Criticism of who? If anything EAs have been far too trusting of their actual leaders. Conversely they have been far too critical of people like Holly. Its not a simple matter of some parameter being too high.
Holden is married to Dario Amodei’s sister. Dario is a founder of Anthropic. Holden was a major driver of EA AI policy.
Dustin is a literal billionaire who, along with his wife, has control over almost all EA institutions. Being critical of Dustin, while at all relying on EA funding or support, is certainly brave. Open Phil is known to be quite capricious. If anything the EA comunity was far too trusting of its leaders and funders. Dustin has tons of ties, including financial, to the AI industry.
These serious conflicts explain a lot of why EA took such a strange approach to AI policy.
However criticizing random EAs who are trying to do a good job is completely demotivating. There needs to be some sense of proportionality. I remember being asked about the potential downsides of my project when I applied to future fund. There were concerns about what, to me, seemed extremely unlikely outcomes. It is very funny looking back given that FTX was, at that time, running a gigantic fraud. Criticism of the locally powerful is undersupplied. Criticism of random people is very oversupplied.
It’s not precisely OpenPhil, but GoodVentures’ recent surprise withdrawal from several cause areas and refusal to even publicly say what all the areas they were withdrawing from were comes to mind...
I think this is super important—criticism of those with the most power is likely to be worthwhile. Like in all politics power can “buy” and create “opinion”. Then, if epistemics is something we value, we have to be super careful of the contribution money makes to truth. Just look at the people in climate change—nowadays nearly anyone can frame their pet project as a climate change intervention and they get funded, as long as they go along with the party line. And in climate change there are huge economic incentives—it is not a false claim by conservatives that many “green” investors stand to gain enormously from a change to the cleantech they invested in. If there is one thing history should have taught us it is that power corrupts and I see no robust immune system in EA against this. At the same time we have to be charitable—there are of course significant chances those with power in the movement both have pure intentions of doing good and are able to resist any influence from personal gains they stand to make from nudging the movement in certain directions.
Criticism of who? If anything EAs have been far too trusting of their actual leaders. Conversely they have been far too critical of people like Holly. Its not a simple matter of some parameter being too high.
Holden is married to Dario Amodei’s sister. Dario is a founder of Anthropic. Holden was a major driver of EA AI policy.
Dustin is a literal billionaire who, along with his wife, has control over almost all EA institutions. Being critical of Dustin, while at all relying on EA funding or support, is certainly brave. Open Phil is known to be quite capricious. If anything the EA comunity was far too trusting of its leaders and funders. Dustin has tons of ties, including financial, to the AI industry.
These serious conflicts explain a lot of why EA took such a strange approach to AI policy.
However criticizing random EAs who are trying to do a good job is completely demotivating. There needs to be some sense of proportionality. I remember being asked about the potential downsides of my project when I applied to future fund. There were concerns about what, to me, seemed extremely unlikely outcomes. It is very funny looking back given that FTX was, at that time, running a gigantic fraud. Criticism of the locally powerful is undersupplied. Criticism of random people is very oversupplied.
In what way do you think OpenPhil is capricious?
It’s not precisely OpenPhil, but GoodVentures’ recent surprise withdrawal from several cause areas and refusal to even publicly say what all the areas they were withdrawing from were comes to mind...
I think this is super important—criticism of those with the most power is likely to be worthwhile. Like in all politics power can “buy” and create “opinion”. Then, if epistemics is something we value, we have to be super careful of the contribution money makes to truth. Just look at the people in climate change—nowadays nearly anyone can frame their pet project as a climate change intervention and they get funded, as long as they go along with the party line. And in climate change there are huge economic incentives—it is not a false claim by conservatives that many “green” investors stand to gain enormously from a change to the cleantech they invested in. If there is one thing history should have taught us it is that power corrupts and I see no robust immune system in EA against this. At the same time we have to be charitable—there are of course significant chances those with power in the movement both have pure intentions of doing good and are able to resist any influence from personal gains they stand to make from nudging the movement in certain directions.