Performance gains wouldn’t be that large as enterprise SSDs already have internal capacitors to flush pending writes to NAND.
During typical usage the flash controller is constantly journaling LBA to physical addresses in the background, so that the entire logical to physical table isn’t lost when the drive loses power. With a larger capacitor you could potentially remove this background process and instead flush the entire logical to physical table when the drive registers power loss. But as this area makes up ~2% of the total NAND, that’s at absolute best a 2% performance benefit we are potentially missing out on.
> EA is diffuse and deliberately amorphous; anybody who wants to can call themselves an EA... But with no official leadership structure, no roster of who is and isn’t in the movement, and no formal process for dealing with complaints, Wise argues, it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society.
Moral of the story: be weary of groups with low accountability and vague power structures. In a vacuum, power structures will always emerge, so it's generally better for them to exist in the light than in the dark.
I think it's bizarre EA seems to be a movement with power structures. I always just thought EA was a philosophy and based on that I felt it was an interesting idea. I don't have to worry about sexual harassment when I'm considering Plato or Stoicism. Why is it a thing with EA?
Many industry events have had problems with sexual harassment. Young people living together in group houses (for example, fraternities) often have problems too.
So the problem in this case seems to be for young people who want to connect at in-person events. If you never go to events, don't want an EA job, and don't want to live with other EA people, then I don't think you can be affected?
So I'm not sure it's a problem with the movement as a philosophy, as with holding lots of loosely moderated events, having parties, having group houses, and so on. That is, this pretty intense socializing seems high risk for this sort of thing.
What other institution does this remind me of? College. College sex scandals tend not to make the philosophy department look bad unless a teacher is involved, but that certainly happens.
> holding lots of loosely moderated events, having parties, having group houses, and so on.
Ah. I wonder if the nub of this is group houses?
I can't tell whether the abuse phenomenon is characteristic of EA, or of San Francisco. I understand housing in SF is absurdly expensive, even for well-paid people, so perhaps group houses are more prevalent in SF. Is abuse more common in EA-affiliated group houses in other parts of the country?
My supposition is that abuse is more likely in a group house, whether it's connected with EA or not; but I have no facts to back that up.
Something can both describe a philosophy and a movement. The movement always has hierarchies and power structures. The philosophy doesn't, but then again, it's often presented by the movement so the lines get blurry.
That might be true, but there isn't exactly an "Effective Altruism Foundation" that all the donations funnel through. You basically have a bunch of random people that are donating to charities that are well regarded, with a few philanthropists here and there setting up foundations. You might be able to hijack organizations like givewell (ie. organizations that tell people which charities they should donate to), but trying to monetize that is tricky. At the end of the day you don't really control anything, because you're still reliant on individuals following your advice. So if you try to funnel money to your own foundation (for embezzling purposes), you will easily burn any goodwill that you've built up.
The Centre for Effective Altruism has a turnover in the tens of millions. Surely there are people with greater and lesser decision making abilities within that institution?
>The Centre for Effective Altruism has a turnover in the tens of millions
Google says that their annual budget is $6M, so I think you're overestimating how much money can be siphoned off. Moreover, given how trendy effective altruism is with young professionals from elite universities, getting a high position will be difficult. Sure, an ivy league graduate could fight tooth and nail to get a position at the CEA that pays a meager base salary and hope to siphon off some extra money, but he can make much more money at a professional services firm or in finance. Better yet, he can get some high ranking position at some private company that has 10x turnover and doesn't have public scrutiny (because it's not a charity). That's not to say that everyone at CEA is behaving scrupulously. It's just that getting into effective altruism to embezzle money makes little economic sense.
I think the sums are higher when you consider additional one-off donations. CEA recently bought an estate at Wytham Abbey, which would almost certainly have cost more than their yearly budget. Apparently this was funded by a one-time donation by another EA organization. Similarly, the EA-adjacent ESPR bought a $5m chateau in the Czech Republic. These are major chunks of money to throw around, especially when you factor in maintenance costs, and I have no doubt that the ability to control access to these amazing facilities gives you a lot of influence in the community.
The castle was apparently bought by facebook founder dustin moskovitz. I certainly think the CEA is misguided, but there main purpose is basically having conventions/recruitment events and if they think they'll be spending considerable sums on convention space related to that mission I can see how it makes sense to just buy a property and hold all the events there.
My understanding is that the UK castle was funded by a directed donation from another EA organization that had close ties to CEA. As far as I know, Moscovitz did not direct that organization to buy a castle. Instead a group of tightly-connected colleagues/friends in two EA organizations made the determination, without any (public) cost/benefit analysis or buy-in from the community. This is the precisely the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in a community with large amounts of money and very little accountability, which is the allegation made higher in this thread.
ETA If I’m wrong and you can point me to a detailed cost/benefit analysis, I’ll gladly withdraw my criticism.
