Some important questions for the EA Leadership

I don't think I am a great representative of EA leadership, given my somewhat bumpy relationship and feelings to a lot of EA stuff, but I nevertheless I think I have a bunch of the answers that you are looking for: 

Who is invited to the coordination forum and who attends? What sort of decisions are made? How does the coordination forum impact the direction the community moves in? Who decides who goes to the coordination forum? How? What's the rationale for keeping the attendees of the coordination forum secret (or is it not purposeful)?

The Coordination Forum is a very loosely structured retreat that's been happening around once a year. At least the last two that I attended were structured completely as an unconference with no official agenda, and the attendees just figured out themselves who to talk to, and organically wrote memos and put sessions on a shared schedule. 

At least as far as I can tell basically no decisions get made at Coordination Forum, and it's primary purpose is building trust and digging into gnarly disagreements between different people who are active in EA community building, and who seem to get along well with the others attending (with some balance between the two).

I think attendance has been decided by CEA. Criteria have been pretty in-flux. My sense has been that a lot of it is just dependent on who CEA knows well-enough to feel comfortable inviting, and who seems to be obviously worth coordinating with. 

Which senior decision makers in EA played a part in the decision to make the Carrick Flynn campaign happen? Did any express the desire for it not to? Who signed off on the decision to make the campaign manager someone with no political experience?

I mean, my primary guess here is Carrick. I don't think there was anyone besides Carrick who "decided" to make the Carrick campaign happen. I am pretty confident Carrick had no boss and did this primarily on his own initiative (though likely after consulting with various other people in EA on whether it was a good idea). 

[edit: On more reflection and talking to some more people, my guess is there was actually more social pressure involved here than this paragraph implies. Like, I think it was closer to "a bunch of kind-of-but-not-very influential EAs reached out to him and told him that they think it would be quite impactful and good for the world if he ran", and my updated model of Carrick really wasn't personally attracted to running for office, and the overall experience was not great for him]

I expressed desire for it not to happen! Though like, I think it wasn't super obvious to me it was a wrong call, but a few times when people asked me whether to volunteer for the Carrick campaign, I said that seemed overall bad for the world. I did not reach out to Carrick with this complaint, since doing anything is already hard, Carrick seemed well-intentioned, and while I think his specific plan was a mistake, it didn't seem a bad enough mistake to be worth very actively intervening (and like, ultimately Carrick can do whatever he wants, I can't stop him from running for office).

Why did Will MacAskill introduce Sam Bankman-Fried to Elon Musk with the intention of getting SBF to help Elon buy twitter? What was the rationale that this would have been a cost effective use of $8-15 Billion? Who else was consulted on this?

I think it could be a cost-effective use of $3-10 billion (I don't know where you got the $8-15 billion from, looks like the realistic amounts were closer to 3 billion). My guess is it's not, but like, Twitter does sure seem like it has a large effect on the world, both in terms of geopolitics and in terms of things like norms for the safe development of technologies, and so at least to me I think if you had taken Sam's net-worth at face-value at the time, this didn't seem like a crazy idea to me. 

I don't know why Will vouched so hard for Sam though, that seems like a straightforward mistake to me. I think it's likely Will did not consult anyone else, as like, it's his right as a private individual talking to other private individuals. 

Why did Will MacAskill choose not to take on board any of the suggestions of Zoe Cremer that she set out when she met with him?

My guess is because he thought none of them are very good? I also don't think we should take on board any of their suggestions, and many of them strike me as catastrophic if adopted. I also don't think any of them would have helped with this whole FTX situation, and my guess is some of them would have likely made it worse. 

Will MacAskill has expressed public discomfort with the degree of hero-worship towards him. What steps has he taken to reduce this? What plans have decision makers tried to enact to reduce the amount of hero worship in EA?

I don't know a ton of stuff that Will has done. I do think me and others have tried various things over the years to reduce hero worship. On Lesswrong and the EA Forum I downvote things that seem hero-worshippy to me, and I have written many comments over the years trying to reduce it. We also designed the frontpage guidelines on LW to reduce some of the associated community dynamics. 

