Thanks for this. As someone who has been quietly and frugally doing unpaid EA work for half a decade, it is incredibly frustrating to see these "top EAs" focusing so much on elevating themselves and their personal connections. I keep picking up on bad 'vibes' in the EA community that can never be expressed because they're verbal and not numerical, but at least I can confirm that I'm not crazy when an SBF or a Kat proves me right.
I am not an effective altruist, and effective altruists should feel free to discount what I say accordingly. I also have strong opinions about the process here (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bwtpBFQXKaGxuic6Q/effective-aspersions-how-the-nonlinear-investigation-went), and effective altruists should feel free to discount what I say based on that as well. Finally, I have never been persuaded that any AI safety stuff is doing much, so effective altruists should feel free to discount what I have to say about AI safety orgs due to that as well.
To be succinct and to the point: Inasmuch as EA follows your preferences, I suspect it will either fail as a subculture or deserve to fail. You present a vision of a subculture with little room for grace or goodwill, a space where everyone is constantly evaluating each other and trying to decide: are you worthy to stand in our presence? Do you belong in our hallowed, select group? Which skeletons are in your closet? Where are your character flaws? What should we know, what should we see, that allows us to exclude you?
You are welcome to do that. Perhaps you will even succeed in it. But you cannot at once decry the notion of "top EAs" and the harm it causes, then promote a values system based on effectiveness as an EA that actively excludes everyone other than the same "top EAs" you decry a few paragraphs above. You advocate for an insular and elitist group that stands apart from society, creates an internal network (invitations to Effective Altruism Global, listing on the 80,000 Hours job board, membership in effective altruist coworking spaces, being interviewed on effective altruist podcasts, and so on) open only to the Worthy, and seeks to have dramatic impacts on the world writ large.
Explode your organizations if you will; celebrate the process of burning them down with mixes of truth, rumor, and uncharitable slants if you like; but you are fooling yourself if you think such a winnowing process will lead to a high-minded strong group of idealists and not a petty, risk-averse, cautious group who knows that the knives will be out at signs of weakness and who constantly seeks to self-purify and root out the unworthy within it. There is much I like within effective altruism; your vision, self-contradictory and self-destructive as it is, seems effective primarily at damaging that. I am not persuaded.
EA Global invitations, 80,000 Hours job board listings, coworking space invitations, and podcast interviews are *already* only open to the Worthy. I in fact have none of those things (and shouldn't, because I'm just a blogger). Other than coworking spaces, these institutions also not limited to "top EAs" by any reasonable definition of the term: non-EAs are regularly invited to EA Global and are interviewed on EA podcasts, and non-EA jobs are always listed on the 80,000 Hours job board.
The fact that no one has invited me to be on the 80,000 Hours Podcast hasn't stopped me from participating in the effective altruist community in other ways, from talking with other EAs online to going to Solstice to sending my child to a small private school founded by EAs.
Okay. How do you reconcile this with your claim that an inner circle of top effective altruists neither does, nor should, exist? Obviously you are grading each other, and you want to be grading each other. Obviously you have high standards, and you want to have high standards. Obviously the people drawn to the same ideas are drawn to working alongside others effective at pursuing those ideas, and they want to be drawn to each other.
I can imagine kaizen norms without a viciously insular purity spiral. Having seen the direct, immediate impacts of a viciously insular purity spiral you saw and evidently cheered on, I cannot imagine you are meeting them. If you must be a community of excellence (and I absolutely do endorse the value of communities of excellence), then your exclusion mechanisms (and here I mean: the standards you use to torch people to the ground and to condemn them as worthy of hatred) must be beyond reproach, and you should be much more embarrassed than you are at how badly they failed.
More simply, endorsing Kaizen norms is very different to endorsing blowing it all up and letting people sort through the wreckage, so while my imagination does indeed stretch far enough to picture the one without the other, it does not stretch quite far enough to allow me to picture your express preference without a viciously insular purity spiral.
I think kaizen norms lack a certain amount of playfulness and creativity that would actually be EV maximizing.
this is gonna sound schizo but I think worth saying. kaizen comes from japanese business culture. japan went through this incredible economic growth and then just stagnated for a while. my headcanon reason for the Lost Decade is that the exacting, perfectionist culture was really good at quality manufacturing but anti-entrepreneurial in the long run. Firms are concerned about longevity over growth. I watched this japanese youtube video about a young entrepreneur - and it spent like 60% of the time showing her being adult-like and good at business etiquette (you hand over your business card exactly like *this*) and like 10% actually showing her product and describing what's innovative about it.
