At 2M$/year for this forum, it seems that CEA is willing to pay 7.5$ for the average hour of engagement and 40$/month for the average monthly active user.
I found this much higher than I expected!
I understand that most of the value of spending on the forum is not in current results but in future returns, and in having a centralized place to “steer” the community. But this just drove home to me how counter-intuitive the cost-effectiveness numbers for AI-safety are compared to other cause areas.
E.g. I expect Dominion to have cost 10-100x less per hour of engagement, and the amount of investment on this forum to not make sense for animal welfare concerns.
I was really, really happy to see transparency on the team now focusing more on AI-safety, after months/years of rumors and the list of things we are not focusing on still including “Cause-specific work (such as … AI safety)”.
I think it’s a great change in terms of transparency and greatly appreciate you sharing this
But this just drove home to me how counter-intuitive the cost-effectiveness numbers for AI-safety are compared to other cause areas.
E.g. I expect Dominion to have cost 10-100x less per hour of engagement, and the amount of investment on this forum to not make sense for animal welfare concerns.
Your first sentence might well be true. But the comparison with the Dominion documentary doesn’t seem very relevant. If I consider the primary uses of the forum for animal welfare folks, I expect them to be some combination of a) sharing and critiquing animal-welfare related research and strategy, b) fundraising, and c) hiring.[1]
So the comparison with an animal welfare-related documentary for mass consumption is less apt, and perhaps you should compare with an hour of engagement for animal-welfare related journals (for the research angle) or fundraisers with fairly wealthy[2] animal welfare-interested people.
Though I suppose normal fundraisers are with very wealthy people, and not just fairly wealthy ones? But I imagine EAF onlookers to have a long tail, wealth-wise.
I understand your intuition behind dividing the hours by expenses, but I don’t think those numbers are correct; this comment has a bit more detail.
I also agree with Linch that Dominion is probably not the right comparison; a conference like CARE might be a better reference class of “highly dedicated people seriously engaging with complex animal welfare topics”
That being said, I think you have an underlying point which is underappreciated: we sometimes talk about “cause prioritization” as though one cause would be universally better than another, but it’s entirely consistent to be willing to pay more for someone to read a forum post about AI safety than about animal welfare, while simultaneously being willing to pay more for an animal welfare documentary than an AI safety one. I think it is, in fact, true that many people I talk to would pay more for an hour of someone reading about AI safety than an hour of reading about animal welfare, and that is a relevant fact for figuring out how we should prioritize our work.
(This argument also should make us aware of bias in the users: people who use the EA Forum are disproportionately interested in causes where the EA Forum is useful. My guess, though I’m not sure, is that the EA Forum is more oriented towards existential risk than EA overall is, for this reason. Thanks to AGB for pointing this out to me.)
Given the recent increase in Forum expenditures, it’d probably better to use some measure that incorporates historical cost if it were available to compute hourly rate—we wouldnt expect to see much of the effects of recent budget expansion (much of which went to hiring developers) to reflect in the 2023 level of engagement.
I fully agree. If I understand correctly, the extra hires were in June 2022, and these numbers are from January 2023. I think the main point still stands though
Thank you for the transparency!
At 2M$/year for this forum, it seems that CEA is willing to pay 7.5$ for the average hour of engagement and 40$/month for the average monthly active user.
I found this much higher than I expected!
I understand that most of the value of spending on the forum is not in current results but in future returns, and in having a centralized place to “steer” the community. But this just drove home to me how counter-intuitive the cost-effectiveness numbers for AI-safety are compared to other cause areas.
E.g. I expect Dominion to have cost 10-100x less per hour of engagement, and the amount of investment on this forum to not make sense for animal welfare concerns.
I was really, really happy to see transparency on the team now focusing more on AI-safety, after months/years of rumors and the list of things we are not focusing on still including “Cause-specific work (such as … AI safety)”. I think it’s a great change in terms of transparency and greatly appreciate you sharing this
Your first sentence might well be true. But the comparison with the Dominion documentary doesn’t seem very relevant. If I consider the primary uses of the forum for animal welfare folks, I expect them to be some combination of a) sharing and critiquing animal-welfare related research and strategy, b) fundraising, and c) hiring.[1]
So the comparison with an animal welfare-related documentary for mass consumption is less apt, and perhaps you should compare with an hour of engagement for animal-welfare related journals (for the research angle) or fundraisers with fairly wealthy[2] animal welfare-interested people.
Looking at the animal welfare posts on the forum sorted by relevance, I think my summary is roughly true. Feel free to correct me!
Though I suppose normal fundraisers are with very wealthy people, and not just fairly wealthy ones? But I imagine EAF onlookers to have a long tail, wealth-wise.
Thanks for the comment!
I understand your intuition behind dividing the hours by expenses, but I don’t think those numbers are correct; this comment has a bit more detail.
I also agree with Linch that Dominion is probably not the right comparison; a conference like CARE might be a better reference class of “highly dedicated people seriously engaging with complex animal welfare topics”
That being said, I think you have an underlying point which is underappreciated: we sometimes talk about “cause prioritization” as though one cause would be universally better than another, but it’s entirely consistent to be willing to pay more for someone to read a forum post about AI safety than about animal welfare, while simultaneously being willing to pay more for an animal welfare documentary than an AI safety one. I think it is, in fact, true that many people I talk to would pay more for an hour of someone reading about AI safety than an hour of reading about animal welfare, and that is a relevant fact for figuring out how we should prioritize our work.
(This argument also should make us aware of bias in the users: people who use the EA Forum are disproportionately interested in causes where the EA Forum is useful. My guess, though I’m not sure, is that the EA Forum is more oriented towards existential risk than EA overall is, for this reason. Thanks to AGB for pointing this out to me.)
Given the recent increase in Forum expenditures, it’d probably better to use some measure that incorporates historical cost if it were available to compute hourly rate—we wouldnt expect to see much of the effects of recent budget expansion (much of which went to hiring developers) to reflect in the 2023 level of engagement.
I fully agree. If I understand correctly, the extra hires were in June 2022, and these numbers are from January 2023. I think the main point still stands though