GET AMBITIOUS SLOWLY

Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I'm sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring  speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up. 

Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options. 

•  try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure. 
• fake it, probably without knowing they're doing so
• learned helplessness, possible systemic depression
• be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you'd never started to the one where they had to rescue you. 
• discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot. 

The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times.

My preferred version is ambition snowball or "get ambitious slowly". Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures.

I claim EA's emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago 

What size of challenge is the right size? I've thought about this a lot and don't have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules:

• stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can't track reality well enough to know why a failure happened you definitely* need an easier project. 
• if your talk gives people a lot of ambitions to save the world/build billion dollar companies but their mind goes blank when they contemplate starting a freelancing business, the ambition is fake. 

There's a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as "supportive", maybe even a very tiny gift. But that's only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].

One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn't a natural fit for,  because "it's quick and there are few applicants".   This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn't the only person the grantmaker encouraged.  I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.

[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I'm not mad at you personally]. 

I've been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone "yeah you're probably not good enough".

A lot of EA job postings encourage people to apply even if they don't think they're a good fit. I expect this is done partially because orgs genuinely don't want to lose great applicants who underestimate themselves, and partially because it's an extremely cheap way to feel anti-elitist. 

I don't know what the solution is here. Many people are miscalibrated on their value or their competition, all else being equal you do want to catch those people. But casting wider net entails more bycatch.

It's hard to accuse an org of being mean to someone who they encouraged to apply for a job or grant. But I think that should be in the space of possibilities, and we should put more emphasis on invitations to apply for jobs/grants/etc being clear, and less on welcoming. This avoids wasting the time of people who were predictably never going to get the job. 

EA hiring gets a lot of criticism. But I think there are aspects at which it does unusually well.

One thing I like is that hiring and holding jobs feels way more collaborative between boss and employee. I'm much more likely to feel like a hiring manager wants to give me honest information and make the best decision, whether or not that's with them.Relative to the rest of the world they're much less likely to take investigating other options personally.

Work trials and even trial tasks have a high time cost, and are disruptive to people with normal amounts of free time and work constraints (e.g. not having a boss who wants you to trial with other orgs because they personally care about you doing the best thing, whether or not it's with them). But trials are so much more informative than interviews, I can't imagine hiring for or accepting a long-term job without one. 

Trials are most useful when you have the least information about someone, so I expect removing them to lead to more inner-ring dynamics and less hiring of unconnected people.

EA also has an admirable norm of paying for trials, which no one does for interviews. 

Two popular responses to FTX are "this is why we need to care more about honesty" and "this is why we need to not do weird/sketchy shit". I pretty strongly believe the former. I can see why people would believe the latter, but I worry that the value lost is too high.

But I think both side can agree that representing your weird/sketchy thing as mundane is highly risky. If you're going to disregard a bunch of the normal safeguards of operating in the world, you need to replace them with something, and most of those somethings are facilitated by honesty. 

None of my principled arguments against "only care about big projects" have convinced anyone, but in practice Google reorganized around that exact policy ("don't start a project unless it could conceivably have 1b+ users, kill if it's ever not on track to reach that") and they haven't grown an interesting thing since.

My guess is the benefits of immediately aiming high are overwhelmed by the costs of less contact with reality.

People talk about running critical posts by the criticized person or org ahead of time, and there are a lot of advantages to that. But the plans I've seen are all fairly one sided: all upside goes to the criticized, all the extra work goes to the critic.

What I'd like to see is some reciprocal obligation from recipients of criticism, especially formal organizations with many employees. Things like answering questions from potential critics very early in the process, with a certain level of speed and reliability. Right now it feels like orgs are very fast to respond to polished, public posts, but you can't count on them to even answer questions. They'll respond quickly to public criticism, and maybe even to polished posts sent to them before publication, but they are not fast or reliable at answering questions with implicit potential criticism behind them. Which is a pretty shitty deal for the critic, who I'm sure would love to find out their concern was unmerited before spending dozens of hours writing a polished post. 

This might be unfair. I'm quite sure it used to be true, but a lot of the orgs have professionalized over the years. In which case I'd like to ask they make their commitments around this public and explicit, and share them in the same breath that they ask for heads up on criticism. 

