Yeah, I did not mean to suggest anything about Will's support for buying small island nations. The point is just that when buying land (albeit coal mines, not Nauru) and building bunkers are mentioned in the same breath in a very public discussion at a very public EA event:
I think this makes it harder for the EA community to put as much ideological space between itself and "buy Nauru" as we might like to. Clearly "buy island nation" and "buy coal mines/build bunkers" are different, but I don't know that they're sufficiently different that I would say "wow, Gabe really went out on a limb in coming up with this; I doubt this idea was inspired by others he was exposed to through conversations with people in the EA community."
This makes me think that more extreme versions of these ideas were being floated behind closed doors (/on Signal). If I'm right about this, then I suspect we'll see more evidence of this during the trial, and I will happily eat my words in a few months if we don't.
Maybe a more precise way of putting this:
If "buy coal mines/build bunkers" = A, and "buy Nauru" = E, then my view is that: 1) A and E aren't that far apart (just separated by B, C, and D) and 2) I suspect B, C, and D were being discussed.
I agree that the media coverage implies SBF endorsed the content of this memo more than is warranted based on this text alone. But I would guess there was serious discussion of this kind of thing (maybe not buying Nauru specifically, but buying other pieces of land for the purpose of building bunkers/shelters).
In this EAG Fireside Chat from October 2021, Will MacAskill says: "I'm also really keen on more disaster preparedness work, so like, buying coal mines I'm totally serious on... but also just other things for if there's a collapse of civilization... at the most extreme you might have, like, a hermetically sealed bunker that no pathogens can enter into" (42:26). So I don't think "Buy Nauru" falls into the category of "all sorts of wild possibilities got discussed around that time" versus a plausible extension of an idea that had become somewhat mainstream within EA at that point.
I'm glad you're doing this, and think it's a great idea. One small point: most eating disorders (a broad category) are not addictions, although some share features with addiction. Given this, I suspect that most people with eating disorders have had pretty different illness experiences than most people with addictions, and might benefit from different recovery group activities. (Obviously, people can decide for themselves whether the group is helpful.) Kudos again for starting this.
OpenAI caught some flak for there being no women on the Superalignment team. Does Jan think that the demographics of the team will affect how the team conceptualizes "human intent" in ways that are relevant, at this early stage, to the work the team is doing?
In this post, HLI explicitly compares its evaluation of StrongMinds to GiveWell's evaluation of AMF, and says:
"At one end, AMF is 1.3x better than StrongMinds. At the other, StrongMinds is 12x better than AMF. Ultimately, AMF is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions.
Our general recommendation to donors is StrongMinds."
This seems like an argument for scrutinizing HLI's evaluation of StrongMinds just as closely as we'd scrutinize GiveWell's evaluation of AMF (i.e., closely). I apologize for the trite analogy, but: if every year Bob's blueberry pie wins the prize for best pie at the state fair, and this year Jim, a newcomer, is claiming that his blueberry pie is better than Bob's, this isn't an argument for employing a more lax standard of judging for Jim's pie. Nor do I see how concluding that Jim's pie isn't the best pie this year—but here's a lot of feedback on how Jim can improve his pie for next year—undermines Jim's ability to win pie competitions going forward.
This isn't to say that we should expect the claims in HLI's evaluation to be backed by the same level of evidence as GiveWell's, but we should be able to take a hard look at HLI's report and determine that the strong claims made on its basis are (somewhat) justified.
Yeah, I should've probably been more precise: the criticism of HLI has mainly been leveled against their evaluation of a single organization's single intervention, whereas GW has evaluated 100+ programs, so my gut instinct is that it's fair to hold HLI's StrongMinds evaluation to the same ballpark level of scrutiny we'd hold a single GW evaluation to (and deworming certainly has been held to that standard). It might be unfair to expect an HLI evaluation to be at the level as a GW evaluation per dollar invested/hour spent (given that there's a learning curve associated with doing such evaluations and there's value associated with having multiple organizations do them), but this seems like—if anything—an argument for scrutinizing HLI's work more closely, since HLI is trying to climb a learning curve, and feedback facilitates this.
Although I agree with much of the criticism against them, the hammering they took felt at best rough and perhaps even unfair.
