Does the evidence support a conclusion that EAs as a whole have some sort of consensus that is against pause advocacy and/or PauseAI US? The evidence most readily available to me seems mixed.
PauseAI US’ fundraising challenges suggest that the major funding sources are—at a minimum—not particularly excited about the org. [EDIT: Struck this out in light of Holly’s comment below.]
I don’t have any knowledge about PauseAI’s success among rank-and-file EA donors (and PauseAI may not have good insight here either, given that donations don’t come with an EA flag on them and the base rate of EA-aligned donations to a random org in the AI space may be hard to discern).
PauseAI ranked very well in last year’s donation election, although it didn’t quite end up in the money.
Holly’s posts relating to AI issues have on average received significant karma on net over the past ~2 years, such as:
To be fair, other posts have low (but still positive) karma. Some of these I would characterize as sharp in tone—to be clear, I am using sharp in a descriptive sense, trying to avoid any evaluation of the tone here. For example, the title and first paragraph of this post claim that a significant number of readers have been “[s]elling out,” “are deluded,” and need to “[w]ake up.” My recollection is that sharply toned posts tend to incur a karma penalty irrespective of the merits of the perspective offered (unless the target is, e.g., SBF). But although the net karma on that post is only +3, that is on 60 votes—suggesting quite a bit of upvotes to counter the downvotes.
Holly also has some high-karma comments which express a lot of frustration with EA being too cozy with Big AI, such as this (+51) and this (+39). There are also comments with net negative karma, some of which are very sharp and some of which I think are not reasonably explainable on that basis.
There’s of course much more to EA than the Forum, but its metrics have the advantage of being quantifiable and thus maybe a little less vibes-based than some competing measures.
I think a lot of the younger and less involved people interacting with this site like the Pause position just like 70-80% of the public like it if it’s explained to them. I wish those people were just as much EA as the Bay Area community doing direct work, but by design they are not. That core community is where the beef comes from. iirc correctly you don’t do EA stuff outside this forum so you wouldn’t know except for what those people post here.
PauseAI US’ fundraising challenges suggest that the major funding sources are—at a minimum—not particularly excited about the org.
The way you phrased that came off as insulting, and it took me a while to realize you weren’t saying “you don’t have money bc you suck”.
We have many funders, including some you probably meant to refer to here like FLI and SFF. It was Open Phil who gave me the runaround bc they want Anthropic to win. We are not particularly “challenged” at fundraising for an org at our stage, especially considering I never raised before PauseAI and I’ve been the sole raiser. There’s lot of other money in the world. We’re probably healthier with our funds in terms of diversity and robustness and maintaining mission control than most EA charities who get all the money from OP/LTFF.
Thanks for the clarification; I struck that bullet point from my comment. Sorry that my phrasing didn’t accomplish what I meant to say—that a non-funding decision would be consistent with anything between the funder being strongly opposed to the organization and the funder concluding that it was just under their bar. I’m glad to hear PauseAI is doing better with fundraising than I thought.
Does the evidence support a conclusion that EAs as a whole have some sort of consensus that is against pause advocacy and/or PauseAI US? The evidence most readily available to me seems mixed.
PauseAI US’ fundraising challenges suggest that the major funding sources are—at a minimum—not particularly excited about the org.[EDIT: Struck this out in light of Holly’s comment below.]I don’t have any knowledge about PauseAI’s success among rank-and-file EA donors (and PauseAI may not have good insight here either, given that donations don’t come with an EA flag on them and the base rate of EA-aligned donations to a random org in the AI space may be hard to discern).
PauseAI ranked very well in last year’s donation election, although it didn’t quite end up in the money.
Holly’s posts relating to AI issues have on average received significant karma on net over the past ~2 years, such as:
To be fair, other posts have low (but still positive) karma. Some of these I would characterize as sharp in tone—to be clear, I am using sharp in a descriptive sense, trying to avoid any evaluation of the tone here. For example, the title and first paragraph of this post claim that a significant number of readers have been “[s]elling out,” “are deluded,” and need to “[w]ake up.” My recollection is that sharply toned posts tend to incur a karma penalty irrespective of the merits of the perspective offered (unless the target is, e.g., SBF). But although the net karma on that post is only +3, that is on 60 votes—suggesting quite a bit of upvotes to counter the downvotes.
Holly also has some high-karma comments which express a lot of frustration with EA being too cozy with Big AI, such as this (+51) and this (+39). There are also comments with net negative karma, some of which are very sharp and some of which I think are not reasonably explainable on that basis.
There’s of course much more to EA than the Forum, but its metrics have the advantage of being quantifiable and thus maybe a little less vibes-based than some competing measures.
I think a lot of the younger and less involved people interacting with this site like the Pause position just like 70-80% of the public like it if it’s explained to them. I wish those people were just as much EA as the Bay Area community doing direct work, but by design they are not. That core community is where the beef comes from. iirc correctly you don’t do EA stuff outside this forum so you wouldn’t know except for what those people post here.
The way you phrased that came off as insulting, and it took me a while to realize you weren’t saying “you don’t have money bc you suck”.
We have many funders, including some you probably meant to refer to here like FLI and SFF. It was Open Phil who gave me the runaround bc they want Anthropic to win. We are not particularly “challenged” at fundraising for an org at our stage, especially considering I never raised before PauseAI and I’ve been the sole raiser. There’s lot of other money in the world. We’re probably healthier with our funds in terms of diversity and robustness and maintaining mission control than most EA charities who get all the money from OP/LTFF.
Thanks for the clarification; I struck that bullet point from my comment. Sorry that my phrasing didn’t accomplish what I meant to say—that a non-funding decision would be consistent with anything between the funder being strongly opposed to the organization and the funder concluding that it was just under their bar. I’m glad to hear PauseAI is doing better with fundraising than I thought.