Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: GiveWell is hiring a Research Analyst (apply by November 20), published by GiveWell on November 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

GiveWell is looking for a Research Analyst to join our core interventions team, which investigates and makes funding decisions about programs we're already supporting at scale, including our top charities. The application deadline for this role is midnight Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, November 20. This role does not require any particular academic credentials or work experience. However, it does demand strong analytical and communication skills and a high degree of comfort in interpreting data.

More details follow. We invite anyone who feels this role would be a good fit for them to apply by the above deadline.

The role

As a Research Analyst on GiveWell's core interventions team, you will help the team decide how hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent with the goal of saving and improving the lives of people living in the lowest-income communities in the world. The core interventions team focuses on programs that we are already supporting at scale—this includes our top charities. This team updates our cost-effectiveness estimates for these programs on a rolling basis. Your work will support our goal of always directing money to the most cost-effective funding opportunities available at the time of our grantmaking.

You would be responsible for:

Analyzing data on spending and numbers of people previously served by a program to generate estimates of cost per person reached in future programs.

Adapting cost-effectiveness models to apply to new locations that a program may expand to, including determining which inputs to update and sourcing data for those inputs.

Applying updates to our top charities cost-effectiveness analysis, a process which includes archiving the previous model, documenting the change in results, and managing a quality assurance procedure.

Writing entries for cost-effectiveness analysis changelogs (examples here) and drafting updates to reports that summarize our cost-effectiveness analyses (example here).

Creating cost-effectiveness analysis inputs for programs where we have a framework for these inputs but need to interpret messy data to apply that framework to a particular case. Examples include inputs for mosquito resistance to insecticides used in malaria nets, population-level burden of infection with certain parasites, and length of time a malaria net remains effective in a given context.

About you

Note: Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. Here’s a secret: there's no such thing as a "perfect" candidate. GiveWell is looking for exceptional people who want to make a positive impact through their work and help create an organization where everyone can thrive. So whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this role would make you excited to come to work every day.

We expect you will be characterized by many of the below qualities. We encourage you to apply if you would use the majority of these characteristics to describe yourself:

Conscientious: You are able and willing to carefully follow a process with many steps. You carefully document processes and sources. You are thoughtful about your approach and perform high-quality work, with or without supervision. You exhibit meticulous attention to detail, including fine print, and don’t cut corners. (This doesn’t mean you never make mistakes, but you learn from them and rarely repeat one.)

Strong communicator: You write clearly and concisely. You clearly communicate what you believe and why, as well as what you are uncertain about. You can explain our cost-effectiveness analysis parameters and our reasons for changing them clearly and succinctly to a semi-informed audience (e.g., GiveWell staff and donors).

Analytic...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CEA/EV + OP + RP should engage an independent investigator to determine whether key figures in EA knew about the (likely) fraud at FTX, published by Tyrone-Jay Barugh on November 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I think that key EA orgs (perhaps collectively) like the Center for Effective Altruism/Effective Ventures, Open Philanthropy, and Rethink Priorities should consider engaging an independent investigator (with no connection to EA) to try to identify whether key figures in those organisations knew (or can reasonably be inferred to have known, based on other things they knew) about the (likely) fraud at FTX.

The investigator should also be contactable (probably confidentially?) by members of the community and others who might have relevant information.

Typically a lawyer might be engaged to carry out the investigation, particularly because of professional obligations in relation to confidentiality (subject to the terms of reference of the investigation) and natural justice. But other professionals also conduct independent investigations, and there is no in principle reason why a lawyer needs to lead this work.

My sense is that this should happen very promptly. If anyone did know about the (likely) fraud at FTX, then delay potentially increases the risk that any such person hides evidence or spreads an alternative account that vindicates them.

I'm torn about whether to post this, as it may well be something that leadership (or lawyers) in the key EA orgs are already thinking about, and posting this prematurely might result in those orgs being pressured to launch an investigation hastily with bad terms of reference. On the other hand, I've had the concern that there is no whistleblower protection in EA for some time (raised in my March 2022 post on legal needs within EA), and others (e.g. Carla Zoe C) have made this point earlier still. I am not posting this because I have a strong belief that anyone in a key EA org did know - I have no information in this regard beyond vague speculation I have seen on Twitter.

