“having strong or intimate connections with employees of Open Philanthropy greatly enhances the chances of having funding, and it seems almost necessary”
Is this a well-identified phenomenon (in the causal inference sense) ?
Consider the following directed acyclic graph:
Connected with OpenPhil employees ----------> Gets funding from OpenPhil
^ ^ | | | | | | | | +------ Works on alignment ------+
One explanation for this correlation you identify is that being connected with OpenPhil employees leads to people getting funding from OpenPhil (as demonstrated by the horizontal arrow). However, another explanation is that working on alignment causes one to connect with others who are interested in the problem of AI alignment, as well as getting funding from a philanthropic organisation which funds work on AI alignment (as demonstrated by the vertical arrows).
These two explanations are observationally equivalent, in the absence of exogenous variation with respect to how connected one is to OpenPhil employees. Since claiming that it is “almost necessary” to have “strong or intimate connections with employees of Open Philanthropy” to get funding implies wrongdoing from OpenPhil, I’d be interested in evidence which would demonstrate this!
Is this a well-identified phenomenon (in the causal inference sense) ?
Consider the following directed acyclic graph:
Connected with OpenPhil employees ----------> Gets funding from OpenPhil
^ ^
| |
| |
| |
| |
+------ Works on alignment ------+
One explanation for this correlation you identify is that being connected with OpenPhil employees leads to people getting funding from OpenPhil (as demonstrated by the horizontal arrow). However, another explanation is that working on alignment causes one to connect with others who are interested in the problem of AI alignment, as well as getting funding from a philanthropic organisation which funds work on AI alignment (as demonstrated by the vertical arrows).
These two explanations are observationally equivalent, in the absence of exogenous variation with respect to how connected one is to OpenPhil employees. Since claiming that it is “almost necessary” to have “strong or intimate connections with employees of Open Philanthropy” to get funding implies wrongdoing from OpenPhil, I’d be interested in evidence which would demonstrate this!