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Notes -
Here is a rant about Effective Altruism. It goes as follows:
Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism
1. I want to better understand in order to better decide
As a counterbalance to the rosier and more philosophical perspective that Effective Altruism (EA) likes to present of itself, I describe some unflattering aspects of EA. These are based on my own experiences with it, and my own disillusionments1.
If people getting into EA2 have a better idea of what they are getting into, and decide to continue, maybe they’ll think twice, interact with EA less naïvely and more strategically, and not become as disillusioned as I have.
But also, the EA machine has been making some weird and mediocre moves, leaving EA as a whole as a not very formidable army3. A leitmotiv from the Spanish epic poem The Song of the Cid is “God, what a good knight would the Cid be, if only he had a good lord to serve under”. As in the story of the Cid then, so in EA now. As a result, I think it makes sense for the rank and file EAs to more often do something different from EA™, from EA-the-meme. To notice that taking EA money carries costs. To reflect on whether the EA machine is better than their outside options. To walk away more often.
2. That the structural organization of the movement is distinct from the philosophy
Effective altruism’s philosophical ideas are seductive: who wants to be less effective? who wants to work on intractable, overgrazed and worthless projects, as opposed to tractable, neglected and impactful problems? But liking the philosophy doesn’t mean you will like the actual movement, or that you should join it. You can have many different kinds of organizational structures corresponding to the same philosophy, and some will be a poor fit for you.
For example, after the 2008 crisis, one could be in favor of reforming the US financial system and holding those responsible for the 2008 crisis accountable, but find Occupy Wall Street deeply disappointing. Historically, there has been huge confusion about this point in EA.4
3. and EA structurally orients itself around one billionaire’s money.
To a first approximation, the structural organization of Effective Altruism is as follows:
There are players who do not fit into this scheme, but I would describe their contribution as marginal. Not as irrelevant, mind you, just as very small in comparison with the Open Philanthropy juggernaut. Still, a few points of nuance:
Still, the decisions of Open Philanthropy end up being decisive. How decisive? Well, Open Philanthropy directs something like 90% of current funding within the EA movement6. So other funders just don’t have as much capacity in comparison. For example, running a 10 person organization in the EA movement really benefits from having backing from Open Philanthropy, because relying on the other funders adds too much uncertainty and volatility. So I’d say that they end up being pretty decisive.
4. In practice, cost-effectiveness estimates keep EA honest, but only for global health
If we have some reliable way of estimating the value of projects, structural organization doesn’t matter that much. You would propose your project, it would be evaluated, and if it was above some cost-effectiveness bar, it would be funded. That is, to a first approximation, what happens within the global health cause area in EA. You can seek to objectively7 estimate the quality-adjusted life years that an intervention saves. You can have an evaluator like GiveWell. And you can have an organization like Charity Entrepreneurship trying to find interventions that would be evaluated favorably by GiveWell.
The situation with animal welfare is a bit messier. Open Philanthropy might be making some quantified estimates, but I don’t recall them being public. And Animal Charity Evaluators, the would-be GiveWell equivalent, doesn’t do quantified estimates of the value of the charities they rank. Still, in principle you could do estimates of value for animal suffering interventions and avoid the problems I outline below.
With longtermism and global catastrophic risks, you don’t have good methods of estimating the value of different interventions, for example of determining that one AI safety research agenda is better than another, or that one AI governance approach is superior. So in practice, you end up relying on the personal judgment of a crowd of amalgamated8 EA leaders for making funding and prioritization decisions.
Historically, Open Philanthropy has been slow to trust people, either as employees or as grantees. So these amalgamated EA leaders have been overworked, busy, unapproachable9. In practice, people go to great lengths to try to approach and socialize with Open Philanthropy employees, like visiting or moving to the very expensive San Francisco Bay area.
That grant-makers are busy and unavailable makes getting access to them hard, because the group has limited available throughput. But say you increase the throughput. Then, if the game and the habits are still to compete for a limited pool of resources, and if there is still infinite demand for free billionaire money, then charismatic grantees close to EA leaders will still out-compete others. Competing for access is still the wrong game to be playing, though, and I resent this; you don’t want to have a pool of talent competing hard for grant-maker attention, you want to have a pool of talent working hard at making the world a better place10.
Consider the sunflower. The sun provides a source of energy; the sunflower evolves to follow it. So with Open Philanthropy and Effective Altruism. I’m then saying that in a sunflower field, flowers who don’t move to track the sun could be out-competed. But tracking the sun is a distraction, an instrumental goal at best.
The same story told from the bottom up is: an aspiring EA starts with the intention of doing large amounts of good, and will try to do something semi-ambitious. Then he’ll find out that funding constraints are a big part of making shit happen. And when solving that funding bottleneck, he will be in a social context where the natural good move is to try to get access and then seduce a busy, overworked, and therefore unavailable coterie of grantmakers11,12. He’ll burn out.
But that’s the wrong game to be playing because if you look at autochthonous EAs, at the rank and file, many are nerds, nerds who are able to do good work but who will find it hard to jockey for access. Their winning move would be not to play, and to gain real power by building something independently.
