I co-founded WhiteBox Research in 2023 and lead its operations and marketing. WhiteBox aims to solve open research problems in AI interpretability and develop more AI safety researchers in Southeast Asia. I’m also a co-founder and board member of EA Philippines.
I previously was a Group Support Contractor for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) for two years, where I helped support EA groups around the world.
You can reach out to me at brian@whiteboxresearch.org or find me on LinkedIn.
Both founders don’t seem to have a background in technical AI safety research. Why do you think Nonlinear will be able to research and prioritize these interventions without having prior experience or familiarity in technical AI safety research?
Relatedly, wouldn’t the organization be better if it hired for a full-time researcher or have a co-founder who has a background in technical AI safety research? Is this something you’re considering doing?
BERI should be renamed to BERI Good.
I’d like users to be able to attach/link a profile picture to their EA Forum profile, and that these pictures would be viewable next to their usernames in posts or comments. I think this would make the forum a bit more human and friendly!
I re-analyzed OpenPhil’s grants data just now (link here), and I noticed that across all your grants since Jan. 1, 2020, scientific research is the focus area with the largest amount granted to, at $66M, or 27% of total giving since then, closely beating out global health and development (chart shown below).
OpenPhil also gave an average of $48M per year from 2017-2020 to scientific research. I’m surprised by this—I knew OpenPhil gave some funding to scientific research, but I didn’t know it’s now the largest cause OpenPhil grants to.
Was there something that happened that made OpenPhil decide to grant more in this area?
Scientific research isn’t a cause area heavily associated with EA currently − 80K doesn’t really feature scientific research in their content or as a priority path, other than for doing technical AI safety research or biorisk research. Also, EA groups and CEA don’t feature scientific research as one of EA’s main causes—the focus still tends to be on global health and development, animal welfare, longtermism, and movement building / meta. (I guess scientific research is cross-cutting across these areas, but I still don’t see a lot of focus on it). Do you think more EAs should be looking into careers in scientific research? Why or why not?
I love the Zuckerberg references and would want to read more of Zuckerberg’s downfall. I hope future Forum feature releases are as good and funny as this!
Hi Rob, I also like the idea of “there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods.”
However, it’s not easy for “people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).” Most people do not have the brand or reach of 80,000 Hours.
It’s likely that only very popular figures in the EA community would get substantial reach if they made an Intro to EA collection, and it would still likely not be as large as the reach of 80,000 Hours’s. As such, 80,000 Hours’s choice of what Intro to EA resources to include is quite hard to compete with, and thus should ideally be more representative of what the community thinks.
80K will somewhat solve this problem themselves since they will create their own feed that exposes people to a wider variety of problems and topics, and possibly they could create a near-termist feed aside from that too. But I still think it would be better if what 80K marketed as an “Intro to EA” feed had more global health and dev’t and animal welfare content. I talk more about this here.
I do see that many hours probably went into picking the ten episodes. But it seems like 80K didn’t get enough feedback from more people (or a wider variety of people) before releasing this. Hence I’m giving my feedback this way, and judging from the upvotes, quite a few people agree with me.
Of course, I agree that more testing and re-listening could be done. But I would think that a significant % of people who get interested in EA, including quite a few people who are into longtermism, first get interested in global health and development or animal welfare, before getting interested in longtermism. And I think 80K might be losing out on these people with this feed.
Thanks for the reply Kat!
However, I’m still a bit confused. When you say “We are not intending to do technical AI safety work. We are going to focus on non-technical for the time being.”, do you mean you will only be researching high leverage, non-technical AI Safety interventions? Or do you mean that the research work you’re doing is non-technical?
I understand that the research work you’re doing is non-technical (in that you probably aren’t going to directly use any ML to do your research), but I’m not that aware of what the non-technical AI Safety interventions are, aside from semi-related things like working on AI strategy and policy (i.e. FHI’s GovAI, The Partnership on AI) and advocating against shorter-term AI risks (i.e. Future of Life Institute’s work on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems). Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say you will focus on non-technical AI safety work for the time being? Maybe you could give some examples of possible non-technical AI safety interventions? Thanks!
For everyone: What are your thoughts on the effective altruism movement? What do you like about it, and what do you not like about it?
Thanks for this! A few thoughts:
On support for local groups
Since CEA can’t constantly give personal support or feedback to all groups, I think CEA can instead help newer groups get connected with older groups to get feedback and advice from them. Or, newer groups can proactively seek out advice from more established groups.
We in EA Philippines were able to get advice from older EA groups, such as the ones in Singapore, Toronto, Quebec, and Norway, at different points in the past year, and we only started in Nov. 2018. Some of this advice was very valuable. Forming these relationships also just increased our motivation to do community building, since we heard of and learned from how others did it.
On the survey questions
Here are questions I’d love to know the answers to—maybe some of these could be included in future surveys:
1. If you added up the average number of hours a week each of the organizers in your local group contributed the past year, what would that number be? (i.e. if you’re 3 organizers averaging 15 hours a week each, then that’s 45 hours)
It would be great to see if there’s a correlation between the EA outcome metrics with the number of hours per week spent community building. And it’d be interesting to see if there are any outlier groups (those that have very few organizers or spend very little time, but have a lot of highly engaged people in their community).
2. What problems did you experience while organizing for your local group over the past year?
Maybe this could be a freetext/open-ended question first, since I’m not sure what could be the dropdown options for this. Then maybe the answers could be manually clustered / grouped after.
If you’d prefer the question to have options though, possible options I can think of are: Personal mental health issues, Organizer/s leaving or not contributing, Getting less than expected number of people at an event, Having to cancel an event, and “Others” (which can be a freetext).
I’m happy this exists and I like the logo!
Thanks for making this podcast feed! I have a few comments about what you said here:
I think if you are going to call this feed “Effective Altruism: An Introduction”, it doesn’t make sense to skew the selection towards longtermism so heavily. Maybe you should have phrased the feed as “An Introduction to Effective Altruism & Longtermism” given the current list of episodes.
In particular, I think it would be better if the Lewis Bollard episode was added, and one on Global Health & Dev’t, such as either the episode with Rachel Glennerster or James Snowden (which I liked).
If 80K wanted to limit the feed to 10 episodes, then that means 2 episodes would have to be taken out. As much as I like the episode with David Denkenberger, I don’t think learning about ALLFED is “core” to EA, so that’s one that I would have taken out. A 2nd episode to take out is a harder choice, but I would pick between taking one out among the episodes with Will MacAskill, Paul Christiano, or Hilary Greaves. I guess I would pick the one with Will, since I didn’t get much value from that episode, and I’m unsure if others would.
Alternatively, an easier solution is to expand the number of episodes in the feed to 12. 12 isn’t that much farther from 10.
I think it is important to include an episode on animal welfare and global health and development because
The EA movement does important work in these two causes
Many EAs still care about or work on these two causes, and would likely want more people to continue entering them
People who get pointed to this feed and don’t get interested in longtermism (or aren’t a fit for careers in it) might think that the EA movement is not for them, even when it could be, if they just learned more about animal welfare or global health and development.
As a broader point, when we introduce or talk about EA, especially with large reach (like 80K’s reach), I think it’s important to convey that the EA movement works on a variety of causes and worldviews.
Even from a longtermist perspective, I think the EA community is better the “broader” it is and the more it also includes work on other “non-longtermist” causes, such as global health and development and animal welfare. This way, the community can be bigger, and it’s probably easier to influence things for the long-term better the bigger the community is. For example, more people would be in government or in influential roles.
These are just my thoughts. I’m open to hearing others’ thoughts too!