If you have a better suggestion, I would appreciate you sharing it (even if anonymously).

Epistemic status: pretty uncertain, slightly anxious this will make the situation worse, but on balance think worth raising.

Relevant disclosure: I received a regrant from the FTX Future Fund to investigate the legal needs of effective altruist organisations.

Edit: I want to clarify that I don't think that any particular person knew. I still trust all the same community figures I trusted one week ago, other than folks in the FTX business. For each 'High Profile EA' I can think of, I would be very surprised if that person in particular knew. But even if we think there is only a 0.1% chance that any of the most influential, say, 100 EAs knew, then the chance that none of them knew is 0.999^100, which is about 90.4% (assuming we naively treat those as independent events). If we care about the top 1000 most influential EAs, then we could get that 90.4% chance with just a 0.01% chance of failure.

Edit: I think Ryan Carey's comment is further in the right direction than this post (subject to my view that an independent investigation should stick to fact-finding rather than making philosophical/moral calls for EA) plus I've also had other people contact me spitballing ideas that seem sensible. I don't know what the terms of reference of an investigation would be, but it does seem like simply answering "did anybody know" might be the wrong approach. If you have further suggestions for the sorts of things that should be considered, it might be worth dropping those into the comments.

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How could we have avoided this?, published by Nathan Young on November 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

It seems to me that the information that betting so heavily on FTX and SBF was an avoidable failure. So what could we have done ex-ante to avoid it?

You have to suggest things we could have actually done with the information we had. Some examples of information we had:

First, the best counterargument:

Then again, if we think we are better at spotting x-risks then these people maybe this should make us update towards being worse at predicting things.

Also I know there is a temptation to wait until the dust settles, but I don't think that's right. We are a community with useful information-gathering technology. We are capable of discussing here.

Things we knew at the time

We knew that about half of Alameda left at one time. I'm pretty sure many are EAs or know them and they would have had some sense of this.

We knew that SBF's wealth was a very high proportion of effective altruism's total wealth. And we ought to have known that something that took him down would be catastrophic to us.

This was Charles Dillon's take, but he tweets behind a locked account and gave me permission to tweet it.

Peter Wildeford noted the possible reputational risk 6 months ago:

We knew that corruption is possible and that large institutions need to work hard to avoid being coopted by bad actors.

Many people found crypto distasteful or felt that crypto could have been a scam.

FTX's Chief Compliance Officer, Daniel S. Friedberg, had behaved fraudulently In the past. This from august 2021.

In 2013, an audio recording surfaced that made mincemeat of UB’s original version of events. The recording of an early 2008 meeting with the principal cheater (Russ Hamilton) features Daniel S. Friedberg actively conspiring with the other principals in attendance to (a) publicly obfuscate the source of the cheating, (b) minimize the amount of restitution made to players, and (c) force shareholders to shoulder most of the bill.

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Naïve vs Prudent Utilitarianism, published by Richard Y Chappell on November 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Critics sometimes imagine that utilitarianism directs us to act disreputably whenever it appears (however fleetingly) that the act would have good consequences. Or whenever crudely calculating the most salient first-order consequences (in isolation) yields a positive number. This “naïve utilitarian” decision procedure is clearly daft, and not something that any sound utilitarian actually advocates. On the other hand, critics sometimes mistake this point for the claim that utilitarianism itself is plainly counterproductive, and necessarily advocates against its own acceptance. While that’s always a conceptual possibility, I don’t think it has any empirical credibility. Most who think otherwise are still making the mistake of conflating naïve utilitarianism with utilitarianism proper. The latter is a much more prudent view, as I’ll now explain.

Adjusting for Bias

Imagine an archer, trying to hit a target on a windy day. A naive archer might ignore the wind, aim directly at the target, and (predictably) miss as their arrow is blown off-course. A more sophisticated archer will deliberately re-calibrate, superficially seeming to aim “off-target” but in a way that makes them more likely to hit. Finally, a master archer will automatically adjust as needed, doing what (to her) seems obviously how to hit the target, though to a naïve observer it might look like she was aiming awry.