5. Outside of global health, the leadership of the EA machinery has even more unappealing aspects
Even beyond the sunflower issues, the central EA machinery, at organizations like the Center for Effective Altruism or Open Philanthropy, has other issues that make it unappealing to me as a source of leadership—of guidance, of evaluation, of moral direction:
First, their priorities are different from mine: Open Philanthropy seems fairly committed to worldview diversification, which I consider a mediocre framework. The Center for Effective Altruism cares much more about the reputation of the “Effective Altruism” brand than I do. In general, I get the impression that they want to “be in control”, and reduce variance from people they don’t deeply trust, while at the same time coming to trust people slowly. In contrast, I would prefer to increase formidability, to employ Auftragstaktik.
As a small but very concrete example of the disconnect between my priorities and those of the EA machine, the EA forum has become a worse place for me over the last couple of years; it seems slower, more pushy, more censorious, more paternalistic. It started as a mean lean machine hosting community discussion, and it is now more of a vehicle for pushing ideas CEA wants you to know about. In the process it grew to cost $2M/year (!?!), employ six to eight people. You can see this thought elaborated further here.
Second, I don’t really understand how feedback loops work in Effective Altruism. If someone thinks that Open Philanthropy is making some mistakes, do they ¿write an EA Forum post and hope to get the attention of someone on inside an inner circle? ¿ambush someone at a party? ¿how do they find the party? ¿how do they get heard? Over the past years I’ve had some disagreements with Open Philanthropy around forecasting strategy, worldview diversification, or the wisdom of committing to donate all of Moskovitz’s money before he dies, and I haven’t felt particularly heard.
Third, I feel that EA leadership uses worries about the dangers of maximization to constrain the rank and file in a hypocritical way. If I want to do something cool and risky on my own, I have to beware of the “unilateralist curse” and “build consensus”. But if Open Philanthropy donates $30M to OpenAI, pulls a not-so-well-understood policy advocacy lever that contributed to the US overshooting inflation in 2021, funds Anthropic13 while Anthropic’s President and the CEO of Open Philanthropy were married, and romantic relationships are common between Open Philanthropy officers and grantees, that is ¿an exercise in good judgment? ¿a good ex-ante bet? ¿assortative mating? ¿presumably none of my business?
Fourth, my impression is that the leadership doesn’t see itself accountable to the community, but to their understanding of the philosophy and to the funding source. E.g., Holden Karnofsky, the erstwhile head honcho of Open Philanthropy, for a long time didn’t answer comments on his posts.
Fifth, Open Philanthropy is large enough that it begins to have “seeing like a state” problems, the problems of bureaucracies. It moves slowly, and seems to have an “unfocused glaze”. E.g., it took two years and an extra $100M to exit the criminal justice cause area. Its forecasting grant-making could have used more small experimentation over large grants to existing organizations. For example, Scott Alexander’s grants seem much more exciting than a $8.5 million to Metaculus, but Open Philanthropy chose the $8.5M to Metaculus and warped the forecasting ecosystem and distribution of talent towards Metaculus-shaped things instead of many small experiments14.
So overall, my impression is that the leadership of EA holds a “leadership without consent”, a leadership without much listening and telegraphing one’s priorities so that the leaders can coordinate better with those they lead, and incorporate their perspectives and feedback. It falls on the wrong side of the socialist calculation debate15, and doesn’t compensate enough. And that makes some sense: Open Philanthropy, the main source of funding, is a bureaucracy spun up to spend a billionaire’s wealth according to his16 broad, delegated desires. It would then be surprising if they were able to also skillfully steer and command a 10k strong community, and listen and address their worries, absorb their perspectives. But also as a result, I don’t feel particularly inclined to take my cues from that machinery.
6. …and EA leadership doesn’t display a blistering, white-hot competence
If the EA leadership was, you know, an Arthurian elite which routinely displayed a blistering white hot competence, then I would be more willing to continue pouring my heart and soul into plans of their design in the absence of feedback loops.
But they aren’t, so I’m not.
7. Therefore it might make sense to walk away more often
I see bright-eyed young EAs wanting to roll deeper into the EA rabbit hole and to get employed by EA organizations. They will learn much at first, but later find themselves at the mercy of a machine that can’t hear them. Bad move to walk into that without forewarning. I see the EA machine luring brilliant minds that might be better off trying to amass a small fortune through capitalistic entrepreneurship and then deploying that fortune subject to many fewer constraints. I see people with ambitious visions with their wings clipped because they are illegible to grantmakers, and I think, what good knights they would be, if they had a good lord to serve under.
Perhaps it makes sense to instead do something subtly different from EA, to ignore the implicit vibes and expectations of the EA machine. To sometimes take their funding, but to do your own thing and preserve your ability to comfortably leave. To not serve a billionaire’s notion of the good within a structure with exceedingly poor feedback loops. To notice that if you could do well inside the EA machine, you might do better outside of it. And sometimes, to simply walk away, to burn the remainder of your youth in the pursuit of making the world a better place, outside of EA.