A friend asked me which projects in EA I thought deserved more money, especially ones that seemed to be held back by insufficient charisma of the founders. After a few names he encouraged me to write it up. This list is very off the cuff and tentative: in most cases I have pretty minimal information on the project, and they’re projects I incidentally encountered on EAF. If you have additions I encourage you to comment with them. 

The main list

The bar here is “the theory of change seems valuable, and worse projects are regularly funded”. 

Faunalytics

Faunalytics is a data analysis firm focused on metrics related to animal suffering. I searched high and low for health data on vegans that included ex-vegans, and they were the only place I found anything that had any information from ex-vegans. They shared their data freely and offered some help with formatting, although in the end it was too much work to do my own analysis.

I do think their description minimized the problems they found. But they shared enough information that I could figure that out rather than relying on their interpretation, and that’s good enough. 

ALLFED

EA is trend-following to unfortunate degrees. ALLFED picked the important but unsexy target of food security during catastrophes, and has been steadfastly pursuing it for 7 years. 

Charity Entrepreneurship pilot fund 

CE runs a bootcamp/incubator that produces several new charities each run. I don’t think every project that comes out of this program is gold. I don’t even know of any projects that make me go “yes, definitely amazing”. But they are creating founder-talent where none existed before, and getting unsexy projects implemented, and building up their own skill in developing talent. 

CE recently opened up the funding circle for their incubated projects. 

Exotic Tofu Project, perhaps dependent on getting a more charismatic co-founder

I was excited by George Stiffman’s original announcement of a plan to bring unknown Chinese tofus into the west and marketing it to foodie omnivores as desirable and fun. This was a theory of change that could work, and that avoided the ideological sirens that crash so many animal suffering projects on the rocks. 
 

Then he released his book. It was titled Broken Cuisine: Chinese tofu, Western cooking, and a hope to save our planet. The blurb opens with “Our meat-based diets are leading to antibiotic-resistant superbugs, runaway climate change, and widespread animal cruelty. Yet, our plant-based alternatives aren't appealing enough. This is our Broken Cuisine. I believe we must fix it.”  . This is not a fun and high status leisure activity: this is doom and drudgery, aimed at the already-converted. I think doom and drudgery strategies are oversupplied right now, but I was especially sad to see this from someone I thought understood the power of offering options that were attractive on people’s own terms. 

This was supposed to be a list of projects who are underfunded due to lack of charisma; unfortunately this project requires charisma. I would still love to see it succeed, but I think that will require a partner who is good at convincing the general public that something is high-status. My dream is a charming, high-status reducetarian or ameliatarian foodie influencer, but just someone who understood omnivores on their own terms would be an improvement. 

Impact Certificates
 

I love impact certificates as a concept, but they’ve yet to take off. They suffer from both lemon and coordination problems.They’re less convenient than normal grants, so impact certificate markets only get projects who couldn’t get funding elsewhere. And it’s a 2 or 3 sided market (producers, initial purchasers, later purchasers). 

There are a few people valiantly struggling to make impact certificates a thing. I think these are worth funding directly, but it’s also valuable to buy impact certificates. If you don’t like the uncertainty of the project applications you can always be a secondary buyer, who are perhaps even rarer. 
 

Projects I know doing impact certificates

• Manifund. Manifund is the IC subproject of Manifold Market, which manifestly does not suffer from lack of extroversion in its founder. But impact certs are just an uphill battle, and private conversations with founder Austin Chen indicated they had a lot of room for more funding. 
• ACX Grants runs an impact certificate program, managed by Manifund. 
• Oops, the primary project I was thinking of has gone offline. 

Ozzie Gooen/QURI

Full disclosure: I know Ozzie socially, although not so well as to put him in the Conflicts of Interest section. 

Similar to ALLFED: I don’t know that QURI’s estimation tools are the most important project, but I do know Ozzie has been banging the drums on forecasting for years, way before Austin Chen made it cool, and it’s good for the EA ecosystem to have that kind of persistent pursuit in the mix.

