I currently lead EA funds.
Before that, I worked on improving epistemics in the EA community at CEA (as a contractor), as a research assistant at the Global Priorities Institute, on community building, and Global Health Policy.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s.
You can give me positive and negative feedback here.
I’ve only skimmed this post, but I think this I agree with all of the main points. I would prefer EA meta orgs that provide benefits to people with money charged for some of their services. I do think the situation is significantly more complicated with orgs that receive substantial institutional funding so I think the original post applies a bit less to orgs like CEA, and more to specific EA groups or small-scale projects (including projects that the EAIF funds).
I suggested to various regional EA groups that they should try and cover some fraction of their costs from members, but there was quite a lot of negative push back (e.g. fundraising distracting them from their main jobs).[1]
EAIF is most interested in funding projects that shouldn’t be funded via regular markets, or might not be noticed as being especially valuable (e.g. many public goods in the nonexcludable and nonrivalrous sense).
@Harri Besceli feel free to push back on any of this if it conflicts with your impression of how the EAIF does/should work.
I still think some version of this is workable but it’s not a priority for the EAIF to figure out right now.
I think focussing on pledges of future income (if you are targeting students) seems great, most students don’t have much money and are also used to living on a much lower amount than they will in a few years after graduating (particularly people in engineering, CS, and math).
I’m aware of at least two efforts to run table top exercises on AI takeoff with decision makers so I don’t think this is particularly neglected, but I do think it’s valuable.
AW seems clearly more neglected in terms of funding inside the effective giving space and on net.
There is plenty of room for funding in the AW space, I would be surprised if $100M couldn’t be spent down over the next 10 years in the AW space at > 50% of the cost-effectiveness of the current marginal dollar (on average).
Most of my uncertainty comes from some credence that human lives are vastly more important than non-human animal lives, or medium-term growth being accelerated by GH interventions which could make GH work much more leveraged.
This is great! Thank you very much for writing this up. I’d be extremely excited for more local groups to self-fund retreats like this. I have seen similar events have large impacts on people’s goals/career choices/etc. and they seem pretty viable to do without a huge amount of planning/money.
A few things that come to mind that I appreciate in people’s applications:
apply to several funders where possible
try and point to a concrete plan (even if it’s basic)
talk about any tests you’ve done for your plan already (e.g. have you spent some time trying to upskill outside of a grant)
talk about why a grant is better than applying to a program/internship/job (or it could be that it’s worse, but you aren’t ready to do those alternatives yet)
try to talk about an end-to-end theory of change for your work—this is mostly about showing you’ve thought about how this project fits into a larger plan and you’re thinking strategically about your career
To be clear you don’t need to do any of these things to get funding, but I often find that applications are improved after people consider some of these bullet points.
simply become one of the most successful and influential ML researchers 🤷♂️
Idk, many of the people they are directing would just do something kinda random which an 80k rec easily beats. I’d guess the number of people for whom 80k makes their plans worse in an absolute sense is kind of low and those people are likely to course correct.
Otoh, I do think people/orgs in general should consider doing more strategy/cause prio research, and if 80k were like “we want to triple the size of our research team to work out the ideal marginal talent allocation across longtermist interventions” that seems extremely exciting to me. But I don’t think 80k are currently being irresponsible (not that you explicitly said that, for some reason I got a bit of that vibe from your post).
I think it’s worth noting that the two papers linked (which I agree are flawed and not that useful from an x-risk viewpoint)
I haven’t read the papers but I am surprised that you don’t think they are useful from an x-risk perspective. The second paper “A Model for Estimating the Economic Costs of Computer Vision Systems that use Deep Learning” seems highly relevant to forecasting AI progress which imo is one of the most useful AIS interventions.
The OP’s claim
This paper has many limitations (as acknowledged by the author), and from an x-risks point of view, it seems irrelevant.
Seems overstated and I’d guess that many people working on AI safety would disagree with them.
Great post—I really enjoyed reading this.
