Academically/professionally interested in AI governance (research, policy, communications, and strategy), technology policy, longtermism, healthy doses of moral philosophy, the social sciences, and blog writing.
Hater of factory farms, enjoyer of effective charities.
julian[dot]hazell[at]mansfield.ox.ac.uk
I’m appreciative for Shakeel Hashim. Comms roles seem hard in general. Comms roles for EA seem even harder than that. Comms roles for EA during the last 3 months sound unbelievably hard and stressful.
(Note: Shakeel is a personal friend of mine, but I don’t think that has much influence on how appreciative I am of the work he’s doing, and everyone else managing these crises).
This is great, thanks for the change. As someone who aspires to use evidence and careful reasoning to determine how to best use my altruistic resources, I sometimes get uncomfortable when people call me an effective altruist.
Thank you for the work you and your team do, Julia. Many of these situations are incredibly tricky to handle, and I’m very grateful the EA community has people working on them.
When are you gonna go on the 80,000 Hours podcast, Luke? :)
Thanks for the post Michael — these sorts of posts have been very helpful for making me a more informed donor. I just want to point out one minor thing though.
I appreciate you and your team’s work and plan on donating part of my giving season donations to either your organisation, Strongminds, or a combination of both. But I did find the title of this post a bit unnecessarily adversarial to GiveWell (although it’s clever, I must admit).
I’ve admired the fruitful, polite, and productive interactions between GW and HLI in the past and therefore I somewhat dislike the tone struck here.
(This can include current and former team members)
EA is neglecting trying to influence non-EA organizations, and this is becoming more detrimental to impact over time.
+1 to this — it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, and I’m happy you mentioned it.
I’m not convinced the EA community will be able to effectively solve the problems we’re keen on tackling if we mainly rely on a (relatively) small group of people who are unusually receptive to counterintuitive ideas, especially highly technical problems like AI safety. Rather, we’ll need a large coalition of people who can make progress on these sorts of challenges. All else equal, I think we’ve neglected the value of influencing others, even if these folks might not become highly active EAs who attend conferences or whatever.
Thanks for taking the time to write up your views on this. I’d be keen on reading more posts like this from other folks with backgrounds in ML — particularly those who aren’t already already in the EA/LessWrong/AIS sphere.
Yeah, I’m also similarly sceptical that a highly publicised/discussed portion of one of the most hyped industries — one that borders on a buzzword at times — has not captured the attention or consideration of the market. Seems hard to imagine given the remarkably salient progress we’ve seen in 2022.
Thank you to the CAIS team (and other colleagues) for putting this together. This is such a valuable contribution to the broader AI risk discourse.