Is the best way to be a successful archer on a windy day to stop even trying to hit the target? Surely not. (It’s conceivable that an evil demon might interfere in such a way as to make this so — i.e., so that only people genuinely trying to miss would end up hitting the target — but that’s a much weirder case than what we’re talking about.) The point is just that naïve targeting is likely to miss. Making appropriate adjustments to one’s aim (overriding naive judgments of how to achieve the goal) is not at all the same thing as abandoning the goal altogether.

And so it goes in ethics. Crudely calculating the expected utility of (e.g.) murdering your rivals and harvesting their vital organs, and naively acting upon such first-pass calculations, would be predictably disastrous. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon the goal of doing good. It just means that you should pursue it in a prudent rather than naive manner.

Metacoherence prohibits naïve utilitarianism

“But doesn’t utilitarianism direct us to maximize expected value?” you may ask. Only in the same way that norms of archery direct our archer to hit the target. There’s nothing in either norm that requires (or even permits) it to be pursued naively, without obviously-called-for bias adjustments.

This is something that has been stressed by utilitarian theorists from Mill and Sidgwick through to R.M. Hare, Pettit, and Railton—to name but a few. Here’s a pithy listing from J.L. Mackie of six reasons why utilitarians oppose naïve calculation as a decision procedure:

Shortage of time and energy will in general preclude such calculations.

Even if time and energy are available, the relevant information commonly is not.

An agent's judgment on particular issues is likely to be distorted by his own interests and special affections.

Even if he were intellectually able to determine the right choice, weakness of will would be likely to impair his putting of it into effect.

Even decisions that are right in themselves and actions based on them are liable to be misused as precedents, so that they will encourage and seem to legitimate wrong actions that are superficially similar to them.

And, human nature being what it is, a practical working morality must not be too demanding: it is worse than useless to set standards so high that there is ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: IMPCO, don't injure yourself by returning FTXFF money for services you already provided, published by EliezerYudkowsky on November 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

In my possibly contrarian opinion, and speaking as somebody who I don't think actually got any money directly from FTX Future Fund that I can recall; also speaking for myself and hastily, having not run this post past any other major leaders in EA:

You are not obligated to return funding that got to you ultimately by way of FTX; especially if it's been given for a service you already rendered, any more than the electrical utility ought to return FTX's money that's already been spent on electricity; especially if that would put you to hardship. This is not a for-the-greater-good argument; I don't think you're obligated to that much personal martyrdom in the first place, just like the utility company isn't so obligated.

It's fine to be somebody who sells utilons for money, just like utilities sell electricity for money. People who work in the philanthropic sector, and don't capture all of the gain they create, do not thereby relinquish the solidity of their claim to the part of that gain they do capture, to below the levels of an electrical utility's claim to similar money. The money you hold could maybe possibly compensate some FTX users - if it doesn't just get immediately captured by users selling NFTs to Bahamian accounts, or the equivalent in later bankruptcy proceedings - but that's equally true of the electrical utility's money, or, heck, money held by any number of people richer than you. Plumbers who worked on the FTX building should likewise not anguish about that and give the money back; yes, even though plumbers are probably well above average in income for the Bahamas.

You are not more deeply implicit in FTX's sins, by way of the FTX FF connection, than the plumber who worked directly on their building.

I don't like the way that some people think about charity, like anybody who works in the philanthropic sector gives up the right to really own anything. You can try to do a little good in the world, or even sell a little good into the world, without signing up to be the martyr who gets all the blame for not being better when something goes wrong.

You probably forwent some of your possible gains to work in the charity sector at all, and took a bit of a generally riskier job. (If you didn't know that, my condolences.) You may suddenly need to look for a new job. You did not sign away your legal or moral right to keep title to money that was already given you, if you've already performed the corresponding service, or you're still going to perform that service. If you can't perform the service anymore, then maybe return some of that money once it's clear that it'll actually make its way to FTX customers; but keep what covers the cost of a month to re-search for a job, or the month you already spent searching for that job.

It's fine to call it your charity and your contribution that you undercharge for those utilons and don't capture as much value as you create - if you're nice enough to do that, which you don't have to be, you can be Lawful Neutral instead of Lawful Good and I won't think you're as cool but I'll still happily trade with you.

(I apologize for resorting to the D&D alignment chart, at this point, but I really am not sure how to compactly express these ideas without those concepts, or concepts that I could define more elaborately that would mean the same thing.)