One general problem with online discourse is that even if each individual makes a fair critique, the net effect of a lot of people doing this can be disproportionate, since there's a coordination problem. That said, a few things make me think the level of criticism leveled at HLI was reasonable, namely:
HLI was asking for a lot of money ($200k-$1 million).
The critiques people were making seemed (generally) unique, specific, and fair.
The critiques came after some initial positive responses to the post, including responses to the effect of "I'm persuaded by this; how can I donate?"
Does there need to be a "scrutiny rebalancing" of sorts. I would rather other orgs got more scrutiny, rather than development orgs getting less.
I agree with you that GHD organizations tend to be scrutinized more closely, in large part because there is more data to scrutinize. But there is also some logic to balancing scrutiny levels within cause areas. When HLI solicits donations via Forum post, it seems reasonable to assume that donations they receive more likely come out of GiveWell's coffers than MIRI's. This seems like an argument for holding HLI to the GiveWell standard of scrutiny, rather than the MIRI standard (at least in this case).
That said, I do think it would be good to apply stricter standards of scrutiny to other EA organizations, without those organizations explicitly opening themselves up to evaluation by posting on the Forum. I wonder if there might be some way to incentivize this kind of review.
I shared this opportunity with a law school friend, and their reaction was: law students at good schools will already have their summer plans set well before late June, so most won't be able to commit to working on something full-time for 8-12 weeks between July and October. Correspondingly, LPP may be significantly limiting its applicant pool (and possibly the quality of its applicants) by posting these kinds of opportunities so late. I flag this in part because I think something similar happened with LPP's cost-benefit writing competition last summer—the opportunity was posted in June and had a deadline in July.
LPP is throwing serious money at these (both cool-seeming!) projects, but I suspect is significantly undermining their effectiveness by only sharing the opportunities so late. (I also recognize LPP may not have that much control over when it gets its funding, so this comment may be a critique of whoever is funding these projects (OP?) as much as a critique of LPP.)
This is speculative, and I don't want this to be read as an endorsement of people's critical comments; rather, it's a hypothesis about what's driving the "harsh discussion":
It seems like one theme in people's critical comments is misrepresentation. Specifically, multiple people have accused HLI of making claims that are more confident and/or more positive than are warranted (see, e.g., some of the commentsbelow, which say things like: "I don't think this is an accurate representation," "it was about whether I thought that sentence and set of links gave an accurate impression," and "HLI's institutional agenda corrupts its ability to conduct fair-minded and even-handed assessments").
I wonder if people are particularly sensitive to this, because EA partly grew out of a desire to make charitable giving more objective and unbiased, and so the perception that HLI is misrepresenting information feels antithetical to EA in a very fundamental way.
Yeah, I did not mean to suggest anything about Will's support for buying small island nations. The point is just that when buying land (albeit coal mines, not Nauru) and building bunkers are mentioned in the same breath in a very public discussion at a very public EA event:
Maybe a more precise way of putting this:
If "buy coal mines/build bunkers" = A, and "buy Nauru" = E, then my view is that: 1) A and E aren't that far apart (just separated by B, C, and D) and 2) I suspect B, C, and D were being discussed.
I agree that the media coverage implies SBF endorsed the content of this memo more than is warranted based on this text alone. But I would guess there was serious discussion of this kind of thing (maybe not buying Nauru specifically, but buying other pieces of land for the purpose of building bunkers/shelters).
In this EAG Fireside Chat from October 2021, Will MacAskill says: "I'm also really keen on more disaster preparedness work, so like, buying coal mines I'm totally serious on... but also just other things for if there's a collapse of civilization... at the most extreme you might have, like, a hermetically sealed bunker that no pathogens can enter into" (42:26). So I don't think "Buy Nauru" falls into the category of "all sorts of wild possibilities got discussed around that time" versus a plausible extension of an idea that had become somewhat mainstream within EA at that point.
I'm glad you're doing this, and think it's a great idea. One small point: most eating disorders (a broad category) are not addictions, although some share features with addiction. Given this, I suspect that most people with eating disorders have had pretty different illness experiences than most people with addictions, and might benefit from different recovery group activities. (Obviously, people can decide for themselves whether the group is helpful.) Kudos again for starting this.
