I think in the EA community, the bottleneck is the supply of AI safety related jobs/projects, but there is already a very strong desire to move into AI safety. The problem is not longtermists who are already working on something else. They should generally continue to do so, because the portfolio argument is compelling. The problem is the bootstrapping problem for people who want to start working an AI safety
Even if you only value AI safety, having a good portfolio community is important and makes our community attractive. Ai safety is still weird. FTX was originally only vegan, and only then shifted to long term considerations. That’s the trajectory of most people here. Being diverse is at least cool for that reason.
I think that if the community was convinced that it was by far the most important thing, we would try harder to find projects and I’m confident there are a bunch of relevant things that can be done. I think we’re suffering from a argument to moderation fallacy that makes that we underinvest massively in AI safety bc : 1) AI Safety is hard 2) There are other causes that when you think not to deeply about it, seem equally important
The portfolio argument is an abstraction that hides the fact that if something is way more important than something else, you just shouldn’t diversify, that’s precisely why we give to AMF rather than other things without diversifying our portfolio.
“Ai safety is still weird. FTX was originally only vegan, and only then shifted to long term considerations.” That’s right but then your theory of change in other areas needs to be oriented towards AI safety and that might lead to very difference strategies. For instance you might want to not lose “weirdness points” for other cause areas, or might not want to bring in the same type of profiles.
I think in the EA community, the bottleneck is the supply of AI safety related jobs/projects, but there is already a very strong desire to move into AI safety. The problem is not longtermists who are already working on something else. They should generally continue to do so, because the portfolio argument is compelling. The problem is the bootstrapping problem for people who want to start working an AI safety
Even if you only value AI safety, having a good portfolio community is important and makes our community attractive. Ai safety is still weird. FTX was originally only vegan, and only then shifted to long term considerations. That’s the trajectory of most people here. Being diverse is at least cool for that reason.
I think that if the community was convinced that it was by far the most important thing, we would try harder to find projects and I’m confident there are a bunch of relevant things that can be done.
I think we’re suffering from a argument to moderation fallacy that makes that we underinvest massively in AI safety bc :
1) AI Safety is hard
2) There are other causes that when you think not to deeply about it, seem equally important
The portfolio argument is an abstraction that hides the fact that if something is way more important than something else, you just shouldn’t diversify, that’s precisely why we give to AMF rather than other things without diversifying our portfolio.
“Ai safety is still weird. FTX was originally only vegan, and only then shifted to long term considerations.”
That’s right but then your theory of change in other areas needs to be oriented towards AI safety and that might lead to very difference strategies. For instance you might want to not lose “weirdness points” for other cause areas, or might not want to bring in the same type of profiles.