Questions for The Truman Prize

Good prize with some questionable examples

The organization Superlinear has recently announced a $5,000-$10,000 prize, the Truman Prize, for valuable work which can’t be publicized directly. I applaud anyone who’s trying something new. I’m excited about the cool people they have on the prize committee. A lot of valuable work in biosecurity, policy, and other areas is work that you can’t ever tell anyone you did. The money is nice, but even nicer is that there’s a legible way to go “these cool people think you’re cool, and probably if you could tell people what you did lots of people would think you were cool.”

However, some of the examples given on the website of potentially Truman-Prize-winning work trouble me.

Max has a criminal record and troubled past. He’s reformed now, but his background makes him a liability for any person or org to publicly associate with him. He silently does good work behind the scenes, so someone that knows him nominates him for The Truman Prize on the basis of a specific critical contribution which was made to a now successful larger project. The committee awards the prize…

Person A has recurring depression. Therefore, he does not want to work or associate with any specific people or orgs because he doesn’t want to let them down due to an episode. Person A does a lot of high impact work for free, and gives credit to others who are better placed to continue executing on the project. Someone nominates him for the Truman Prize on the basis of two specific projects that were done without credit. The committee members award the money and names the individual and the project.

In general, I find the “people or orgs” phrase troubling. Certainly an organization might not want to hire someone with a criminal record or a recurring depressive episode. There are far fewer organizations than people, and most of them have a high threshold for hiring. But it seems very unlikely to me that no person could reasonably accept the risk of being let down by someone they’re working with, or of publicly associating with someone with a criminal record. I, for one, would happily publicly associate with someone with a criminal record; if someone would judge me for this I don’t care to be their friend. I’m certain I’m not alone.

The Person A and Max cases are different, and I will take them one at a time.

I think that the appropriate response to Person A refusing to take credit for their work is for people to say, gently but firmly, that they deserve credit. It should not be for Person A to get a prize for their scrupulous behavior.

Credit is free. It takes ten seconds to type “thanks for Person A for help with research and their detailed feedback!” at the end of an Effective Altruism Forum post. It only takes a few more seconds, and some social awareness, for the founder of an organization to say when appropriate “Person A helped a lot early on, but then they had to leave for personal reasons.” Ethically, you should not fail to credit a person for their work solely because they have a mental illness.

Even setting aside matters of ethics, what happens if Person A finds an antidepressant that works, or graduates from therapy with a really good therapist, or changes life situations to a less depressing one? It’s hard to get a job when your resume is patchy because you’re mentally ill. I can’t imagine how hard it would be if you had spent years failing to take credit for the work you actually did. Organizations would mistakenly fail to hire a very talented and newly reliable person.

I worry that this example tells people who have difficulty working because of their mental illness that they shouldn’t take credit for the work they can do.

Max’s case is more complicated. Certainly, there are any number of organizations which would discriminate against people with a criminal record for reputational reasons or because they’re not certain that the person has really reformed.

We don’t know whether Max is a shoplifter or a serial killer, and the appropriate response to these is different. I would, in general, advise organizations to not hire serial killers; perhaps this award would be appropriate for any altruism-minded serial killers in the world.¹ But if Max has committed a more ordinary sort of crime-- burglary or drug dealing or sex work or breaking someone's nose in a fistfight while drunk-- and if he has genuinely stopped committing crimes, it seems very implausible to me that there are no organizations that could reasonably hire him. Nearly all organizations have jobs that don't involve talking to the public. A random technical AI safety researcher or ops person is not a public figure. Sure, someone could go "Look! Anthropic has a former burglar on staff! Don't trust them!" but those people are... kind of insane? Do we want to give in to them? Is the precedent we want to set that effective altruist organizations shouldn't hire the most qualified people who will do the best things for the world because someone on Twitter might hypothetically get mad about it?

I worry that this sentiment is a reflection of classism. Lower-class people are far more likely to be arrested than middle-class or upper-class people. It is difficult for many middle-class or upper-class people to understand what drives people to commit crimes: our schools didn’t have gangs; we’ve never had to steal or do illegal sex work in order to pay the water bill. We’re also less criminalized. The police don’t care if we snort cocaine, and if we do a little light embezzlement or tax fraud we’re probably going to get a slap on the wrist. A lot of crimes are, basically, someone in their early twenties being stupid. If you’re middle-class or above and you’re a stupid twentysomething, there’s a safety net. If you’re lower-class and you’re stupid, all too often, you carry a black mark for the rest of your life. And instead of sympathy and understanding that others are less fortunate than them, many middle-class and upper-class people have an instinctive feeling of revulsion about people with criminal records.

Effective altruism already disproportionately draws from the upper middle class and upper class. I worry that assuming that, of course, no one would want to publicly associate with someone with a criminal record is alienating to lower-class people—even ones without a criminal record. For many people, that’s talking about your family member, your friend, someone you went to high school with. It sounds tonedeaf. It sounds like a place that isn’t for people like you.

Again, I don’t mean to criticize the prize in general! It seems like an excellent prize. But I think it would do better without those specific examples.

1. Although maybe Serial Killer Max would be best-advised to use his platform to do advocacy from prison? Maybe ask an 80,000 Hours career coach about this.