Wait just to clarify critical takes on EA is his day job. He’s a philosophy professor who worked at GPI and his body of work is mostly around EA. That’s fine and the critique is admittedly harsh but he’s not some third party person doing this casually. He himself has been funded by EA Infrastructure Fund and GPI and admitted he used his adjacency to AI as a hot topic.
Thanks—that was specifically a reference to blogging. If I’m not mistaken, the blog isn’t even referenced on his professional website or listed on his CV, which to me is evidence that blogging “is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job.” I think that’s relevant to what I take as the implied claim here (i.e., that [edit: the philosopher] is somehow unreasonably picking on EA by not also blogging about other entities that spend money questionably [at best] in his view).
As far as his academic work, longtermists are making philosophical claims that they seek to be taken seriously. “[C]orportaions, governments, etc,” who “are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects” are, as a rule, not doing that. It’s understandable that a philosopher would focus on people who are making and acting on such claims.
I am referring to the blogging. It does do things for his day job. His ability to get outside grants is a sizeable chunk of getting a tenure track job. His blog has been funded on manifund and referenced in other grants as justification. I don’t think he’s beholdened to EA in anyway but to act like he doesn’t benefit in anyway from this bent on a professional level is a weird claim to make. His blog posts are often drafts of his academic critiques and distillations of critiques too.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
Sorry for the dead response, I think I took the secondary claim he made that extra money would go towards a podcast as the warrant for my latter claim. Again I don’t feel any which way about this other than we should fund critics and not let the external factors that are just mild disdains from forum posters as determinative about whether or not we fund him.
Wait just to clarify critical takes on EA is his day job. He’s a philosophy professor who worked at GPI and his body of work is mostly around EA. That’s fine and the critique is admittedly harsh but he’s not some third party person doing this casually. He himself has been funded by EA Infrastructure Fund and GPI and admitted he used his adjacency to AI as a hot topic.
Thanks—that was specifically a reference to blogging. If I’m not mistaken, the blog isn’t even referenced on his professional website or listed on his CV, which to me is evidence that blogging “is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job.” I think that’s relevant to what I take as the implied claim here (i.e., that [edit: the philosopher] is somehow unreasonably picking on EA by not also blogging about other entities that spend money questionably [at best] in his view).
As far as his academic work, longtermists are making philosophical claims that they seek to be taken seriously. “[C]orportaions, governments, etc,” who “are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects” are, as a rule, not doing that. It’s understandable that a philosopher would focus on people who are making and acting on such claims.
I am referring to the blogging. It does do things for his day job. His ability to get outside grants is a sizeable chunk of getting a tenure track job. His blog has been funded on manifund and referenced in other grants as justification. I don’t think he’s beholdened to EA in anyway but to act like he doesn’t benefit in anyway from this bent on a professional level is a weird claim to make. His blog posts are often drafts of his academic critiques and distillations of critiques too.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
Sorry for the dead response, I think I took the secondary claim he made that extra money would go towards a podcast as the warrant for my latter claim. Again I don’t feel any which way about this other than we should fund critics and not let the external factors that are just mild disdains from forum posters as determinative about whether or not we fund him.