Dustin posts a lot on the ea meme Facebook group(no clue how he finds the time while being the ceo of asana) and admitted to being the buyer there. Could’ve been memeing, but he seemed serious.
I think CEA has made some poor choices, and SBFs future fund even more so. But if it’s true that the money used for this property was specifically earmarked for purchase of a property by a single donor as the forum post claims I can see how it makes sense. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...
I searched the link you provided for anything that claimed Dustin Moskovitz requested that purchase, but I didn't find it. I did however find this detailed explanation of the grant-making process [1] by Claire Zabel of Open Philanthropy, and it seems pretty clear that the request to purchase Wytham Abbey came from Owen (Cotton-Barratt, I think?) of CEA (now known as Effective Ventures.)
Claire provides her justification for granting the funds to purchase the property, and it is not particularly compelling. (She even concludes that she would not have made the grant if she had a chance to do it over today.) There certainly doesn't appear to have been anything approaching due diligence about the cost-effectiveness of this particular purchase, which is really surprising given that effective use of resources is the core premise of EA.
To make things worse, the commenters point out that Claire Zabel is also on the board of Effective Ventures (formerly CEA), which makes this a much worse conflict of interest. It's hard to look at these organizations as anything more than a tightly-knit group of friends passing donor money around between them.
PS If CEA and OP are just fronts for Dustin Moscovitz, it's totally fine for them to spend money on whatever they want: as long as he's cool with it. I had the impression these organizations were part of a broader community promoting the principles of Effective Altruism as a movement, and the community would hold them to those principles. It is extremely difficult to look at the details of this episode and believe that's happening.
Open Phil is literally just Dustin’s foundation. He’s also one of the main funders of givewell’s research work and I am not a fan of how incestuous a lot of the orgs are.
The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogative.
The contention made (far!) up-thread was "When there is a lot of money moving around, it seems inevitable that power structures will form around it."
Then somebody else said that CEA's budget was only $6m, so how bad could things get? The Wytham Abbey example was brought up just to show how much more money CEA could tap into, through its connections with other EA orgs.
But from my perspective, the EA "castle adventure" is also an excellent illustration of those power structures. Here we see a small number of people (friends, colleagues, fellow board members) take control of core EA institutions (using enormous flows of donor cash) with very little pushback from the community. And worse, they are using this money for purposes that are completely at odds with the stated principles of the EA movement.
As an outsider, if a few people with access to cash are so easily able to capture the most prominent orgs in the EA movement and make them ineffective, then that's pretty terrible for EA as a brand. This doesn't mean I'm opposed to the broader concept of "giving money effectively", but I'm definitely going to feel an aversion to anything that carries the EA label.
I see the conversation has gotten ahead of me, but the Wytham Abbey purchase is absolutely an example of my concerns. The justification wasn't much more than "I like going to conferences in big posh buildings and some other people I've talked to do as well".
Makes me think of Parkinson's law: "work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion" -- but this time, "money spent expands to match the amount of donations".
I wonder how to design an organization, where people don't do that. Seems it's hard.
Maybe new metrics: Money-not-spent, and Time-we-didn't-need-to-use. But can be easily gamed, hmm
The EA "philosophy" is strongly tied up in libertarian utilitarian ways of thinking, and such people are able to talk themselves into believing that it's rational to defer to people smarter/richer than themselves. They get money, intelligence and virtue all mixed up and confused with each other. Being intelligent gets you money, money buys virtue, those who are smartest will become richest and those who are richest will be able to buy the most virtue.
This is an aside, but although I agree that groups without formal power structures can hide real ones, I'm not sure explicit hierarchies are necessarily better. In my experience, they can be used to legitimize shadow hierarchies or corruption, which sometimes makes the problems worse. Those vague power structures exist with or without formal ones; when they coincide it's good, but when they don't, it can perpetuate or reinforce problems more than they might otherwise.
I'm not trying to defend anything about EA, though. It's always seemed somewhat suspicious to me, and there's probably a lot of ways in which it could be used as an example of phenomena that occur more broadly in society.
> In my experience, they can be used to legitimize shadow hierarchies or corruption, which sometimes makes the problems worse.
At least in your day-to-day formal hierarchies, those who are negatively affected by the shadow hierarchy don't have anything to lose by acknowledging that it is indeed a power structure. If Alice is the boss but Bob is the one really running all the things, none of Alice's employees are going to lose any sleep by acknowledging the truth of the situation.
But in communities that claim to be non-hierarchical, coming to terms with the existence of a shadow hierarchy could constitute an existential crisis. This isn't a logical necessity-- e.g., members could simply notice and just shrug it off. But most groups I've come into contact with that claim to be non-hierarchical assign great positive value to it, and they get defensive or squirrely about any attempts to uncover hidden power structures within.
> I'm not sure explicit hierarchies are necessarily better.