I do think this is a bit of a point of disagreement between me and others in the community, where I have had more concerns about this domain than others, but my sense is everyone is pretty broadly on-board with reducing this. I do sadly also don't have a ton of traction on reducing this. 

The EA community prides itself on being an open forum for discussion without fear of reprisal for disagreement. A very large number of people in the community however do not feel it is, and feel pressure to conform and not to express their disagreement with the community, with senior leaders or even with lower level community builders.Has there been discussions within the community health team with how to deal with this? What approaches are they taking community wide rather than just dealing with ad hoc incidents?

I do think it is indeed really sad that people fear reprisal for disagreement. I think this is indeed a pretty big problem, not really because EA is worse here than the rest of the world, but because I think the standard for success is really high on this dimension, and there is a lot of value in encouraging dissent and pushing back against conformity, far into the tails of the distribution here. 

I expect the community health team to have discussed this extensively (like, I have discussed it with them for many hours). There are lots of things attempted to help with this over the years. We branded one EAG after "keeping EA weird", we encouraged formats like whiteboard debates at EAG to show that disagreement among highly-engaged people is common, we added things like disagree-voting in addition to normal upvoting and downvoting to encourage a culture where it's normal and expected that someone can write something that many people disagree with, without that thing being punished. 

My sense is this all isn't really enough, and we still kind of suck at it, but I also don't think it's an ignored problem in the space. I also think this problem gets harder and harder the more you grow, and larger communities trying to take coordinated action require more conformity to function, and this sucks, and is I think one of the strongest arguments against growth. 

A number of people have expressed suspicion or worry that they have been rejected from grants because of publicly expressing disagreements with EA. Has this ever been part of the rationale for rejecting someone from a grant?

Anything I say here is in my personal capacity and not in any way on behalf of EA Funds. I am just trying to use my experience at EA Funds for some evidence about how these things usually go.

At least historically in my work at EA Funds this would be the opposite of how I usually evaluate grants. A substantial fraction of my notes consist of complaining that people seem too conformist to me and feel a bit like "EA bots" who somewhat blindly accept EA canon in ways that feels bad to me. 

My sense is other grantmakers are less anti-conformity, but in-general, at least in my interactions with Open Phil and EA Funds grantmakers, I've seen basically nothing that I could meaningfully describe as punishing dissent. 

I do think there are secondary things going on here where de-facto people have a really hard time evaluating ideas that are not expressed in their native ontology, and there is a thing where if you say stuff that seems weird from an EA framework this can come across as cringe to some people, and I do hate a bunch of those cringe reactions, and I think think it contributes a lot to conformity. I think that kind of stuff is indeed pretty bad, though I think almost all of the people who I've seen do this kind of thing would at least in the abstract strongly agree that punishing dissent is quite bad, and that we should be really careful around this domain, and have been excited about actively starting prices for criticism, etc.

FTX Future Fund decided to fund me on a project working on SRM and GCR, but refused to publicise it on their website. How many other projects were funded but not publicly disclosed? Why did they decide to not disclose such funding?

Again, just using my historical experience at EA Funds as evidence. I continue to in no way speak on behalf of funds, and this is all just my personal opinion. 

I would have to look through the data, but my guess is about 20% of EA Funds funding is distributed privately, though a lot of that happens via referring grants to private donors (i.e. most of this does not come from the public EA Funds funding). About three-quarters (in terms of dollar amount) of this is to individuals who have a strong preference for privacy, and the other quarter is for stuff that's more involved in policy and politics where there is some downside risk of being associated with EA in both directions (sometimes the policy project would prefer to not be super publicly associated and evaluated by an EA source, sometimes a project seems net-positive, but EA Funds doesn't want to signal that it's an EA-endorsed project). 

SFF used to have a policy of allowing grant recommenders to prevent a grant from showing up publicly, but we abolished that power in recent rounds, so now all grants show up publicly.

I personally really dislike private funding arrangements and find it kind of shady and have pushed back a bunch on them at EA Funds, though I can see the case for them in some quite narrow set of cases. I personally quite dislike not publicly talking about policy project grants, since like, I think they are actually often worth the most scrutiny. 

