Cullen

Karma: 3,472

I am a lawyer and policy researcher interested in improving the governance of artificial intelligence using the principles of Effective Altruism. In May 2019, I received a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. I currently work as a Research Scientist in Governance at OpenAI.

I am also a Research Affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI at the Future of Humanity Institute; Founding Advisor and Research Affiliate at the Legal Priorities Project; and a VP at the O’Keefe Family Foundation.

My research focuses on the law, policy, and governance of advanced artificial intelligence.

You can share anonymous feedback with me here.

Cullen 20 Mar 2023 22:02 UTC
2 points
0
on: Forecasts on Moore v Harper from Samotsvety
Market: https://manifold.markets/Radicalia/will-samotsvetys-forecast-on-moore?r=UmFkaWNhbGlh

Cullen 10 Feb 2023 23:00 UTC
22 points
16
in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Linda Linsefors’s Shortform
Relevant, ICYMI: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pz7RdMRouZ5N5w5eE/ea-should-taboo-ea-should

Cullen 10 Feb 2023 18:25 UTC
5 points
2
on: Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
I don’t fully understand why the netted enclosure helps. Is the idea just that it prevents humans from coming close to the barns?

Cullen 7 Feb 2023 7:31 UTC
4 points
0
on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Another market: https://manifold.markets/Radicalia/what-percent-of-100m-people-will-di?r=UmFkaWNhbGlh

Cullen 6 Feb 2023 18:25 UTC
5 points
0
on: Launching The Collective Intelligence Project: Whitepaper and Pilots
Congrats Jasmine et al :-)

Cullen 1 Feb 2023 3:40 UTC
2 points
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on: Google Maps nuke-mode
How do I access this?

Cullen 4 Jan 2023 22:00 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows?

I feel like I was only speaking out against the framing that critics of EA are entitled to a lengthy reply because of EA being ambitious in its scope of caring. (This framing was explicit at least in the quoted paragraph, not necessarily in her post as a whole or her previous work.)

Ah, okay. That seems more reasonable. Sorry for misunderstanding.

Cullen 4 Jan 2023 21:20 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Cullen’s comment on: If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows?
I would also point out that I think the proposition that ” that social norms or norms of discourse should never disincentivize trying to do more than the very minimum one can get away with as an apathetic person or as a jerk” is both:
1. Probably undesirable to implement in practice because any criticism will have some disincentivizing effect.
2. Probably violated by your comment itself, since I’d guess that any normal person would be disincentivized to some extent by engaging in constructive criticism (above the baseline of apathy or jerkiness) that is likely to be labeled as immoral.
This is just to say that I value the general maxim you’re trying to advance here, but “never” is way too strong. Then it’s just a boring balancing question.

Cullen 4 Jan 2023 20:47 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows?

Yeah. I have strong feelings that social norms or norms of discourse should never disincentivize trying to do more than the very minimum one can get away with as an apathetic person or as a jerk. For example, I’m annoyed when people punish others for honesty in cases where it would have been easy to tell a lie and look better. Likewise, I find it unfair if having the stated goal to make the future better for all sentient beings is somehow taken to imply “Oh, you care for the future of all humans, and even animals? That’s suspicious – we’re definitely going to apply extra scrutiny towards you.” Meanwhile, AI capabilities companies continue to scale up compute and most of the world is busy discussing soccer or what not. Yet somehow,”Are EAs following democratic processes and why does their funding come from very few sources?” is made into the bigger issue than widespread apathy or the extent to which civilization might be acutely at risk.

I think this is an undervalued idea. But I also think that there’s a distinct but closely related idea, which is valuable, which is that for any Group X with Goal Y, it is nearly always instrumentally valuable for Group X to hear about suggestions about how it can better advance Goal Y, especially from those who believe that Goal Y is valuable. Sometimes this will read as (or have the effect of) disincentivizing adopting Goal Y (because it leads to criticism), but in fact it’s often much easier to marginally improve the odds of Goal Y being achieved by attempting to persuade Group X to do better at Y than to persuade Group ~X who believes ~Y. I take Carla Zoe to be doing this good sort of criticism, or at least that’s the most valuable way to read her work.

Cullen 9 Dec 2022 23:00 UTC
42 points
33
in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
The main problem with lavishness, IMHO, is not optics per se, but rather that it’s extremely easy for people to trick themselves into believing that spending money on their own comfort/lifestyle/accommodations is net-good-despite-looking-bad (for productivity reasons or whatever). This generalizes to the community level.

(To be clear, this is not to say that we should never follow such reasoning. It’s just a serious pitfall. This is also not original—others have certainly brought this up.)
What links here?
- The case for transparent spending by Jeroen Willems (15 Dec 2022 17:42 UTC; 18 points)

Cullen 7 Dec 2022 18:00 UTC
48 points
38
on: The Spanish-Speaking Effective Altruism community is awesome
Wholesome and awesome and informative!

