Co-founder of Nonlinear, Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health, and Charity Science.
Kat Woods
Karma: 4,493
Loved this post! Thanks for writing it.
I’ve been having some pretty good success doing online outreach that I think is replicable but don’t want to share strategies publicly. I’d be happy to give advice and/or swap tips privately with anybody else interested in the area.
Just DM me telling me what you’re working on/want to work on.
Thank you for writing this. I think this really does make a difference for people’s motivation and the vibe of the community.
This doesn’t change your conclusions at all, but it’s hard to count the Nonlinear Network donations without accidentally double counting because a lot of the largest donors are also on the platform.
The Nonlinear Network was designed to help increase funding diversification in the movement.
It was also designed to be maximally low effort on both the funder and the applicant side. This is why we allow people to apply with any existing fundraising materials and there are very few required questions so if you’ve already fundraised, it should take you minutes to apply.
It’s not nearly enough to solve the whole problem, but it’s low cost and high upside so good EV for most AI safety orgs
A couple of articles relevant to this topic:
Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument by Scott Alexander
You mentioned looking for longtermist donation opportunities. One thing that might help is the Nonlinear Network, where donors can see a wide variety of AI safety donation opportunities, and also see expert reviewers ratings and comments. You can also see other donors’ opinions and voting on various donation opportunities. This allows you to avoid the unilateralist curse and use elite common sense.
Seems worth mentioning that if you’re a funder, you can see tons of AI safety funding opportunities, sorted by votes, expert reviews, intervention type, and more, if you join the Nonlinear Network.
You also might want to check out the AI safety funding opportunities Zvi recommends
You could also consider joining Catalyze’s seed funding network that donates to new AI safety orgs on their “demo days” after they’ve gone through the incubation program
o3 is not being released to the public. First they are only giving access to external safety testers. You can apply to get early access to do safety testing
Seems like a good place to remind people of the Nonlinear Network, where donors can see a ton of AI safety projects with room for funding, see what experts think of different applications, sort by votes and intervention, etc.
Love it!
I also really like reading mantras because it helps engage so many different parts of your brain, so helps you stay focused.
Huzzah!
I did the technical magic of turning something on the website off and on again and apparently that fixed it.
Thanks for pointing that out!
It was happening on my colleague’s computer too, and we did something that fixed it on his end. Is it still happening on your computer?
Regardless, it should always be fine if you type in www.nonlinear.org/network (for some reason, it wasn’t liking it if you didn’t write the “www” )
Thanks for writing this! Found it really inspiring and uplifting.
I think you’re right that Benjamin Lay, who we’re currently celebrating, would totally be banned from EA events and blacklisted by the Community Health Team.
The same would happen for most historical moral heroes, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.
If a community that is trying to be morally ambitious would ban people who, in retrospect, are considered moral heroes, this should make us reconsider our current starndards and processes.
So there’s no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many don’t though. What’s the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so they’re never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
I think the former is a better solution.
It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse
It looks like this is saying that women can’t say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
Am I missing something?
I’m confused. Why would people be afraid to come forward? Owen is being banned, was forced to resign, and many other punishments. One of the women who spoke to the Time journalist got a ton of karma for writing about it.
Even the peope saying he’s a good guy in the comments are saying what he did was still unethical (I disagree, but I’m not saying he’s a good guy. I don’t know him. I just disagree with the ethical framework of this whole thing).
EA does not seem to have an under-reporting problem for issues.
OK. Does it make a difference that the only instance where we have public details, Owen wasn’t making sexual advances in his house? He just mentioned, to a friend where they were both doing radical honesty with each other, inspired by circling, that he was going to masturbate that day. When she wasn’t in the house. Not masturbating about her or anything. Just that he’d do what the vast majority of guys do every day.
She was a friend, not a colleague. He wasn’t doing professional connecting people with jobs or anything like that. He only started that role later.
It’s a weird thing to say in most contexts, but if you’re friends and have mutually agreed radical honesty, it seems fine. It would be like attending a circling event (where radical honesty is expected). As long as people are choosing to do it, then they’re adults and can do what they want.
Now, it’s unclear whether he also expressed romantic interest in others while at his house, and it’s also unclear whether such people were working for/with him or were visting his house as a friend, etc.
I think “labs” has the connotation of mad scientists and somebody creating something that escapes the lab, so has some “good” connotations for AI safety comms.
Of course, depending on the context and audience.