What sort of coordination, if any, goes on around which EAs talk to the media, write highly publicised books, go in curricula etc? What is the decision making procedure like?

There is no formal government here. If you do something that annoys a really quite substantial fraction of people at EA organizations, or people on the EA Forum, or any other large natural interest group in EA, there is some chance that someone at CEA (or maybe Open Phil) reaches out to someone doing a lot of things very publicly and asks them to please stop it (maybe backed up with some threat of the Effective Altruism trademark that I think CEA owns)

I think this is a difficult balance, and asking people to please associate less with EA can also easily contribute to a climate of conformity and fear, so I don't really know what the right balance here is. I think on the margin I would like the world to understand better that EA has no central government, and anyone can basically say whatever they want and claim that it's on behalf of EA, instead of trying to develop some kind of party-line that all people associated with EA must follow. 

The image, both internally and externally, of SBF was that he lived a frugal lifestyle, which it turns out was completely untrue (and not majorly secret). Was this known when Rob Wiblin interviewed SBF on the 80000 Hours podcast and held up SBF for his frugality?

I do think this was a quite misleading narrative (though I do want to push back on your statement of it being "completely untrue"), and people made a pretty bad mistake endorsing it. 

Up until yesterday I thought that indeed 80k fucked up pretty badly here, but I talked a bit to Max Dalton and my guess is the UK EAs seemed to maybe know a lot less about how Sam was living than people here in the Bay Area, and it's now plausible to me (though still overall unlikely) that Rob did just genuinely not know that Sam was actually living a quite lavish lifestyle in many ways. 

I had drafted an angry message to Rob Wiblin when the interview came out that I ended up not sending because it was a bit too angry that went approximately something like "Why the hell did you tell this story of SBF being super frugal in your interview when you know totally well that he lives in one of the most expensive apartments in the Bahamas and has a private jet". I now really wish I had sent it. I wonder whether this would have caused Rob to notice something fishy was going on, and while I don't think it would have flipped this whole situation, I do think it would have potentially made a decent dent into not being duped into this whole situation. 

(This is an annoyed post. Having re-read it, I think it's mostly not mean, but please downvote it if you think it is mean and I'll delete it.)

I have a pretty negative reaction to this post, and a number of similar others in this vein. Maybe I should write a longer post on this, but my general observation is that many people have suddenly started looking for the "adults in the room", mostly so that they can say "why didn't the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?", and that they have decided that "EA Leadership" are the adults. 

But I'm not sure "EA Leadership" is really a thing, since EA is a movement of all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, and so "EA Leadership" fails to identify specific people who actually have any responsibility towards you. The result is that these kinds of questions end up either being vague or suggesting some kind of mysterious shadowy council of "EA Leaders" who are secretly doing naughty things.

It gets worse! When people do look for an identifiable figure to blame, the only person who looks vaguely like a leader is Will, so they pick on him. But Will is not the CEO of EA! He's a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff. But people really want him to be the CEO of EA so they can be angry that he's not being more CEO-like, and that seems pretty unfair to me.

But I think the reality is: there are no adults in the room, who are managing everything behind the scenes, and who you can be angry at for failing you. There are a lot of people doing various specific ways, and working with each other in various more-or-less coordinated ways. "EA" does not do things, "EA" did not "endorse" SBF. Some specific individuals may have done this, but the shadowy council of EA Leadership did not meet at midnight to declare SBF the Chosen Saviour.

