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I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely t

I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? Optics sometimes necessitate sacrificing the "mathematically superior choice" for one that's worse in the name of not pissing off a ton of people the support of whom you rely upon.

joy_void_joy 3y ago
I'm a bit taken aback at the replies who say that EA never takes that into consideration. It had been actually exactly the kind of discourse I was seeing back in 2019 in the EA sphere. Actually, the reason this changed is exactly to avoid another SBF disaster: If you focus too much on consequentialism and convoluted reasons for why you're doing is the highest EV, you are incentivizing very unlawful and unwanted behaviours. EA pivoted to a more deontological framework to avoid those kind of dangerous reasonings at that point On the object level, about your point, Scott alludes to it in his linked article: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wif...
lmm 3y ago
Reputation has a value but that value is not infinite. Presumably they made a guess at how bad the hit would be. (Also, with the right audience, being willing to make tough choices like this would enhance their reputation)
raverbashing 3y ago
> Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? True. But the EA crowd has a hard time understand perception or empathy and has to resort to mathematical calculations I could think of a couple of ways better than "buying a castle" for conferences.
- Version467 3y ago
  e/acc is short for effective accelerationism and not effective altruism. Those groups are interested in very different things.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    True, fixed. But the groups have some overlap
    - rolisz 3y ago
      Do they? Aren't EAs mostly doomers? I haven't followed the debate closely.
      - reducesuffering 3y ago
        EA and e/acc have a lot of overlap in being free market, pro technology, urban, fairly online groups. The "doomer" and charity parts are the difference. EA's mostly believe that current trajectory of AGI will "paperclip maximize" humans, regardless of our suffering. While e/acc believe that heralding in AGI is the next frontier of tech, and that more tech is always good, that tech = positive progress. EA like to donate towards helping humanity. E/acc believe in getting really rich through tech and by markets, this helps other people too, via Randian market prosperity.
      - nyssos 3y ago
        > Do they? Not really, but they're both descended (in part) from the same early 2000s Bay Area counterculture-technoutopian-libertarian milieu.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  The thing is, perception and empathy often are included in their "mathematical calculations", or at least some kind of simulation or guess of it. It wasn't in this case, and that's very strange.
lispisok 3y ago
This stuck out to me too. If Effective Altruism is about using math to figure out how to do the most good they seemed to have ignored higher order effects of their actions. What if buying the castle hurt Effective Altruism's reputation so less people got into EA so less people donated money to buy mosquito nets or malarial regions in Africa resulting is less overall good?
- unholiness 3y ago
  It's hard to trust a community who claims to focus on effectiveness but then it turns out puts great effort into looking good. That kind of deception is more damaging than a bit of bad press. There's plenty of charities with great marketing. EA doesn't need to be another one.
  - taylorius 3y ago
    But the point is, you're just asserting that. I think the parent poster was observing that, as effective altruists, they might attempt to quantify the pros and cons of such reputational factors (some game theoretic calculation, perhaps?) and include it in their determinations.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    Prove it with the maths. I'd be willing to bet that the maths comes out on the favour of those who put effort into looking good.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Not when you factor in how this strategy affects those who employ it. Sure, compromising your ethics and lying to people in order to secure more donations will bring in more money for the good cause - short-term. Longer term, how long until you start thinking, since you're already lying to the donors anyway, why not also lie about the whole charity thing and start pocketing the donations for yourself? "Ends don't justify the means" isn't true on paper, for perfectly rational actors - but is true for actual humans.
- 3y ago
Aurornis 3y ago
The way this post leaves no room for debate about how the decision was good and paints all of the people who disagree as ignorant outsiders feels very disingenuous. There was a lot of criticism coming from inside the EA community, too. It became taboo to criticize it with multiple EA figureheads (author of this article included) making definitive statements that any critics were wrong and the decision was unequivocally right.
- germyj 3y ago
  I have found it somewhat... amusing... how this decision resulted in downgrading the entire community discussion section at EA Forum.
- enragedcacti 3y ago
