I didn’t mean to argue against the Digital Minds work here and explicitly see them as within the circle of moral concern. However, I believe that a different funder within the EA community would still mitigate the costs I’m talking about tactically. By bringing up the topic there, I only meant to say this isn’t all about personal/selfish ends from my POV (*not* that I think it nets out to being bad to do).
It is not a lot of money to fund at this stage as I understand it, and I hope to see if funded by someone who will also engage with the intellectual and comms work. For GV, I feel more than fully occupied with AI Safety.
Appreciate you engaging thoughtfully with these questions!
I’m slightly confused about this specific point—it seems like you’re saying that work on digital minds (for example) might impose PR costs on the whole movement, and that you hope another funder might have the capacity to fund this while also paying a lot of attention to the public perception.
But my guess is that other funders might actually be less cautious about the PR of the whole movement, and less invested in comms that don’t blow back on (for example) AI safety.
Like, personally I am in favour of funder diversity but it seems like one of the main things you lose as things get more decentralised is the ability to limit the support that goes to things that might blow back on the movement. To my taste at least, one of the big costs of FTX was the rapid flow of funding into things that looked (and imo were) pretty bad in a way that has indirectly made EA and OP look bad. Similarly, even if OP doesn’t fund things like Lighthaven for maybe-optics-ish reasons, it still gets described in news articles as an EA venue.
Basically, I think better PR seems good, and more funding diversity seems good, but I don’t expect the movement is actually going to get both?
(I do buy that the PR cost will be more diffused across funders though, and that seems good, and in particular I can see a case for preserving GV as something that both is and seems reasonable and sane, I just don’t expect this to be true of the whole movement)
I didn’t mean to argue against the Digital Minds work here and explicitly see them as within the circle of moral concern. However, I believe that a different funder within the EA community would still mitigate the costs I’m talking about tactically. By bringing up the topic there, I only meant to say this isn’t all about personal/selfish ends from my POV (*not* that I think it nets out to being bad to do).
It is not a lot of money to fund at this stage as I understand it, and I hope to see if funded by someone who will also engage with the intellectual and comms work. For GV, I feel more than fully occupied with AI Safety.
Appreciate you engaging thoughtfully with these questions!
I’m slightly confused about this specific point—it seems like you’re saying that work on digital minds (for example) might impose PR costs on the whole movement, and that you hope another funder might have the capacity to fund this while also paying a lot of attention to the public perception.
But my guess is that other funders might actually be less cautious about the PR of the whole movement, and less invested in comms that don’t blow back on (for example) AI safety.
Like, personally I am in favour of funder diversity but it seems like one of the main things you lose as things get more decentralised is the ability to limit the support that goes to things that might blow back on the movement. To my taste at least, one of the big costs of FTX was the rapid flow of funding into things that looked (and imo were) pretty bad in a way that has indirectly made EA and OP look bad. Similarly, even if OP doesn’t fund things like Lighthaven for maybe-optics-ish reasons, it still gets described in news articles as an EA venue.
Basically, I think better PR seems good, and more funding diversity seems good, but I don’t expect the movement is actually going to get both?
(I do buy that the PR cost will be more diffused across funders though, and that seems good, and in particular I can see a case for preserving GV as something that both is and seems reasonable and sane, I just don’t expect this to be true of the whole movement)
“PR risk” is an unnecessarily narrow mental frame for why we’re focusing.
Risky things are risky in multiple ways. Diffusing across funders mitigates some of them, some of the time.
AND there are other bandwidth issues: energy, attention, stress, political influence. Those are more finite than capital.