Community Building

Most work done under the name “community building” is recruiting. Recruiting can be a fine thing to do, but it makes me angry to see it mislabeled in this, while actual community building starves. Community recruiting is extremely well funded, at least for people willing to frame their project in terms of accepted impact metrics. However if you do the harder part of actually building and maintaining a community that nourishes members, and are uncomfortable pitching impact when that’s not your focus, money is very scarce. This is a problem because 

1. EA has an extractive streak that can burn people out. Having social support that isn’t dependent on validation for EA authorities is an important counterbalance. 
2. The people who are best at this are the ones doing it for its own sake rather than optimizing for short-term proxies on long-term impact. Requiring fundees to aim at legible impact selects for liars and people  worse at the job.
3. People driven to community build for its own sake are less likely to pursue impact in other ways. Even if you think impact-focus is good and social builders are not the best at impact, giving them building work frees up someone impact-focused to work on something else. 
    

Unfortunately I don’t have anyone specific to donate to, because the best target I know already burnt out and quit. But I encourage you to be on the lookout in your local community. Or be the change I want to see in the world: being An Organizer is hard, but hosting occasional movie nights or proactively cleaning at someone else's party is pretty easy, and can go a long way towards creating a healthy connected community. 

 

Projects with conflicts of Interest

The first section featured projects I know only a little about. This section includes projects I know way too much about, to the point I’m at risk of bias. 

Independent grant-funded researchers

Full disclosure: I am an independent, sometimes grant-funded, researcher.

This really needs to be its own post, but in a nutshell: relying on grants for your whole income sucks, and often leaves you with gaps or at least a lot of uncertainty. I’m going to use myself as an example because I haven’t run surveys or anything, but I expect I’m on the easier end of things.
 

The core difficulty with grant-financing: grantmakers don’t want to pay too far in advance. Grantmakers don’t want to approve new grants until you’ve shown results from the last grant. Results take time. Grant submissions, approval, and payout also take time. This means that, at best, you spend many months not knowing if you’ll have a funding gap, and many times the answer will be yes. I don’t know if this is the grantmaker’s fault, but many people feel pressure to ask for as little money as possible, which makes the gaps a bigger hardship

I get around this by contracting and treating grants as one client out of several, but I’m lucky that’s an option. It also means I spend time on projects that EA would consider unoptimal. Other problems: I have to self-fund most of my early work because I don’t want to apply for a grant until I have a reasonable idea of what I could hope to accomplish. There are projects I’ve been meaning to do for years, but are too big to self-fund, and too illegible and inspiration-dependent to survive a grant process. I have to commit to a project at application time but then not start until the application is approved, which could be months later.
 

All purpose funding with a gentle reapplication cycle would let independents take more risks at a lower psychological toll. Or test out Austin Chen’s idea of ~employment-as-a-service. Alas neither would help me right this second- illness has put me behind on some existing grant funded work, so I shouldn’t accept more money right now. But other independents could; if you know of any, please leave a pitch in the comments.

Lightcone

full disclosure: I volunteer and am very occasionally paid for work at Lightcone, and have deep social ties with the team. 

Lightcone’s issue isn’t so much charisma as that the CEO is allergic to accepting money with strings, and the EA-offered money comes with strings. I like Lightcone's work, and some of my favorite parts of their work would have been much more difficult without that independence. 

Complaints about lack of feedback for rejected grants are fairly frequent, but it seems relevant that I can't get feedback for my accepted grants or in-progress work. The most I have ever gotten was a 👍 react when I texted them "In response to my results I will be doing X instead of the original plan on the application". In fact I think I've gotten more feedback on rejections than acceptances (or in one case, I received feedback on an accepted grant, from a committee member who'd voted to reject). Sometimes they give me more money, so it's not that the work is so bad it's not worth commenting on. Admittedly my grants are quite small, but I'm not sure how much feedback medium or even large projects get. 

Acceptance feedback should be almost strictly easier to give, and higher impact. You presumably already know positives about the grant, the impact of marginal improvements is higher in most cases, people rarely get mad about positive feedback, and even if you share negatives the impact is cushioned by the fact that you're still approving their application. So without saying where I think the line should be, I do think feedback for acceptances is higher priority than for rejections. 

As of October 2022, I don't think I could have known FTX was defrauding customers.

If I'd thought about it I could probably have figured out that FTX was at best a casino, and I should probably think seriously before taking their money or encouraging other people to do so.  I think I failed in an important way here, but I also don't think my failure really hurt anyone, because I am such a small fish.

