I’m not aware of any such organizations! This is an example of one of the ‘holes’ that I’m trying to highlight in our ecosystem.
We have so many people proposing and discussing general ideas, but there’s no process in place to rigorously compare those ideas to each other, choose a few of those ideas to move forward, write up legislation for the ideas that are selected, and advertise that legislation to policymakers.
I don’t object to the community proposing 5-10x more ideas than it formally writes up as policies; as you say, some filtering is appropriate. I do object to the community spending 5-10x more time proposing ideas than it spends on drafting them. The reason why it makes sense to have lots of ideas is that proposing an idea is (or should be) quick and easy compared to the hard work of drafting it into an actual policy document. If we spend 70% of our resources on general academic discussion of ideas without anyone ever making a deliberate effort to select and promote one or two of those ideas for legislative advocacy, then something’s gone badly wrong.
Marcus, I agree with your first paragraph—part of my frustration is that it’s not obvious to me that any AI governance donors have more than a vibes-based metric for what it means for “other orgs to be better at it for the cost.” Donors did eventually tell us that they thought other orgs were more cost-effective, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t say which effects they thought were cheaper elsewhere or how they were measuring that.
In hindsight, you may be right that we should have posted earlier on Less Wrong and EA Forums. I will say that we did not see raising significant amounts of money directly from the public (rather than from large donors and institutional donors) as a promising strategy, and that we turned to it only as a last resort when institutional funding unexpectedly ran dry.
However, I object to your implication that until recently we haven’t been communicating or sending updates about our work. You may recall that in October 2023, you and I met in person at EA Global Boston, where I pitched you about our work. At your request, I sent you a 15-page document in March 2024 in which I quantitatively estimated the microdooms averted by CAIP’s work. You seemed to agree that our work was promising, but at EA Global Boston October 2024, you told me that you were donating only to animal welfare charities. You did not share any criticisms of our work at that time other than that it was not in your preferred cause area.
Our communications team sends out a weekly newsletter to 1,400 subscribers, which is also publicly posted on LinkedIn and X. We also sent out various documents to past and prospective donors, including a detailed annual report that included a dozen examples of us being cited favorably in mainstream media, along with links. We have hosted regular in-person events that are open to the public, where anyone can come and see for themselves which Congressional staffers are coming and speaking with us. If any of the donors had at any time expressed any concerns about our accomplishments being “hard to verify,” we would have gladly taken them along to one of our meetings or events or sent them whatever additional information they might have wanted. However, I have never before heard any such complaints.