Habryka gave nice answers to the questions already, which is great. Here are some grumpy answers:

• Why is the attendance of the Coordination forum secret? Why should it be open? It's a get-together for some people to talk to each other, why are they obliged to be super-transparent to you? It's not the Secret Gathering of EA Leadership.
• Why did Will not consult people before he talked to Elon? Because he's an individual who can do his own thing, and there's no Council of Elders of EA to be "consulted" at times like this. 
• Why did Will not adopt Zoe's suggestions? Is that Will's job? To enforce the uptake of structural reforms across EA? Sounds like the sort of thing the CEO of an organization might be responsible for... but Will isn't the CEO of EA.
• Why isn't Will doing something about people hero-worshipping him? Because that's also not his job? If you're concerned about people hero-worshipping Will, perhaps you should get angry at the people doing it instead of Will, who's not obviously doing anything to encourage it.
• Why has the community health team not solved emergent social problems on the forum? Because that's hard? And maybe also not their job? Perhaps we as a community should be being nicer to people.
• What is the decision-making procedure for things going into the media? There probably isn't one? That would imply a some kind of central EA comms org, which doesn't exist. CEA has a comms department, but I think they mostly help people out when requested. Probably any number of orgs do their own comms stuff as they see fit.
• I won't comment on Carrick except that Habryka points out that Carrick did it, again, no anointing by EA Leadership or anything.

To be clear, I'm not saying we as a community get a free pass, nor that specific individuals or organizations shouldn't get some criticism. I just think we should avoid imagining centralized loci of control that don't really exist.

"The image, both internally and externally, of SBF was that he lived a frugal lifestyle, which it turns out was completely untrue (and not majorly secret). Was this known when Rob Wiblin interviewed SBF on the 80000 Hours podcast and held up SBF for his frugality?"

Thanks for the question Gideon, I'll just respond to this question directed at me personally.

When preparing for the interview I read about his frugal lifestyle in multiple media profiles of Sam and sadly simply accepted it at face value. One that has stuck in my mind up until now was this video that features Sam and the Toyota Corolla that he (supposedly) drove.

I can't recall anyone telling me that that was not the case, even after the interview went out, so I still would have assumed it was true two weeks ago.

The assumption I had is we defer a lot of power, both intellectual, social and financial, to a small group of broadly unaccountable, non-transparent people on the assumption they are uniquely good at making decisions, noticing risks to the EA enterprise and combatting them, and that this unique competence is what justifies the power structures we have in EA.

Is this actually true right now? People donating to EA Funds seem like an example of deferring financial decisions, but I don't have data how EAs donate to the Funds vs. decide themselves where to donate. Or do you mean decisions like relying on GiveWell recommendations as an example of 'deferring financial power'?

I am also not sure how the EA Community compares to other movements. Is your claim that EA is worse at this than comparable movements or that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard?

I have mixed feelings about your post overall. If people defer decision-making power to "the leadership" then it's good to ask these questions. But mostly I see individuals making decisions for themselves. If others think the decisions are bad, they don't have to admire "the leadership" for it.

A series of failure by the community this year, including the Carrick Flynn campaign and now the FTX scandal has shattered my confidence in this group.

I'm really surprised anyone is even super confident that the Carrick Flynn campaign made major mistakes (or was a major mistake to attempt), much less that anyone thinks of the campaign as "a confidence-shattering failure" about EA as a whole. I feel like I must be missing something very basic that's in other people's models. Or maybe a lot of people were just very emotionally invested in that primary race?

There are probably things that could have been done better in the campaign, especially with the benefit of hindsight and experience. But getting members of a weird new niche academic philosophy elected to the US House of Representatives isn't the sort of thing I expect to have a >50% success rate, even if we try our hardest. And Flynn did pretty well in the polls, and would have won the primary if he'd peeled off ~5500 votes (9% of all votes cast) from Salinas.

That's a good enough showing that I expect there are a lot of nearby worlds where Flynn wins, and I'd happily give it another attempt if I could travel back in time, even if I could only make mild tweaks to the campaign strategy. There's just a lot of contingency and unpredictability in political campaigns, and the EV seems good to me, especially taking into account the information value of "try something very new and see what happens".

(Also, plenty of other EA campaigns and political efforts have succeeded, even if they weren't as widely discussed as Carrick's campaign. This is a big part of what makes the "Carrick losing was a total catastrophe" narrative seem strange to me.)

Not saying I disagree with this, but it may be worth noting that "democracy" as an alternative didn't exactly do great either -- Stuart Buck wrote this comment, and it got downvoted enough that he deleted it.