  > The way this post leaves no room for debate about how the decision was good and paints all of the people who disagree as ignorant outsiders feels very disingenuous. Agreed, I went to look for these thinkpieces to see what the arguments were since the guy with footnotes longer than some articles didn't cite any. Searching Google News for '"effective altruism" ( "castle" OR "Wytham" OR "£15m" )' netted 10 total results: - Three articles about a DIFFERENT castle in the Czech Republic also bought by effective altruists (What's the marginal utility of castles?) - One article about EVF (formerly CEA) claiming FTX funds weren't used to by Wytham Abby - A smattering of anti-EA of anti-SBF pieces that make single line references to the castle Even just googling for the same you get one New Yorker article that makes offhand mention, then mostly forum threads and a couple blogs that are debating (pretty fairly imo) about whether it was an effective use of money. I'm sure I could have missed some pieces but this looks like the classic and all too common "got mad about some random hyper-niche tweets but can't admit it"
- skybrian 3y ago
  A link would have been nice, but it’s a side point anyway. If you care enough, maybe do a little research?
johnfn 3y ago
It's easy to say in retrospect, but it's not like all the movement ever did in it's entire existence was buy a single castle. Do you really think they were expecting EA to explode in the public consciousness after the SBF thing and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited for what could make the best outrage-bait article? That's quite a black swan event.
- germyj 3y ago
  >to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited Historically, yes, that's the entire point of the movement. Audit everything in the goal of doing the most good and not wasting money on frivolities. The auditing approach faded as the movement has grown and became more longtermist, though I (somewhat) expect it to come back now that we're post-ZIRP, post-SBF.
- tux3 3y ago
  >and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited [...]? That part they should have expected (and I'm sure they did). Scott claims they expected negative social reactions, just maybe not to this extent. Even in the absence of journalist attention, EAs love to exhaustively audit line-items. Something as big as Wytham Abbey was clearly not going to escape commentary. I don't follow why SBF somehow excuses this. It seems you're suggesting buying the abbey would have been fine if only it could have been kept quiet, but because of this unforeseeable black swan event people heard about the Secret EA Castle and now we have all this outrage. I heard about it from the EA Adjacent forum, and I don't see what SBF has to do with the argument that this burned a lot of social capital and reputation within the community for very nebulous gains (compared to buying a counterfactual property). The abbey might be relatively cheap for what it is, but not absolutely cheap. And it turned out to be very expensive in other ways.
  - johnfn 3y ago
    My point is that you could take an action which seems reasonable and justified and thought out within the community that you're in (e.g. EA) because you know everyone's working off the same set of axioms and can follow your reasoning. But when you suddenly get the entire world watching, that's not true any more, and you realize you can't explain the axioms to them, because it's a lot easier to say haha castle stupid EA people than to actually think it through and besides they're already scrolling past on their feed to the next bit of outrage-bait.
low_tech_love 3y ago
The problem here is that, in order to believe this, we would have to accept that "the castle was the cheapest choice". There are near-infinite ways to present (and omit) numbers in a way that makes your point and your biased choice look like the best one, especially for smart people with a messiah complex. Unless there is someone on the other side actively interested in refuting it, they can massage the numbers as much as they want. It is reasonable for an average person to doubt that buying a castle was indeed the cheapest choice they had.
- eru 3y ago
  Nobody really objects to them holding conferences. (At least not too many people do.) Renting venues for the conferences vs buying a venue seems like a straightforward financial calculation one can make and decide on fairly objectively. If you want to have a moral discussion, we should probably talk about what kind of venues conferences should be held at; not on whose balance sheets the assets are held.
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    Sure. I don’t object to them doing anything they want, but if you tag yourself as an “altruist” (effective or not) then other people’s opinions and perspectives are at the very core who you are (or pretend to be). The idea is that they “don’t care” because they believe the numbers, and the numbers only; if the numbers are telling you did the right thing, then it doesn’t matter what people think, right? Well yes, if you’re naive enough to believe that the numbers can be infallible (in which case you’re being used), or if you’re smart enough to massage them for your own good (in which case you’re using others). Seriously, in the end it’s just a bunch of people in a big circle jerk looking for social media points, like so many others. “Oh look at how objective we are,” give me a break.
    - eru 3y ago
      > I don’t object to them doing anything they want, but if you tag yourself as an “altruist” (effective or not) then other people’s opinions and perspectives are at the very core who you are (or pretend to be). I don't understand that. You can eg measure relatively easily and relatively objectively how many people die from malaria and how many life years that cost.
bowsamic 3y ago
I agree. It seems that EA forgets to factor in PR into its mathematics. Really the mathematically superior choice should take optics and the effect of good and bad optics into account