4 out of 6 members of the Paypal Mafia built bombs as a kid. I'm worried that any culture where you aren't supposed to eat on the street or put your feet on the squishy chairs at a family restaurant is too stifling to raise kids who do great things.
Ok, I guess this is a bit of a slippery slope fallacy. Like obviously maximum lawfulness is bad but maximum chaos is bad, and steps towards chaos are almost always bad and steps towards efficiency/correctness are almost always good. There's some Balance probably. maybe the ideal org would allow things that look "non-efficient" as long as the downside is not too much, or try to meritocratically reward based on results or something. which maybe isn't too different from what you propose
sometimes I worry that my work at manifold is too "fun", but I don't have a clear vision for what direction we should be more disciplined in. It's plausible that we should, like, do more user studies or look at analytics more frequently or do QA more instead of yolo'ing code into main or do integration tests or do double entry bookkeeping. but I dunno none of that feels like a home run to me, there are lots of other ideas that are also plausible.
From your linked article, Kaizen norms seem very compatible with not making one sided anonymous callout posts.
"Kaizen groups may have very specific norms about the style or format of critique/feedback that’s welcome, and it may well be considered rude to give feedback in the wrong style."
> You present a vision of a subculture with little room for grace or goodwill, a space where everyone is constantly evaluating each other
Evaluation is at the heart of effective altruism. It's what the "effective" part means. (To avoid evaluation, traditional charity is the traditional place.) The part that is evaluated is the projects and their expected impact. Nonlinear seems like lots of glamour, but little measurable... whatever it is they are doing. Therefore, we should not consider them to be representative of effective altruism. (That's what this article was about.)
A different kind of evaluation is evaluating Nonlinear qua employer. (That's what the *previous* article was about.) The kind of things people sometimes post on Glassdoor; that part is not specific for effective altruism. Is there a reason why specifically effective altruists should *not* be doing that?
> You advocate for an insular and elitist group that stands apart from society, creates an internal network (...) open only to the Worthy
The idea is that this "elite" is selected based on their present accomplishments, as evaluated by others. (As opposed to e.g. selected based on their networking skills.) Similarly how you could e.g. select "elite" mathematicians by evaluating their proofs and then awarding some of them a medal.
I don't see anything on this list that could plausibly have this effect. How did you get from here to there?
I get that the attacks on Nonlinear have often been unfair. And maybe I lack context that makes this look worse. But I don't see any connection between "don't be a clout-chasing Instagram addict" and "joyless group where everyone is constantly judging everyone".
Part of it is that I don't think Kat can be fairly described as a clout-chasing Instagram addict at all. Part of it is noting that Ozy took a defense against claims of abuse and used it as a judgment on efficacy. Part of it is that the process around the Nonlinear affair, which Ozy very clearly sees as a net good, was clearly destructive and irresponsible by my standards, and upon writing my post I was flooded by requests from people wanting to share similar experiences or worries based on their experiences within the EA ecosystem.
The sum of it is that I think Ozy is motivated in part by a personal, visceral disgust (as described at the top of the post) that makes them willing to lean into whatever process successfully results in damaging the reputation of those they feel deserve to have their reputation damaged, and in that same spirit half-seriously proposes digging up and exposing dirt on everyone who has dirt. That is not the sort of thing that suggests a trustworthy culture to me, but a petty, vindictive one. It is in service of high ideals, but "tearing people down in service of high ideals" describes most vindictive cultures. Looking for the worst in people, then actively excluding them, should--to the extent it is necessary at all--be handled with a sort of care, seriousness, and respect Ozy entirely elides. There is a tremendous missing mood in their sentiment.
That would make perfect sense as a response to their other post, but it seems a little off-topic on this one. Because it doesn't seem like you actually object to most of the opinions expressed on this post, even though you think it's inappropriate for these opinions to be involved when the court of public opinion is making judgments.
Going by what I've seen you write, I could see you expressing sentiments very similar to the first three points of this four-point post. The second one is pretty close to what you're saying right now. And the third point has a lot in common with your earlier criticism of how the callout was handled. The only real disagreement seems to be the last point, about radical transparency.
Since we're discussing personal biases, I should probably declare my own. My perspective on this is probably coloured by the fact that I'm not sure there should be an EA community at all. For me EA is a great approach to charitable evaluation and that's about it. I've always been a bit puzzled by people forming friend groups around it.
