacency might be attributed to brand protection and what percent is toward leadership betrayal, but I suspect both could be at play, because many people could have felt betrayed by the fact that EA leadership was well aware of FTX sketchiness and didn't say anything (or weren't aware, but then maybe you'd be betrayed by their incompetence).
Brand confusion: After brand embarrassment and leadership betrayal, I think a 3rd potential explanation for EA adjacency is a sort of brand confusion problem. Here, I think EA is sort of like Christianity -- there's an underlying set of beliefs that almost everyone in the general Christian community agrees with, but different factions can be WILDLY different culturally and ideologically. Unfortunately, only EA insiders are familiar with these distinctions. So right now, acknowledging being an EA is like acknowledging you're a Christian to someone who only knows about Mormons. If you're actually a liberal Episcopalian and don't want to be seen as being a Mormon, maybe you don't have time to get into the fact that yes, technically you are a Christian but not that kind of Christian. I wonder if EA-adjacent folks would be more comfortable acknowledging EA connection if they could identify a connection with only one part or faction of EA, and there was greater clarity in the public eye about the fact that EA is not a monolith.
In terms of what behavior I'd like to see from other EAs and EA-adjacents: If I'm talking to an EA insider, I still say I have issues with parts of EA while acknowledging that I have a ton of shared values and work in the space. If someone is mocking EA as an outsider, I am actually MORE likely to admit connection and shared values with EA, because I usually think they are focusing on the wrong problems.
struck for accuracy, see comments
To be clear, I think my post could apply to your review, as my post reflects a general concern that when doing charity evaluations people often don't have sufficient context to know if they're accurately assessing cost effectiveness or general purpose. But I haven't followed Sinergia closely so I have no idea the extent to which it is in fact applicable to Sinergia -- I'd need to be an insider to know that.
So what I meant when I said Vetted Causes' review could be an example of this pattern is that it appears you are doing reviews of strategies and organizations without being either extremely experienced at that strategy or extremely familiar with the organization's potentially private intentions. I have no idea if in fact Sinergia or the other organizations you have reviewed have private intentions that are different from their publicly stated goals -- I'm raising that as a possibility for any charity, as a factor that makes evaluating strategy difficult. Of course, if you in fact have an enormous amount of campaigning experience and access to Sinergia's private strategy documents, please do correct my misapprehension!
While I think you're last question is reasonable due to the direction of the conversation, I'm nevertheless not going to answer it, because it takes us off the topic of this post and into criticism/discussion of the content of your review in particular (as opposed to the general principle I am trying to focus on with this post: that sometimes organizations have non-publicly shareable strategies, and that makes accurately evaluating them challenging or impossible).
Yeah that's a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this.
That said, it doesn't really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise -- I'm pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don't know how I'd advise other people who aren't in that position.
In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I'm not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns...
I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn't be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn't really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness.