Davidmanheim

Karma: 7,960

Davidmanheim 10 Jun 2026 7:22 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 1
on: My disagreements with CEA’s approach to stewarding EA
I partly agree with these concerns, but think the solution should be very different. As I’ve argued for quite some time, EA should not be a community, but should be much larger. That is, EA needs to be a movement, not a question.
What would this look like? I think three central points capture most of this, with the latter two emerging from the first.
1. Effective Altruism as a community, or affiliation, or description, isn’t a goal.
2. Giving effectively needs to be about giving effectively, not about identity.
3. Career choice needs to be about people and goals, not about movement building.
I think this incidentally addresses the problems with the growth funnel model; we’re not trying to get people into groups, we’re trying to get them to give effectively and pick careers that are impactful. This is directly in contrast with your claim that we should be aiming for engagement instead of trying to aim for concrete goals. In fact, promoting community is exactly where you’d expect Goodharting and self-promotion in place of concrete goals, and self-dealing and community building replace impact.
This also addresses selection effects—if we’re not focused on community, we don’t need to select on beliefs. Anyone donating to any cause they choose effectively is signing on. Any progress towards goals that improve the present and future is success, regardless of whether it comes from those affiliated with our community.
And according to this model, we’re far more successful than CEA will ever be able to take credit for, because it’s one organization, and is not what matters for whether EA succeeds.
So is the Gates Foundation EA? Not if we care about community and direct affiliation, but absolutely if we care about goals. Is Progress Studies EA? Not if we focus on affiliation, but yes if we care about effective career focuses and decision making. Are Vitalik Buterin, or Michael Bloomberg, or Eric Schmidt, or MacKenzie Scott (Bezos) effectively giving? Not if we care about which cause areas are being supported, but yes if we care about the ethos of picking causes, trying to figure out how to actually do good, and voting with dollars donated.
Perhaps it doesn’t even matter whether people hate effective altruism as a movement, if they are raising money for the global poor. I think the change in culture around giving has been enormous, and it’s partially due to the movement to give money effectively and care about changing the world, even if the movement itself is, as the post claims, dying.
I think principles first stewardship is a partial answer to how to move forward, but I also want the idea of EA as a brand to die. As I have said in the past, I hope that EA does not meaningfully exist in the future, and that it’s seen as a movement which succeeded; to the extent that the shell remains, it shouldn’t matter. The fact that many younger people reject feminism or wokeness doesn’t mean that the movements lost, it often means they were successful enough that it’s hard to even question the things they started out to accomplish. And yes, the organizations left over from the successes of movements like feminism and civil rights keep pushing, but the principal successes are behind them. Their current work may be good, or damaging, or whatever, but it doesn’t matter, because they won the fights they were built to have.
I want that for EA. I want a future where EA as a community doesn’t matter, but effective giving and caring about impact are so commonplace people don’t realize they were once unusual. And I think that’s a path we’re actually able to continue walking, and a goal we could reach—even without EA as a brand.

Davidmanheim 1 Jun 2026 13:37 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why I’m Skeptical of Air Filters for Infection Prevention
This matches my understanding, but I think the conclusion is too strong. That is, I would agree that in most conditions this won’t materially affect transmission, but there are still reasons to think that in settings where people are properly masking, there should be a reasonably clear (or even large) effect on residual transmission. So I’ll strongly agree that it’s good further studies are underway, but I’m skeptical that they address the point I think i most likely to be relevant.
Does this matter in practice? Well, not when people are ignoring infection risks and can’t be bothered to mask, so perhaps not—unless we see an actually worst case pandemic, in which case I expect for behaviors to change and for this to have some non-trivial impact. How much is very uncertain, but I could imagine that conditional on masking, it would decrease transmission rate by more than 10%, which matters greatly if we’re talking about moving from, say, r=1.05 to r=0.95.
How likely is the case where it makes such a difference? It’s unlikely, but it’s exactly the class of case where making a difference matters; the infection rate is possible to reduce greatly, but not easy to actually reduce enough to stop spread using other interventions. (Also, as we saw during COVID, policy responses seem to get relaxed around r=1, and groups that want to push below that level will need something marginal to reduce transmission in their community.)
Given the above logic, clearly there are other methods we should prioritize more strongly, but I think it’s premature to claim the intervention isn’t going to work at all, even if we find trivially small or null impacts from newer studies. This mistake would be similar to, and related to, the mistake made during COVID, when many public health officials jumped from the observed and easy to notice fact that most transmission is via large droplets to the incorrect claim that there isn’t aerosol transmission. And if we slow large droplet based transmission, i.e. if people can keep their damn masks on, the residual infections plausibly get much more important.

