On EAs in policy, I’d flag that: - There’s a good number of people currently working in AI governance, Bio governance, and animal law. - Very arguably, said people have had a decent list of accomplishments and power positions, given that such work was fairly recent. See Biden’s executive orders on AI, or the UK AI Security Institute. https://www.aisi.gov.uk/ - People like Dustin Moskovitz and SBF were some highly prominent donors to the Democratic party.
I think the EA policy side might not get a huge amount of popularity here, but it seems decently reputable to me. Mistakes have been made, but I think a decent report on the wins and losses would include several wins.
I do agree that finding others doing well and helping them is one important way to help. I’d suspect that the most obvious EA work would look like prioritization for policy efforts. This has been done before, and there’s a great deal more that could be done here.
In fairness, SBF was also secretly a prominent Republican donor, right? Didn’t he basically suggest in the infamous interview with Kelsey Piper that he was essentially cynical about politics and just trying to gain influence with both parties to help advance FTX and Alameda’s interests?
He was a Republican donor, but from what I understand, not really a MAGA donor. My impression was that he was funding people on both sides, who were generally in favor of their interests—but that their interests did genuinely include issues like bio/ai safety.
I think it’s very reasonable to try to be bipartisan on these issues.
Fair point. I certainly don’t think it is established (or even more than 50% likely) that SBF was purely motivated by narrow personal gain to the exclusion of any real utilitarian convictions at all. But I do think he misrepresented his political convictions.
On EAs in policy, I’d flag that:
- There’s a good number of people currently working in AI governance, Bio governance, and animal law.
- Very arguably, said people have had a decent list of accomplishments and power positions, given that such work was fairly recent. See Biden’s executive orders on AI, or the UK AI Security Institute. https://www.aisi.gov.uk/
- People like Dustin Moskovitz and SBF were some highly prominent donors to the Democratic party.
I think the EA policy side might not get a huge amount of popularity here, but it seems decently reputable to me. Mistakes have been made, but I think a decent report on the wins and losses would include several wins.
I do agree that finding others doing well and helping them is one important way to help. I’d suspect that the most obvious EA work would look like prioritization for policy efforts. This has been done before, and there’s a great deal more that could be done here.
In fairness, SBF was also secretly a prominent Republican donor, right? Didn’t he basically suggest in the infamous interview with Kelsey Piper that he was essentially cynical about politics and just trying to gain influence with both parties to help advance FTX and Alameda’s interests?
He was a Republican donor, but from what I understand, not really a MAGA donor. My impression was that he was funding people on both sides, who were generally in favor of their interests—but that their interests did genuinely include issues like bio/ai safety.
I think it’s very reasonable to try to be bipartisan on these issues.
Fair point. I certainly don’t think it is established (or even more than 50% likely) that SBF was purely motivated by narrow personal gain to the exclusion of any real utilitarian convictions at all. But I do think he misrepresented his political convictions.
I think it’s clear he misrepresented his political convictions, especially to the public (as opposed to close friends and some EAs).
But I think there’s separately decent evidence that he was thinking of himself as ultimately advancing utilitarian goals.
Not that that makes it okay—it’s very possible to consider yourself trying to help any noble goals—then using that to justify really bad actions.
That’s my read of the evidence as well, but I haven’t examined it closely.