I think groups naturally become communities and benefit from being communities, though in the case of EA in specific I would advise them to name the community something different to the approach to charitable evaluation. People like spending time around others whose values align with theirs, and EA people find a lot of common ground as far as values go. It is also natural, as they try to persuade people to align with those values, that those who come to similar conclusions begin to cluster together. All of that is both natural and good.
When that happens, though, the groups begin to have duties to their members. I think EA is in an awkward spot, trapped between decentralizing and centralizing urges, at once a community and a method of evaluating charities, and that inasmuch as it is a community Ozy's approach is likely to damage it. Inasmuch as it is simply a method for evaluating charities, none of the benefits Ozy mentions are particularly relevant, as all of them are inherently community-connected. Even there, though, someone will ultimately be the judge, and their inclusion and exclusion criteria will make or break careers. There's a serious responsibility inherent in that.
But I don't think it's actually hypocritical of Ozy to support organizational inner circles while opposing social ones. It may be impossible to get one without the other, but I think it's a reasonable thing to want.
I think Ozy is mostly in denial about social inner circles, claiming that they neither should not do exist while unquestionably being part of them. Their linked article in that regard contains some interesting sub-points, but its central thesis, I think, is kinda bad. Partially by happenstance, partially due to committed work, they know, on a social level, a lot of wildly interesting people with deep ties to the EA movement. That they don't want that social comfort to impact funding opportunities and the like is commendable, but there is always going to be value in proximity to interesting and powerful people, in a mostly neutral way.
I'm also increasingly part of my own social inner circles, partially due to committed work, partially due to happenstance, at least one of which my friends and I built from the ground up into something meaningful. It didn't used to be this way, and both the work and the happenstance were important. I gain real, concrete benefits from them and am happy to be in them. I think those circles will always exist and should exist, and interested parties should broadly seek to join or build them through that same combination of work and happenstance. Denying that they exist and provide real benefits is a disservice to those early in their careers or who notice their own lack of ties, reassuring them that everyone's in roughly the same boat when they simply aren't.
I think Ozy wants to keep the organizational inner circle - which has, and inevitably will have, social elements - elite, while also having strong egalitarian values that create discomfort with elitism. Further, I think they perceive Nonlinear as trying to foster elitism, while Nonlinear perceives itself as working to open meaningful doors for people with good ideas who don't have the same social connections Ozy does, and if asked would probably share Ozy's discomfort with elitism. I do think there's a hypocrisy there, albeit an unconscious one.
Something about Kat Wood's Facebook post(s) always rubbed me the wrong way...
I think you captured it -- it's the implication that this is part of virtuous and altruistic work. It's clearly not. It's fine for people to enjoy traveling, vacations, and other luxuries.. but implying this sort of lifestyle is part and parcel of the Effective Altruism movement is messed up on a number of levels.
... I can imagine an counter argument that the lure of that sort of lifestyle could get more people to work in EA, resulting in a net benefit? But more people doing it increases the surface area for it to leak out to EA's critics...harming EA's reptuation.. So I don't find that argument compelling. People care a lot about people's intentions, especially when those people are claiming to be more virtuous and ethical.
Thanks for the post. As someone considering if and how to start contributing to EA, the last post made me concerned. I tried writing out a comment that was basically going to ask you if points 1 and 2 are normal for EA organizations, because of so, I'm not interested. You addressed my concerns perfectly
Once again, I appreciate your clearly expressed insights into the nature of Nonlinear. Words and actions do matter, and the treatment of employees/fellow workers ought to be scrutinised. The values attributable to anyone attaching themselves to Effective Altruism must meet with the standards implied by the very words 'effective' and 'altruism'. Thank you for the intelligence and compassion you bring to bear through your examination of Nonlinear's words and deeds, along with their consequences.
There’s something to be said for marginal EA, e.g. that you might as well do something good while yachting, if you’re going to yacht regardless. But I worry we’ve become too blasé about giving EA kudos to people doing more than they have to, but far less than they could. Those people deserve some credit! But kudos are a resource we can allocate in order to result in more good being done, just like money. We should try to spend them optimally.
Also, “marginal EA” is arguably just regular charity.
Thanks for this. As someone who has been quietly and frugally doing unpaid EA work for half a decade, it is incredibly frustrating to see these "top EAs" focusing so much on elevating themselves and their personal connections. I keep picking up on bad 'vibes' in the EA community that can never be expressed because they're verbal and not numerical, but at least I can confirm that I'm not crazy when an SBF or a Kat proves me right.