But I think in a better world I should have had the information that would lead me to conclude that Sam Bankman-Fried was an asshole who didn't keep his promises, and that this made it risky to make plans that depended on him keeping even explicit promises, much less vague implicit commitments.  I have enough friends of friends that have spoken out since the implosion that I'm quite sure that in a more open, information-sharing environment I would have gotten that information. And if I'd gotten that information, I could have shared it with other small fish who were considering uprooting their lives based on implicit commitments from SBF. Instead, I participated in the irrational exuberance that probably made people take more risks on the margin, and left them more vulnerable to the collapse of FTX. Assigning culpability is hard here, but this isn't just an abstract worry: I can think of one person I might bear some responsibility for, and another who I would be almost 100% responsible for, except they didn't get the grant. 

I think the encouragement I gave people represents a moral failure on my part. I should have realized I didn't have enough information to justify it, even if I never heard about specific bad behavior. Hell even if SBF wasn't an unreliable asshole, Future Fund could have turned off the fire hose for lots of reasons. IIRC they weren't even planning on continuing the regrantor project.  

But it would also have been cool if that low key, "don't rely on Sam- I'm not accusing him of anything malicious, he's just not reliable" type of information had circulated widely enough that it reached me and the other very small fish, especially the ones taking major risks that only made sense in an environment where FTX money flowed freely. 

I don't know what the right way to do that would have been. But it seems important to figure out. 

I also suspect that in an environment where it was easy to find out that SBF was an unreliable asshole, it would have been easier to discover or maybe even prevent the devastating fraud, because people would have felt more empowered to say no to him. But that might be wishful thinking. 

Good posts generate a lot of positive externalities, which means they're undersupplied, especially by people who are busy and don't get many direct rewards from posting. How do we fix that? What are rewards relevant authors would find meaningful?

Here are some possibilities off the top of my head, with some commentary. My likes are not universal and I hope the comments include people with different utility functions.

• Money. Always a classic, rarely disliked although not always prioritized. I'm pretty sure this is why LTFF and EAIF are writing more now.
• Appreciation (broad). Some people love these. I definitely prefer getting them over not getting them, but they're not that motivating for me. Their biggest impact on motivation is probably cushioning the blow of negative comments.
• Appreciation (specific). Things like "this led to me getting my iron tested" or "I changed my mind based on X". I love these, they're far more impactful than generic appreciation. 
• High quality criticism that changes my mind. 
• Arguing with bad commenters. 
  • One of the hardest parts of writing for me is getting a shitty, hostile comment, and feeling like my choices are "let it stand" or "get sucked into a miserable argument that will accomplish nothing". Commenters arguing with commenters gets me out of this dilemma, which is already great, but then sometimes the commenters display deep understanding of the thing I wrote and that's maybe my favorite feeling. 

Deliberately not included: longer term rewards like reputation that can translate into jobs, employees, etc. I'm specifically looking for quick rewards for specific posts

LessWrong’s emoji palette is great

That palette is not just great in the abstract, it's great as a representation of LW. I did some very interesting anthropology with some non-rationalist friends explaining the meaning and significance of the weirder reacts.

A lot of what I explained was how specific reacts relate to one of the biggest pain points on LW (and EAF): shitty comments. The reacts are weirdly powerful, in part because it's not the comments'  existence that’s so bad, it’s knowing that other people might read them and not understand they are shitty. I could explain why in a comment of my own, but that invites more shitty comments and draws attention to the original one. It’s only worth it if many people are seeing and believing the comment.

Emojis neatly resolve this. If several people mark a comment as soldier mindset, I feel off the hook for arguing with it. And if several people (especially people I respect) mark a comment as insightful or changing their mind, that suggests that at a minimum it’s worth the time to engage with the comment, and quite possibly I am in the wrong. 

You might say I should develop a thicker skin so shitty comments bug me less, and that is probably be true on the margin, but I think it’s begging the question. Emojis give me valuable information about how a comment is received; positive emojis suggest I am wrong that it is shitty, or at least how obvious it is. It is good to respond differently to good comments, obviously shitty comments, and controversial comments differently, and detailed reacts make it much easier. So I think this was a huge win for LessWrong.

Meanwhile on the EAForum...
 