I would have thought the standard way to resolve some of the questions above would be to use a large agent-based model, simulating disease transmission among millions of agents and then observing how successful some testing scheme is within the model (you might be able to backtest the model against well-documented outbreaks).
I’m not sure how much you’d trust these models over your intuitions, but I’d guess they’d have quite a lot of mileage.
I’ve only skimmed these papers, but these seem promising and illustrative of the direction to me:
The first two bullets don’t seem like small UI changes to me; the second, in particular, seems too adversarial imo.
Fwiw, I don’t think that being on the 80k podcast is much of an endorsement of the work that people are doing. I think the signal is much more like “we think this person is impressive and interesting”, which is consistent with other “interview podcasts” (and I suspect that it’s especially true of podcasts that are popular amongst 80k listeners).
I also think having OpenAI employees discuss their views publicly with smart and altruistic people like Rob is generally pretty great, and I would personally be excited for 80k to have more OpenAI employees (particularly if they are willing to talk about why they do/don’t think AIS is important and talk about their AI worldview).
Having a line at the start of the podcast making it clear that they don’t necessarily endorse the org the guest works for would mitigate most concerns—though I don’t think it’s particularly necessary.
I think this is a good policy and broadly agree with your position.
It’s a bit awkward to mention, but as you’ve said that you’ve delisted other roles at OpenAI and that OpenAI has acted badly before—I think you should consider explicitly saying that you don’t necessarily endorse other roles at OpenAI and suspect that some other role may be harmful on the OpenAI jobs board cards.
I’m a little worried about people seeing OpenAI listed on the board and inferring that the 80k recommendation somewhat transfers to other roles at OpenAI (which, imo is a reasonable heuristic for most companies listed on the board—but fails in this specific case).
Companies often hesitate to grant individual raises due to potential ripple effects:
The true cost of a raise may exceed the individual amount if it:
Necessitates adjustments to other salaries via organizational policies
Sets precedents for other employees
Sparks salary discussions among colleagues
An alternative for altruistic employees: Negotiate for charitable donation matches
Generally less desirable for most employees
Similarly attractive to altruists (Assumption: Current donations to eligible charities exceed the proposed raise)
This approach allows altruists to increase their impact without triggering company-wide salary adjustments.
Fwiw I think that posts and comments on the EA Forum do a lot to create an association. If there wasn’t any coverage of Hanania attending Manifest on the forum, I think something like 10x+ fewer EAs would know about the Hanania stuff, and it would be less likely to be picked up by journalists (a bit less relevant as it was already covered by the Guardian). It seems like there’s a nearby world where less than 1% of weekly active forum users know that an EAish organisation at a commercial venue run by EAish people invited Hanania to attend an event—which I personally don’t think creates much association between EA and Hanania (unlike the current coverage).
Of course, some people here might think that EA should be grappling with racism outside of this incident, in which case opportunities like this are helpful for creating discourse. But insofar as people think that Manifest’s actions were ok-ish, it’s mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, meaning they personally don’t want to attend Manifest; I think debating the topic on the forum is pretty counterproductive. My impression is that the majority of people in the comments are in the latter camp.
If you think that it’s important that Manifest knows why you personally aren’t attending, emailing them seems like a very reasonable action to me (but of course, this doesn’t achieve the goal of letting people who don’t organise the event know why you aren’t attending).
The Labour Party comes to mind—though I have not verified the claims myself and idk if this is what Richard had in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_British_Labour_Party#2021–present
That all makes sense. I will very likely have a think about who to refer.
It’s probably good to note that Manifold is not an EA organisation, and Manifest (iiuc) was not funded by EA funders or branded as an EA event (though I think Manifest was trying to channel some of the EA vibe, and many attendees were involved in EA in some way).
I think Oliver has talked with the writer on twitter already!
Aren’t most of the downsides and upsides to norms hard to reverse (almost by definition)? Maybe you don’t think the upside is in getting other people to also participate in using the signal—but my read of the OP thinks that this is mostly about creating norms.