I am not an effective altruist, and effective altruists should feel free to discount what I say accordingly. I also have strong opinions about the process here (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bwtpBFQXKaGxuic6Q/effective-aspersions-how-the-nonlinear-investigation-went), and effective altruists should feel free to discount what I say based on that as well. Finally, I have never been persuaded that any AI safety stuff is doing much, so effective altruists should feel free to discount what I have to say about AI safety orgs due to that as well.
To be succinct and to the point: Inasmuch as EA follows your preferences, I suspect it will either fail as a subculture or deserve to fail. You present a vision of a subculture with little room for grace or goodwill, a space where everyone is constantly evaluating each other and trying to decide: are you worthy to stand in our presence? Do you belong in our hallowed, select group? Which skeletons are in your closet? Where are your character flaws? What should we know, what should we see, that allows us to exclude you?
You are welcome to do that. Perhaps you will even succeed in it. But you cannot at once decry the notion of "top EAs" and the harm it causes, then promote a values system based on effectiveness as an EA that actively excludes everyone other than the same "top EAs" you decry a few paragraphs above. You advocate for an insular and elitist group that stands apart from society, creates an internal network (invitations to Effective Altruism Global, listing on the 80,000 Hours job board, membership in effective altruist coworking spaces, being interviewed on effective altruist podcasts, and so on) open only to the Worthy, and seeks to have dramatic impacts on the world writ large.
Explode your organizations if you will; celebrate the process of burning them down with mixes of truth, rumor, and uncharitable slants if you like; but you are fooling yourself if you think such a winnowing process will lead to a high-minded strong group of idealists and not a petty, risk-averse, cautious group who knows that the knives will be out at signs of weakness and who constantly seeks to self-purify and root out the unworthy within it. There is much I like within effective altruism; your vision, self-contradictory and self-destructive as it is, seems effective primarily at damaging that. I am not persuaded.
EA Global invitations, 80,000 Hours job board listings, coworking space invitations, and podcast interviews are *already* only open to the Worthy. I in fact have none of those things (and shouldn't, because I'm just a blogger). Other than coworking spaces, these institutions also not limited to "top EAs" by any reasonable definition of the term: non-EAs are regularly invited to EA Global and are interviewed on EA podcasts, and non-EA jobs are always listed on the 80,000 Hours job board.
The fact that no one has invited me to be on the 80,000 Hours Podcast hasn't stopped me from participating in the effective altruist community in other ways, from talking with other EAs online to going to Solstice to sending my child to a small private school founded by EAs.
It's actually okay for a group to run on kaizen norms (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/norms-of-membership-for-voluntary-groups/). If you can't imagine kaizen norms without a viciously insular purity spiral, that speaks more to your personal experiences than to the nature of the EA community. We must be a community of excellence.
Okay. How do you reconcile this with your claim that an inner circle of top effective altruists neither does, nor should, exist? Obviously you are grading each other, and you want to be grading each other. Obviously you have high standards, and you want to have high standards. Obviously the people drawn to the same ideas are drawn to working alongside others effective at pursuing those ideas, and they want to be drawn to each other.
I can imagine kaizen norms without a viciously insular purity spiral. Having seen the direct, immediate impacts of a viciously insular purity spiral you saw and evidently cheered on, I cannot imagine you are meeting them. If you must be a community of excellence (and I absolutely do endorse the value of communities of excellence), then your exclusion mechanisms (and here I mean: the standards you use to torch people to the ground and to condemn them as worthy of hatred) must be beyond reproach, and you should be much more embarrassed than you are at how badly they failed.
More simply, endorsing Kaizen norms is very different to endorsing blowing it all up and letting people sort through the wreckage, so while my imagination does indeed stretch far enough to picture the one without the other, it does not stretch quite far enough to allow me to picture your express preference without a viciously insular purity spiral.
I think kaizen norms lack a certain amount of playfulness and creativity that would actually be EV maximizing.
this is gonna sound schizo but I think worth saying. kaizen comes from japanese business culture. japan went through this incredible economic growth and then just stagnated for a while. my headcanon reason for the Lost Decade is that the exacting, perfectionist culture was really good at quality manufacturing but anti-entrepreneurial in the long run. Firms are concerned about longevity over growth. I watched this japanese youtube video about a young entrepreneur - and it spent like 60% of the time showing her being adult-like and good at business etiquette (you hand over your business card exactly like *this*) and like 10% actually showing her product and describing what's innovative about it.
