Looking to advance businesses with charities in the vast majority shareholder position. Check out my TEDx talk for why I believe Profit for Good businesses could be a profound force for good in the world.
Brad Westđ¸
Karma: 2,628
Could you please give examples of these posts you seem to be saying are wholly without merit? Scrolling through my feed, it isnât evident to me to what you are referring.
Hi Jake,
Normal businesses pay at least 25% tax in Australia, whereas Profit for Good businesses (Humanitix, Give Industries, Thankyou) pay no tax, leading to about a 33% yield advantage (1 /â 0.75 = 1.333). It is strange that philanthropy more generally does not utilize Australia as an investment opportunity for foundations/â other philanthropic investors.
Re someone with a private equity background. Yes, they would be potentially a very good fit, with the understanding that their primary job would be securing funds for these acquisitions in exchange for bonds on the acquired businesses from philanthropists/âincome investors.
ProÂject COA is hiring a FoundÂing PartÂnerÂships Lead
I actually wonder whether there were more people who opened up to the idea of harm reduction by being an insider within the factory farming system than there were people who were persuaded of the clear foolishness of joining AI companies to try to make a difference (as I think was the satirical point of this post).
This is actually a quite apt summary.
Profit for Good 390 page ReÂsearch Compilation
I donât understand why you put such a significance on the drafting of the material. Someone could have more problematic use of AI if they simply deferred to erroneous AI research findings and made a post in his/âher own words. Someone could brainstorm and follow the erroneous reasoning of an AI and do so in human words. Conversely, AI could draft words where the research and reasoning is checked and the words to express the thoughts are iterated many times between human/âAI to come to a very strong and clear method of expressing it.
Your drawing the line at drafting both does not capture many bad uses of AI and also captures many good or great uses of AI, in my view.
Iâm not disagreeing with this post (or, in any event, not in the comment to which you replied). I am noting that most of the discussion that I have seen has been pretty against AI-generated writing writ large, conflating the good use of it with the bad use. I am noting my opinion that there is a lot of value in this usage. When I am saying âmost of the discussionâ, I am not talking about this post specifically, but the broader discussion there has been about the use of AI to generate writings.
[requires disclosure] A user has an idea for a forum post, then co-writes it with an LLM, turning a verbal mind-dump into bullet points, into an essay, into bullets again, etc⌠It turns out good.
I think this category, back and forth idea and drafting iteration between human and AI(s), has an enormous amount of value. The chatbots are very good at both generalizing from pithy insights and organizing material pretty effectively. Discussion and feedback over several rounds, at least for me, can produce content that well conveys my ideas much more quickly than if I were to just do it myself.
I think it is unfortunate that most of the discussion seems to be about demonizing the use of all AI for writing-generation, rather than distinguishing the good for the bad, and encouraging its positive use to enable contributions that otherwise just would not have happened.
Regarding the social multiplier, financial effect on vegan products, and boosting the social credibility of animal welfare, it seems like you are making the case that âoffsettingâ should take the full counterfactual difference between being an omnivore and a vegan, which includes the positive effects of being a vegan as well as the avoidance of the negative effects of being an omnivore. I would be interested in seeing attempts at calculating the value of these positive effects, attempted to be cashed out in terms of funding for farmed animal charities.
If AGI goes well for humans, this will likely mean a lot of technological development. This would likely include technologies allowing for products equal to or superior on the dimensions humans like, that donât have the animal welfare entailments. I realize that there have been some arguments that people would still prefer products created through suffering even if alternatives could be just as cheap, satisfying, and convenient, but I think that attitudes would change in the medium to long-term if those conditions were met.
Are the services available to founders (or other EAs that might be interested) for a fee?
The ambiguity in this regard may give the impression that there is more hostility toward people using AI to draft things than there actually is.
Thereâs some ambiguity as to whether this is a personal preference question (I.e., I would never post something drafted by an AI, but donât have a problem if you do) or a normative question (I. E., I would never post something drafted by an AI and neither should you.
I would definitely want a human reviewing and possibly iterating, but if that is happening and the AI is drafting, thatâs fine.
I think the problem is fundamentally the lack of care and attention to the content being created, not whether or not AI is used. If it is in peopleâs incentives to produce polished, thoughtless, drivel on LinkedIn and they can do it in 10 seconds, they will.
This is very different from an iterative process in which the human is carefully examining the output and refining to optimize the exploration and explanation of an idea.
I have experience writing things with and without AI. At least for me, it can be a very difficult process trying to convey things as clearly and effectively as I can. Perhaps I am being unreasonable in putting that much time into the process and perhaps other people are just much better at writing clearly and effectively without AI. But I can say that I would not produce a lot of the content that I produce without AI being able to shorten the process significantly.
I disagree pretty strongly with this.
Although there are tradeoffs associated with AI writing, mostly being able to produce content that can appear polished and well-considered when it is not, I think AIâs enabling the proliferation of good thoughts and ideas that would otherwise just never happen far outweighs this.Going back and forth with AI, reviewing, and drafting can turn a writing process that might take several days to a week or more, into an hour or two, or less. This enables me, and Iâm sure others, to share content and ideas that otherwise we would not be able to.
Removing the barriers to people sharing their thoughts quickly and effectively is probably how we get more new and impactful ideas out there. Iâve been pretty sad at the sort of witch-huntery Iâve been seeing about AI generated content.
This is a worthwhile idea and I appreciate you putting it out there. Team formation and skills matching are real bottlenecks. That said, for ideas that fall outside established EA cause areas or existing frameworks, the bigger bottleneck is often upstream of team formation: getting even modest funding to explore feasibility in a rigorous way. Volunteer energy and cross-functional collaboration are valuable, but they tend to dissipate without some resource runway. Your model might be even stronger if it included a pathway for connecting promising early-stage ideas to funders willing to back basic exploration, not just to collaborators.
Seems there might be something of a negative reinforcement cycle. Less posts/âengagement > people less incentivized to visit forum > less posts/âengagement > etc.
Iâm probably saying something obvious, but itâs worth thinking about what might break and reverse this cycle.