IanDavidMoss

Karma: 2,723

IanDavidMoss Oct 22, 2022, 1:56 PM
8 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires
Hmm, I guess I’m more optimistic about 3 than you are. Billionaires are both very competitive and often care a lot about how they’re perceived, and if a scaled-up and properly framed version of this evaluation were to gain sufficient currency (e.g. via the billionaires who score well on it), you might well see at least some incremental movement. I’d put the chances of that around 5%.

IanDavidMoss Oct 16, 2022, 6:06 PM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Fantastic impacts through ordinary, plausible, practical acts
I thought this was great! With a good illustrator and some decent connections I think you could totally get it published as a picture book. A couple of feedback notes:
- The transition from helping people in Johnny’s life to helping people far away via the internet felt a bit forced. If Johnny is supposed to be a student in primary school like the intended reader, it wasn’t clear where he gets his donation budget from and I wonder how relatable that would be (a donation of $25 is mentioned, which I guess could come from allowance/gift money, but it’s implied that it’s only one of many donations). It might be better and more realistic to depict Johnny fundraising for these charities from his parents and other people in his life or community.
- One great thing about the first part is that you see the impact of Johnny’s help on his teacher, the bullied kid, etc., whereas that becomes more obscure once he transitions to the internet. I wonder if you could fix that by temporarily switching the focus of the story to the person who got their eyes fixed because of Johnny, showing how meaningful it was for them. I think it’s really critical in a story like this to demonstrate that far-away people are just as real and lead just as worthwhile lives as those close to us.

IanDavidMoss Oct 7, 2022, 2:53 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Warning Shots Probably Wouldn’t Change The Picture Much
I’m not aware of anyone working on it really seriously!

IanDavidMoss Oct 6, 2022, 8:51 PM
26 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Susan II’s comment on: Warning Shots Probably Wouldn’t Change The Picture Much
It’s possible there’s a more comprehensive writeup somewhere, but I can offer two data points regarding the removal of $30B in pandemic preparedness funding that was originally part of Biden’s Build Back Better initiative (which ultimately evolved into the Inflation Reduction Act):
- I had an opportunity to speak earlier this summer with a former senior official in the Biden administration who was one of the main liaisons between the White House and Congress in 2021 when these negotiations were taking place. According to this person, they couldn’t fight effectively for the pandemic preparedness funding because it was not something that representatives’ constituents were demanding.
- During his presentation at EA Global DC a few weeks ago, Gabe Bankman-Fried from Guarding Against Pandemics said that Democratic leaders in Congress had polled Senators and Representatives about their top three issues as Build Back Better was being negotiated in order to get a sense for what could be cut without incurring political backlash. Apparently few to no members named pandemic preparedness as one of their top three. (I’m paraphrasing from memory here, so may have gotten a detail or two wrong.)
The obvious takeaway here is that there wasn’t enough attention to motivating grassroots support for this funding, but to be clear I don’t think that is always the bottleneck—it just seems to have been in this particular case.
I also think it’s true that if the administration had wanted to, it probably could have put a bigger thumb on the scale to pressure Congressional leaders to keep the funding. Which suggests that the pro-preparedness lobby was well-connected enough within the administration to get the funding on the agenda, but not powerful enough to protect it from competing interests.

IanDavidMoss Oct 6, 2022, 1:40 PM
19 points
4 ∶ 1
on: Warning Shots Probably Wouldn’t Change The Picture Much
I have some sympathy for the second view, although I’m skeptical that sane advisors have significant real impact. I’d love a way to test it as decisively as we’ve tested the “government (in its current form) responds appropriately to warning shots” hypotheses.
On my own models, the “don’t worry, people will wake up as the cliff-edge comes more clearly into view” hypothesis has quite a lot of work to do. In particular, I don’t think it’s a very defensible position in isolation anymore....if you want to argue that we do need government support but (fortunately) governments will start behaving more reasonably after a warning shot, it seems to me like these days you have to pair that with an argument about why you expect the voices of reason to be so much louder and more effectual in 2041 than they were in 2021.
(Which is then subject to a bunch of the usual skepticism that applies to arguments of the form “surely my political party will become popular, claim power, and implement policies I like”.)
I think the second view is basically correct for policy in general, although I don’t have a strong view yet of how it applies to AI governance specifically. One thing that’s become clear to me as I’ve gotten more involved in institution-focused work and research is that large governments and other similarly impactful organizations are huge, sprawling social organisms, such that I think EAs simultaneously underestimate and overestimate the amount of influence that’s possible in those settings. The more optimistic among us tend to get too excited about isolated interventions (e.g., electing a committed EA to Congress, getting a voting reform passed in one jurisdiction) that, even if successful, would only address a small part of the problem. On the other hand, skeptics see the inherent complexity and failures of past efforts and conclude that policy/advocacy/improving institutions is fundamentally hopeless, neglecting to appreciate that critical decisions by governments are, at the end of the day, made by real people with friends and colleagues and reading habits just like anyone else.
Viewed through that lens, my opinion and one that I think you will find is shared by people with experience in this domain is that the reason we have not seen more success influencing large-scale bureaucratic systems is that we have have been under-resourcing it as a community. By “under-resourcing it” I don’t just mean in terms of money, because as the Flynn campaign showed us it’s easy to throw millions of dollars at a solution that hits rapidly diminishing returns. I mean that we have not been investing enough in strategic clarity, a broad diversity of approaches that complement one another and collectively increase the chances of success, and the patience to see those approaches through. In the policy world outside of EA, activists consider it normal to have a 6-10 year timeline to get significant legislation or reforms enacted, with the full expectation that there will be many failed efforts along the way. But reforms do happen—just look at the success of the YIMBY movement, which Matt Yglesias wrote about today, or recent legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, which was in no small part the result of an 8-year, $100M campaign by Arnold Ventures.
Progress in the institutional sphere is not linear. It is indeed disappointing that the United States was not able to get a pandemic preparedness bill passed in the wake of COVID, or that the NIH is still funding ill-advised research. But we should not confuse this for the claim that we’ve been able to do “approximately nothing.” The overall trend for EA and longtermist ideas being taken seriously at increasingly senior levels over the past couple of years is strongly positive. Some of the diverse factors include the launch of the Future Fund and the emergence of SBF as a key political donor; the publication of Will’s book and the resulting book tour; the networking among high-placed government officials by EA-focused or -influenced organizations such as Open Philanthropy, CSET, CLTR, the Simon Institute, Metaculus, fp21, Schmidt Futures, and more; and the natural emergence of the initial cohort of EA leaders into the middle third of their careers. Just recently, I had one senior person tell me that Longview Philanthropy’s hiring of Carl Robichaud, a nuclear security grantmaker with 20 years of experience, is what got them to pay attention to EA for the first time. All of it is, by itself, not enough to make a difference, and judged on its own terms will look like a failure. But all of it combined is what creates the possibility that more can be accomplished the next time around, and all of the time in between.

