EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Caroline Ellison has accepted a role at Manifund, to develop our funding platform and research how to effectively direct philanthropic dollars.

Austin Chen and Caroline Ellison, “Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund.”

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1. Introduction

This is Part 1 of a new series, Community. The effective altruist and rationalist communities are strange beasts. They are often impenetrable to outsiders and frequently misunderstood. However, understanding the structure of these communities is integral to understanding why they behave as they do. This series discusses issues surrounding the effective altruist and rationalist communities.

Today's post explores a striking recent development. Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, the trading arm of FTX, has been hired by Manifund, a leading funder.

The announcement of Ellison's hiring is admirably transparent, and Manifund executives have shown remarkable patience in responding to criticism. However, at the risk of joining the already existing pile-on, I want to discuss some reasons why this hiring should be looked on unfavorably.

Due to the recency of these developments, I prioritized speed at the possible expense of rigor in preparing this post. While I have done my best to make sure that the discussion meets a reasonable standard of [...]

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Outline:

(00:42) 1. Introduction

(02:02) 2. Background

(02:06) 2.1. Manifold and Manifund

(03:20) 2.2. FTX

(05:16) 3. Hiring announcement

(07:05) 4. The nature of the position

(08:43) 5. Outstanding debts to FTX

(11:46) 6. Repentance and redemption

(15:05) 7. Mixing personal and professional considerations

(16:41) 8. Bad judgment

(18:07) 9. Reputation and signaling

(19:24) 10. Taking stock

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Author: Grace Ryba (she/her), Executive Director

TL;DR:

• BluePerch is a new animal welfare grantmaker.
• Grant applications aren't open yet - we're aiming to open applications in roughly mid-2027.
• We welcome early expressions of interest from potential grantseekers so we can notify you when applications open - express your interest here or see further details below.
• We're also seeking board members to help run BluePerch; details below.

BluePerch

BluePerch is a new animal welfare fund seeking to make grants to promising or impactful animal advocacy projects around the world.

We intend to create cost-effective impact for farmed animals by making the grants that other funders cannot - small grants delivered early and fast - and using grants to generate evidence that guides the movement's funding decisions.

Key details (this information is tentative and may change between now and when grant applications are opened):

• Broad focus on impactful animal advocacy, but a particular interest in early-stage animal advocacy projects, time-sensitive policy windows, and orgs that fall through the cracks of other animal funders
• Grant sizes ~5 to 100 thousand dollars, flexible
• Granting ~1.2 million dollars per year in the first year, scaling to ~4 million dollars disbursed in [...]

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Outline:

(00:50) BluePerch

(02:15) What projects BluePerch intends to fund

(05:00) When grant applications will open

(05:30) Are you looking for funding for a high-impact animal advocacy project?

(06:06) Are you interested in helping to run BluePerch by joining the board of directors?

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I loved Phoebe's Updates from the Swarm and George's Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on. I think it's a good time for sharing big feelings, so here's an essay which rhymes with theirs. I drafted most of it in 2022, which was also a time of big feelings for me.

I grew up in a small town surrounded by good people. My mum stayed at work late to help women through labour and my dad really tried to lead the Rotary Club in helping our community.

I had some general sense that there was more that we should do about helping others in low-income countries, but I was young and the world was complicated, and I hadn’t figured all of that out yet.

When my friend Dan introduced me to The Life You Can Save, I saw a clear argument that our lack of action to help those folks meant that each of the good people around me was allowing tens, and often hundreds, of people to die through inaction.

It seemed like the most important truth I had ever come across. But when I talked to people about it they scarcely [...]

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Summary: Good work helps build a good reputation, but it's not the only factor. Reputation also requires making your work legible, building relationships with stakeholders, and communicating with them consistently over time. I think many people in EA systematically underestimate what a bad reputation costs, largely because those costs are invisible. You can see the people who stick around. You can't see the people who decided not to work with you. I close with some practical suggestions for weighing reputation in decisions.

Notes on writing: This is more of a hot-take, quickly written, with some Claude assistance in shaping it into a full post, but heavily edited and reviewed by me. This was spurred by Manifund's recent announcement but is something I generally have been wanting to write. I've written this in my personal capacity, and it's informed by working 5 years in senior roles at EA orgs.

Good work is necessary, not sufficient

Reputation is everything. It's a cliché for a reason.

Doing good work is one of the main ways to build a good reputation, and there's an implicit belief I've noticed in many people in EA that it's the only thing that should matter. If the [...]

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Outline:

(01:08) Good work is necessary, not sufficient

(01:58) What a good reputation actually buys you

(02:36) The invisible costs of a bad reputation

(03:24) Being weird about this doesn't scale

(04:40) The people we lose

(05:27) What to do about it

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I want to start by noting that I am enthusiastic about everything that the EA animal welfare movement has accomplished. I am enthusiastically supportive of all of the campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.

I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm incredibly proud of that work.

That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.

There are two central arguments that I hear in EA circles and that I think are worthy of reconsideration:

1) These efforts have been tried and failed. Let's move on.

2) Everyone agrees with us on factory farming, so let's focus there and stop talking about whether eating meat is unethical; that's where we meet overwhelming pushback.

I don't agree with either of these statements, and I believe that some of the influx of money we’re expecting for animals should be spent on animal liberation and diet change advocacy.

Here are some thoughts and questions that I think support my point-of-view. I look forward to hearing what others think.

1) The [...]