That you're trying to be some degree of Good, by undercharging for the utilons you provide, doesn't mean you can't still hold that money that you got in Lawful Neutral exchange for the services you sold. Just like any ordinary plumber is entitled to do, if it turned out they unwittingly fixed the toilet of a bad bad pers...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Speculation on Current Opportunities for Unusually High Impact in Global Health, published by johnswentworth on November 11, 2022 on LessWrong.

Epistemic Status: armchair speculation from a non-expert.

Short version: I expect things to get pretty bad in the Sahel region over the next year in particular. The area is an obvious target for global health interventions even in good times, and impact is presumably higher in bad times. A simple baseline intervention: fill a backpack with antibiotics, fly to the region, and travel around distributing the antibiotics.

What’s The “Sahel” Region?

The Sahel is a semi-arid region along the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Think roughly Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan.

Bad How?

Based on statistics on the Sahel, it’s one of the few remaining regions on Earth where the population is near Malthusian equilibrium. Fertility is high, contraception is rare; about half the population is under age 16. Infant mortality is around 6-8%, and ~a quarter of children are underweight. (Source: CIA World Factbook entries on Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan.)

Being near Malthusian equilibrium means that, when there’s an economic downturn, a substantial chunk of the population dies.

Die How?

Traditional wisdom says: war, famine, disease. In this case, I’d expect famine to be the main instigator. Empty bellies then induce both violence and weak immune systems. On priors, I’d expect infectious disease to be the main proximate killer.

The Next Year In Particular?

The global economy has been looking rough, between the war in Ukraine shocking oil and food markets, and continuing post-Covid stagflation. Based on pulling a number out of my ass without looking at any statistics, I’d guess deaths from violence, starvation, and disease in the Sahel region will each be up an order of magnitude this year/next year compared to a good year (e.g. the first-quartile best year in the past decade).

That said, the intervention we’ll talk about is probably decently impactful even in a good year.

So What’s To Be Done?

Just off the top of my head, one obvious baseline plan is:

Fill a hiking backpack with antibiotics (buy them somewhere cheap!)

Fly to N'Djamena or take a ferry to Timbuktu

Obtain a motorbike or boat

Travel around giving away antibiotics until you run out

Repeat

Note that you could, of course, substitute something else for "antibiotics" - maybe vitamins or antifungals or water purification tablets or iron supplements or some mix of those is higher marginal value.

There are some possibly-nonobvious considerations here. First, we can safely assume that governments in the area are thoroughly corrupt at every level, and presumably the same goes for non-government bureaucracies; trying to route through a local bureaucratic machine is a recipe for failure. Thus, the importance of being physically present and physically distributing things oneself. On the other hand, physical safety is an issue, even more so if local food insecurity induces local violence or civil war. (That said, lots of Westerners these days act like they’ll be immediately assaulted the moment they step into a “bad neighborhood” at night. Remember, folks, the vast majority of the locals are friendly the vast majority of the time, especially if you’re going around obviously helping people. You don’t need to be completely terrified of foreign territory. But, like, don’t be completely naive about it either.)

Also, it is important to explain what antibiotics are for and how to use them, and there will probably be language barriers. Literacy in these regions tends to be below 50%, and presumably the rural regions which most need the antibiotics also have the lowest literacy rates.

How Much Impact?

I’m not going to go all the way to estimating QALYs/$ here, but. according to this source, the antibiotic impor...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Instrumental convergence is what makes general intelligence possible, published by tailcalled on November 11, 2022 on LessWrong.

TL;DR: General intelligence is possible because solving real-world problems requires solving common subtasks. Common subtasks are what give us instrumental convergence. Common subtasks are also what make AI useful; you want AIs to pursue instrumentally convergent goals. Capabilities research proceeds by figuring out algorithms for instrumentally convergent cognition. Consequentialism and search are fairly general ways of solving common subtasks.

General intelligence is possible because solving real-world problems requires solving common subtasks

No-free-lunch theorems assert that any cognitive algorithm is equally successful when averaged over all possible tasks. This might sound strange, so here's an intuition pump. Suppose you get a test like

2+2 = _

32 = _

and so on. One cognitive algorithm would be to evaluate the arithmetic expression and fill the answer in as the result. This algorithm seems so natural that it's hard to imagine how the no-free-lunch theorem could apply to this; what possible task could ever make arithmetic score poorly on questions like the above?

