I am also pretty disappointed that OP hasn’t funded some academics that seem like slam dunks to me and think this reflects an anti-academia bias within OP (note they know I think this and disagree with me).
My prior is that people who Jacob thinks are slam-dunks should basically always be getting funding, so I’m pretty surprised by this anecdote. (In general I also expect that there are a lot of complex details in cases like these, so it doesn’t seem implausible that it was the right call, but it seemed worth registering the surprise.)
I work at Open Philanthropy, and in the last few months I took on much of our technical AI safety grantmaking.
In November and December, Jacob sent me a list of academics he felt that someone at Open Phil should reach out to and solicit proposals from. I was interested in these opportunities, but at the time, I was full-time on processing grant proposals that came in through Open Philanthropy’s form for grantees affected by the FTX crash and wasn’t able to take them on.
This work tailed off in January, and since then I’ve focused on a few bigger grants, some writing projects, and thinking through how I should approach further grantmaking. I think I should have reached out to at least a few of the people Jacob suggested earlier (e.g. in February). I didn’t make any explicit decision to reject someone that Jacob thought was a slam dunk because I disagreed with his assessment — rather, I was slower to reach out to talk to people he thought I should fund than I could have been.
I plan to talk to several of the leads Jacob sent my way in Q2, and (while I would plan to think through the case for these grants myself to the extent I can) I expect to end up agreeing a lot with Jacob’s assessments.
With that said, Jacob and I do have more nebulous higher-level disagreements about things like how truth-tracking academic culture tends to be and how much academic research has contributed to AI alignment so far, and in some indirect way these disagreements probably contributed to me prioritizing these reach outs less highly than someone else might have.
My prior is that people who Jacob thinks are slam-dunks should basically always be getting funding, so I’m pretty surprised by this anecdote. (In general I also expect that there are a lot of complex details in cases like these, so it doesn’t seem implausible that it was the right call, but it seemed worth registering the surprise.)
I work at Open Philanthropy, and in the last few months I took on much of our technical AI safety grantmaking.
In November and December, Jacob sent me a list of academics he felt that someone at Open Phil should reach out to and solicit proposals from. I was interested in these opportunities, but at the time, I was full-time on processing grant proposals that came in through Open Philanthropy’s form for grantees affected by the FTX crash and wasn’t able to take them on.
This work tailed off in January, and since then I’ve focused on a few bigger grants, some writing projects, and thinking through how I should approach further grantmaking. I think I should have reached out to at least a few of the people Jacob suggested earlier (e.g. in February). I didn’t make any explicit decision to reject someone that Jacob thought was a slam dunk because I disagreed with his assessment — rather, I was slower to reach out to talk to people he thought I should fund than I could have been.
I plan to talk to several of the leads Jacob sent my way in Q2, and (while I would plan to think through the case for these grants myself to the extent I can) I expect to end up agreeing a lot with Jacob’s assessments.
With that said, Jacob and I do have more nebulous higher-level disagreements about things like how truth-tracking academic culture tends to be and how much academic research has contributed to AI alignment so far, and in some indirect way these disagreements probably contributed to me prioritizing these reach outs less highly than someone else might have.