I'm confused by this post. Sam Altman isn't an EA, afaik, and hasn't claimed to be, afaik, and afaik no relatively in-the-know EAs thought he was, or even in recent years thought he was particularly trustworthy, though I'd agree that many have updated negative over the last year or two.

But a substantial number of EAs spent the next couple of weeks or months making excuses not to call a spade a spade, or an amoral serial liar an amoral serial liar. This continued even after we knew he'd A) committed massive fraud, B) used that money to buy himself a $222 million house, and C) referred to ethics as a "dumb reputation game" in an interview with Kelsey Piper.

This wasn't because they thought the fraud was good; everyone was clear that SBF was very bad. It's because a surprisingly big number of people can't identify a psychopath. I'd like to offer a lesson on how to tell. If someone walks up to you and says "I'm a psychopath", they're probably a psychopath.

Very few EAs that I know did that (I'd like to see stats, of the dozens of EAs I know, none publicly/to my knowledge did such a thing except if I remember right Austin Chen in an article I now can't find). And for people who did defend Sam, I don't know why you'd assume that the issue is them not being able to identify psychopaths, as opposed to being confused about the crimes SBF committed and believing they were the result of a misunderstanding or something like that

I think the Ibrahim Prize was created partly to "bribe" (incentivize) heads of state in Africa into being good leaders and respecting term limits. Iirc it's the biggest prize for an individual in the world

sounds like it's also below Zurich minimum wage (not totally sure if that minimum wage is currently in effect or not) and similar to the London "living wage" (which isn't a required thing)

I currently work at a large EA-ish org that allows me to fully expense EAG travel and I (like some of the other commenters) am pretty strongly in the "prefer hub" camp. Like lots of EAs, I try to intensely optimize my time, and I'd prefer to optimize for work and play separately (so I would prefer to focus on work when going to EAGs, then separately take vacations optimized for being fun for me, e.g. by being in a place that's a great fit for me and my primary partner). I am happy to travel occasionally if there's a strong impact justification, but don't want CEA trying to influence me to do travel for fun at a location and time it picks. In my experience, EAs in general are more intense about their time and possibly less into travel than most people in academia. 

Even if you assume everyone would go, I don't think it's a clear win. I think a lot of professionals in the space place a lot of value on an hour of their labor; if they value it at $100/hour (i.e. equivalent to $200k/year in donations), and you make them travel e.g. 12 hours roundtrip to get to a conference location, and that affects 300 attendees who would otherwise have had reasonable in-city daily commutes, that's $360k-equivalent added (though in reality I agree many just wouldn't go, and some would also do the vacation thing so this would funge against hours they'd spend traveling for vacation anyway). Then additionally, you have EA orgs paying the travel costs themselves, which maybe looks better for CEA but is the same to EA funders (though maybe some people can also expense it to non-EA orgs?). If the orgs are paying $1000 per person (let's say $400 on travel, $450 for 3 nights of hotel rooms at $150/night, the rest for meals and other incidental expenses) and 300 more people need to travel than otherwise would if the EAG were in a hub area, that's another $300k.

Also, CEA staff probably benefit from specialist knowledge of cities they often run EAGs in, so either they are stuck in the same non-hub city repeatedly, or they probably suffer costs of trying to run conferences in cities they aren't used to. 

It'd be partly counterbalanced, in addition to being less expensive to CEA, by being less expensive for the people that would need to travel either way (lower hotel and meal costs in lower cost-of-living cities), to get to the EAG, so I don't think it's an obvious call.

I strongly disagree with this. I've dated ~ 10 people in my life. I have also been sexually assaulted (not by someone in the community). I would quickly and without hesitation take a trade to experience 1 rape like the one I experienced (non-violent) in return to keep any of my happy relationships I've had in my life (about half of which I think wouldn't have formed absent what the author is calling "sleeping around"). For my best relationship (which initially formed via "sleeping around" and I don't think could easily have done so otherwise, and is now the love of my life), I would trade dozens of rape, easily, for the joy and love my partner brings me. 

For sexual harassment, the ratio is even more skewed (obviously). Maybe I'm unusual, but this doesn't feel personally like a hard trade at all on the current margin. 

Why is this not listed as a 'Community' post? (And thereby blocked by default?) 

Sorry to the authors, it's not their faults presumably, I'm just tired of this insular/naval-gazing stuff, was excited to see this more out of my feed

Hi Maya, glad to hear that that was the outcome of your deeper dive. If you're comfortable, I think it might be good if you edited in a comment about this to your top-level post (and maybe that's what Constance meant?), because a lot of people read posts but then don't read the comments, and so they might not otherwise know you updated about this (very important-seeming, to me) question (like something like "Edit: after checking out some of the claims raised in the comments, I now think the situation was more like [whatever you think]") 

When will people hear back about their applications? I think if I were to do something like this, I'd want to plan it well in advance, so hear back soon

The weirdness Linch points at makes sense to me.  Other kinds reactions that channel enthusiasm that seem good to me 

"This is very cool, I'm excited other people also see promise in this work, and I can't wait to get started" 

"I'm honored by the trust that's been placed in me, I take it seriously and will strive to live up to it" 

Or/and you could just generally thank everyone in EA who seems to be doing important jobs well

[Edit: this whole comment makes less sense after Julia's edits. Thanks for helping out with my questions, Julia.]

I'm not trying to be oblivious or facetious, but I don't really understand what it means when Julia and other people say "it's okay to leave EA" or "it's fine to leave if you need to" or conversely for someone else to say, perhaps to themselves "it's not okay to leave EA".  It doesn't feel... concrete enough? For me to make sense of. I want to taboo the words "fine" and "okay" to try to understand better. 

Sometimes EA is hard for me and I want to leave and I'm like "is it fine? Is it okay?" And like, damn,  that seems like a really hard question. 

I directionally agree with "My guess is that if you feel like you’re drowning, you need to disrupt something about your circumstances, and you’ll eventually be more able to do good work (in EA or outside EA) than if you’d continue struggling in the same place.", especially if people have felt like they're drowning for months instead of e.g. hours.

Some things people could interpret this post as meaning:

• Julia thinks you shouldn't feel bad about yourself if you leave EA (because it wouldn't be healthy or productive). (Idk if this is true, I feel like the fact that I'd be disappointed in myself if I didn't do EA stuff drives me to do actually valuable EA stuff, do we know that self-punishment is always eventually counterproductive?)
• Julia Wise won't hate you if you leave EA (probably true)
• Julia Wise wants to send care and warm feelings towards EAs who leave and EAs who are struggling (probably true)
• Julia Wise thinks that in general, people who want to leave EA probably feel more negative about having that desire than is healthy? Useful? Productive?
• Julia Wise claims no one will resent you leaving EA if you want to (probably false)
• Julia Wise thinks EA will be better off if it has a culture of not resenting people who leave EA (probably?)
• It's guaranteed to not be true that if you leave EA, some sentient beings have a horrible time instead of a good time (probably false)
• In expectation, more sentient beings will have a good time instead of a horrible time, if you leave EA contingent on you wanting to leave EA (?? sounds like Julia agrees it's unclear)