[ETA 2023-11-10: turns out I picked a feel-good thread with a special react palette to get my screen shots. I still think my point holds overall but regret the accidental exaggeration. I should have been more surprised when I went to get a screen shot and the palette wasn't what I expected]

This palette has 5 emojis (clapping, party, heart, star, and surprise) covering maybe 2.5 emotions if you're generous and count heart as care and not just love. It is considerably less precise than Facebook's palette. I suspect the limited palette is an attempt to keep things positive, but given that negative comments are (correctly) allowed, this only limits the ability to cheaply push back. 

I'll bet EAF put a lot of thought into their palette. This isn't even their first palette, I found out the palette had changed when I went to get a screen shot for this post. I would love to hear more about why they chose these 5. 

This is not quite as bad as the feel-good palette (I'm so sorry!), but I still think leaves a tremendous amount of value on the table. It gives no way to give specific negative feedback to bad comments like "too combative" or "misunderstands position?" . It's not even particularly good at compliments, except for "Changed my mind". 
 

Jason @ 2023-11-10T02:32 (+16)

How common do you think "shitty comments" are? And how well/poorly do you think the existing karma system provides an observer with knowledge that the user base "understand[s] they are shitty"? (To be sure, it doesn't tell you if the voting users understand exactly why the comment is shitty.)

I'm not sure how many people would post attributed-to-them emojis if they weren't already anonymously downvoting a comment for being shitty. So if they aren't already getting significant downvotes, I don't know how many negative emojis they would get here.

Elizabeth @ 2023-11-10T21:10 (+6)

They're especially useful for comments of mixed quality- e.g. someone is right and making an important point, but too aggressively. Or a comment is effortful, well-written, and correct within its frame, but fundamentally misunderstood your position. Or, god forbid, someone make a good point and a terrible point in the same comment. I was originally skeptical of line-level reacts but ended up really valuing them due to that.

There's also reacts like "elaborate", "taboo this word" and "example" that invite a commenter to correct problems, at which point the comment may become really valuable. Unfortunately there's no notifications for reacts so this can really easily go unnoticed, but I it at least raises the option.  

If I rephase your question as "how often do I see comments for which reacts convey something important I couldn't say with karma?"; most of my posts since reacts came out have been controversial, so I'm using many comment reacts per post (not always dismissively). 

I also find positive emojis much more rewarding than karma, especially Changed My Mind. 

akash @ 2023-11-11T17:27 (+10)

I like the LW emoji palette, but it is too much. Reading forum posts and parsing through comments can be mentally taxing. I don't want to spend additional effort going through a list of forty-something emojis and buttons to react to something, especially comments. I am often pressed for time, so almost always I would avoid the LW emoji palette entirely. Maybe a few other important reactions can be added instead of all of them? Or maybe there could be a setting which allows people to choose if they want to see a "condensed" or "extended" emoji palette? Either way, just my two cents.

Elizabeth @ 2023-11-12T23:32 (+10)

I agree EAF shouldn't have a LW-sized palette, much less LW's specific palette. I want EAF to have a palette that reflects its culture as well as LW's palette reflects its culture. And I think that's going to take more than 4 reacts (note that my original comment mortifyingly used a special palette made for a single post, the new version has the normal EAF reacts of helpful, insightful, changed my mind, and heart), but way less than is in the LW palette. 

I do think part of LessWrong's culture is preferring to have too many options rather than making do with the wrong one. I know the team has worked really hard to keep reacts to a manageable level, while making most of them very precise, while covering a wide swath of how people want to react. I think they've done an admirable job (full disclosure: I'm technically on the mod team and give opinions in slack, but that's basically the limit of my power). This is something I really appreciate about LW, but I know shrinks its audience.

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2023-11-26T15:42 (+2)

I'm not on LW very often, how frequently do you see these emojis being used?

From a UX perspective, I agree with Akash - it seems like there are way too many options and my prior is that people wouldn't use >80% of them.

