I think it's bizarre EA seems to be a movement with power structures. I always just thought EA was a philosophy and based on that I felt it was an interesting idea. I don't have to worry about sexual harassment when I'm considering Plato or Stoicism. Why is it a thing with EA?
Many industry events have had problems with sexual harassment. Young people living together in group houses (for example, fraternities) often have problems too.
So the problem in this case seems to be for young people who want to connect at in-person events. If you never go to events, don't want an EA job, and don't want to live with other EA people, then I don't think you can be affected?
So I'm not sure it's a problem with the movement as a philosophy, as with holding lots of loosely moderated events, having parties, having group houses, and so on. That is, this pretty intense socializing seems high risk for this sort of thing.
What other institution does this remind me of? College. College sex scandals tend not to make the philosophy department look bad unless a teacher is involved, but that certainly happens.
> holding lots of loosely moderated events, having parties, having group houses, and so on.
Ah. I wonder if the nub of this is group houses?
I can't tell whether the abuse phenomenon is characteristic of EA, or of San Francisco. I understand housing in SF is absurdly expensive, even for well-paid people, so perhaps group houses are more prevalent in SF. Is abuse more common in EA-affiliated group houses in other parts of the country?
My supposition is that abuse is more likely in a group house, whether it's connected with EA or not; but I have no facts to back that up.
Something can both describe a philosophy and a movement. The movement always has hierarchies and power structures. The philosophy doesn't, but then again, it's often presented by the movement so the lines get blurry.
That might be true, but there isn't exactly an "Effective Altruism Foundation" that all the donations funnel through. You basically have a bunch of random people that are donating to charities that are well regarded, with a few philanthropists here and there setting up foundations. You might be able to hijack organizations like givewell (ie. organizations that tell people which charities they should donate to), but trying to monetize that is tricky. At the end of the day you don't really control anything, because you're still reliant on individuals following your advice. So if you try to funnel money to your own foundation (for embezzling purposes), you will easily burn any goodwill that you've built up.
The Centre for Effective Altruism has a turnover in the tens of millions. Surely there are people with greater and lesser decision making abilities within that institution?
>The Centre for Effective Altruism has a turnover in the tens of millions
Google says that their annual budget is $6M, so I think you're overestimating how much money can be siphoned off. Moreover, given how trendy effective altruism is with young professionals from elite universities, getting a high position will be difficult. Sure, an ivy league graduate could fight tooth and nail to get a position at the CEA that pays a meager base salary and hope to siphon off some extra money, but he can make much more money at a professional services firm or in finance. Better yet, he can get some high ranking position at some private company that has 10x turnover and doesn't have public scrutiny (because it's not a charity). That's not to say that everyone at CEA is behaving scrupulously. It's just that getting into effective altruism to embezzle money makes little economic sense.
I think the sums are higher when you consider additional one-off donations. CEA recently bought an estate at Wytham Abbey, which would almost certainly have cost more than their yearly budget. Apparently this was funded by a one-time donation by another EA organization. Similarly, the EA-adjacent ESPR bought a $5m chateau in the Czech Republic. These are major chunks of money to throw around, especially when you factor in maintenance costs, and I have no doubt that the ability to control access to these amazing facilities gives you a lot of influence in the community.
The castle was apparently bought by facebook founder dustin moskovitz. I certainly think the CEA is misguided, but there main purpose is basically having conventions/recruitment events and if they think they'll be spending considerable sums on convention space related to that mission I can see how it makes sense to just buy a property and hold all the events there.
My understanding is that the UK castle was funded by a directed donation from another EA organization that had close ties to CEA. As far as I know, Moscovitz did not direct that organization to buy a castle. Instead a group of tightly-connected colleagues/friends in two EA organizations made the determination, without any (public) cost/benefit analysis or buy-in from the community. This is the precisely the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in a community with large amounts of money and very little accountability, which is the allegation made higher in this thread.
ETA If I’m wrong and you can point me to a detailed cost/benefit analysis, I’ll gladly withdraw my criticism.
Dustin posts a lot on the ea meme Facebook group(no clue how he finds the time while being the ceo of asana) and admitted to being the buyer there. Could’ve been memeing, but he seemed serious.
I think CEA has made some poor choices, and SBFs future fund even more so. But if it’s true that the money used for this property was specifically earmarked for purchase of a property by a single donor as the forum post claims I can see how it makes sense. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
I searched the link you provided for anything that claimed Dustin Moskovitz requested that purchase, but I didn't find it. I did however find this detailed explanation of the grant-making process [1] by Claire Zabel of Open Philanthropy, and it seems pretty clear that the request to purchase Wytham Abbey came from Owen (Cotton-Barratt, I think?) of CEA (now known as Effective Ventures.)
Claire provides her justification for granting the funds to purchase the property, and it is not particularly compelling. (She even concludes that she would not have made the grant if she had a chance to do it over today.) There certainly doesn't appear to have been anything approaching due diligence about the cost-effectiveness of this particular purchase, which is really surprising given that effective use of resources is the core premise of EA.
To make things worse, the commenters point out that Claire Zabel is also on the board of Effective Ventures (formerly CEA), which makes this a much worse conflict of interest. It's hard to look at these organizations as anything more than a tightly-knit group of friends passing donor money around between them.
PS If CEA and OP are just fronts for Dustin Moscovitz, it's totally fine for them to spend money on whatever they want: as long as he's cool with it. I had the impression these organizations were part of a broader community promoting the principles of Effective Altruism as a movement, and the community would hold them to those principles. It is extremely difficult to look at the details of this episode and believe that's happening.
Open Phil is literally just Dustin’s foundation. He’s also one of the main funders of givewell’s research work and I am not a fan of how incestuous a lot of the orgs are.
The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogative.
The contention made (far!) up-thread was "When there is a lot of money moving around, it seems inevitable that power structures will form around it."
Then somebody else said that CEA's budget was only $6m, so how bad could things get? The Wytham Abbey example was brought up just to show how much more money CEA could tap into, through its connections with other EA orgs.
But from my perspective, the EA "castle adventure" is also an excellent illustration of those power structures. Here we see a small number of people (friends, colleagues, fellow board members) take control of core EA institutions (using enormous flows of donor cash) with very little pushback from the community. And worse, they are using this money for purposes that are completely at odds with the stated principles of the EA movement.
As an outsider, if a few people with access to cash are so easily able to capture the most prominent orgs in the EA movement and make them ineffective, then that's pretty terrible for EA as a brand. This doesn't mean I'm opposed to the broader concept of "giving money effectively", but I'm definitely going to feel an aversion to anything that carries the EA label.
I see the conversation has gotten ahead of me, but the Wytham Abbey purchase is absolutely an example of my concerns. The justification wasn't much more than "I like going to conferences in big posh buildings and some other people I've talked to do as well".
Makes me think of Parkinson's law: "work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion" -- but this time, "money spent expands to match the amount of donations".
I wonder how to design an organization, where people don't do that. Seems it's hard.
Maybe new metrics: Money-not-spent, and Time-we-didn't-need-to-use. But can be easily gamed, hmm
The EA "philosophy" is strongly tied up in libertarian utilitarian ways of thinking, and such people are able to talk themselves into believing that it's rational to defer to people smarter/richer than themselves. They get money, intelligence and virtue all mixed up and confused with each other. Being intelligent gets you money, money buys virtue, those who are smartest will become richest and those who are richest will be able to buy the most virtue.