Davidmanheim 18 Apr 2026 17:19 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Unfalsifiable stories of doom
I’m not trying to imply it, I’m trying to state it clearly. You dismiss the arguments made in the book as not being empirical. If you haven’t read your post, here are some quotes indicating where you do this explicitly:
”the chapter presents effectively zero empirical research”
“one might expect Y&S to substantiate their case with empirical evidence”
″lack of empirical evidence”

Davidmanheim 16 Apr 2026 15:25 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Unfalsifiable stories of doom
The insistence that only a certain form of evidence, in this case, empirical evidence, would count is for an argument is something Eliezer anticipated in the sequences, unsurprisingly.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/logical-rudeness

Davidmanheim 16 Apr 2026 13:55 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: TFD’s comment on: You Aren’t in Charge of the Overton Window; Politics Is Not Interior Design
I will ask to keep the discussion in one place, and not duplicate comments. I’ve responded to the original post, if any readers want to click the link below to see the reply.

Davidmanheim 3 Apr 2026 14:49 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Impact of Holocaust on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails
Strongly disagree.
Edit to add: Good to know that people react to other people’s discomfort with jokes about mass murder of their family with downvotes.

Davidmanheim 26 Mar 2026 18:48 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: $1 billion is not enough; OpenAI Foundation must start spending tens of billions each year
That’s a really good point, thanks! Though if they don’t have short timelines, it seems like they are being quite irresponsible as board members not preventing Sam from making increasingly large bets on scaling. Of course, they might not be willing to cross him; the current board presumably learned the lesson from Ilya’s ill-fated decision.
Also, you need what are currently considered almost implausibly long timelines to not think that them spending more quickly makes sense.

Davidmanheim 26 Mar 2026 9:10 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: $1 billion is not enough; OpenAI Foundation must start spending tens of billions each year
1. This is year two, not year one.
2. See the new Q&A item addressing the ned to build capacity; they could give to Givewell, Givedirectly, or via Coeff’s funds specific to their goals. They could also give via Gates foundation, etc. They can do this while building up their internal capacity, so they really don’t need to delay additional years.
3. They have incredibly short AGI timelines, so per their own views, they can’t afford to move slowly. If they are giving less than 5% of assets after they already claim AGI, that’s a huge failure. So in my view, your proposed 2028 target for giving so little that they are more than doubling assets yearly is insanely conservative, not at all “an aggressive, public ramp-up targets.”
4. That said, yes, I already agreed that actually ambitious public ramp-up commitments could be sufficient; as I said in the post “if it’s done in the next two years, I will admit they are doing their jobs”—but they didn’t announce any such plans, and as noted in the post, the total giving commitment is a cash total certainly worth less than 1/6th of their (current rapidly growing) funds; that’s insanely low given that it is their total eventual commitment!

Davidmanheim 25 Mar 2026 16:16 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael Townsend🔸’s comment on: $1 billion is not enough; OpenAI Foundation must start spending tens of billions each year
No, it would not. Per the frame that makes the argument more compelling, as I said; “Secondly, they may be even more successful in building significantly more powerful AI, transforming the world. Obviously, the nonprofit would become far wealthier, but given OpenAI’s mandate, it also becomes irrelevant.”

But within the first option, if they are actually more than doubling their value yearly (as implied by 100x in 6 years, which matches their current revenue growth continuing at the current rate,) if they give away $20 billion per year, starting at their current valuation of $150 billion, they end up giving away only a small fraction of their eventual endowment—about 13%. And in that case, given that it’s hard to spend 13% of $150b effectively, it’s going to be far harder to spend any large percentage of their $15 trillion endowment in later years!

Davidmanheim 25 Mar 2026 11:53 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: $1 billion is not enough; OpenAI Foundation must start spending tens of billions each year
To forestall an obvious objection, I do not endorse the decision of OpenAI to use this structure, and there are many other problems. However, the above arguments should apply according to the views they profess, which seems important.

Davidmanheim 10 Mar 2026 13:48 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: You Should Donate To EA Fundraisers or Community-Builders rather than GiveWell’s Top Charities
To be clear about my views, I do support spending on local community orgs—but “local organizations or those where I have personal affiliations or feel responsibilities towards are also important to me—but… this is conceptually separate from giving charity effectively, and as I mentioned, I donate separately from the 10% dedicated to charity.”