Lizka @ 2023-11-10T13:33 (+9)

Hi! I think we might have a bug — I'm not sure where you're seeing those emojis on the Forum. For me, here are the emojis that show up: 

@Agnes Stenlund might be able to say more about how we chose those,^[1] but I do think we went for this set as a way to create a low-friction way of sharing non-anonymous positive feedback (which authors and commenters have told us they lack, and some have told us that they feel awkward just commenting with something non-substantive but positive like "thanks!") while also keeping the UX understandable and easy to use. I think it's quite possible that it would be better to also add some negative/critical emojis, but I'm not very convinced right now and not convinced that it's super promising relative to the others stuff we're working on, & something we should dive deeper into. It won't be my call in the end, regardless, but I'm definitely up for hearing arguments about why this is wrong!

1. ^{^}

   I don't view this as a finalized set — I think there's a >50% chance (75%?) that we've changed at least something about it in the next ~6 months. 

Ollie Etherington @ 2023-11-10T13:50 (+8)

Not a bug - it's from Where are you donating this year, and why? which is grandfathered into an old experimental voting system (and it's the only post with this voting system - there are a couple of others with different experimental systems).

Elizabeth @ 2023-11-10T20:52 (+4)

I'm so sorry- I should have been more surprised when I went to get a screenshot and it wasn't the palette I expected. I have comments set to notify me only once per day, so I didn't get alerted to the issue until now. 

I wrote this with the standard palette so I still think there is a problem, but I feel terrible for exaggerating it with a palette that was perfectly appropriate for its thread. 

Pablo @ 2023-11-11T11:18 (+4)

Semi-tangential question: what's the rationale for making the reactions public but the voting (including the agree/disagree voting) anonymous?

Rebecca @ 2023-11-10T10:29 (+8)

Where are you seeing that emoji palette on here?

Elizabeth @ 2023-11-10T21:09 (+2)

See sister thread- this was for a specific positivity focused thread I picked completely at random 😱. 

Sarah Cheng @ 2023-11-10T19:45 (+4)

I'll bet EAF put a lot of thought into their palette.

As Ollie mentioned, I made the set you referenced for just this one thread. As far as I remember it was meant to to support positive vibes in that thread and was done very quickly, so I would not say a lot of thought went into that palette.

Elizabeth @ 2023-11-10T19:40 (+2)

@Lizka and co: could I ask for some commentary on this?

A repost from the discussion on NDAs and Wave (a software company). Wave was recently publicly revealed to have made severance dependent on non-disparagement agreements, cloaked by non-disclosure agreements. I had previously worked at Wave, but negotiated away the non-disclosure agreement (but not the non-disparagement agreement).

But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn't actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)

I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.

I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when it's embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave

To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.

So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.

This is one benefit to paying people well, and a reason having fewer better-paid workers is sometimes better than more people earning less money. If your grants or salary give you just enough to live as long as the grants are immediately renewed/you don't get fired, even a chance of irritating your source of income imperils your ability to feed yourself. 6 months expenses in savings gives you the ability to risk an individual job/grant. Skills valued outside EA give you the ability to risk pissing off all of EA and still be fine. 

I'm emphasizing risk here because I think it's the bigger issue. If you know something is wrong, you'll usually figure out a way to act on it. The bigger problem is when you some concerns but they legitimately could be nothing, but worry that investigating will imperil your livelihood.

I sometimes argue against certain EA payment norms because they feel extractive, or cause recipients to incur untracked costs. E.g. "it's not fair to have a system that requires unpaid work, or going months between work in ways that can't be planned around and aren't paid for". This was the basis for some of what I said here. But I'm not sure this is always bad, or that the alternatives are better. Some considerations