Easy: While an arithmetic evaluator would score well if you e.g. get 1 point for each expression you evaluate arithmetically, it would score very poorly if you e.g. lose 1 point for each expression you evaluate arithmetically.

This doesn't matter much in the real world because you are much more likely to encounter situations where it's useful to do arithmetic right than you are to encounter situations where it's useful to do arithmetic wrong. No-free-lunch theorems point out that when you average all tasks, useful tasks like "do arithmetic correctly" are perfectly cancelled out by useless tasks like "do arithmetic wrong"; but in reality you don't average over all conceivable tasks.

If there were no correlations between subtasks, there would be no generally useful algorithms. And if every goal required a unique algorithm, general intelligence would not exist in any meaningful sense; the generally-useful cognitions are what constitutes general intelligence.

Common subtasks are what give us instrumental convergence

Instrumental convergence basically reduces to acquiring and maintaining power (when including resources under the definition of power). And this is an instance of common subtasks: lots of strategies require power, so a step in lots of strategies is to accumulate or preserve power. Therefore, just about any highly capable cognitive system is going to be good at getting power.

"Common subtasks" views instrumental convergence somewhat more generally than is usually emphasized. For instance, instrumental convergence is not just about goals, but also about cognitive algorithms. Convolutions and big matrix multiplications seem like a common subtask, so they can be considered instrumentally convergent in a more general sense. I don't think this is a major shift from how it's usually thought of; computation and intelligence are usually considered as instrumentally convergent goals, so why not algorithms too?

Common subtasks are also what make AI useful; you want AIs to pursue instrumentally convergent goals

The logic is simple enough: if you have an algorithm that solves a one-off task, then it is at most going to be useful once. Meanwhile, if you have an algorithm that solves a common task, then that algorithm is commonly useful. An algorithm that can classify images is useful; an algorithm that can classify a single image is not.

This applies even to power-seeking. One instance of power-seeking would be earning money; indeed an AI that can autonomously earn money sounds a lot more useful than one that cannot. It even applies to "dark" power-seeking, like social manipulatio...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Thoughts on FTX and returning to our ideals, published by michel on November 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I can’t work today. I knew I wouldn’t be able to work as soon as I woke up. The ordinary tasks I’d dedicate myself to feel so distant from the shitshow unfolding as I sit at my desk.

The news of FTXs unraveling hit me hard. Most immediately, I feel for the people who entrusted their life savings to an organization that didn’t deserve their trust.

It’s easy to extrapolate from the twitter updates I scroll past of people’s net worth halving in hours, of people frantically trying to withdraw money they’re not sure exists anymore: people’s lives just got ruined. Families will struggle to send their kids to college. Young adults will need to take on new jobs to stay afloat. Poor parents who looked at FTX for a way out will lose their trust and so much more in a system that continues to fail them. I hope those responsible for gambling money that wasn’t theirs to gamble are held responsible, and I dearly hope FTX can find a way to repay the people who trusted them.

I grieve for those who trusted in FTX, and that includes people in the effective altruism community. We’re not the victims – we benefited incredibly from Sam Bankman–Fried and others at FTX over the past years. But, to my knowledge, we had no idea that what appears to be fraud at this level was a possibility when we signed onto a billionaire’s backing. Money changes the world, and I don’t hate us for getting it. Up until this week, I had a very favorable impression of Sam Bankman-Fried. I saw him as an altruist who encapsulated what it meant to think big. No longer; doing good means acting with integrity. This feels like the moment that you learn that a childhood hero of yours might be no hero after all.

A lot just changed. Projects from people in the effective altruism community that I think would have genuinely improved the world, like pandemic preparedness initiatives and charity startups, may be delayed for years – or never arrive at all. Our community's entire trust networks, emphasis on ambition, and expectation that standout ideas need not be held back my insufficient funds feel as if they’re beginning to shake, and it’s not clear how much they’ll withstand over the coming months. At a personal level, too, those grant applications I’ve been waiting on to fund my past months of independent work seem awfully precarious. I know I’ll be fine, but others won’t be, including the people alive today and far beyond tomorrow who aspiring effective altruists are trying to help.

