This is generally less than one FTE for an AI safety organization. Remember, there are other costs than just salary.
MATS is spending far more than £500k/year. I don’t know how accurate it is but it looks like they might have spent ~$4.65MM. I’m happy to be corrected but I think my figure it more accurate.
The other two things I want to point out are:
It’s very tempting to be biased towards “the thing I should be doing is making money”. I’ve seen a shocking amount of E2Gers that don’t seem to do much giving, particularly in AI safety. There should be a small anti-correction bias against the thing you should be doing is making money and investing it to earn more money. That looks a lot like selfish non-impact.
£250k/year after taxes and expenses, just isn’t that much to donate. I think in the UK (where £250k/year would be paid) would incur income tax of ~35-40% depending on deductions. Let’s call it £95k. After say £45k/year in personal expenses (more if you have a family), we are talking about about £110k/year. Invested or not, this just isn’t that much money to move the needle on AI safety by enough to write home about. AI governance organizations would very happily have a very good mid to senior operations management roles at EA and adjacent organisations with longtermist focus or other role. These orgs spend £110k/year like its nothing.
I think this effect is completely overshadowed by the fact if what you are saying is true, we have 5-10 years on the technical alignment/governance of AI to get things to go well.
Now is the time to donate and work on AI safety stuff. Not to get rich and donate to it later in the hopes that things worked out.
From an outsider perspective, this looks like the sort of thing that almost anyone could get started on and I like the phrasing you used to signal that. AI progress moves so fast that you are most likely going to the only one looking at something and so you can do very basic things like
“How deterministic are these models? If you take the first K lines of the CoT and regenerate it, do you get the same output?”
It’s pretty easy to imagine taking 1 line of CoT and regenerating and then 2 lines...
I think a lot of people can just do this and getting to do it under Neel Nanda is likely to lead to a high quality paper.
In common English parlance, we don’t preface everything with “I have estimates that state...”.
I don’t think any reasonable person thinks that they mean that if they got an extra $1, they’d somehow pay someone for 10 minutes of time to lobby some tiny backyard farm of about 1770 pigs to take on certain oractices. You get to these unit economics with a lot more nuance.
It’s eag weekend. I would give at least a week before rushing to a judgement.
First, I want to commend Vetted Causes for doing this. The EA community loves criticism as a concept but rarely likes it when it comes to the object level. This is quite the object level critique and we see how our soldier mindset quickly arose. I’m hesitant to give any pushback on this since I want the cost to doing this work (which is quite hard) to be as low as possible. With that said, I want to
When it comes to Sinergia, I have quite the strong prior that they would be effective. Sinergia is what you would get if you took THL-style corporate campaigns, put them in the Global South where most of the animals on Earth live, in worse conditions than in the Global North, get way cheaper talent since salaries are lower and put in a kick-ass CEO in Carolina. This is kind of a recipe for an effective charity.
For Vetted Causes, I think your critiques would do better, be more productive for the community and frankly, be better received by the EA community if you would first get feedback from the organization that you are evaluating. You don’t even need to change anything based on what they reply. I would recommend you use your judgement in evaluating what they have to say if it corrects any factual errors but the rights to the final wording of the post remain your own. This has three main advantages
It corrects factual errors that might not be public
It gives the organization a chance to give their perspective on things to the public
The community wants this as a norm (for reasons 1&2 and you should want a strong reason to violate a norm) and so your critique will be better accepted if you do this. Again, you don’t need to make any changes if the organizations response isn’t convincing from your POV.
I again want to commend VettedCauses for doing these. They aren’t easy. I’ll pre-commit at least $1000 USD to VettedCauses for their next critique (provided it’s a serious one) and they run it by the organization in question for feedback.
I just want to add some colour as someone from a Western country (Canada) that has lived a couple years in Latin America. The rule of law is simply followed far less and it is a far lower trust society. However much American companies follow corporate commitments, I expect less of Brazilian ones.
Also, companies in Western countries don’t follow the law all the time. In Latin America, the law is a bit of a joke and there is more corruption. The fact that it was already illegal updates me ~0 on what a factory farm in Brazil is doing.
Agree with others. This is fantastic. Learned a lot.
It’s a shame and a sign of significant bias in EA that this got so many disagree votes. What are people disagreeing with? Presumably that taxes kill people but the author makes a very simple argument that nearly everyone in EA approximately agrees with. He then goes on to point out cases where the sign could be reversed or approximately 0.
This is lazy voting.
Agree with others. This is fantastic. Learned a lot.
Not specifically but in talking with investors, it was made pretty clear that they would not be happy to invest if their profits would be hampered from donations and we could only do it with our own money. Frankly, I think that makes sense. You get to donate your own money, not others. If you’re in a spot where you can be picky with investors, you can just get a higher valuation or better deal terms.
I think people should stop thinking of conservatives as racist/sexist/bigoted. I’m not a conservative (I’m a libertarian) but I know a few EAs who are and they are silent about it until you get to know them well. I haven’t found them to be transphobic (they respect trans pronouns). I haven’t found them to be racist (they donate significantly to Africans). The majority are vegan (at least, i don’t know about all of them).
