NunoSempere
Bio
I run Sentinel, a team that seeks to anticipate and respond to large-scale risks. You can read our weekly minutes here. I like to spend my time acquiring deeper models of the world, and generally becoming more formidable. I'm also a fairly good forecaster: I started out on predicting on Good Judgment Open and CSET-Foretell, but now do most of my forecasting through Samotsvety, of which Scott Alexander writes:
Enter Samotsvety Forecasts. This is a team of some of the best superforecasters in the world. They won the CSET-Foretell forecasting competition by an absolutely obscene margin, “around twice as good as the next-best team in terms of the relative Brier score”. If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”.
I used to post prolifically on the EA Forum, but nowadays, I post my research and thoughts at nunosempere.com / nunosempere.com/blog rather than on this forum, because:
- I disagree with the EA Forum's moderation policy—they've banned a few disagreeable people whom I like, and I think they're generally a bit too censorious for my liking.
- The Forum website has become more annoying to me over time: more cluttered and more pushy in terms of curated and pinned posts (I've partially mitigated this by writing my own minimalistic frontend)
- The above two issues have made me take notice that the EA Forum is beyond my control, and it feels like a dumb move to host my research in a platform that has goals different from my own.
But a good fraction of my past research is still available here on the EA Forum. I'm particularly fond of my series on Estimating Value.
My career has been as follows:
- Before Sentinel, I set up my own niche consultancy, Shapley Maximizers. This was very profitable, and I used the profits to bootstrap Sentinel. I am winding this down, but if you have need of estimation services for big decisions, you can still reach out.
- I used to do research around longtermism, forecasting and quantification, as well as some programming, at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI). At QURI, I programmed Metaforecast.org, a search tool which aggregates predictions from many different platforms—a more up to date alternative might be adj.news. I spent some time in the Bahamas as part of the FTX EA Fellowship, and did a bunch of work for the FTX Foundation, which then went to waste when it evaporated.
- I write a Forecasting Newsletter which gathered a few thousand subscribers; I previously abandoned but have recently restarted it. I used to really enjoy winning bets against people too confident in their beliefs, but I try to do this in structured prediction markets, because betting against normal people started to feel like taking candy from a baby.
- Previously, I was a Future of Humanity Institute 2020 Summer Research Fellow, and then worked on a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to do "independent research on forecasting and optimal paths to improve the long-term."
- Before that, I studied Maths and Philosophy, dropped out in exasperation at the inefficiency, picked up some development economics; helped implement the European Summer Program on Rationality during 2017, 2018 2019, 2020 and 2022; worked as a contractor for various forecasting and programming projects; volunteered for various Effective Altruism organizations, and carried out many independent research projects. In a past life, I also wrote a popular Spanish literature blog, and remain keenly interested in Spanish poetry.
You can share feedback anonymously with me here.
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Posts 104
Comments1196
Topic contributions14
Here are some caveats/counterpoints:
- EA/OP does give large amounts of resources to areas that others find hard to care about, in a way which does seem more earnest & well-meaning than many other people in society
- The alternative framework in which to operate is probably capitalism, which is also not perfectly aligned with human values either.
- There is no evil mustache twirling mastermind. To the extent these dynamics arise, they do so out of some reasonably understandable constraints, like having a tight-knit group of people
- In general it's just pretty harsh to just write a list of negative things about someone/some group
- It's much easier to point out flaws than to operate in the world
- There are many things to do in the world, and limited competent operators to throw at problems. Some areas will just see less love & talent directed to them. There is some meta-prioritization going on in a way which broadly does seem kind of reasonable.
The EA forum has tags. The one for criticisms of effective altruism is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-effective-altruism
Beyond that, here are some criticisms I've heard or made. Hope it helps:
Preliminaries:
- EA is both a philosophy and a social movement/group of existing people. Defenders tend to defend the philosophy and in particular the global health part, which is more unambiguously good. However, many of the more interesting things happen on the more speculative parts of the movement.
- A large chunk of non-global health EA or EA-adjacent giving is controlled by Open Philanthropy. Alternatively, there needs to be a name for "the community around Open Philanthropy and its grantees" so that people can model it. Hopefully this sidesteps some definitional counterarguments.
Criticism outlines:
- Open Philanthropy has created a class of grants officers who, by dint of having very high salaries, are invested in Open Philanthropy retaining its current giving structure.