It's the explicitness that is the good part, not the hierarchy. The premise is that there will always be hierarchy; groups that profess to be non-hierarchical have a hidden hierarchy that is more pernicious.
So it's not like "Oh, this group has no hierarchy, so lets invent one and write it down", it's more "This group appears to have no hierarchy; so we need to do some digging, to expose the hierarchy".
If you join a non-hierarchical group, it can take years to discover that it really does have a hierarchy, and more years to learn how it works. Hidden power is more dangerous than overt power.
I see that essay linked every six months or so, and I swear every time I read it, a new element of it rings true to me. Really timeless, invaluable writing on the way groups of humans work.
Something I'm curious about: why do you think that an excess of stimulants is societally damaging? For the past few years I'm of the opinion that these substances should be available to those who find them useful (maybe with a doctor check-in required for blood pressure and dosage regulation).
While the abuse potential for adderall has a stronger case, something like methylphenidate has a relatively low abuse potential and has been shown to be neuroprotective (unlike adderall which may be damaging long term). Requiring people to go through a semi-permeable ADHD screening and visit a doctor every 3 months for refills is unnecessary load on an already overburdened health care system (I'm in Canada).
Why are caffeine pills ubiquitous and accepted as a means to improve productivity, yet other stimulants are not? In my mind, this parallels the argument as to how alcohol is given a pass compared to other recreational drugs since it is already culturally accepted.
> why do you think that an excess of stimulants is societally damaging?
Because of their potential for addiction, and also we know that excessive usage of stimulants can have bad physical and psychological impacts.
You compared caffeine, well, that's not really comparable to stronger stimulants. Unless someone has committed murder five days into a No-Doze bender that I'm unaware of.
True, I suppose there are the "extreme" users of amphetamines which I haven't considered. Though I wonder if those who take megadoses of adderall are the same people who already are willing to consume methamphetamine or other street stims.
This isn't the same person as the student or office worker who prefers taking low dose methylphenidate to their usual two cups of coffee. If the drug was obtained illegally, many consider this to be misuse or abuse of the drug, and this is the caffeine/ADHD med cultural discrepancy I was pointing out.
So I suppose it is fair to ask: with the availably of black market stimulants, to what extent does restricting ADHD medication availability cut down on stimulant abuse?
Methylphenidate is often a fallback for methamphetamine users who can't hook up, but I agree it's ridiculous to expect constraining Ritalin supply will make them magically not addicted to meth.
I love this idea in theory, but recognize that you are moving the discussion from providing effective, safe, and equitable transportation towards solving homelessness.
Both issues are important, but in the context of this article one must ask, "what is best for the majority of public transit users?". It's certainly possible that a $2 rate improves quality or security meaningful ways.
The problem of "sketchy homeless and mentally ill people" is large enough that I personally prefer cycling over public transport when possible.
> I love this idea in theory, but recognize that you are moving the discussion from providing effective, safe, and equitable transportation towards solving homelessness.
Sure, but if the objection to "public transport should be free" is "then there will be a bunch of scary homeless people there" shouldn't be "let's charge enough so they can't ride the bus" it should be "hey let's fix that too!"
You would think, but obviously not happening. This quarter measure (enacted before prerequisites) makes it worse for the working poor. And anyone who is in favor of transit, tourists too, who are important for the economy.
I think the parent comment is referring the homeless population which is violent or too public in their drug use/paraphernalia.
Pick the right bus line in Vancouver. You will notice mentally ill, violent people, and it certainly discourages the public from using public transit. Now, will waiving a $2 fee change this meaningfully? Hard to day. But it's not helpful to ignore the problem.
The state has an interest in keeping its cities economically healthy, perhaps more than the city government itself which is focused on appeasing citizens with its delivery of police/recreation services. The state government can act more dynamically since it has a wider voter base to consider, including those who would like to live in the city but are pushed out.
The Valley must maintain some level of competitiveness with other city hubs, else the techxodus worsens and California loses a large portion of their economy and tax revenue. This is an existential threat to California, and the residents of the valley will lose out in the long run.
California was doing just fine when I was a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s. No doubt it’ll be doing just fine when the tech bros take their ball and go home.
There’s absolutely nothing in California that is essential for the tech industry but plenty to offer that turned it into an economic powerhouse before that time.
Pretty depressing that the only way I could possibly permanently move back to the land of my birth is in a casket.
While productive jobs will pay for their own salary, any business is still operating with a fixed amount of resources and thus a set number of employees it can hire for the time. Therefore (high paying) jobs are in fact a zero sum resource
During typical usage the flash controller is constantly journaling LBA to physical addresses in the background, so that the entire logical to physical table isn’t lost when the drive loses power. With a larger capacitor you could potentially remove this background process and instead flush the entire logical to physical table when the drive registers power loss. But as this area makes up ~2% of the total NAND, that’s at absolute best a 2% performance benefit we are potentially missing out on.