One thing EA could do is push the progressiveness a bit less. The vast majority of the world would laugh at the fact that at EAG, people try to get you to wear a pin with your pronoun and are a bit repulsed at how “in your face” the polyamorous stuff is. For me, it’s normal since I’m from Canada but it wont be for most of the world (and even about half of America). Nearl all of latin American, most of asia (where the majority of the world live) etc. would be described as “conservative” by this standard and we shouldn’t be turning them off unnecessarily.
Sure. While I am a fan of the NLN, a big point of mine is that individual donors is a very tiny portion of the funding ecosystem, especially for larger projects, they can’t really use independent donors to diversify.
I think there are a lot of roles on the 80k job board and other places that don’t need anyone special but just need good hard generalist workers. A lot of operations roles don’t need anything special but just “work that needs doing”.
As some examples https://jobs.lever.co/aisafety/c5269975-e074-44ee-ad32-9ff521f4d709 this is a good job if someone wants something in AI safety.
This is more of an EA infrastructure role https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/careers/operations-associate
Another AI role https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/postings/b6cbef86-5239-4218-9aaa-8b7fe660db72
Another AI role https://www.arena.education/operations-lead
For animal welfare, I would say the bulk of the jobs don’t need anyone who is some kind of 0.001% person.
https://animal-equality.rippling-ats.com/job/807514/operations-manager
https://www.fishwelfareinitiative.org/pa
For Global health, there are a ton of jobs at the Clinton Health Initiative that you don’t need to move to Africa to do. Other than that, here are some
This, along with OAI is likely worth investigating.
This is a great point that I strong upvoted.
1 is just a good point. happy you made it. I wish people owned the EA reputation more and we should work towards it having a better brand. I also acknowledge that “what is EA” is fuzzy and also that in an ideal analysis, I would have summed up EA organizations (by my definition) receiving funding as opposed to tallying EA sources of funding.
On 2, I agree but I don’t think this will change the calculation very much. Even if I were to grant Schmidt Ventures as an EA funder (I don’t fwiw, they mostly fund science), this doesn’t change much in the realm of being able to significantly diversify funding (there are 2 funding sources and not one).
Withr respect to the org you work for being funded by a donor who isn’t widely considered an “EA billionaire”, that’s awesome but again, I don’t think will change the math very much. It would be similar (at best) to adding another SFF. It would take OPs funding percentage from 89% to say 85%. It helps but doesn’t change the big picture.
I should also note that this isn’t surprising. In the hedge fund or VC space, firms usually have a few investors representing the bulk of their funds. Every firm is different but generally speaking, fewer than 5 investors make up 80% of a firm’s AUM and it very much follows a power law.
Good point. OpenAI as well.
Ill respond to all thoughts
Correct.
One way of viewing altruism is that you have an energy bar of it and you should spend it wisely. The other way of viewing it is more like exercising muscles at the gym. I think in general, the 2nd view has slightly more merit and much more than we like to give it credit for since it’s inconvenient. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DBcDZJhTDgig9QNHR/altruism-sharpens-altruism
I don’t think EA says that, at least in practice. I know of no EAs that donate all money above what they absolutely require, have no outside hobbies, etc.
Most of EA is inconvenient. That’s fair.
I agree, I would also supplement with my comment I left here where similar things were discussed.
My reasons for being vegan have little to do with the direct negative effects of factory farming. They are in roughly descending order of importance.
A constant reminder to myself that non-human animals matter. My current day-to-day activities give nearly no reason to think about the fact that non-human animals have moral worth. This is my 2-5 times per day reminder of this fact.
Reduction of cognitive dissonance. It took about a year of being vegan to begin to appreciate, viscerally, that animals had moral worth. It’s hard to quantify this but it is tough to think that animals have moral worth when you eat them a few times a day. This has flow-through effects on donations, cause prioritization, etc.
The effect it has on others. I’m not a pushy vegan at all. I hardly tell people but every now and then people notice and ask questions about it.
Solidarity with non-EAA animal welfare people. For better or worse, outside of EA, this seems to be a ticket to entry to be considered taking the issue seriously. I want to be able to convince them to donate to THL over a pet shelter and to SWP over dog rescue charities and the the EA AWF over Pets for Vets. They are more likely to listen to me when they see me as one of them who just happens to be doing the math.
Reducing the daily suffering that I cause. It’s still something even though it pales in comparison to my yearly donations but it is me living in accordance with my values and is causing less suffering than I would otherwise.
Vetted causes, I agree with you that Sinergia shouldn’t be deleting column W, especially at this time when this is happening. I think they should put it back up and add more explanatory comments if necessary.
That said, I think you are perhaps assuming too much bad faith in this whole ordeal. It seems extremely plausible to me that an ESL person would confuse a small word like this and I think you are coming at this from a perspective where you are assuming mal-intent and are finding corroborating evidence for this.