EA Meta for 7 years!
COO of Ambitious Impact (previously Charity Entrepreneurship).
Co-Founder of High Impact Professionals. We enable working professionals to maximize their positive impact by supporting them in donating their time, skills and resources effectively.
Ex-CTO and MD of Germany for Founders Pledge. Big on promoting Effective Giving.
Originally from New York, living in Berlin.
I continue to be impressed by the Effektiv Spenden team. Well done everyone!
To me, based on what you said, you have provided a lot of value to many people at relatively low cost to yourself. I have the impression that the time was quite counterfactual given you didn’t seem to have many burning projects at the time. So, seems pretty good to me on the face of it although for every given detail you know way more than I do!
I continue to be impressed by the breadth and depth of stuff you and the rest of the CE team pump out, seemingly on a monthly basis!
Really excited by this and all of the work the CE team has been pumping out!
Quick question regarding programming: You say the first month is about learning and the second about applying, but that the course is 11 weeks. What is the extra time dedicated to?
Strong agree with this. Most EAs would probably agree with these points abstractly, but there is likely a gap in that (I believe) most EAs have not e.g. taken the GGWC pledge.
Hey David, thanks for the question. I just want to chime in from High Impact Professionals’ stand point.
High Impact Professionals has two main products, both of which are geared at getting professionals into more impactful roles. These are:
- Talent Directory—We have a talent directory with over 750 impact-oriented professionals looking for work at high-impact organizations and over 100 organizations sourcing from it. We encourage both professionals and organizations to sign up. I think this doesn’t have much overlap with SuccessIf, except with their matchmaking work, where we’d be excited if they matchmade using our talent directory as a source.
- Impact Accelerator Program—We are currently running a 6-week program geared towards helping professionals form and execute on an impact plan, with a focus on identifying and removing barriers to impact. Participants meet weekly to discuss progress on their impact plan and take part in a mastermind session where they discuss current barriers. I’d say this program has decent overlap with Successif’s programs, especially the peer support and overcoming barriers aspects.
I think one difference as I understand it is that SuccessIf is mostly focused on AI/Longtermist work in terms of resources dedicated to those areas, whereas HIP is cause neutral in the sense that it doesn’t seek to prioritize a particular cause area. But I’ll let Claire elaborate here.
I just want to say thank you for being courageous and sharing this and also sorry that you had to/have to go through this.
This is really great to hear!
Can I ask roughly how much it costs to commission such a report? I’d love to see more investigations into different organizations to get more robust data on how impactful they are.
Great to hear! It was on my agenda to reach out to you today and I appreciate the proactivity!
I agree with you and also want to push back on the meme that “all the good stuff gets funded”.
Cool initiative!
I am not very involved in AI Safety but have heard multiple times from big funders in the ecosystem over time something like “everything in AI Safety that SHOULD be funded IS being funded. What we really need are good people working on it.” I’d expect e.g. OP to be excited to fund great people working in the space, so curious why you think the people who will apply to your network aren’t getting funded otherwise.
Just for context: I am very FOR a more diverse funding ecosystem so I think getting more people to fund more projects who have different strategies for funding and risk tolerances is going in the right direction.
Very excited for you to take on this project as you already know Fernando!
Great initiative Rebecca!
Awesome, Hauke. Really excited to see this.
Excited to see another impactful set of charities get founded!
I agree that is the other way out of the puzzle. I wonder whom to even trust if everyone is susceptible to this problem...
Yeah I suppose we just disagree then. I think such a big error and hit to the community should downgrade any rational person’s belief in the output of what EA has to offer and also downgrade the trust they are getting it right.
Another side point: Many EAs like Cowen and think he is right most of the time. I think it is suspicious that when Cowen says something about EA that is negative he is labeled stuff like “daft”.
The difference in that example is that Scholtz is one person so the analogy doesn’t hold. EA is a movement comprised of many, many people with different strengths, roles, motives, etc and CERTAINLY there are some people in the movement whose job it was (or at a minimum there are some people who thought long and hard) to mitigate PR/longterm risks to the movement.
I picture the criticism more like EA being a pyramid set in the ground, but upside down. At the top of the upside-down pyramid, where things are wide, there are people working to ensure the longterm future goes well on the object level, and perhaps would include Scholtz in your example.
At the bottom of the pyramid things come to a point, and that represents people on the lookout for x-risks to the endeavour itself, which is so small that it turned out to be the reason why things toppled, at least with respect to FTX. And that was indeed a problem. It says nothing about the value of doing x-risk work.
I think that is a charitable interpretation of Cowen’s statement: “Hardly anyone associated with Future Fund saw the existential risk to…Future Fund, even though they were as close to it as one could possibly be.”
I think charitably, he isn’t saying that any given x-risk researcher should have seen an x-risk to the FTX project coming. Do you?
I agree with most of your points, but strongly disagree with number 1 and surprised to have heard over time that so many people thought this point was daft.
I don’t disagree that “existential risk” is being employed in a very different sense, so we agree there, in the two instances, but the broader point, which I think is valid, is this:
There is a certain hubris in claiming you are going to “build a flourishing future” and “support ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects” (as the FFF did on its website) only to not exist 6 months later and for reasons of fraud to boot.
Of course, the people who sank untold hours into existential risk research aren’t to blame, and it isn’t an argument against x-risk/longtermist work, but it does show that EA, as a community missed something dire and critical and importantly something that couldn’t be closer to home for the community. And in my opinion that does shed light on how successful one should expect the longer term endeavours of the community to be.
I find the statement is more precise if you put “longtermism” where “EA” is. Is that your sense as well?