I think we EAs need to increasingly prioritize speaking up about concerns like the ones Habryka mentioned.

Even when positive in-group feelings, the fear of ostracism, and uncertainty/risk aversion internally influences one to not bring up these concerns, we should fight back against this urge because the concerns, if true, will likely grow larger and larger until they blow up.

There is very high EV in course correction before the catastrophic failure point.

I’ll speak to question 6, since I am on the community health team, and in particular was hired in large part to work on community epistemics, but am only speaking to the work I’ve done rather than the whole team since I’m newish to the team. (Haven’t done tons of work on this yet, and my initial experiments and forays have been pretty varied, since the epistemics space is really large)

Tl;dr I think this matters, in and of itself it hasn’t been the top thing on my list, adjacent/related things have been high priority.

(Other CEA teams online (via the forum), groups and events teams have all thought about this as well.)

Whether people feel “able” to disagree itself might take some disambiguation - I tried to think a bunch about (1) intellectual challenge of having an inside view in a world with tons of information and how to make that easier and (2) the emotional difficulty of believing in your own ideas, not falling prey to epistemic learned helplessness, noticing your own intuitions, etc. 

When I thought about working on the latter at scale, I thought about:

• Modelling thinking out loud, what it looks like when people try to figure things out and show all the messiness, that people others respect a lot have plenty of uncertainties, and trying to make figuring things out more accessible
• Talking a lot about the mental and conversational motions I think are great, including those that solicit disagreement
• Getting high status people to encourage disagreement
   

Before the FTX situation happened, I had been updating more towards “doing things that don’t scale” and considering things like:

• Epistemics coaching / “epistemics therapy”
• A residence at a uni group to be a person who could focus on helping people shake up their thinking / get red-teaming on their current ideas / encouragement to think for themselves
• Asking a lot of people what helped them think better and think about what social and physical contexts let people really think
  • E.g. the pros and cons of sharper and softer cultures for this, and whether EA should more explicitly think of itself as an archipelago, where there are different areas for different vibes, and your job is to figure out which one works best for you or move around as needed
  • I’ve definitely heard that some spaces feel like they privilege only a certain kind of thinking or set of conclusions, and that makes it hard for others to think straight, especially when access to funding / coworking spaces / etc feels contigent on it. That sucks and is hard. My team has done some thinking about this - I think the current sense is that adding more support is a better move than trying to get people to change how they run their own things, but I am definitely not super sure.

And more generally trying to give support to people like group leaders, anyone who is closer to the ground and has more leverage over the social environment. My guess is a lot of the value of “feel viscerally like you have social support for disagreeing” happens in smaller contexts like that, and I’ve been in conversations with a handful about how they support their groups to think (like, I’m obsessed with this). E.g. my guess is that getting high status people to encourage disagreement is more useful here than it is at scale (but not sure whether it’s so much more useful that it out-does scale). In general people being excited about criticism, saying when they’ve updated and highlighting their favorites seems really great.

When I thought about the problem of inside views, I was much more focused on people feeling afraid to even start thinking, and deferring too much / more than they endorsed, and trying to make figuring out what’s true easier. I suspect that kind of thing has valuable knock-on effects on “feeling like you’ll have social support to speak up” - personally when I know why I think what I think, I feel much more able to articulate it and fight for it than if I feel much more confused about the world. 

Maybe the direct “social support for disagreeing” should have been more my focus, I’m not sure. It was definitely on my radar. 

• I thought “the forum being scary” might end up being a real epistemics problem (though I wasn’t sure it was the top of my list of such problems, and the forum team have worked hard on this). 
• I think it’s very possible we should have more debates at EAGs and have bid for it. 
• I was at high school programs tracking in part how pressure-y we were being (and I’m so appreciative to others at those programs who have a lot more experience at it than me and were amazing influences). (In practice, I think people on average are overworried about this in high school contexts rather than under, but it definitely matters.) 
  • I also taught a class that involved talking about how to actually make people feel like disagreeing was good (one feedback I got was that we’d done too much to make disagreeing feel like the thing to do and people felt a little pressured to come up with a disagreement!) 

