It seems to me that the problem isn’t just with Open Phil-funded speculative orgs, but with all speculative orgs.
To give some more specific examples, it’s unclear to me how someone outside of Open Philanthropy could go about advocating for the importance of an organization like New Science or Qualia Research Institute.
I think it’s just as unclear how someone inside Open Phil could advocate for those. Open Phil might have access to some private information, but that won’t help much with something like estimating the EV of a highly speculative nonprofit.
Paul Christiano is excited by Ought’s plan and work, and we trust his judgement.
And:
We have seen some minor indications that Ought is well-run and has a reasonable chance at success, such as: an affiliation with Stanford’s Noah Goodman, which we believe will help with attracting talent and funding; acceptance into the Stanford-Startx4 accelerator; and that Andreas has already done some research, application prototyping, testing, basic organizational set-up, and public talks at Stanford and USC.
So it’s not really a big expected value calculation. It’s more like:
We consider AI Safety to be very important
A trusted advisor is excited
Everything checks out at the operational level
It might not follow point-by-point, but I can imagine how a similar framework might apply to New Science / QRI / Charter Cities.
Returning to the original point: As far as I can tell, these are not the kinds of issue we are (or should be) discussing on EA Forum. I could be wrong, but it’s hard to imagine endorsing a norm where many top EA Forum posts are of the form “I talked to Alexey Guzey from New Science, it seems exciting” or worse “I talked to Adam Marblestone about New Science, and he seems excited about it”.
Full disclosure, I did talk to Alexey about New Science and it did seem exciting. I also talked to Andrew at QRI and Mark at Charter Cities, and they all seemed exciting! But precisely the point of this question is to figure out how I’m supposed to frame that endorsement in a way that is both appropriate and useful.
It seems to me that the problem isn’t just with Open Phil-funded speculative orgs, but with all speculative orgs.
I think it’s just as unclear how someone inside Open Phil could advocate for those. Open Phil might have access to some private information, but that won’t help much with something like estimating the EV of a highly speculative nonprofit.
I also don’t know for sure, but this examples might be illustrative:
Ought General Support:
And:
So it’s not really a big expected value calculation. It’s more like:
We consider AI Safety to be very important
A trusted advisor is excited
Everything checks out at the operational level
It might not follow point-by-point, but I can imagine how a similar framework might apply to New Science / QRI / Charter Cities.
Returning to the original point: As far as I can tell, these are not the kinds of issue we are (or should be) discussing on EA Forum. I could be wrong, but it’s hard to imagine endorsing a norm where many top EA Forum posts are of the form “I talked to Alexey Guzey from New Science, it seems exciting” or worse “I talked to Adam Marblestone about New Science, and he seems excited about it”.
Full disclosure, I did talk to Alexey about New Science and it did seem exciting. I also talked to Andrew at QRI and Mark at Charter Cities, and they all seemed exciting! But precisely the point of this question is to figure out how I’m supposed to frame that endorsement in a way that is both appropriate and useful.