Academic freedom is not and has never been meant to protect professors on topics that have no relevance to their discipline: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment."

If, say, a philosophy professor wants to express opinions on infanticide, that is covered under academic freedom. If they want to encourage students to drink bleach, saying it is good for their health, that is not covered.

We can and should have a strong standard of academic freedom for relevant, on-topic contributions. But race science is off topic and irrelevant to EA. It's closer to spam. Should the forum have no spam filter and rely on community members to downvote posts as the method of spam control?

A clear example of a post that would be banned under the rules: why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die.

Reducing chronic health risks from indoor air pollution (mostly PM 2.5) generally entails different strategies than reducing infection risk from aerosols. Filtration can address both, but the airflow rates and costs can be quite different. UVC won't do anything about PM 2.5, and may contribute to it with ozone formation.

I recommend reading the supporting literature and history behind ASHRAE Std 62.1 and Std 241, which cover ventilation and control for infectious diseases in buildings. There are also several recent studies by the National Academies on air pollution and infectious aerosols. The indoor air and infectious disease communities are quite large - with their own funding sources and conferences. It seems a lot of the "gaps" presented here are not unknown to experts, but just to the EA community and amateur researchers.

Meta level question:

How does Manifest have anything to do with Effective Altruism, and why is this on the EA forum?

Shouldn't this post be on some other other channel internal to Manifest and the forecasting community?

It get there are some people that went to Manifest that are also in the EA movement, but it seems like the communities are quite distinct and have different goals. From comments and conversations, it seems pretty clear to me that this Manifest community has a strong hostility towards even considering the reputational risks platforming racist speakers has on the rest of the EA movement. Part of being a big tent movement means caring about not stinking up the tent for everyone else.

Let's please firewall the Manifest community from EA?

I think that longtermism relies on more popular, evidenced-based causes like global health and animal welfare to do its reputational laundering through the EA label. I don't see any benefit to global health and animal welfare causes from longtermism. And for that reason I think it would be better for the movement to split into "effective altruism" and "speculative altruism" so the more robust global health and animal welfare causes areas don't have to suffer the reputational risk and criticism that is almost entirely directed at the longtermism wing.

Given the movement is essentially driven by Open Philanthropy, and they aren't going to split, I don't see such a large movement split happening. So I may be inclined towards some version of, as you say, "Stop doing stuff that looks weird, even if it is perfectly defensible by longtermist lights, simply because I have neartermist values and disagree with it." The longtermist stuff is maybe like 20% of funding and 80% of reputational risk, and the most important longtermist concerns can be handled without the really weird speculative stuff.

But that's irrelevant, because I think this ought to be a pretty clear case of the grant not being defensible by longtermist standards. Paying bay area software development salaries to develop a video game (why not a cheap developer literally anywhere else?) that didn't even get published is hardly defensible. I get that the whole purpose of the fund is to do "hits based giving". But it's created an environment where nothing can be a mistake, because it is expected most things would fail. And if nothing is a mistake, how can the fund learn from mistakes?

A butterfly flaps its wings and causes a devastating hurricane to form in the tropics. Therefore, we must exterminate butterflies, because there is some small probability X that doing so will avert hurricane disaster.

But it is just as easily the case that the butterfly flaps prevent devastating hurricanes from forming. Therefore we must massively grown their population.

The point being, it can be practically impossible to understand the casual tree and get even the sign right around low probability events.

That's what I take issue with - it's not just the numbers, it's the structural uncertainty of cause and effect chains when you consider really low probability events. Expected value is a pretty bad tool for action relevant decision making when you are dealing with such numerical and structural uncertainty. It's perhaps better to pick a framework like "it's robust under multiple decision theories" or "pick something that has the least downside risk".

