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ElliotTep
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Wow great PSA. Claude tells me this could be the solution to vegan matza balls that don’t fall apart, as well as all the other desserts. Just ordered some to Australia.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply to the thoughtful reply. I appreciate the challenge of trying to bridge together two different frameworks you care about and the challenges of discussing it on the forum.
Two points I want to follow up on relate to the metacrsis.I’ve tried to learn about it and felt like I was reading continental philosophy where it seems like clarity wasn’t being optimised for.
I also found the solutions to to be very lacking, where the only answers I could ascertain were sensemaking and raising awareness and then some complicated things I couldn’t understand. For example here is a quote from transcript of a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger on the metacrisis:
So it’s not a solution, it’s a whole ecosystem of solutions that we have to work on, but they all have to be informed by understanding the problems and the interconnection of the whole well enough that you don’t advantage one part while externalizing the cost to the other areas. So I think we’ve got to do… And I appreciate you being available late at night your time, I think we got to do the beginning first part of this thing that is I found meaningful in your work and was valuable for me to make more central of the embedded growth obligation in finance being coupled to diminishing returns in energy that are not easily overcomeable through the current renewable technologies and process or the efficiencies in process and that being a major fucking thing that we have to deal with and that being connected to so many of the other things. I think we did a good job of starting that and maybe starting to get to what some of the transition looks like, some of the cultural parts, some of the advanced policy parts can be our next conversation.
I’d be curious to hear from you, what are some wins the metacrisis movements have had, or proposed solutions?
Tapping into EA’s most neglected market
I appreciate the efforts to try and bridge two projects you think are valuable. A few thoughts/comments/disagreements:
1. One way to read this seems to me like it could boil down to: if you like EA, but also want some more metacrisis/sensemaking/systems thinking than what EA typically offers, then that’s us. Come say hi.
2. I feel like there’s some irony here where EA conversation norms tend towards very direct communication, and sensemaking folks tend to speak in a more indirect way. In pitching integral altruism I can’t help but get the feeling it is framed in fairly indirect language at times. It’s hard to name the exact dynamic but I found myself working hard to understand parts of what this paragraph is trying to say (maybe that’s just me):
Psychological, emotional and spiritual development can help us cultivate a genuine desire for the wellbeing of others, resulting in altruism grounded in truth rather than being driven by guilt or pride. Such growth can also improve our epistemics by shining light on What’s Going On For Us and inspire action by deeply connecting us to the value we’re fighting for.
3. Some of these points seem surprising to include as what is added by integral altruism as they seem to me as a regular part of EA discourse. I’m thinking about the sections that discuss valuing other things in life besides impact, and that inner work can lead to more impact.
4. I think a big decision point here is whether or not the merits of integral altruism will be argued on the territory of EA assumptions or not, and this post seems to move between the two. For example, you make the claim that there are real downsides to seeing x-risk in isolation rather than in the way it is interconnected with other problems. This seems big and important if true, and seems like something that could be argued comfortably within the framework of EA norms. I appreciate that puts the burden on you, but if you persuade folks here, I imagine that would be a big win for everyone. FWIW whenever I’ve listened to folks talk about the metacrisis I’ve literally not been able to understand the arguments. Could be a huge service to try and make the case for the metacrisis in EA friendly language.
Yeah I have, and my impression from those I’ve spoken with is that this has not been the case. You don’t think most people whose job primarily involves sitting at a computer could have much of their job automated by a software engineer on call? For example:
I know grantmakers who have significantly automated parts of their work.
I know people who have classified 1,000 people in their CRM across a range of people using AI instead of manually.
I’ve seen some impressive use of AI to go through 1000′s of academic papers looking for novel solutions to a welfare that might exist but is not widely known.
ElliotTep’s Quick takes
How organisations with low AI usage can and should be using it more
There is a lot of discussion about how everyone should be using AI more, and efforts to increase use and literacy. So far in animal advocacy spaces where I work I’ve seen the following efforts to increase usage so far:
Orgs provide model subscriptions to their teams.
People share the ways they’ve been using AI in slack channels or recurring meetings.
There are educational webinars or fellowships.
The above has made a real dent in AI usage, but much less than we should be aiming for given the gains left on the table. My sense is that the reason these actions have only seen incremental improvements is that:
Significantly upgrading usage requires a lot of dedicated time to experiment and learn in ways that can feel hard during a busy work week.
A great way to learn can be trying a task just outside of one’s ability with someone on hand to help, which is quite hard to set up in the age of remote work.
For folks who don’t have a coding/IT background, it’s hard to know what activities could be automated, or what supportive infrastructure is needed to pull it off.
I think the following would meaningfully improve how much individuals and organisations use AI:
Extended time for peer-to-peer co-working on trying to solve problems with AI (e.g. every second Friday afternoon.)