joy_void_joy 3y ago

I'm a bit taken aback at the replies who say that EA never takes that into consideration. It had been actually exactly the kind of discourse I was seeing back in 2019 in the EA sphere. Actually, the reason this changed is exactly to avoid another SBF disaster: If you focus too much on consequentialism and convoluted reasons for why you're doing is the highest EV, you are incentivizing very unlawful and unwanted behaviours. EA pivoted to a more deontological framework to avoid those kind of dangerous reasonings at that point On the object level, about your point, Scott alludes to it in his linked article: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wif...

lmm 3y ago

Reputation has a value but that value is not infinite. Presumably they made a guess at how bad the hit would be. (Also, with the right audience, being willing to make tough choices like this would enhance their reputation)

raverbashing 3y ago

> Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? True. But the EA crowd has a hard time understand perception or empathy and has to resort to mathematical calculations I could think of a couple of ways better than "buying a castle" for conferences.

Version467 3y ago
e/acc is short for effective accelerationism and not effective altruism. Those groups are interested in very different things.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  True, fixed. But the groups have some overlap
  - rolisz 3y ago
    Do they? Aren't EAs mostly doomers? I haven't followed the debate closely.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      EA and e/acc have a lot of overlap in being free market, pro technology, urban, fairly online groups. The "doomer" and charity parts are the difference. EA's mostly believe that current trajectory of AGI will "paperclip maximize" humans, regardless of our suffering. While e/acc believe that heralding in AGI is the next frontier of tech, and that more tech is always good, that tech = positive progress. EA like to donate towards helping humanity. E/acc believe in getting really rich through tech and by markets, this helps other people too, via Randian market prosperity.
    - nyssos 3y ago
      > Do they? Not really, but they're both descended (in part) from the same early 2000s Bay Area counterculture-technoutopian-libertarian milieu.
bowsamic 3y ago
The thing is, perception and empathy often are included in their "mathematical calculations", or at least some kind of simulation or guess of it. It wasn't in this case, and that's very strange.

lispisok 3y ago

This stuck out to me too. If Effective Altruism is about using math to figure out how to do the most good they seemed to have ignored higher order effects of their actions. What if buying the castle hurt Effective Altruism's reputation so less people got into EA so less people donated money to buy mosquito nets or malarial regions in Africa resulting is less overall good?

unholiness 3y ago
It's hard to trust a community who claims to focus on effectiveness but then it turns out puts great effort into looking good. That kind of deception is more damaging than a bit of bad press. There's plenty of charities with great marketing. EA doesn't need to be another one.
- taylorius 3y ago
  But the point is, you're just asserting that. I think the parent poster was observing that, as effective altruists, they might attempt to quantify the pros and cons of such reputational factors (some game theoretic calculation, perhaps?) and include it in their determinations.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  Prove it with the maths. I'd be willing to bet that the maths comes out on the favour of those who put effort into looking good.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Not when you factor in how this strategy affects those who employ it. Sure, compromising your ethics and lying to people in order to secure more donations will bring in more money for the good cause - short-term. Longer term, how long until you start thinking, since you're already lying to the donors anyway, why not also lie about the whole charity thing and start pocketing the donations for yourself? "Ends don't justify the means" isn't true on paper, for perfectly rational actors - but is true for actual humans.
3y ago

Aurornis 3y ago

The way this post leaves no room for debate about how the decision was good and paints all of the people who disagree as ignorant outsiders feels very disingenuous. There was a lot of criticism coming from inside the EA community, too. It became taboo to criticize it with multiple EA figureheads (author of this article included) making definitive statements that any critics were wrong and the decision was unequivocally right.