Davidmanheim 10 Mar 2026 13:46 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Bregman makes a decent case for boycotting Chat GPT
I am not saying everyone is malicious, nor that no-one cares—but belief fixation can happen with a moderate non-majority proportion of a population incentivized to believe it is true, and something like this isn’t incompatible with good motivations, and it is about as hard to refute once people claim it’s true as it would to establish the claim in the first place.

Davidmanheim 26 Feb 2026 5:39 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: You Should Donate To EA Fundraisers or Community-Builders rather than GiveWell’s Top Charities
Very briefly, it’s unclear to me how much of the claimed impact of meta and community building orgs is counterfactual. The incentives created here are quite solidly against any impartial analysis. Also, as I’ve argued before, as an almost deontological point, I’m uncomfortable with people funding their social circle and community and putting what would otherwise be considered spending on dues in community organizations as their 10% giving to effective charity.

Davidmanheim 26 Feb 2026 5:28 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Bregman makes a decent case for boycotting Chat GPT
pretty well established though in the activist world that is often effective to pick one specific thing to get a”win” on, at the right time.
It may be well established, but given the incentives in that world, it’s unlikely that the belief would need to correlate with truth to have become well established.

Davidmanheim 11 Feb 2026 20:37 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: Thoughts on Toby Ords AI Scaling Series
Strong agree that absent new approaches the tailwind isn’t enough—but it seems unclear that pretraining scaling doesn’t have farther to go, and it seems that current approaches with synthetic data and training via RL to enhance one-shot performance have room left for significant improvement.

I also don’t know how much room there is left until we hit genius level AGI or beyond, and at that point even if we hit a wall, more scaling isn’t required, as the timeline basically ends.

Davidmanheim 27 Jan 2026 0:57 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 1
on: Why I reject the longtermist argument against accelerating AI
the extinction scenario that Eliezer Yudkowsky has described. His scenario depends on the premise that AI systems could quickly develop advanced molecular nanotechnology capable of matching or even surpassing the sophistication of biological systems.
But that’s not the claim he makes!
To quote:
The concrete example I usually use here is nanotech, because there’s been pretty detailed analysis of what definitely look like physically attainable lower bounds on what should be possible with nanotech, and those lower bounds are sufficient to carry the point.

Davidmanheim 15 Jan 2026 11:26 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: Who sets my org’s agenda?
Mostly agree. I’ve been involved in local orgs a bit more than most people in EA, and grew up in a house where my parents were often serving terms on different synagogue and school boards, and my wife has continued her family’s similar tradition—so I strongly agree that passionate alignment changes things—but even that rarely leads to boards setting the strategic direction.

I think a large part of this is that strategy is hard, as you note, and it’s very high context for orgs. I still wonder about who is best placed to track priority drift, and about how much we want boards to own the strategic direction; it would be easy, but I think very unhelpful, for the board to basically just do what Holden suggests, and only be in charge of the CEO—because a lot of value from the board is, or can be, their broader strategic views and different knowledge. And for local orgs, that happens much more, the leaders need to convince board members to do things or make changes, rather than doing it on their own and getting vague approval from the board. But, as a last point, it seems hard to do lots of this for small orgs. Overhead from the board is costly, and I don’t know how much effort we want to expect.

Davidmanheim 12 Jan 2026 19:16 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: alene’s comment on: Who sets my org’s agenda?
My board isn’t the reason for the lack of clarity—and it certainly is my job to set the direction. I don’t think any of them are particularly dissatisfied with the way I’ve set the org’s agenda. But my conclusion is that I disagree somewhat with Holden’s post that partly guided me in the past couple years, in that it’s more situational, and there are additional useful roles for the board.

Davidmanheim 6 Jan 2026 16:57 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Clay🔸’s comment on: Where do AI Safety Fellows go? Analyzing a dataset of 600+ alumni
I’d find a breakdown informative, since the distribution both between different frontier firms and between safety and not seems really critical, at least in my view of the net impacts of a program. (Of course, none of this tells us counterfactual impact, which might be moving people on net either way.)

Davidmanheim 5 Jan 2026 9:35 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Where do AI Safety Fellows go? Analyzing a dataset of 600+ alumni
Biggest unanswered but I think critical question:
What proportion are working for frontier labs (not “for profit” generally, but the ones creating the risks,) in which roles (how many are in capabilities work now?) and at which labs?