Point #2, #3, and the first half of #4 are reasonable for EAs and potential-EAs to know, but it's unclear that any of them constitute problems. For instance, to what extent is it bad that one billionaire moves a majority of the resources? To the extent it is bad, what realistic alternative would be better?
The second half of #4 refers to a problem that will plague any member who does hard-to-evaluate work at any large organization - i.e. nearly all white collar work, and a significant amount of government and blue collar work: namely that success depends on the perception of your work's value rather than its value, which gives you a dichotomy:
Obviously, there is a spectrum here. This is frustrating for the more scrupulous people, but beyond bad actors gaming the system, there are a number of causal reasons this dynamic persists:
The parallels for the hard-to-measure parts of EA are straightforward. This sucks, and I agree it's a "problem", but it's hard for me to imagine a clear solution. You seem to think it would be better if
I intuitively agree with #2, but #1 seems really unclear to me. Commenters are nearly always less well-informed than the decision-makers, so it's unclear to me that this is actually a good use of the decision-makers' time. Maybe they could hire PR people to do this for them? Is that a good use of EA money? idk - maybe. But I suspect this would make you more upset rather than less.
Can you give an example of any multi-billion dollar movement or organization that displays "blistering, white-hot competence"? If not, maybe your standard is unreasonable?
This seems blatantly anti-social and immoral.
Ultimately, this critique seems to fundamentally be an attempt to take someone whose genuine values match EA-the-philosophy and warn them that EA-the-movement differs, which is all well and good. However, it might be stronger, if you
You can also be on the lookout for different games to play.
I think this is too much of a simplification. I am making the argument that EA is structured such that leaders don't really aggregate the knowledge of their followers.
Some which could come to mind: Catholic Church in Spain 1910 to early 2000s, Apple, Amazon, SpaceX, Manhattan project, Israeli nuclear weapons project, Peter Thiel's general machinations, Linus Torvald's stewardship of the Linux project, competent Hollywood directors, Marcus Aurelius, Bismark's unification of Germany and his web of alliances, Chicago school, MIT's JPAL (endowment size uncertain though), the Jesuits, the World Central Kitchen.
I discussed a previous one on the Motte here, here is a more recent one: CEA spends ~$1-2M/year to host the equivalent of a medium subreddit, or a forum with probably less discussion than The Motte itself.
Here are some blue-sky alternatives, Auftragstaktik is one particular thing I'd want to see more of.
Do you mean leaving the company and/or deciding to put your energy into non-work things? Or something else?
Hmm. I'm imagining something like an explicit set of users who are gatekeepers, so if I have a 10x idea, I can just convince one person to have The Powers That Be consider it? Something along those lines?
I think it's important to decide whether we're judging these from the insider or the outside.
If you went to work for Apple, I'm feel pretty sure you'd come away thinking it is woefully incompetent. From the outside, however, it largely appears competent. Not unlike the other FAANG companies imo. Likewise, if you actually worked as a priest in the Catholic Church in Spain in the 20th century, I'd be shocked if you felt this was what "blistering, white-hot competence" looked like. From the outside, I think EA is pretty clear amazingly competent, saving more counterfactual lives per dollar than nearly any other organization, even if you round everything hard-to-value to zero. From the inside however, ...
Re EA being less effective. Alas, it is tedious, but I fear the only way for us to reach a common understanding is point by point, starting with
The Forum
First, re moderation policy - this is something we discuss occasionally here. Blunt people think it's crazy to mod someone just because they were blunt - it drives away such people and we lose their valuable opinions! Other people think the reveres is more powerful: blunt people drive away blunt-averse people and cause the loss of their valuable opinions. I'm unfamiliar with any actual evidence on the matter.
Next, spending. The comment you link to explicitly says they would not accept 2x funding, which imo puts them heads and shoulders above the default of outside society (e.g. a team at a S&P 500 company, in the government, or at a typical nonprofit). I personally put a fair amount of weight on that kind of signal (I loved that Evidence Action closed down their bussing program for not-enough-impact reasons). I think its quite plausible that the forum's benefit of fostering an EA community creates new EAs and retains old ones to the extent that the value outweighs the $2m cost.
That being said, I think you are probably correct in your own comment in that thread in pointing out there is a margin-average distinction being elided, so the 2m probably really is too high.
That comment also links to a page on how they're trying to have impact. The task they rate as the most promising is running job ads on the forum. The second-most promising is helping recruiters find potential candidates. Those seem reasonably valuable to me, but, I'd still guess the EV is less than $2m.
That being said, there are some ameliorating factors:
Ultimately, I'm inclined to agree that $2M is too much, without having context on how the budget was determined, I'm not sure how much of a black eye this should be on EA as a whole.
Criminal Justice Reform
When I went through Open Philanthropy's database of grants a couple years ago, I felt only about half its spending would fall under conventional Effective Altruist priorities (e.g. global health, animal welfare, X-risk). That is, I've felt for a couple years that Open Philanthropy is only about half-EA, which, to be clear is still dramatically better than the typical non-profit, but I don't personally them funding a cause as equivalent to the EA community thinking the cause is effective. #NoTrueScotsman
I'm going to be honest - I do not, tonight, have the time to go through the two "alternatives" links with the thoroughness they deserve
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