That’s something that weighs on me: while so much feels like it’s changed, the problems in this world haven’t. People will still die from preventable diseases today; we’ll still experience a background noise of nuclear armageddon threats tomorrow; and emerging technologies coming in the next decades could still pose a threat to all sentient life.

It’s in this context – a community that implicitly trusted FTX in their efforts to do good being shaken up and the world’s problems staying awfully still – that I’m drawn back to effective altruism’s core project: trying to improve the world as much as we can with the resources that we have.

Amidst everything shaking right now, I notice my personal commitment to effective altruism's ideals standing still. And I can picture my friends' commitments to effective altruism's ideals standing steadfast too. Over the past two years, engaging with this community has introduced me to some of the most incredible, kind-hearted people I know. I haven’t talked to many of them as I’ve tried to gather my thoughts over the past day, but I bet they too are still committed to creating a world better than the one they were born into.

Absolutely, we’ll all need to reassess how we bring our altruistic proj...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Another FTX post: suggestions for change, published by SaraAzubuike on November 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I suggested that we would have trouble with FTX and funding around 4 months ago.

SBF has been giving lots of money to EA. He admits it's a massively speculative bubble. Crypto crash hurts the most vulnerable, because poor uneducated people put lots of money into it (Krugman). Crypto is currently small, but should be regulated and has potential contagion effects (BIS). EA as a whole is getting loose with it's money due to large crypto flows (MacAskill). An inevitable crypto crash leads to either a) bad optics leading to less interest in EA or b) lots of dead projects.

It was quite obvious that this would happen--although the specific details with Alameda were not obvious. Stuart Buck and Blonergan (and a few others) were the only one who took me seriously at the time.

Below are some suggestions for change.

1. The new button of "support" is great, but I think EA forum should have a way to sort by controversiality. And, have the EA forum algorithm occasionally (some ϵ% of the time), punt controversial posts back upwards to the front page. If you're like me, you read the forum sorted by Magic (New and Upvoted). But this promotes herd mentality. The red-teaming and self-criticism is excellent, but if the only way we aggregate how "good" is is by up-votes, that is flawed. Perhaps the best way to know that criticism has touched a nerve is to compute a fraction: how many members of the community disagree vs how many agree. (or, even better, if you are in an organization, use a weighted fraction, where you put lower weight on the people in the organization that are in positions of power (obviously difficult to implement in practice))

2. More of you should consider anonymous posts. This is EA forum. I cannot believe that some of you delete your posts simply because it ends up being downvoted. Especially if you're working higher up in an EA org, you ought to be actively voicing your dissent and helping to monitor EA.

For example, this is not good:

"Members of the mutinous cohort told me that the movement’s leaders were not to be taken at their word—that they would say anything in public to maximize impact. Some of the paranoia—rumor-mill references to secret Google docs and ruthless clandestine councils—seemed overstated, but there was a core cadre that exercised control over public messaging; its members debated, for example, how to formulate their position that climate change was probably not as important as runaway A.I. without sounding like denialists or jerks." (New Yorker)

What makes EA, EA, what makes EA antifragile, is its ruthless transparency. If we are self-censoring because we have already concluded something is super effective, then there is no point in EA. Go do your own thing with your own money. Become Bill Gates. But don't associate with EA.

3. Finances should be partially anonymized. If an EA org receives some money above a certain threshold from an individual contribution, we should be transparent in saying that we will reject said money if it is not donated anonymously. You may protest that this would decrease the number of donations by rich billionaires. But take it this way: if they donate to EA, it's because they believe that EA can spend it better. Thus, they should be willing to donate anonymously, to not affect how EA spends money. If they don't donate to EA, then they can establish a different philanthropic organization and hire EA-adjacent staff, making for more competition. [Edit--see comments/revision]

Revision:

Blonergan took my previous post very seriously--apologies.

Anonymizing finances may not be the best option. I am clearly naive about the legal implications. Perhaps other members of the community have suggestions about h...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Under what conditions should FTX grantees voluntarily return their grants?, published by sawyer on November 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

There is a possibility of clawbacks, in which case orgs could be legally obligated to return funds. But in cases in which we're not legally required to return a grant, could it still be morally good to do so?

I think it could be useful to discuss this before even the basic details of the case have been settled, since there will be a high potential for motivated reasoning in favor of keeping the grants.

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