1. if it's okay for people to donate money I can't think of a principled reason it's not okay for them to donate time -> unpaid work is not a priori bad.
2. If it would be okay for people to solve the problem of gaps in grants by funding bridge grants, it can't be categorically disallowed to self-fund the time between grants. 
3. If partial self-funding is required to do independent, grant-funded work, then only people who can afford that will do such work. To the extent the people who can't would have done irreplaceably good work, that's a loss, and it should be measured. And to the extent some people would personally enjoy doing such work but can't, that's sad for them. But the former is an empirical question weighed against the benefits of underpaying, and the latter is not relevant to impact.
   1. I think the costs of blocking people who can't self-fund from this kind of work are probably high, especially the part where it categorically prevents segments of society with useful information from participating. But this is much more relevant for e.g. global development than AI risk. 
4. A norm against any unpaid work would mean no one could do anything unless they got funder approval ahead of time, which would be terrible. 
5. A related problem is when people need to do free work (broadly defined, e.g. blogging counts) to get a foot in the door for paid work. This has a lot of the same downsides as requiring self-funding, but, man, seems pretty stupid to insist on ignoring the information available from free sources, and if you don't ban it there will be pressure to do free work.
   1. To me, "creating your own projects, which people use to inform their opinions of you" feels pretty different from "you must do 50 hours of task X unpaid before we consider a paying position", but there are ambiguous cases. 
6. it's pretty common for salaried EAs to do unpaid work on top of their normal job. This feels importantly different to me from grant-funded people funding their own bridge loans, because of the job security and predictability. The issue isn't just "what's your take home pay per hour?", it's "how much ability to plan do you have?"
7. Any money you spend on one independent can't be spent on someone else. To the extent EA is financially constrained, that's a big cost.
8. It feels really important to me that costs of independence, like self-bridge-funding or the headache of grant applications, get counted in some meaningful sense, the same as donating money or accepting a low salary. 

I feel like a lot of castle discourse missed the point.

1. By default, OpenPhil/Dustin/Owen/EV don't need anyone's permission for how they spend their money. 
   1. And it is their money, AFAICT open phil doesn't take small donations. I assume Dustin can advocate for himself here.
2. One might argue that the castle has such high negative externalities it can be criticized on that front. I haven't seen anything to convince me of that, but it's a possibility and "right to spend one's own money" doesn't override that.
3. You could argue OpenPhil etc made some sort of promise they are violating by buying the castle. I don't think that's true- but I also think the castle-complainers have a legitimate grievance. 
   1. I do think the word "open" conveys something of a promise, and I will up my sympathy for open phil if they change their name. But my understanding is they are more open than most foundations.

My guess is that lots of people  entered EA with inaccurate expectations, and the volume at which this happens indicates a systemic problem, probably with recruiting. They felt ~promised that EA wasn't the kind of place where people bought fancy castles, or would at least publicly announce they'd bought a retreat center and justify it with numbers.

Highly legible, highly transparent parts of EA exist, and I'm glad they do. But it's not all of EA, and I don't think it should be. I think it's important to hold people to commitments, and open phil at one point did have a commitment to transparency, but they publicly renounced it years ago so that's no longer in play. I think the problem lies with the people who set the false expectations, which I imagine happened in recruiting.

 It's hard for me to be more specific than this because I haven't followed EA recruiting very closely, so what reaches me tends to be complaints about the worst parts. My guess is this lies in the more outward facing parts of Effective Ventures (GWWC, 80k, CEA's university recruiting program, perhaps the formalization of EA groups in general).

[I couldn't quickly verify this but my understanding is open phil provides a lot of the funding for at least some of these orgs, in which case it does bear some responsibility for the misleading recruiting]

I would like to see recruiting get more accurate about what to expect within EA. I want that partially because honesty is generally good, partially because this seems like a miserable experience for people who have been misled. And partially because I want EA to be a weird do-ocracy, and recruiting lots of people who object to doing weird things without permission slows that down. 

I think an underappreciated part of castlegate is that it fairly easily puts people in an impossible bind.

EA is a complicated morass, but there are a few tenets that are prominent, especially early on. These may be further simplified, especially in people using EA as treatment for their scrupulosity issues. For most of this post I'm going to take that simplified point of view (I'll mark when we return to my own beliefs). 

Two major, major tenets brought up very early in EA are:

1. You should donate your money to the most impactful possible cause
   1. Some people will additionally internalize "The most impactful in expectation"
2. GiveWell and OpenPhil have very good judgment. 

The natural conclusion of which is that donating GiveWell or OpenPhil-certified causes is a safe and easy way to fulfill your moral duty.

If you're operating under those assumptions and OpenPhil funds something without making their reasoning legible, there are two possibilities:

1. The opportunity is bad, which at best means OpenPhil is bad, and at worst means the EA ecosystem is trying to fleece you. 
2. The opportunity is good but you're not allowed to donate to it, which leaves you in violation of tenet #1. 

Both of which are upsetting, and neither of which really got addressed by the discourse. 

