I agree but I want to be clear that I don’t think senior EAs are innocent here. I agree with Habryka that this is a situation that was made by a lot of the senior EAs themselves who actively went all in on only two funders (now down to one) and discouraged a lot of attempts to diversify philanthropy.
I encouraged people against earning to give before (though I updated sharply after 2022), and I largely regret that move. (I don’t think of myself as senior, especially at the time, but I’m unusually vocal online so I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a disproportionate influence).
Due to my borderline forum addiction, you probably have a disproportionate influence on on me haha. Will probably never earn to give though so no harm done here ;).
I’m not thinking just discouraging attempts to diversify funding of one’s own org, but also discouraging earning to give, discouraging projects to bring in more donors, etc.
Yea, that seems bad. It felt like there was a big push a few years ago to make a huge AI safety researcher pipeline, and now I’m nervous that we don’t actually have the funding to handle all of that pipeline, for example.
For sure. Not only the lack of funding to handle the pipeline, but there seems to be increasing concern around the benefits to harm tradeoff of technical AI research too.
Perhaps like with the heavy correction against earning to give a few years ago which now seems likely a mistake, maybe theres a lesson to be learned against overcorrecting against the status quo in any direction too quickly...
One obvious way that EA researchers could help improve the situation, is to use comments like these to highlight that it is lacking, and try to discuss where to improve things. :)
I agree but I want to be clear that I don’t think senior EAs are innocent here. I agree with Habryka that this is a situation that was made by a lot of the senior EAs themselves who actively went all in on only two funders (now down to one) and discouraged a lot of attempts to diversify philanthropy.
I encouraged people against earning to give before (though I updated sharply after 2022), and I largely regret that move. (I don’t think of myself as senior, especially at the time, but I’m unusually vocal online so I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a disproportionate influence).
Due to my borderline forum addiction, you probably have a disproportionate influence on on me haha. Will probably never earn to give though so no harm done here ;).
I don’t know about that, your other work sounds pretty great!
Yep, this also makes sense.
I imagine responsibility is shared, and also the opportunity to improve things from here is shared.
I don’t feel like I’ve witnessed too many cases of organizations discouraging attempts to diversify funding, but trust that you have.
I’m not thinking just discouraging attempts to diversify funding of one’s own org, but also discouraging earning to give, discouraging projects to bring in more donors, etc.
Yea, that seems bad. It felt like there was a big push a few years ago to make a huge AI safety researcher pipeline, and now I’m nervous that we don’t actually have the funding to handle all of that pipeline, for example.
For sure. Not only the lack of funding to handle the pipeline, but there seems to be increasing concern around the benefits to harm tradeoff of technical AI research too.
Perhaps like with the heavy correction against earning to give a few years ago which now seems likely a mistake, maybe theres a lesson to be learned against overcorrecting against the status quo in any direction too quickly...
One obvious way that EA researchers could help improve the situation, is to use comments like these to highlight that it is lacking, and try to discuss where to improve things. :)
is… that rot13′d for a reason? (it seemed innocuous to me)