A full week of staff training on AI use, so that lessons can be followed by practice (HT to Eleanor McAree for this one).
Organisations with 20+ staff should hire an AI specialist who goes from team to team and person to person to help them use AI to increase their productivity on an ongoing basis (I think if someone builds a technical solution, it usually requires maintenance by someone with that level of proficiency).
Smaller organisations could have fractional AI specialists on retainer to do the same thing.
What do people think? What have I missed?
This is very sweet. Made my day :)
Seconded
I had in mind the EA Animal Welfare fund where small orgs is a reasonable part of its giving portfolio (I don’t have exact numbers off the top of my head)
FWIW the main point I wanted to make in this post is that individuals should not be reaching out to Anthropic staff who don’t actively indicate they want to be pitched directly. Part of our strategy is to have a high-trust call to action, but this is mostly based on conversations we’ve had with Anthropic staff themselves.
I’m not particularly against newer funds coming on to the scene and agree with a lot of the comments in this post about the pros of doing so.
As a small nitpick some of these major funds do give a lot of smaller donations to smaller, less established organizations, so I wouldn’t say major funds = money goes to major orgs.
I interpreted this as the challenge of setting up a foundation with one purpose in mind, and then the people you hire executing something different because of the values they bring to the table. In general, I’d guess that people who work in philanthropic spaces skew left-wing, and so whatever mandate you set will end up skewing more left-wing than you intend (if you yourself are not left-wing).
Apologies, by that I mean a few Anthropic staff said one thing that was missing from the donor advisor space was recommendations of what % of their donations to allocate across cause areas, so this is something I tried to make happen by advocating for a few other organisations and individuals to do this.
Hi Abraham, I’m curious what you think about the difference between FTX and this situation is that FTX was disbursing hired grantmakers to do the work. My impression is that most Anthropic staff don’t have the time or expertise to set this up themselves, even if it was a model like a giving circle, nor do they want to.
It seems like a challenge here to recreate FTX’s level of willingness to fund ambitious projects is that for Anthropic donors, either they’d need to want to spend the time setting up foundations individually, or someone with the right expertise would need to set up their own fund and join the fray on more speculative work.
FWIW my vague impression (I have less visibility into other cause areas) is that as funds anticipate an influx of funding coming into the space, funding more ambitious and speculative bets seems to be a part of the conversation (while hopefully reducing the downsides that came with FTX funding).
Hi Nick, thanks for engaging. I agree that in writing this, there is a level of scrutiny I’ve opened myself up to. I’ll respond to some of the main points:
I agree that everything I’ve said in this post conveniently aligns with my job. I also have said them not to gatekeep but because I think it is true and has signficant implications for the future of funding in EA.
I endeavour to provide services to Anthropic staff that sit at the intersection of valuable to them AND good for the world. For example, I’ve spent a fair bit of time advocating for recommended default splits across cause areas based on feedback from a few Anthropic staff. We’ve also developed resources on some of the main fund options in the animal advocacy space and run an event in SF to ask questions of the fund managers.
The default preference to defer to funds has come from Anthropic staff communicating that for most of them, that’s their preference due to lacking the time or expertise. If individuals at Anthropic have wanted to donate to individual organisations, we’ve been happy to make introductions or specific recommendations.
I agree there is a collective action problem at the level of funds, and how that is navigated is important. I just think that it is a much smaller pool of pitches than at the organisation level. FWIW there have been ongoing efforts among the funders in FAW to coordinate to reduce the collective action problem.
Incoming money, integrity, and collective action problems
These posts need warnings that if you have any important work to do in the next hour not to click on them. Watching these videos is too damn tempting! Well done to the team as always!
Makes sense. Also: great post.
Curious if you disagree but this strikes me as red flags (I skimmed these so let me know if I got anything wrong).
I’m very skeptical of any theory of change that relies on large parts of society behaving differently, unless there is very compelling evidence that this would work. I see this a lot in non-EA vegan advocacy where there is a claim that if everybody just did x differently (e.g. debated differently). Everybody very very rarely just does anything differently. One of the big values I see in EA is, for example, contributing to companies going cage-free at scale, while the rest of the vegan movement was failing to win individual hearts and minds or developing some social movement theory about how we’re on the precipice of a new way of thinking spreading.
I’ve been curious what the metacrisis folks could produce because I respect some of the people involved and I take the critique seriously that EA doesn’t focus on systemic issues or interrelated problems enough.
But it strikes me that folks looking at systemic/interrelated solutions should grapple with the fact that these are so much harder to do, and that, to me at least, the solutions proposed seem very unlikely to come close to remotely tackling the problem.
Caveat: I do appreciate all of this could just be due to my lack of deep engagement.