I really wish donors would write up their reasons for/âagainst funding things like Manifund does. It really doesnât take long, so I donât buy the usual âtime constraintsâ argument, but I think the people at CAIP would waste a lot LESS time if they were told âwe donât think your work is good/âmeets the funding bar. These other orgs are better at it for the cost and would rather scale them up than fund your organization.â Itâd waste a lot LESS grantee time. They can just add a disclaimer that this isnât any way an abdication of their character or something.
That said, I looked at CAIP, and while you say here what youâve accomplished, it seems hard to verify that. I searched the EA forum and the internet, and only 2 people you list in your staff have posted on the forum here, and one more has an account. I didnât do the same for LW or AF, but I expect similar there, maybe a bit more. Itâs going to be very hard to get 7 figures per year for your non-profit if you arenât very public about what you are doing. I know that takes time, but if you arenât advertising the work you do, people wonât know about it.
Here, in this post, you sort of just make a new account and say, âIf we donât get $1.6M soon, we are shutting downâ. Thatâs⌠a lot of money. Itâs hard to overstate how hard it is to make and then donate that amount of money per year. But more importantly, itâd be very weird if this worked. There needs to be a lot more constant communication and updates from organizations if they want to continue to receive funding. It begs the question, what does the âCommunications Teamâ do? I know they are probably primarily responsible for communicating with congresspeople, but at least some of that needs to be communicating with the EA/âAIS community.
Marcus, I agree with your first paragraphâpart of my frustration is that itâs not obvious to me that any AI governance donors have more than a vibes-based metric for what it means for âother orgs to be better at it for the cost.â Donors did eventually tell us that they thought other orgs were more cost-effective, but they couldnât or wouldnât say which effects they thought were cheaper elsewhere or how they were measuring that.
In hindsight, you may be right that we should have posted earlier on Less Wrong and EA Forums. I will say that we did not see raising significant amounts of money directly from the public (rather than from large donors and institutional donors) as a promising strategy, and that we turned to it only as a last resort when institutional funding unexpectedly ran dry.
However, I object to your implication that until recently we havenât been communicating or sending updates about our work. You may recall that in October 2023, you and I met in person at EA Global Boston, where I pitched you about our work. At your request, I sent you a 15-page document in March 2024 in which I quantitatively estimated the microdooms averted by CAIPâs work. You seemed to agree that our work was promising, but at EA Global Boston October 2024, you told me that you were donating only to animal welfare charities. You did not share any criticisms of our work at that time other than that it was not in your preferred cause area.
Our communications team sends out a weekly newsletter to 1,400 subscribers, which is also publicly posted on LinkedIn and X. We also sent out various documents to past and prospective donors, including a detailed annual report that included a dozen examples of us being cited favorably in mainstream media, along with links. We have hosted regular in-person events that are open to the public, where anyone can come and see for themselves which Congressional staffers are coming and speaking with us. If any of the donors had at any time expressed any concerns about our accomplishments being âhard to verify,â we would have gladly taken them along to one of our meetings or events or sent them whatever additional information they might have wanted. However, I have never before heard any such complaints.
Yes, I do recall meeting at EAG two years ago and yes, I wasnât giving any money to AI safety back then. I donât have any criticism because I donât know better about what policies to support and didnât want to add noise.
I donât want to be too critical of CAIP here and my original comment might have come off as too harsh. Iâm not a big fan of the current funding ecosystem being so private with info and reasoning being so secretive. Itâs caused us harm before and I expect will cause us harm again and I expect even greater it is causing passive harm where organizations donât improve.
I really wish donors would write up their reasons for/âagainst funding things like Manifund does. It really doesnât take long, so I donât buy the usual âtime constraintsâ argument, but I think the people at CAIP would waste a lot LESS time if they were told âwe donât think your work is good/âmeets the funding bar. These other orgs are better at it for the cost and would rather scale them up than fund your organization.â Itâd waste a lot LESS grantee time. They can just add a disclaimer that this isnât any way an abdication of their character or something.
That said, I looked at CAIP, and while you say here what youâve accomplished, it seems hard to verify that. I searched the EA forum and the internet, and only 2 people you list in your staff have posted on the forum here, and one more has an account. I didnât do the same for LW or AF, but I expect similar there, maybe a bit more. Itâs going to be very hard to get 7 figures per year for your non-profit if you arenât very public about what you are doing. I know that takes time, but if you arenât advertising the work you do, people wonât know about it.
Here, in this post, you sort of just make a new account and say, âIf we donât get $1.6M soon, we are shutting downâ. Thatâs⌠a lot of money. Itâs hard to overstate how hard it is to make and then donate that amount of money per year. But more importantly, itâd be very weird if this worked. There needs to be a lot more constant communication and updates from organizations if they want to continue to receive funding. It begs the question, what does the âCommunications Teamâ do? I know they are probably primarily responsible for communicating with congresspeople, but at least some of that needs to be communicating with the EA/âAIS community.
Marcus, I agree with your first paragraphâpart of my frustration is that itâs not obvious to me that any AI governance donors have more than a vibes-based metric for what it means for âother orgs to be better at it for the cost.â Donors did eventually tell us that they thought other orgs were more cost-effective, but they couldnât or wouldnât say which effects they thought were cheaper elsewhere or how they were measuring that.
In hindsight, you may be right that we should have posted earlier on Less Wrong and EA Forums. I will say that we did not see raising significant amounts of money directly from the public (rather than from large donors and institutional donors) as a promising strategy, and that we turned to it only as a last resort when institutional funding unexpectedly ran dry.
However, I object to your implication that until recently we havenât been communicating or sending updates about our work. You may recall that in October 2023, you and I met in person at EA Global Boston, where I pitched you about our work. At your request, I sent you a 15-page document in March 2024 in which I quantitatively estimated the microdooms averted by CAIPâs work. You seemed to agree that our work was promising, but at EA Global Boston October 2024, you told me that you were donating only to animal welfare charities. You did not share any criticisms of our work at that time other than that it was not in your preferred cause area.
Our communications team sends out a weekly newsletter to 1,400 subscribers, which is also publicly posted on LinkedIn and X. We also sent out various documents to past and prospective donors, including a detailed annual report that included a dozen examples of us being cited favorably in mainstream media, along with links. We have hosted regular in-person events that are open to the public, where anyone can come and see for themselves which Congressional staffers are coming and speaking with us. If any of the donors had at any time expressed any concerns about our accomplishments being âhard to verify,â we would have gladly taken them along to one of our meetings or events or sent them whatever additional information they might have wanted. However, I have never before heard any such complaints.
Yes, I do recall meeting at EAG two years ago and yes, I wasnât giving any money to AI safety back then. I donât have any criticism because I donât know better about what policies to support and didnât want to add noise.
I donât want to be too critical of CAIP here and my original comment might have come off as too harsh. Iâm not a big fan of the current funding ecosystem being so private with info and reasoning being so secretive. Itâs caused us harm before and I expect will cause us harm again and I expect even greater it is causing passive harm where organizations donât improve.