- EA seduces some people into believing that they would be cherished members, but then leaves them unable to find jobs and in a worse position that they otherwise would have been if they had built their career capital elsewhere. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BEecjksNZNHQmdyM/don-t-be-bycatch
- EA the community is much more of a pre-existing clique and mutual admiration society than its emphasis on the philosophy when presenting itself would indicate. This is essentially deceptive, as it leads prospective members, particularly neurodivergent ones, to have incorrect expectations. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BEecjksNZNHQmdyM/don-t-be-bycatch
- It's amusing that the Center for Effective Altruism has taken a bunch of the energy of the EA movement, but itself doesn't seem to be particularly effective cf. https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/10/15/ea-forum-stewardship/
- EA has tried to optimize movement building naïvely, but focus on metrics has led it to focus on the most cost-effective interventions for the wrong thing, in a way which is self-defeating cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xomFCNXwNBeXtLq53/bad-omens-in-current-community-building
- Worldview diversification is an ugly prioritization framework that generally doesn't follow from the mathematical structure of anything but rather from political gerrymandering cf. https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/25/worldview-diversification/
- Leadership strongly endorsed FTX, which upended many plans from the rank and file after it turned out to be a fraud and its promised funding was recalled
- EA has a narrative about how it searches for the best interventions using tools like cost-effectiveness analyses. But for speculative interventions, you need a lot of elbow grease, judgment calls. You have a lot of degrees of freedom. This amplies/enables clique dynamics.
- Leaders have been somewhat hypocritical around optimizing strongly, with a "do what I say not what I do" attitude towards deontological constraints. cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5o3vttALksQQQiqkv/consequentialists-in-society-should-self-modify-to-have-side
- The community health team lacks many of the good qualities of a (US) court, such as the division of powers between judge, jury and executioner, or the possibility to confront one's accuser, or even know what one has been accused of. It is not resilient to adversarial manipulation, and priviledges the first party when both have strong emotions.
- EA/OP doesn't really know how to handle the effects of throwing large amounts of money on people's beliefs. Throwing money at a particular set of beliefs makes it gain more advocates and harder to update away from it. Selection effects will apply at many levels. cf. https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/23/my-highly-personal-skepticism-braindump-on-existential-risk/
- EA is trapped in a narrow conceptual toolkit, which makes critics very hard to understand/slightly schizophrenic once they step away from that toolkit. cf. Milan Griffes
Finally, for global health, something which keeps me up at night is the possiblity that subsaharan Africa is trapped in a malthusian equilibrium, where further aid only increases the population which increases suffering.
The previous version of this post had a comment from Julia Wise outlining some of her past mistakes, as well as a reply from Alexey Guzey (now deleted, but you can see some of the same contents below the table of contents here). You can also see comments from Julia here and here reflecting on her handling of complaints against Owen Cotton-Baratt. I think these are all informative in terms of predicting that sometimes the people pointed at in this post can fail as well.
I thought it would be interesting to add uncertainty. If you have
20K 40K # Mean annual salary 2025 pledgers
* 0.1 # 10% given
* beta 1 4 # counterfactual adjustment. Differs from post
* beta 5 5 # effectiveness adjustment
* 5 20 # discounted living lifespan
* 1.1 2 # reporting adjustment
* 800 2K # expected number of pledgers
* 1.2 1.5 # adjustment for largest donors
* beta 2 8 # more adjustments (the product of rows 27:37 is 0.18)
/ 209K # cost of GWWC
The result is a giving multiplier of 0.2 to 30.
To me the key parameter is the counterfactuality of these donations. Your current number is 50%, but not super sure if you are accounting for people being less able to do ambitious things because they have fewer savings.
To some extent you may also want to account for adjustments you haven't thought of generally
Seems like a cry for help. In particular, instead of "isolating [yourself] from all sources of misaligned social motivation" you might be ''isolating yourself from all ways of realizing that you are falsifying your own preferences''.
It also seems dumb because it's not a particularly corrigible action.
Do you have people you can reach out though? Reading through your forum posts some of the projects you have are cool. Any collaborators which you can reach out to? Or are you already pretty isolated?
For a while, I've been thinking about the following problem: as you get better models of the world/ability to get better models of the world, you start noticing things that are inconvenient for others. Some of those inconvenient truths can break coordination games people are playing, and leave them with worse alternatives.
Some examples:
- The reason why organization X is doing weird things is because their director is weirdly incompetent
- XYZ is explained by people jockeying for influence inside some organization
- Y is the case but would be super inconvenient to the ideology du jour
- Z is the case, but our major funder is committed to believing that this is not the case
- E.g., AI is important, but a big funder thinks that it will be important in a different way and there is no bandwidth to communicate.
- Jobs in some area are very well paid, which creates incentives for people to justify that area
- Someone builds their identity on a linchpin which is ultimately false ("my pet area is important")
- "If I stopped believing in [my religion] my wife would leave me"—true story.
- Such and such a cluster of people systematically overestimate how altruistic they are, which has a bunch of bad effects for themselves and others when they interact with organizations focused on effectiveness
Poetically, if you stare into the abyss, the abyss then later stares at others through your eyes, and people don't like that.
I don't really have many conclusions here. So far when I notice a situation like the above I tend to just leave, but this doesn't seem like a great solution, or like a solution at all sometimes. I'm wondering whether you've thought about this, about whether and how some parts of what EA does are premised on things that are false.
Perhaps relatedly or perhaps as a non-sequitur, I'm also curious about what changed since your post a year ago talking about how EA doesn't bring out the best in you.
Seems like a pretty niche worry, I wouldn't read too much into it not being discussed much. It's just that if true it does provide a reason to discount global health and development deeply.