OpenAI caught some flak for there being no women on the Superalignment team. Does Jan think that the demographics of the team will affect how the team conceptualizes "human intent" in ways that are relevant, at this early stage, to the work the team is doing?
In this post, HLI explicitly compares its evaluation of StrongMinds to GiveWell's evaluation of AMF, and says:
This seems like an argument for scrutinizing HLI's evaluation of StrongMinds just as closely as we'd scrutinize GiveWell's evaluation of AMF (i.e., closely). I apologize for the trite analogy, but: if every year Bob's blueberry pie wins the prize for best pie at the state fair, and this year Jim, a newcomer, is claiming that his blueberry pie is better than Bob's, this isn't an argument for employing a more lax standard of judging for Jim's pie. Nor do I see how concluding that Jim's pie isn't the best pie this year—but here's a lot of feedback on how Jim can improve his pie for next year—undermines Jim's ability to win pie competitions going forward.
This isn't to say that we should expect the claims in HLI's evaluation to be backed by the same level of evidence as GiveWell's, but we should be able to take a hard look at HLI's report and determine that the strong claims made on its basis are (somewhat) justified.
Yeah, I should've probably been more precise: the criticism of HLI has mainly been leveled against their evaluation of a single organization's single intervention, whereas GW has evaluated 100+ programs, so my gut instinct is that it's fair to hold HLI's StrongMinds evaluation to the same ballpark level of scrutiny we'd hold a single GW evaluation to (and deworming certainly has been held to that standard). It might be unfair to expect an HLI evaluation to be at the level as a GW evaluation per dollar invested/hour spent (given that there's a learning curve associated with doing such evaluations and there's value associated with having multiple organizations do them), but this seems like—if anything—an argument for scrutinizing HLI's work more closely, since HLI is trying to climb a learning curve, and feedback facilitates this.
One general problem with online discourse is that even if each individual makes a fair critique, the net effect of a lot of people doing this can be disproportionate, since there's a coordination problem. That said, a few things make me think the level of criticism leveled at HLI was reasonable, namely:
I agree with you that GHD organizations tend to be scrutinized more closely, in large part because there is more data to scrutinize. But there is also some logic to balancing scrutiny levels within cause areas. When HLI solicits donations via Forum post, it seems reasonable to assume that donations they receive more likely come out of GiveWell's coffers than MIRI's. This seems like an argument for holding HLI to the GiveWell standard of scrutiny, rather than the MIRI standard (at least in this case).
That said, I do think it would be good to apply stricter standards of scrutiny to other EA organizations, without those organizations explicitly opening themselves up to evaluation by posting on the Forum. I wonder if there might be some way to incentivize this kind of review.
I'm a bit late to the party here; sorry!
I shared this opportunity with a law school friend, and their reaction was: law students at good schools will already have their summer plans set well before late June, so most won't be able to commit to working on something full-time for 8-12 weeks between July and October. Correspondingly, LPP may be significantly limiting its applicant pool (and possibly the quality of its applicants) by posting these kinds of opportunities so late. I flag this in part because I think something similar happened with LPP's cost-benefit writing competition last summer—the opportunity was posted in June and had a deadline in July.
LPP is throwing serious money at these (both cool-seeming!) projects, but I suspect is significantly undermining their effectiveness by only sharing the opportunities so late. (I also recognize LPP may not have that much control over when it gets its funding, so this comment may be a critique of whoever is funding these projects (OP?) as much as a critique of LPP.)
This is speculative, and I don't want this to be read as an endorsement of people's critical comments; rather, it's a hypothesis about what's driving the "harsh discussion":
It seems like one theme in people's critical comments is misrepresentation. Specifically, multiple people have accused HLI of making claims that are more confident and/or more positive than are warranted (see, e.g., some of the comments below, which say things like: "I don't think this is an accurate representation," "it was about whether I thought that sentence and set of links gave an accurate impression," and "HLI's institutional agenda corrupts its ability to conduct fair-minded and even-handed assessments").
I wonder if people are particularly sensitive to this, because EA partly grew out of a desire to make charitable giving more objective and unbiased, and so the perception that HLI is misrepresenting information feels antithetical to EA in a very fundamental way.
Thanks; sorry I missed this, and will add an edit.