In our instance, two competing plausible structural theories among many are something like: "game teaches someone an AI safety concept -> makes them more knowledgeable or inspire them to take action -> they work on AI safety -> solve alignment problem -> future saved" vs. "people get interested in doing the most good -> sees community of people that claim to do that, but that they fund rich people to make video games -> causes widespread distrust of the movement -> strong social stigma developed against people that care about AI risk -> greatly narrowed range of people / worldviews because people don't want to associate -> makes it near impossible to solve alignment problem -> future destroyed"

The justifications for these grants tend to use some simple expected value calculation of a singular rosy hypothetical casual chain. The problem is it's possible to construct a hypothetical value chain to justify any sort of grant. So you have to do more than just make a rosy casual chain and multiply numbers through. I've commented before on some pretty bad ones that don't pass the laugh test among domain experts in the climate and air quality space.

The key lesson from early EA (evidenced based giving in global health) was that it is really hard to understand if the thing you are doing is having an impact, and what the valence of the impact is, for even short, measurable casual chains. EA's popular causes now (longtermism) seem to jettison that lesson, when it is even more unclear what the impact and sign is through complicated low probability casual chains.

So it's about a lot more than effect sizes.

I do think there are things worth funding for which evidence doesn't exist. The initial RNA vaccine research relied on good judgement around a hypothetical, and had a hard time getting funding for lack of evidence. It ended up being critical to saving millions of lives.

I think there are more ways some sort of evidence can be included in grant making. But the core of the criticism is about judgement, and I think a $100k grant for 6 months of video game developers time, or $50k grants to university student group organizers represent poor judgement (EAIF and LTFF grants). These grants have caused reputational harm to the movement, and that should have been easy to foresee. What has been the hit to fundraising for EA global health and animal welfare causes from the fallout from bad longtermism bets (FTX/SBF included)?

On the rationalization. Perhaps it isn't a post-hoc rationalization, more of an excuse. It is saying "the funding bar was low, but we still think the expected value of the video game is more important than 25 lives". That's pretty crass. And probably worse than just the $100k counterfactual because of reputational spillover to other causes.

The post-hoc rationalization is referring to the "Note that this grant was made at the very peak of the period of very abundant (partially FTX-driven) EA funding where finding good funding opportunities was extremely hard."

If it wasn't a good opportunity, why was it funded?

Why does "infrastructure" and longtermist funding rely so heavily on pascal-mugging with evidence-free hypotheticals?

I can easily craft a hypothetical in the other direction on the video game. Perhaps funding such a game reinforces the impression that EA is a self-serving cult (as Steven Pinker does), causing more people to distance themselves from any longtermist ideas. It certainly has done so with me. Wasn't accounting for negative impacts the point of your recent post on the messiness of bring hypotheticals into the real world?

"I was a fan of Effective Altruism (almost taught a course on it at Harvard) together w other rational efforts (evidence-based medicine, data-driven policing, randomista econ). But it became cultish. Happy to donate to save the most lives in Africa, but not to pay techies to fret about AI turning us into paperclips. Still support the idea; hope they extricate themselves from this rut." - Steven Pinker

I think the pile-on of post-hoc rationalizations trying to defend or excuse this grant is evidence of the rot in EA in captured in Steven Pinker's comment. People are earnestly defending the idea that $100k on a bay area software salary for a speculative video game is worthy of the EA label. Can we at least all agree that this money would have been better spent by GiveWell?

Why is it so hard to say that the grant was a mistake not only in hindsight, but at the time it was made?

"A cost-effectiveness of decreasing GHG emissions of 3.41 tCO2eq/$, with a plausible range of 0.182 to 31.4 tCO2eq/$."

This is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.

It is based on an assumption that CATF nuclear advocacy will result in cheap enough reactors to replace coal in thermal electric power production. That is not credible now, and it wasn't at the time when the BOTEC was made. Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that. Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%. I made a copy of the sheet when it came out to capture any changes or alterations - my copy has some cells labeled that are missing in yours.

The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions. I see it as even odds whether CATF nuclear advocacy increases or reduces emissions in expectation. But extremely likely (>95%) that CATF's nuclear program was a total waste of philanthropic dollars.

The lesson is to be careful with BOTECs - use probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.

Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.