4 out of 6 members of the Paypal Mafia built bombs as a kid. I'm worried that any culture where you aren't supposed to eat on the street or put your feet on the squishy chairs at a family restaurant is too stifling to raise kids who do great things.
Ok, I guess this is a bit of a slippery slope fallacy. Like obviously maximum lawfulness is bad but maximum chaos is bad, and steps towards chaos are almost always bad and steps towards efficiency/correctness are almost always good. There's some Balance probably. maybe the ideal org would allow things that look "non-efficient" as long as the downside is not too much, or try to meritocratically reward based on results or something. which maybe isn't too different from what you propose
sometimes I worry that my work at manifold is too "fun", but I don't have a clear vision for what direction we should be more disciplined in. It's plausible that we should, like, do more user studies or look at analytics more frequently or do QA more instead of yolo'ing code into main or do integration tests or do double entry bookkeeping. but I dunno none of that feels like a home run to me, there are lots of other ideas that are also plausible.
From your linked article, Kaizen norms seem very compatible with not making one sided anonymous callout posts.
"Kaizen groups may have very specific norms about the style or format of critique/feedback that’s welcome, and it may well be considered rude to give feedback in the wrong style."
Good points!
> You present a vision of a subculture with little room for grace or goodwill, a space where everyone is constantly evaluating each other
Evaluation is at the heart of effective altruism. It's what the "effective" part means. (To avoid evaluation, traditional charity is the traditional place.) The part that is evaluated is the projects and their expected impact. Nonlinear seems like lots of glamour, but little measurable... whatever it is they are doing. Therefore, we should not consider them to be representative of effective altruism. (That's what this article was about.)
A different kind of evaluation is evaluating Nonlinear qua employer. (That's what the *previous* article was about.) The kind of things people sometimes post on Glassdoor; that part is not specific for effective altruism. Is there a reason why specifically effective altruists should *not* be doing that?
> You advocate for an insular and elitist group that stands apart from society, creates an internal network (...) open only to the Worthy
The idea is that this "elite" is selected based on their present accomplishments, as evaluated by others. (As opposed to e.g. selected based on their networking skills.) Similarly how you could e.g. select "elite" mathematicians by evaluating their proofs and then awarding some of them a medal.
How?
I don't see anything on this list that could plausibly have this effect. How did you get from here to there?
I get that the attacks on Nonlinear have often been unfair. And maybe I lack context that makes this look worse. But I don't see any connection between "don't be a clout-chasing Instagram addict" and "joyless group where everyone is constantly judging everyone".
Part of it is that I don't think Kat can be fairly described as a clout-chasing Instagram addict at all. Part of it is noting that Ozy took a defense against claims of abuse and used it as a judgment on efficacy. Part of it is that the process around the Nonlinear affair, which Ozy very clearly sees as a net good, was clearly destructive and irresponsible by my standards, and upon writing my post I was flooded by requests from people wanting to share similar experiences or worries based on their experiences within the EA ecosystem.
The sum of it is that I think Ozy is motivated in part by a personal, visceral disgust (as described at the top of the post) that makes them willing to lean into whatever process successfully results in damaging the reputation of those they feel deserve to have their reputation damaged, and in that same spirit half-seriously proposes digging up and exposing dirt on everyone who has dirt. That is not the sort of thing that suggests a trustworthy culture to me, but a petty, vindictive one. It is in service of high ideals, but "tearing people down in service of high ideals" describes most vindictive cultures. Looking for the worst in people, then actively excluding them, should--to the extent it is necessary at all--be handled with a sort of care, seriousness, and respect Ozy entirely elides. There is a tremendous missing mood in their sentiment.
That would make perfect sense as a response to their other post, but it seems a little off-topic on this one. Because it doesn't seem like you actually object to most of the opinions expressed on this post, even though you think it's inappropriate for these opinions to be involved when the court of public opinion is making judgments.
Going by what I've seen you write, I could see you expressing sentiments very similar to the first three points of this four-point post. The second one is pretty close to what you're saying right now. And the third point has a lot in common with your earlier criticism of how the callout was handled. The only real disagreement seems to be the last point, about radical transparency.
Since we're discussing personal biases, I should probably declare my own. My perspective on this is probably coloured by the fact that I'm not sure there should be an EA community at all. For me EA is a great approach to charitable evaluation and that's about it. I've always been a bit puzzled by people forming friend groups around it.