Grantmaking Bowl: An EA Student Competition Idea

Cullen6 Dec 2022 3:27 UTC

13 points

0 comments3 min readEA link

Cullen 30 Nov 2022 5:47 UTC
8 points
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on: Reminder: you can donate your mana to charity!
Out of curiosity, where does the money come from?

Cullen 25 Nov 2022 6:04 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: The biggest red flag about SBF
How clear is it that stablecoins have value other than by enabling speculative transactions on blockchains? My main model of stablecoins, borrowing from Matt Levine, is that if you do a lot of stuff on-chain, it is also useful to have an on-chain way to transact in fiat.

I could definitely think of many situations in which stablecoins would be useful, but on priors I would guess they’re fairly small compared to uses facilitating speculation.

Cullen 18 Nov 2022 19:18 UTC
98 points
92
on: Does Sam make me want to renounce the actions of the EA community? No. Does your reaction? Absolutely.
A bunch of things that all seem true to me:
1. Some number of people in EA community could have done things that were positive in expectation that would have mitigated much of the downside to EA from FTX.
2. A bunch of people are overreacting to this situation and making it seem much more damning to EA than I think it is. Some of those people are acting in bad faith.
3. It is very possible that as a community we overreact to this situation and adopt bad norms, institutions, or practices that are negative EV going forward.

Cullen 15 Nov 2022 7:15 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Dancer’s comment on: CEA/EV + OP + RP should engage an independent investigator to determine whether key figures in EA knew about the (likely) fraud at FTX
Thanks for flagging this!

Cullen 15 Nov 2022 7:14 UTC
17 points
9
in reply to: Paul_Christiano’s comment on: NY Times on the FTX implosion’s impact on EA

I think the point of most non-profit boards is to ensure that donor funds are used effectively to advance the organization’s charitable mission. If that’s the case, then having donor representation on the board seems appropriate.

I don’t see how this follows.

It is indeed very normal to have one or more donors on the board of a nonprofit. But FTX the for-profit organization did in fact have different interests than the FTX Foundation. For example, it was in the FTX Foundation’s interest to not make promises to grantees that it could not honor. It was also in the Foundation’s broader interest to safeguard the reputation of the broader EA community. Both of these interests were in fact jeopardized by FTX’s actions. It’s reasonable to argue whether an average nonprofit board, exercising average levels of diligence, would have pushed back more on FTX. Maybe not. But that there was a conflict is clear ex post, and I think it’s very plausible that having the FTXF Board have one or more fiduciaries that were not simultaneously beholden to FTX would have caused the org to be a lot more cautious in a variety of ways. At least, that’s the normal corporate governance theory.

Cullen 13 Nov 2022 22:29 UTC
41 points
31
on: CEA/EV + OP + RP should engage an independent investigator to determine whether key figures in EA knew about the (likely) fraud at FTX
Another structural question that will need answering at some point: Did anybody outside of FTX consider it okay that all of the directors at the FTX Foundation were senior FTX employees? Why were there no independent (of FTX) directors there?
What links here?
- Greg_Colbourn's comment on Some comments on recent FTX-related events by Holden Karnofsky (15 Nov 2022 10:55 UTC; 6 points)

Cullen 12 Nov 2022 19:54 UTC
78 points
89
in reply to: Cullen’s comment on: A personal statement on FTX
Relatedly, I think a focus on ends-justify-the-means reasoning is potentially misguided because it seems super clear in this case that, even if we put zero intrinsic value on integrity, honesty, not doing fraud, etc., some of the decisions made here were pretty clearly very negative expected-value. We should expect the upsides from acquiring resources by fraud (again, if that is what happened) to be systematically worth much less than reputational and trustworthiness damage our community will receive by virtue of motivating, endorsing, or benefitting from that behavior.

Cullen 12 Nov 2022 18:12 UTC
175 points
130
on: A personal statement on FTX
My naive moral psychology guess—which may very well be falsified by subsequent revelations, as many of my views have this week—is that we probably won’t ever find an “ends justify the means” smoking gun (eg, an internal memo from SBF saying that we need to fraudulently move funds from account A to B so we can give more to EA). More likely, systemic weaknesses in FTX’s compliance and risk management practices failed to prevent aggressive risk-taking and unethical profit-seeking and self-preserving business decisions that were motivated by some complicated but unstated mix of misguided pseduo-altruism, self-preservation instincts, hubris, and perceived business/shareholder demands.

I say this because we can and should be denouncing ends justify the means reasoning of this type, but I suspect very rarely in the heat of a perceived crisis will many people actually invoke it. I think we will prevent more catastrophes of this nature in the future by focusing more on on integrity as a personal virtue and the need for systemic compliance and risk-management tools within EA broadly and highly impactful/prominent EA orgs, especially those whose altruistic motives will be systematically in tension with perceived business demands.

Cullen

Grant­mak­ing Bowl: An EA Stu­dent Com­pe­ti­tion Idea

Grantmaking Bowl: An EA Student Competition Idea