I don't think these tenets are correct, or at least they aren't complete. I think  goodharting on a simplified "most possible impact" metric leads very bad places. And I think that OpenPhil isn't even trying to have "good judgment" in the sense that tenet #2 means it. Even if they weren't composed of fallible humans, they're executing a hits-based strategy that means you shouldn't expect every opportunity to be immediately, legibly good. That's one reason they don't ask for money from small donors. Which means OpenPhil funding things that aren't legibly good doesn't put me in any sort of bind. 

I think it would be harmful to force all of EA to fit the constraints imposed by these two tenets. But I think enough people are under the impression it should that it rises to a level of problem worth addressing, probably through better messaging. 

Utilitarianism without strong object-level truthseeking be like

(credit: I found on twitter, uncredited)

Salaries at direct work orgs are a frequent topic of discussion, but I’ve never seen those conversations make much progress. People tend to talk past each other- they’re reading words differently (“reasonable”), or have different implicit assumptions that change the interpretation. I think the questions below could resolve a lot of the confusion (although not all of it, and not the underlying question. Highlighting different assumptions doesn’t tell you who’s right, it just lets you focus discussions on the actual disagreements). 

Here’s my guess for the important questions. Some of them are contingent-  e.g. you might think new grad generalists and experienced domain experts should be paid very differently. Feel free to give as many sets of answers as you want, just be clear which answers lump together, so no one misreads your expert salary as if it was for interns. 

1. What kind of position are you thinking about?
   1. Experienced vs. new grad
   2. Domain expertise vs generalist?
   3. Many outside options vs. few?
   4. Founder vs employee?
2. What salary are you thinking about?
3. What living conditions do you expect this salary to buy?
   1. Housing?
   2. Location?
   3. Kids? 
   4. Food?
   5. Savings rate
4. What is your bar for “enough” money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Luxury international travel 2x/year? 
5. What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
   1. Some things that might make someone’s existence more expensive:
      1. health issues (physical and mental)
      2. Kids
      3. Introversion
      4. Ailing parents
      5. Distant family necessitating travel. 
      6. Burnout requiring unemployed period.
6. What do you expect to happen for people who can’t thrive in those conditions? 
7. If you lost your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be? 
8. What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?

Ambition snowballs/Get ambitious slowly works very well for me, but sonepeople seem to hate it. My first reaction is that these people need to learn to trust themselves more, but today I noticed a reason I might be unusually suited for this method.

two things that keep me from aiming at bigger goals are laziness and fear. Primarily fear of failure, but also of doing uncomfortable things. I can overcome this on the margin by pushing myself (or someone else pushing me), but that takes energy, and the amount of energy never goes down the whole time I'm working. It's like holding a magnet away from its twin; you can do it, but the minute you stop the system will snap back into place. 

But more than I am lazy and fearful, I am easily bored, and hate boredom even more than I hate work or failure. If I hang around my comfort zone long enough I get bored of it and naturally start exploring outside. And that expansion doesn't take energy; in fact it takes energy to keep me in at that point.

My mom used a really simple example of this on my brother when he was homeschooled (6th grade). He'd had some fairly traumatic experiences in English class and was proving resistant to all her teaching methods. Finally she sat him down in front a computer and told him he had to type continuously for X minutes. It could be literally anything he wanted, including "I can't think of anything to write about", he just had to keep his fingers typing the entire time (he could already touch type at this point, mom bribed us with video games until we got to 60WPM). I don't remember exactly how long this took to work, I think it took her a while to realize she had to ban copy/paste but the moment she did my brother got so bored of typing the same thing that he typed new things, and then education could slip in. 

So I'm not worried about being stuck, because I will definitely gnaw my own leg off just to feel something if that happens. And it's unclear if I can speed up the process by pushing myself outside faster, because leaving comfort zone ring n too early delays getting bored of it (although done judiciously it might speed up the boredom). 

I'll be at EAGxVirtual this weekend. My primary goal is to talk about my work on epistemics and truthseeking within EA, and especially get the kind of feedback that doesn't happen in public. If you're interested, you can find me on the usual channels. 

I'm pretty sure you can't have consequentialist arguments for deceptions of allies or self, because consequentialism relies on accurate data. If you've blinded yourself then you can have the best utility function in the world and it will do you no good because you're applying it to gibberish.