So I think there’s a huge difference between other EA causes and AIS. You can probably accomplish a good number of other objectives in EA without these, but I still think trying to make them higher status might still be useful. It’s a way of signaling what’s important in society and what’s valued. If I knew a way to make someone working in Pandemic Preparedness as high status as the NBA, I probably would.
That being said, AI is a different beast. Places like San Francisco are filled with people working 70+ hours a week, hungry to get ahead in someway in AI. I’d love to tap into that hunger, with the metric for success being Alignment. It would need to have actual metrics for success, though, like provably solving certain certain aspects of the problem, or making a huge discovery in interpretability. If someone can accomplish demonstrable huge gains in this, I don’t really care what their personal motivations are.
Thanks for this added explanation, makes more sense when you put it that way. Again I can never understand somewhere like San Franciso, living in sleepy Northern Uganda and working 40ish hours a week with probably average productivity by your standards!
I also don’t necessarily care what their motivations are, I’m just dubious whether the motivation of greed is going to achieve those huge gains you are hoping for. My 2 big questions hre are
1. Can we actually raise enough money to make the EV of the greedy talent worth it, vs. others who are still very talented but willing to work on safety for less? Like if we hired 2 EA safety people at 100k, would the greedy one at 200k really be achieving more?
2. Will either the org or the individual not eventually be corrupted towards capabilities by the big money anyway? Either when our EA money runs dry or they just get offerred more than we could (300k rather than our 200 whatever it is). Basically what Jason said below.
“Also, if a lab has a massive payroll to meet, that fact alone might subtly push its leaders toward what will generate revenue and/or attract profit-motivated investors., as those revenue sources are more stable/reliable than charitable grants mostly from a single donor.”
Its a reasonable argument you make though, I’m fairly uncertain about this.
I would have said no a year ago, but a lot of people are now much more interested in AIS. I think there’s a lot of potential for much more funding coming in. The binary greedy vs. non-greedy human sounds strange to me. What I can say is many EA types have the mentality of neglectedness, how they can individually have the most impact, etc. Many EAs would probably say they wouldn’t be working on the things they were working on if enough other people were. This is great in isolation, and a mentality I usually hold, but it does have problems. The “greedy” humans have the mentality of “someone else is going to do this, I want to get there first.” Individually, this doesn’t change much. But if you multiple people doing this, you get people competing with each other, and usually they push each other to get to the outcome faster.
Yes. But everyone’s pushing hard on capabilities right now anyway. This has always been a problem in AIS. But we can’t really do anything without running into this risk. But I think there’s a big difference between employees at an org, and people starting orgs. I’d be fine with existing orgs attracting talent the way I mentioned, but I wouldn’t want to throw money at someone (who’s only interested in status) to start their own org. It’s certainly tricky. Like, I can imagine how the leaders of an org can slowly get usurped. Holding current leaders in AIS in prestige can possibly mitigate the risk, where people with senior status in the field can function as “gatekeepers”. Like, a young physicist who wants to gain clout, only for the sake of their own status, is still going to have to deal with senior members in the field who might call bs. If enough senior members call bs, that person loses status.
So I think there’s a huge difference between other EA causes and AIS. You can probably accomplish a good number of other objectives in EA without these, but I still think trying to make them higher status might still be useful. It’s a way of signaling what’s important in society and what’s valued. If I knew a way to make someone working in Pandemic Preparedness as high status as the NBA, I probably would.
That being said, AI is a different beast. Places like San Francisco are filled with people working 70+ hours a week, hungry to get ahead in someway in AI. I’d love to tap into that hunger, with the metric for success being Alignment. It would need to have actual metrics for success, though, like provably solving certain certain aspects of the problem, or making a huge discovery in interpretability. If someone can accomplish demonstrable huge gains in this, I don’t really care what their personal motivations are.
Thanks for this added explanation, makes more sense when you put it that way. Again I can never understand somewhere like San Franciso, living in sleepy Northern Uganda and working 40ish hours a week with probably average productivity by your standards!
I also don’t necessarily care what their motivations are, I’m just dubious whether the motivation of greed is going to achieve those huge gains you are hoping for. My 2 big questions hre are
1. Can we actually raise enough money to make the EV of the greedy talent worth it, vs. others who are still very talented but willing to work on safety for less? Like if we hired 2 EA safety people at 100k, would the greedy one at 200k really be achieving more?
2. Will either the org or the individual not eventually be corrupted towards capabilities by the big money anyway? Either when our EA money runs dry or they just get offerred more than we could (300k rather than our 200 whatever it is). Basically what Jason said below.
“Also, if a lab has a massive payroll to meet, that fact alone might subtly push its leaders toward what will generate revenue and/or attract profit-motivated investors., as those revenue sources are more stable/reliable than charitable grants mostly from a single donor.”
Its a reasonable argument you make though, I’m fairly uncertain about this.
I would have said no a year ago, but a lot of people are now much more interested in AIS. I think there’s a lot of potential for much more funding coming in. The binary greedy vs. non-greedy human sounds strange to me. What I can say is many EA types have the mentality of neglectedness, how they can individually have the most impact, etc. Many EAs would probably say they wouldn’t be working on the things they were working on if enough other people were. This is great in isolation, and a mentality I usually hold, but it does have problems. The “greedy” humans have the mentality of “someone else is going to do this, I want to get there first.” Individually, this doesn’t change much. But if you multiple people doing this, you get people competing with each other, and usually they push each other to get to the outcome faster.
Yes. But everyone’s pushing hard on capabilities right now anyway. This has always been a problem in AIS. But we can’t really do anything without running into this risk. But I think there’s a big difference between employees at an org, and people starting orgs. I’d be fine with existing orgs attracting talent the way I mentioned, but I wouldn’t want to throw money at someone (who’s only interested in status) to start their own org. It’s certainly tricky. Like, I can imagine how the leaders of an org can slowly get usurped. Holding current leaders in AIS in prestige can possibly mitigate the risk, where people with senior status in the field can function as “gatekeepers”. Like, a young physicist who wants to gain clout, only for the sake of their own status, is still going to have to deal with senior members in the field who might call bs. If enough senior members call bs, that person loses status.