No, Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano were at the time employed by OpenAI, the recipient of the $30M grant. They were associated with Open Philanthropy in an advisory role.
I’m not trying to voice an opinion on whether this particular grant recommendation was unprincipled. I do think that things like this undermine trust in EA institutions, set a bad example, and make it hard to get serious concerns heard. Adopting a standard of avoiding appearance of impropriety can head off these concerns and relieve us of trying to determine on a case-by-case basis how fishy something is (without automatically accusing anyone of impropriety).
Hm. I still don’t really see the issue here. These people all work at OpenPhil right?
I guess maybe it looks fishy, but in hindsight do we think it was?
No, Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano were at the time employed by OpenAI, the recipient of the $30M grant. They were associated with Open Philanthropy in an advisory role.
I’m not trying to voice an opinion on whether this particular grant recommendation was unprincipled. I do think that things like this undermine trust in EA institutions, set a bad example, and make it hard to get serious concerns heard. Adopting a standard of avoiding appearance of impropriety can head off these concerns and relieve us of trying to determine on a case-by-case basis how fishy something is (without automatically accusing anyone of impropriety).