germyj 3y ago
I have found it somewhat... amusing... how this decision resulted in downgrading the entire community discussion section at EA Forum.
enragedcacti 3y ago
> The way this post leaves no room for debate about how the decision was good and paints all of the people who disagree as ignorant outsiders feels very disingenuous. Agreed, I went to look for these thinkpieces to see what the arguments were since the guy with footnotes longer than some articles didn't cite any. Searching Google News for '"effective altruism" ( "castle" OR "Wytham" OR "£15m" )' netted 10 total results: - Three articles about a DIFFERENT castle in the Czech Republic also bought by effective altruists (What's the marginal utility of castles?) - One article about EVF (formerly CEA) claiming FTX funds weren't used to by Wytham Abby - A smattering of anti-EA of anti-SBF pieces that make single line references to the castle Even just googling for the same you get one New Yorker article that makes offhand mention, then mostly forum threads and a couple blogs that are debating (pretty fairly imo) about whether it was an effective use of money. I'm sure I could have missed some pieces but this looks like the classic and all too common "got mad about some random hyper-niche tweets but can't admit it"
skybrian 3y ago
A link would have been nice, but it’s a side point anyway. If you care enough, maybe do a little research?

johnfn 3y ago

It's easy to say in retrospect, but it's not like all the movement ever did in it's entire existence was buy a single castle. Do you really think they were expecting EA to explode in the public consciousness after the SBF thing and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited for what could make the best outrage-bait article? That's quite a black swan event.

germyj 3y ago
>to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited Historically, yes, that's the entire point of the movement. Audit everything in the goal of doing the most good and not wasting money on frivolities. The auditing approach faded as the movement has grown and became more longtermist, though I (somewhat) expect it to come back now that we're post-ZIRP, post-SBF.
tux3 3y ago
>and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited [...]? That part they should have expected (and I'm sure they did). Scott claims they expected negative social reactions, just maybe not to this extent. Even in the absence of journalist attention, EAs love to exhaustively audit line-items. Something as big as Wytham Abbey was clearly not going to escape commentary. I don't follow why SBF somehow excuses this. It seems you're suggesting buying the abbey would have been fine if only it could have been kept quiet, but because of this unforeseeable black swan event people heard about the Secret EA Castle and now we have all this outrage. I heard about it from the EA Adjacent forum, and I don't see what SBF has to do with the argument that this burned a lot of social capital and reputation within the community for very nebulous gains (compared to buying a counterfactual property). The abbey might be relatively cheap for what it is, but not absolutely cheap. And it turned out to be very expensive in other ways.
- johnfn 3y ago
  My point is that you could take an action which seems reasonable and justified and thought out within the community that you're in (e.g. EA) because you know everyone's working off the same set of axioms and can follow your reasoning. But when you suddenly get the entire world watching, that's not true any more, and you realize you can't explain the axioms to them, because it's a lot easier to say haha castle stupid EA people than to actually think it through and besides they're already scrolling past on their feed to the next bit of outrage-bait.

low_tech_love 3y ago

The problem here is that, in order to believe this, we would have to accept that "the castle was the cheapest choice". There are near-infinite ways to present (and omit) numbers in a way that makes your point and your biased choice look like the best one, especially for smart people with a messiah complex. Unless there is someone on the other side actively interested in refuting it, they can massage the numbers as much as they want. It is reasonable for an average person to doubt that buying a castle was indeed the cheapest choice they had.

eru 3y ago
Nobody really objects to them holding conferences. (At least not too many people do.) Renting venues for the conferences vs buying a venue seems like a straightforward financial calculation one can make and decide on fairly objectively. If you want to have a moral discussion, we should probably talk about what kind of venues conferences should be held at; not on whose balance sheets the assets are held.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  Sure. I don’t object to them doing anything they want, but if you tag yourself as an “altruist” (effective or not) then other people’s opinions and perspectives are at the very core who you are (or pretend to be). The idea is that they “don’t care” because they believe the numbers, and the numbers only; if the numbers are telling you did the right thing, then it doesn’t matter what people think, right? Well yes, if you’re naive enough to believe that the numbers can be infallible (in which case you’re being used), or if you’re smart enough to massage them for your own good (in which case you’re using others). Seriously, in the end it’s just a bunch of people in a big circle jerk looking for social media points, like so many others. “Oh look at how objective we are,” give me a break.
  - eru 3y ago
    > I don’t object to them doing anything they want, but if you tag yourself as an “altruist” (effective or not) then other people’s opinions and perspectives are at the very core who you are (or pretend to be). I don't understand that. You can eg measure relatively easily and relatively objectively how many people die from malaria and how many life years that cost.

bowsamic 3y ago

I agree. It seems that EA forgets to factor in PR into its mathematics. Really the mathematically superior choice should take optics and the effect of good and bad optics into account