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Tl;dr

• I saw Kabir's post on LessWrong and thought the argument could be strengthened by a framework from the pro-democracy field, which sorts defections into breaking (leave, visibly and publicly) and binding (stay and work from the inside). They can be further divided into the actions of speaking, acting, and standing in the way.
• Research by Dr. Jonathan Pinckney at the University of Texas at Dallas and Claire Trilling at SNF Agora Johns Hopkins on "defections" from authoritarian regimes or during democratic backsliding shows that "noncooperation" is ~2x as effective as simply "speaking out."
• "Loyalty shifts" are rare (23 out of 140 chances in their data). When they happen, they come from "quiet outreach" (~39% of cases), not protest (which did worse than no campaign at all).
• In this post, I'll attempt to translate this research to something meaningful for frontier lab employees, with the obvious caveat that a frontier lab is not a country or regime.
• Refusing the specific work while staying is the highest leverage action in their data. Quietly moving colleagues, and holding your position so someone who'll say yes to the employer doesn't get it, is likely the highest value action you could take.

Background

I've spent [...]

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Applications to AIM's first animal welfare-focused incubation round close this Sunday, 13 September. If you are on the fence, this is my final nudge.

I almost didn’t apply

I only did because someone from the Ambitious Impact team nudged me six years ago. So at the risk of being annoying, I'll say it once more: the best way to find out if this is the right path for you is to apply. The selection process is built to help both of us work out whether you’re a match.

You don’t have to be an animal person

You don’t have to identify as an animal person, an activist, or a vegan. You can be, and plenty of excellent founders are, but it isn’t the bar. I’ve been in and out of veganism since 2017, and I run this program. The bar is taking seriously that factory farming is one of the biggest problems of our time, and being willing to follow the evidence on how to fix it. Animal people are just as welcome, and the best cohort will have a real mix of backgrounds.

Why now

We think the animal welfare movement is at a genuinely exciting moment. [...]

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Outline:

(00:25) I almost didn't apply

(00:46) You don't have to be an animal person

(01:18) Why now

(01:48) Nobody is the perfect fit

(02:29) What you get

(02:51) What I'm hoping comes out of this round

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As a daily reader of the EA Forum, I have found the experience significantly degraded recently. When I come to the /allPosts page, I am confronted with an onslaught of posts with a single upvote, mostly by brand-new users.

I want to give genuine new users a chance and read their stuff, and maybe upvote it. But when I see a pattern of "brand new user wrote long complicated post that currently has no upvotes", most of the time it's fully AI-generated, and it's a waste of my time to read it.

Even just reading through the titles wears me out and makes me want to leave. There will be maybe 15–20 posts for the day, most of which have long, kind of vague titles that take me a minute to parse.

In principle, I don't object to using AI to clean up your prose. But as far as I can tell, these posts usually have zero human thought behind them.*

Many of these posts are already automatically flagged as AI by Pangram. Rather than flagging and leaving them, these posts should be deleted. Or at minimum, the "AI-generated" flag should be visible from the [...]

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Prepared by: Claudinéia Pereira Costa, PhD; Meghan Barrett, PhD

Note: This post is very similar to our own prior EA Forum report on the genetic basis for nociception in another hemipteran, the lac bug (Kerria lacca, Hemiptera: Kerridae). In several places, we directly use the same text as we wrote in the first report to save time and ensure all limitations/caveats of the project are clearly, consistently reported. Consider this an attribution statement to our prior work for any directly copied text found within this post. All results for D. coccus are new and the methodology was slightly altered due to the genomic/proteomic resources available for this species.

Note: This report has not been peer-reviewed and has only been generated for the Forum. Results should be interpreted with caution, though we do follow peer-reviewed methodologies.

Executive Summary

• We analyzed the publicly-available cochineal bug Dactylopius coccus (Hemiptera: Dactylopiidae) genome, which was generated from sessile adult females, for evidence of twelve receptor genes in ten orthologous gene families related to heat, cold, chemical, and mechanical nociception in other insects.
  • Finding any of these genes does not prove nociception is present; functional assays and confirmation of these receptors in nociceptors would be [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Executive Summary

(03:13) Introduction

(07:44) Findings and Discussion

(07:48) Strong support for genes that may encode responsiveness to noxious heat, chemical, and mechanical stimuli in adult female D. coccus genome

(09:10) Noxious cold-sensing channel Pkd2, with function known from fruit flies, was not detected; but, other mechanisms for cold-sensing could still be present, as cold-sensing is critically understudied in arthropods

(11:03) Methods

(14:59) Acknowledgements

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I wrote this post for High Impact Professionals and wanted to share it here since HIP now have an entrepreneurship track in their program, and applications for the AIM program are due September 13! Thanks a lot to @Danielle MacLean for encouraging me to write this.

What it's like to launch a nonprofit

A quick note before we start. This piece focuses on one part of the decision to start or join a nonprofit: what founding looks like day to day and who is a good personal fit for it. In addition to this, whether your idea is worth pursuing and what impact it could have also matter a lot, and I've written about those separately.

When deciding if you should start a nonprofit vs. join one, most people frame this as a question about ideas, skills or impact: is my idea good enough to build an organisation around, or should I lend my skills to one that already exists? That framing misses what matters just as much. Founding is a different job from any role inside an established org, and the deciding factor is rarely the idea. It is whether the shape of a founder's life fits the [...]

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Outline:

(00:27) What it's like to launch a nonprofit

(02:00) You can choose your own hours (as long as it's all of them)

(03:54) A nonprofit founder is the ultimate generalist

(05:06) With founding, there is no manager and no map

(06:20) What founding costs: money, benefits, and recognition

(08:04) The nonprofit founder role changes as the organisation grows

(09:27) You cannot always walk away from founding as easily

(10:13) Career capital of founding vs. joining

(11:56) So who is founding for?

(14:31) Additional Resources:

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