I don’t know but I would feel pretty conflicted about working on a grant from the Sackler family. I am even a bit unsettled about a lot of EA work being funded by Meta who is facing lawsuits e.g. about child addiction to their platform. I even feel uneasy writing this, but when I do, I feel an even stronger urge to say it publicly. I think if fairly criticizing our donors get us in trouble I kind of want to be in trouble.
Thanks for writing this—I think everyone needs to at least be asking those questions to themselves, no matter what their funding source is! Some questions that might help clarify the conflictedness:
How does the conflictedness compare to the conflictedness (if any) you would feel if you were a business performing services for Meta? Would it matter if those services were product-focused (e.g., as a programmer) vs. background in nature (e.g., landscaping)? This is intended to help dissect whether you’re describing a general conflictedness versus something more specific to accepting donations from an organization.
Does the exact nature of the funding affect your sense of conflictedness? On a continuum, you might have funding by Meta itself, funding from a controlling shareholder, funding from someone whose wealth significantly flows from Meta stock that they currently hold, someone whose wealth was significantly made in Meta stock but sold it (+/- significant management control in the past), and so on. The answer might help identify how much of the conflictedness arises from concerns about whitewashing reputation and similar factors that are more prominent on one side of the continuum.
How does the conflictedness compare to the conflictedness (if any) you would feel if you were a business performing services for Meta?
To me, selling services to a bad actor feel significantly more immoral than receiving their donation, since selling a service to them is much more directly helpful to them.
(This is not a comment on how bad Meta is. I do not have an informed opinion on this.)
Yeah those are good questions. I have already helped build wind farms to power the data centers of various big tech companies so my conscience is by no means “clean”! Moreover, I own stock, especially via index funds in Meta and other organizations. I also use and even rely on Meta, Alphabet, etc. for a lot of good in my life and make other purchases that are far less ethical. In the end, I think my analysis would show that no matter what, I am embedded in this super connected and complex society where a lot of different interests are pulling in different directions and I am part of that intricate web trying to nudge, in a very miniscule way, our shared future towards something a bit more hopeful and a bit more secure. Still, I would be worried if I get in trouble from being honest about this, and publicly honest about my uncertainty about whether my sources of funding might make my philanthropic endeavors net positive or not. I think for now it is net positive, but I am quite uncertain about this, especially if e.g. I would receive substantial funding from Meta due to an increase in its share price due to its push for open source, risky AGI. It would be fantastic if there was some rating of philanthropic sources that indicated the likelihood that using such funding would be ok or not. But I think that’s a big ask and with the amount of risk and suffering around us perhaps it is better to just try to do something good.
I don’t know but I would feel pretty conflicted about working on a grant from the Sackler family. I am even a bit unsettled about a lot of EA work being funded by Meta who is facing lawsuits e.g. about child addiction to their platform. I even feel uneasy writing this, but when I do, I feel an even stronger urge to say it publicly. I think if fairly criticizing our donors get us in trouble I kind of want to be in trouble.
Thanks for writing this—I think everyone needs to at least be asking those questions to themselves, no matter what their funding source is! Some questions that might help clarify the conflictedness:
How does the conflictedness compare to the conflictedness (if any) you would feel if you were a business performing services for Meta? Would it matter if those services were product-focused (e.g., as a programmer) vs. background in nature (e.g., landscaping)? This is intended to help dissect whether you’re describing a general conflictedness versus something more specific to accepting donations from an organization.
Does the exact nature of the funding affect your sense of conflictedness? On a continuum, you might have funding by Meta itself, funding from a controlling shareholder, funding from someone whose wealth significantly flows from Meta stock that they currently hold, someone whose wealth was significantly made in Meta stock but sold it (+/- significant management control in the past), and so on. The answer might help identify how much of the conflictedness arises from concerns about whitewashing reputation and similar factors that are more prominent on one side of the continuum.
To me, selling services to a bad actor feel significantly more immoral than receiving their donation, since selling a service to them is much more directly helpful to them.
(This is not a comment on how bad Meta is. I do not have an informed opinion on this.)
Yeah those are good questions. I have already helped build wind farms to power the data centers of various big tech companies so my conscience is by no means “clean”! Moreover, I own stock, especially via index funds in Meta and other organizations. I also use and even rely on Meta, Alphabet, etc. for a lot of good in my life and make other purchases that are far less ethical. In the end, I think my analysis would show that no matter what, I am embedded in this super connected and complex society where a lot of different interests are pulling in different directions and I am part of that intricate web trying to nudge, in a very miniscule way, our shared future towards something a bit more hopeful and a bit more secure. Still, I would be worried if I get in trouble from being honest about this, and publicly honest about my uncertainty about whether my sources of funding might make my philanthropic endeavors net positive or not. I think for now it is net positive, but I am quite uncertain about this, especially if e.g. I would receive substantial funding from Meta due to an increase in its share price due to its push for open source, risky AGI. It would be fantastic if there was some rating of philanthropic sources that indicated the likelihood that using such funding would be ok or not. But I think that’s a big ask and with the amount of risk and suffering around us perhaps it is better to just try to do something good.