In terms of the specific points, you're not wrong (beyond my quibbles here: https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1748132837801267307?s=20).
I think groups naturally become communities and benefit from being communities, though in the case of EA in specific I would advise them to name the community something different to the approach to charitable evaluation. People like spending time around others whose values align with theirs, and EA people find a lot of common ground as far as values go. It is also natural, as they try to persuade people to align with those values, that those who come to similar conclusions begin to cluster together. All of that is both natural and good.
When that happens, though, the groups begin to have duties to their members. I think EA is in an awkward spot, trapped between decentralizing and centralizing urges, at once a community and a method of evaluating charities, and that inasmuch as it is a community Ozy's approach is likely to damage it. Inasmuch as it is simply a method for evaluating charities, none of the benefits Ozy mentions are particularly relevant, as all of them are inherently community-connected. Even there, though, someone will ultimately be the judge, and their inclusion and exclusion criteria will make or break careers. There's a serious responsibility inherent in that.
Makes sense.
But I don't think it's actually hypocritical of Ozy to support organizational inner circles while opposing social ones. It may be impossible to get one without the other, but I think it's a reasonable thing to want.
I think Ozy is mostly in denial about social inner circles, claiming that they neither should not do exist while unquestionably being part of them. Their linked article in that regard contains some interesting sub-points, but its central thesis, I think, is kinda bad. Partially by happenstance, partially due to committed work, they know, on a social level, a lot of wildly interesting people with deep ties to the EA movement. That they don't want that social comfort to impact funding opportunities and the like is commendable, but there is always going to be value in proximity to interesting and powerful people, in a mostly neutral way.
I'm also increasingly part of my own social inner circles, partially due to committed work, partially due to happenstance, at least one of which my friends and I built from the ground up into something meaningful. It didn't used to be this way, and both the work and the happenstance were important. I gain real, concrete benefits from them and am happy to be in them. I think those circles will always exist and should exist, and interested parties should broadly seek to join or build them through that same combination of work and happenstance. Denying that they exist and provide real benefits is a disservice to those early in their careers or who notice their own lack of ties, reassuring them that everyone's in roughly the same boat when they simply aren't.
I think Ozy wants to keep the organizational inner circle - which has, and inevitably will have, social elements - elite, while also having strong egalitarian values that create discomfort with elitism. Further, I think they perceive Nonlinear as trying to foster elitism, while Nonlinear perceives itself as working to open meaningful doors for people with good ideas who don't have the same social connections Ozy does, and if asked would probably share Ozy's discomfort with elitism. I do think there's a hypocrisy there, albeit an unconscious one.
Well said! I think I basically agree on all counts.
Something about Kat Wood's Facebook post(s) always rubbed me the wrong way...
I think you captured it -- it's the implication that this is part of virtuous and altruistic work. It's clearly not. It's fine for people to enjoy traveling, vacations, and other luxuries.. but implying this sort of lifestyle is part and parcel of the Effective Altruism movement is messed up on a number of levels.
... I can imagine an counter argument that the lure of that sort of lifestyle could get more people to work in EA, resulting in a net benefit? But more people doing it increases the surface area for it to leak out to EA's critics...harming EA's reptuation.. So I don't find that argument compelling. People care a lot about people's intentions, especially when those people are claiming to be more virtuous and ethical.
Thanks for the post. As someone considering if and how to start contributing to EA, the last post made me concerned. I tried writing out a comment that was basically going to ask you if points 1 and 2 are normal for EA organizations, because of so, I'm not interested. You addressed my concerns perfectly
Once again, I appreciate your clearly expressed insights into the nature of Nonlinear. Words and actions do matter, and the treatment of employees/fellow workers ought to be scrutinised. The values attributable to anyone attaching themselves to Effective Altruism must meet with the standards implied by the very words 'effective' and 'altruism'. Thank you for the intelligence and compassion you bring to bear through your examination of Nonlinear's words and deeds, along with their consequences.
Strongly agree with this.
I hope every EA would “mmm” and snap to this.
There’s something to be said for marginal EA, e.g. that you might as well do something good while yachting, if you’re going to yacht regardless. But I worry we’ve become too blasé about giving EA kudos to people doing more than they have to, but far less than they could. Those people deserve some credit! But kudos are a resource we can allocate in order to result in more good being done, just like money. We should try to spend them optimally.
Also, “marginal EA” is arguably just regular charity.