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.
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 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!
There are many factual inaccuracies in this post. Oliver Habryka (who runs this Lightcone) wrote a tweet thread explaining some of the most egregious errors.
For example, contrary to the article’s claim no FTX funds were used in the purchase of Lighthaven. According to Kelsey Piper (a journalist at Vox) this “is a really, really bad mistake of the kind that should have been caught in even cursory fact checking”.
I think that 80k doing strategic marketing like this sounds really interesting. I personally wasn’t excited about entering (despite being excited about the prize) because I’m pretty suspicious of “chance of a trip”, I think text like this is much more common when the chance is actually very low than when it’s high which makes the endeavour less worthwhile. I think if you’d given an explicit best guess probability that would have been helpful for me.
I’d guess that the vast majority of people who donate to give directly (including substantial public sums) would not describe themselves as EA and by their lights aren’t focussed on “doing the most good with impartiality and scope sensitivity in mind” so I wouldn’t describe them as an EA on this donation alone, if they talk about EA explicitly in the video it would be great to add that context above.
Obviously not “being an EA” does not diminish this achievement, I’m excited when anyone donates to help the poor in a cost-effective manner independent of their community affiliation and even more excited when it’s such a large amount of money!
Thanks for posting this here, it’s very exciting and I’m looking forward to watching the video!
I think that the boring answer for us not doing as much grantmaking in this area as in technical areas is just that we don’t receive a very high number of applications—but this isn’t clearly a bad thing; there are many excellent organisations that do great work in AI policy/governance/advocacy whilst there are only a handful of active organisations on the technical side. I often think that getting a role in an existing org is a better fit for many applicants than doing independent work or starting their own org and I am grateful that the ecosystem for AI policy/governance/advocacy is developed enough to onboard lots of junior people rather than them having to apply for grants to do independent work.
We are trying to do more grantmaking in this space, but unfortunately, the EA brand makes publicising the grants we do make difficult. Many of our grants would count as “fieldbuilding” for AI policy/governance/advocacy, but we could make this clearer in our descriptions. LTFF fund managers, in general, are very excited about work in this area. Even if we can’t fund it directly, we often try to refer it to other funders to fund, so I’d definitely encourage people to apply.
That makes sense. I currently believe that the grantee did honour their commitment re hours spent on this project, and if I came to believe otherwise I would be much more inclined to claw back funding.
(You didn’t explicitly make this claim, but I’d like to push back somewhat on people with unsuccessful longtermist projects “slacking off”. In general, my impression from speaking to grantees (including those with failed projects) is that they are overworked rather than underworked relative to “normal jobs” that pay similarly or are similarly challenging/selective.)
This isn’t really against Zach’s point, but presumably, a lot of Greg’s motivation here is signalling that he is serious about this belief and having a bunch of people in this community see it for advocacy reasons. I think that taking out a loan wouldn’t do nearly as well on the advocacy front as making a public bet like this.
Oops, I meant that I would like to bet against Greg, but I can see how my last comment was ambiguous, and I appreciate your comment.
I’m an AI-concerned person who would also likely take this bet (or similar bets) against Greg’s side, i.e. I don’t think that AGI will kill us all by the end of 2027. Please do reach out if you’d like to bet in the $100-$10k range.
(Edited for clarity)
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
Seems overstated and I’d guess that many people working on AI safety would disagree with them.