IanDavidMoss Sep 30, 2022, 4:42 PM
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: List of donation opportunities (focus: non-US longtermist policy work)
Amazing resource, thanks so much! I’ll add that the Effective Institutions Project is in the process of setting up an innovation fund to support initiatives like these, and we are planning to make our first recommendations and disbursements later this year. So if anyone’s interested in supporting this work generally but doesn’t have the time/interest to do their own vetting, let us know and we can get you set up as a participant in our pooled fund (you can reach me via PM on the Forum or write info@effectiveinstitutionsproject.org).

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 9:20 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: IanDavidMoss’s comment on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
Also worth noting that you can be influential on Twitter without necessarily having a large audience (e.g., by interacting strategically with elites and frequently enough that they get to know you).

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 9:17 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
It seems worth noting that you can get famous on Twitter for tweeting, or you can happen to be famous on Twitter as a result of becoming famous some other way. The two pathways imply very different promotional strategies and theories of impact. But my sense is that it’s pretty hard to grow an audience on Twitter through tweeting alone, no matter how good your content is.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 9:05 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
He seems like a natural fit for the American economist-public intellectual cluster (Yglesias/Cowen/WaitButWhy/etc.) that’s already pretty sympathetic to EA. The twitter content is basically “EA in depth,” but retaining the normie socially responsible brand they’ve come to expect and are comfortable with. Max Roser would be another obvious candidate to promote Peter. I’d start there and see where it goes.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:59 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Onion Test for Integrity
I’m curious how this applies to infohazards specifically. Without actually spilling any infohazards, could you comment on how one could do a good job applying this model in such a situation?

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:54 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
https://askell.io/

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:42 PM
13 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
I’m a little surprised that Rob Wiblin doesn’t have more followers, but he’s already high-profile enough that it wouldn’t take that big of a push to get him into another tier. He’s also the most logical person to leverage 80K’s broader content on social media given his existing profile and activity. (ETA: although Habiba could do this too, per your suggestion.)

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:38 PM
18 points
4 ∶ 1
on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
Amanda Askell consistently has thoughtful and underrated takes on Twitter.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:37 PM
37 points
3 ∶ 1
on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
Peter Wildeford is an A+ follow on Twitter IMHO. I think it’s realistic to get him a bunch more followers if that’s something he wanted.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:37 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 1
on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
I assume you’re being modest in not suggesting “Nathan Young,” so I’ll do it for you.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:35 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
Do we know that he doesn’t already have a social media manager? He’s had a lot of help to promote the book.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 5:34 PM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
In light of the two-factor voting, I’m unclear what you mean by “upvote.” I would suggest using the “agree/disagree” box as the scoring, with “upvote/downvote” meant to refer to your wisdom in suggesting the person and/or the analysis you provided. But I think you should clarify which one you intend to actually pay attention to.

IanDavidMoss Sep 27, 2022, 4:34 AM
4 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Ask Me Anything about parenting as an Effective Altruist
I think raising one’s own kids is often significantly more rewarding than raising adopted kids, just because one’s own kids will share so much more of one’s cognitive traits, personality traits, quirks, etc, that you can empathize better with them.
I’m extremely skeptical of this claim. Many parents I know with multiple biological children report that they have immensely different personalities, and it seems intuitively obvious that any statistical correlations of such traits between child and parent that are driven by genes will be overwhelmed by statistical noise in a family with an n of, say, 3 or fewer children. As someone with two biological children, IMHO almost all of the rewarding aspects of being a parent come from the experience of watching them grow up on a daily basis and directly contributing to that growth, not from picking out physical or other characteristics that happen to remind me of myself.

IanDavidMoss Aug 31, 2022, 3:31 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Earn To Give $1M/year or Work Directly?
Haha, well it would depend a lot on the specifics but we’d probably at least be up for having a conversation about it :)

IanDavidMoss 31 Aug 2022 2:00 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Earn To Give $1M/year or Work Directly?
Maybe indirectly? Addressing talent gaps within the EA community isn’t a primary focus of ours, but it does seem that our outreach is helping to increase the pool of mid-career and senior people out in the world who take EA seriously.