Quick things: 1. The vast majority of the funding comes from a very few funders. In the cases of GiveWell/ACE, they are meant more for many smaller donors. Historically, funding was not the main bottleneck in longtermism (“we might as well fund everything”) - that said, this is changing now, so it could be a good time to do something different. 2. My guess is that few strong people wanted to themselves make a new evaluator in this space. Many of the strong people who could evaluate longtermist orgs seem to prefer working at OP or, more likely, just working in the field directly. EA is kind of a “do-ocracy”—often the reason for “why didn’t this happen?” is, “it would require some strong talent, and none really was excited about this.” 3. Similar to (1), I haven’t seen a large funding base be very interested in spending money on evaluation here. 4. Much of the longtermist field is fairly friendly with one another and I think there’s a gap of candid evaluation. 5. Honestly, I think a lot of opinions around specific longtermist interventions seem very intuition-based and kind of arbitrary. Especially around AI, there seem to be a bunch of key considerations that many people disagree about—so it’s tricky to have a strong set of agreements to do evaluation around. 6. Some people seem to think that basically nothing in AI Safety is very promising yet, so we’re just trying a bunch of stuff and hoping that eventually strong research programs are evident.
I’d like to see more work here and really hope that things mature.
I tend to agree with this perspective, though I would also add that I think that not investing more in longtermist evaluation seven years ago was a mistake.
Especially around AI, there seem to be a bunch of key considerations that many people disagree about—so it’s tricky to have a strong set of agreements to do evaluation around.
One could try to make the evaluation criteria worldview-agnostic – focusing on things like the quality of their research and workplace culture – and let individuals donate to the best orgs working on problems that are high priority to them.
I think having recommendations in each subfield would make sense. But how many subfields have a consensus standard for how to evaluate such things as “quality of . . . research”?
Quick things:
1. The vast majority of the funding comes from a very few funders. In the cases of GiveWell/ACE, they are meant more for many smaller donors. Historically, funding was not the main bottleneck in longtermism (“we might as well fund everything”) - that said, this is changing now, so it could be a good time to do something different.
2. My guess is that few strong people wanted to themselves make a new evaluator in this space. Many of the strong people who could evaluate longtermist orgs seem to prefer working at OP or, more likely, just working in the field directly. EA is kind of a “do-ocracy”—often the reason for “why didn’t this happen?” is, “it would require some strong talent, and none really was excited about this.”
3. Similar to (1), I haven’t seen a large funding base be very interested in spending money on evaluation here.
4. Much of the longtermist field is fairly friendly with one another and I think there’s a gap of candid evaluation.
5. Honestly, I think a lot of opinions around specific longtermist interventions seem very intuition-based and kind of arbitrary. Especially around AI, there seem to be a bunch of key considerations that many people disagree about—so it’s tricky to have a strong set of agreements to do evaluation around.
6. Some people seem to think that basically nothing in AI Safety is very promising yet, so we’re just trying a bunch of stuff and hoping that eventually strong research programs are evident.
I’d like to see more work here and really hope that things mature.
I tend to agree with this perspective, though I would also add that I think that not investing more in longtermist evaluation seven years ago was a mistake.
Why seven years ago specifically?
Because that seems like enough time to have something good now.
One could try to make the evaluation criteria worldview-agnostic – focusing on things like the quality of their research and workplace culture – and let individuals donate to the best orgs working on problems that are high priority to them.
I think having recommendations in each subfield would make sense. But how many subfields have a consensus standard for how to evaluate such things as “quality of . . . research”?