H

Habryka

18033 karmaJoined Sep 2014

Bio

Project lead of LessWrong 2.0, often helping the EA Forum with various issues with the forum. If something is broken on the site, it's a good chance it's my fault (Sorry!).

Comments
1128

To be clear, what I am criticizing here is not operating the venue while the sale is going on, or setting some kind of target for the operators in terms of quality-adjusted-events or estimates of counterfactual events caused, that would allow them to continue operating the venue. 

I totally agree that observing someone spending money on a "vanity project" would totally be evidence that they are poorly run or corrupt, but like, Wytham would not be a vanity project if it were to make economic sense for EV or the EA community at large to operate. So whether a project is a vanity project is dependent on a cost-effectiveness analysis (which I don't think really has occurred in this case).

Yes, totally possible. I am just specifically claiming that given that the cost of capital is one of the major expenses for this project, it would be surprising to me if it wasn't worth the marginal cost of operating it on financial grounds, at least until some kind of buyer was found. 

I am trying to make a pretty concrete claim about how I expect a benefit calculation to come out if done well, and definitely could be wrong (the thing that I have higher confidence in is that this decision wasn't very sensitive to such a cost-benefit calculation and seems more driven by other factors).

Yep, I think that would be a reasonable calculation. 

I mean it in the sense that they will have to sell substantially below market value if they want to sell it quickly.

This kind of property tends to have huge bid-ask-spreads and the usual thing to do is to continue operating the property while looking for a buyer (my guess is they would succeed at selling it eventually at market value, but it would take a while).

It's plausible that it was an error in the initial reasoning for buying it, but CEA will additionally have to likely take a huge loss on selling it, and I think it's unlikely that that makes sense from a cost-effectiveness standpoint. 

My vague sense, partially from the Open Philanthropy update is that reputation management was the primary consideration here. 

Habryka
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My understanding (based on talking to people involved in Wytham and knowing the economics of renting and buying large venues in a lot of detail) is that the sale of Wytham does not actually make any economic sense for EV in terms of its mission to do as much good as possible. It is plausible that the initial purchase was a mistake, but my understanding is that it will likely take many years for EV to sell during which the venue will be basically completely empty, or the venue will have to be sold at a pretty huge loss. This means at this point, it's likely worth it to keep it running. 

Also based on talking to some of the people close to these decisions, and trying to puzzle together how this decision was made, it seems very likely to me that the reason why Wytham is being sold is not based in a cost-effectiveness analysis, but the result of a PR-management strategy which seems antithetical to the principles of Effective Altruism to me. 

EV (and Open Phil) are supposed to use its assets and funds to help the most people and cause the most good for the world, not to protect their own reputation. Making donations and major financial decisions primarily driven by reputation-concerns is the primary pathology of most of the world's charity landscape, where vanity projects and complicated signaling games dominate where donations go, and going down this path seems to me a very worrying development for the future of EA.

My sense is that with this move, EV and Open Philanthropy have opened up a huge number of organizations within EA to attacks by any sufficiently large online mob, despite potentially producing enormous value, given that they have demonstrated they are willing to force the leadership of the EA community to give up projects with little concern for their cost-effectiveness if they do not align with the signaling aims of Open Phil and EV.

It is possible that maybe someone made a cost-effectiveness analysis here that turned out negative, and if so I would love to see it since it has large relevance to my work. But I would be extremely surprised that a positive cost-effectiveness analysis here would cause EV to reverse the sale of the property, and in conversations on this topic with people involved it seemed that curiosity and appetite for understanding the actual cost-effectiveness of this project was very low compared to the PR-implications of it. 

(To be clear, I am not saying that we should fully blind ourselves to considerations of reputation and public relations. However, I think this kind of reputational optimization is perilous and if is one of the domains where naive consequentialist-type reasoning tends to most often go awry. 

I think our reputational strategy should primarily be oriented around acting with integrity and honesty. And on that dimension the central tenet of how the EA community has presented itself is that we make decisions on the basis of what we think will help the most people, and are very much not making decisions on the basis of what will look good to other people, or will put us personally in the most powerful positions. 

Imagine GiveWell releasing their recommended charities saying "well, there was one charity that easily defeated AMF in terms of the cost-effectiveness of its program activities, but it was dealing with sanitization issues which are really gross that nobody wants to donate to and we expected that if we recommended it this would overall reduce the donations going through GiveWell. We thought this effect was big enough to cause us to decide to not recommend this charity as our top charity". I think this would be crazy and clearly violate the principles that GiveWell set out according to which it compiles its recommendations. While weaker, I think something similar is going on in how this decision seems to have been made) 

That is definitely relevant data! Looking at the recent dates (and hovering over the exact data at the link where the graphs are from) it looks like its around 60% logged-out, 40% logged in. 

I do notice I am surprised by this and kind of want confirmation from the EA Forum team they are not doing some kind of filtering on traffic here. When I compare these numbers naively to the Google Analytics data I have access to for those dates, they seem about 20%-30% too low, and it makes me think there is some filtering going on (though my guess is that 80%-90% logged-out traffic definitely still does not seem representative)

Hmm, my guess is by the time a system might succeed at takeover (i.e. has more than like a 5% chance of actually disempowering all of humanity permanently), I expect its behavior and thinking to be quite rational. I agree that there will probably be AIs taking reckless action earlier than that, but in as much as an AI is actually posing a risk of takeover, I do expect it to behave pretty rationally overall.

I didn't (cross-)post this on LessWrong really only because I'm not often on LessWrong and feel less able to judge what they'd welcome. Happy to take recommendations there too.

FWIW, the post would definitely be welcome on LW/the AI Alignment Forum.

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