Julia Wise has also written in part about how to get real feedback, in the context of power dynamics, and there’s a whole world of “how does funding affect epistemics” I haven’t delved into.

One thing I don’t want to lose track of is that it can feel shitty to have people disagree that one’s ideas or critiques are valuable or true, and that alone is an emotional and often tracked-as-social or in-fact-social hit. But of course no one wants us to be in a position where as a community we can’t say “I don’t think your critique is any good” or “I want to hire that person less because I think their judgments of ideas have been systematically wrong.” Like, lots of criticism is bad. So it’s tricky. 

Really appreciative of the agree/disagree voting system and all the people who say “Thanks so much for voicing your disagreement here” before they say why they don’t buy it. I think those things are great. (Really lovely example here and here). If I may name names, I think Rob Bensinger and Nathan Young are unusually good at this, and I appreciate them for it.

I think this is important but hard, and there are a lot of important things in community epistemics. If you have thoughts on addressing this particular thing, I’d love to hear them (noting that in my role, I might decide there are things that are higher priority - but anyone can help community epistemics, I certainly can’t do it alone)! I have a form here.

(Also, if people aren’t feeling able to disagree with community builders or anyone else, I’d really appreciate hearing about that - the form can be for that too).

I have slightly edited the post, just to clarify some things I ought to have done. 

Not every question I pose is related to SBF etc., just questions I think the EA Leadership at large should answer. I am sure there are rational responses to many of these questions, and in the way that these are interpreted as an "attack" I do apologise; moreover, the "attack-lines" are also plausibly inconsistent, as some lines of attack likely point towards less centralisation and some to more. 

In what sense does EA have something like a leadership?

There is no official overarching EA organisation. Strictly speaking, EA is just a collection of people who all individually does whatever they want. Some of these people have chosen to set up various orgs that does various things. 

But in a less formal but still very real way, EA is very hierarchical. There is a lot of concentration of power. 

1. Some of this is based on status and trust. Some people and orgs have built up a reputation which grants them a lot of soft power within the EA network. 
2. Some of this is because of entrenched infrastructure. CEA runs EA global and gets to decide who can attend. CEA also owns the trademark for "Effective Altruism", and sometimes use this to pressure other projects to do what CEA wants. (I don't know how often this happens since I only have sparce anecdotal information.)
3. But the biggest power factor is control of money. Most EA funding comes from a few mega donors. 

And all of these three points mix. EA funds is an infrastructure (2) that controls the flow of funding (3) which CEA could set up because they have status and trust (1). Because of how these things intermingle, the same few people might end up controlling all three. 

So maybe EA don't have a leadership, but we do have some sort of power center. What, if anything, does the people in power owe the rest of us? 

There isn't an obvious answer. Probably the above question is not even the right framing. 

For myself, I'm mostly over debating what the central powers of EA should do. Given the massive lack of transparency, I just don't know. 

I'd like to see an EA movement that is less centralised, and I don't expect the people currently in power to do anything about that. Maybe they can't or maybe they don't want to. I don't care anymore which one it is. 

I'd love to see someone set up alternative EA infrastructure. I want a competitor to EA Funds. I want an alternative job board that is not controlled by 80k. This is not about these orgs being bad, but about centralisation being bad. 

But I also know that it is hard work setting up alternative infrastructure. It takes time for new things to get traction. It takes time for the word to spread about you even existing. 

Did you know there is a second EA career advice org?
Probably Good | Impact-focused Career Advice 

If established EA orgs want to decrease centralisation (which again, I don't know if they do) then one of the biggest things they could do is to promote their competitors.

Thanks for this post - I think a lot of people have these questions and it's good to have common knowledge of that. I work on the community health team, and one of my areas is community epistemics so I have a lot of thoughts about question 6 and plan to come back to this when things are a little less frenetic.

FTX Future Fund decided to fund me on a project working on SRM and GCR, but refused to publicise it on their website. How many other projects were funded but not publicly disclosed? Why did they decide to not disclose such funding?

Did you receive the grant directly or as part of their regranting program?