Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 9, 2025, 1:15 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Karl Mechkin’s comment on: Karl Mechkin’s Quick takes

  One of the problems with EA is that people are extremely nice and don’t want to tell you that either

  1. They don’t like your project and/​or don’t think it’s very good

  2. They don’t think your project is as good as alternatives and they have limited resources.

  3. They don’t care much about this cause area.

  There are more but it’s very common to hear this kind of positive feedback but no commitment/​further engagement. When people wish you well/​luck, this is them being polite/​nice and saying they aren’t interested but that sounds too mean. Furthermore, they really do wish you luck as they probably wish most people luck on their projects.

  In your case, I expect it to be a mixture of the 3 perhaps, depending on the case. People are being nice to you and don’t want to crush your hopes. Furthermore, if in the EA community, few people care, as a top priority, about climate change.

  This also commonly happens in the for profit world. Investors/​VCs rarely say they are a no. They will usually give some excuse like it not being the right time or they aren’t in this space and such. This allows them to keep the door open to invest in the future if you defy their expectations or just not be seen as a dick/​someone you don’t want to interact with to preserve their reputation or if they change their mind because someone told them the investment is good.

  A good motto to go by when raising funds is “fuck yes or no” meaning if it isn’t an enthusiastic yes with clear things they want further for funding or a promise of funding, it’s a no.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 9:31 PM

  2 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: akash 🔸’s comment on: Matthew_Bar­nett’s Shortform

  Right but most of this is her “pre-AI” stuff and I am saying that I don’t think “Pause AI” is very mainstream by EA standards, particularly the very inflammatory nature of the activism and the policy prescriptions are definitely not in the majority. It is in that sense that I object to Matthew calling her prominent since by the standard you are suggesting, Matthew is also prominent. He’s been in the movement for a decade and written a lot of extremely influential posts and was a well known part of Epoch for a long time and also wrote one of the most prescient posts ever.

  I don’t dispute that Holly has been an active and motivated member of the EA community for a while

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 7:35 PM

  16 points

  11 ∶ 5

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Matthew_Bar­nett’s Shortform

  I was going to write a comment responding but Neel basically did it for me.

  The only thing I would object to is Holly being a “prominent member of the EA community”. The PauseAI/​StopAI people are often treated as fringe in the EA community and the she frequently violates norms of discourse. EAs due to their norms of discourse, usually just don’t respond to her in the way she responds to others..

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 4:09 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason Green-Lowe’s comment on: Please Donate to CAIP (Post 1 of 3 on AI Gover­nance)

  Yes, I do recall meeting at EAG two years ago and yes, I wasn’t giving any money to AI safety back then. I don’t have any criticism because I don’t know better about what policies to support and didn’t want to add noise.

  I don’t want to be too critical of CAIP here and my original comment might have come off as too harsh. I’m not a big fan of the current funding ecosystem being so private with info and reasoning being so secretive. It’s caused us harm before and I expect will cause us harm again and I expect even greater it is causing passive harm where organizations don’t improve.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 12:40 AM

  11 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Please Donate to CAIP (Post 1 of 3 on AI Gover­nance)

  I really wish donors would write up their reasons for/​against funding things like Manifund does. It really doesn’t take long, so I don’t buy the usual “time constraints” argument, but I think the people at CAIP would waste a lot LESS time if they were told “we don’t think your work is good/​meets the funding bar. These other orgs are better at it for the cost and would rather scale them up than fund your organization.” It’d waste a lot LESS grantee time. They can just add a disclaimer that this isn’t any way an abdication of their character or something.

  That said, I looked at CAIP, and while you say here what you’ve accomplished, it seems hard to verify that. I searched the EA forum and the internet, and only 2 people you list in your staff have posted on the forum here, and one more has an account. I didn’t do the same for LW or AF, but I expect similar there, maybe a bit more. It’s going to be very hard to get 7 figures per year for your non-profit if you aren’t very public about what you are doing. I know that takes time, but if you aren’t advertising the work you do, people won’t know about it.

  Here, in this post, you sort of just make a new account and say, “If we don’t get $1.6M soon, we are shutting down”. That’s… a lot of money. It’s hard to overstate how hard it is to make and then donate that amount of money per year. But more importantly, it’d be very weird if this worked. There needs to be a lot more constant communication and updates from organizations if they want to continue to receive funding. It begs the question, what does the “Communications Team” do? I know they are probably primarily responsible for communicating with congresspeople, but at least some of that needs to be communicating with the EA/​AIS community.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 25, 2025, 6:37 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Greenblatt’s comment on: The stakes of AI moral status

  How soon would you expect to see extremely fast economic growth? Say >20%/​year GDP growth.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 24, 2025, 4:53 AM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­thropic is Quietly Backpedal­ling on its Safety Commitments

  Another great post. I highly recommend this newsletter

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 24, 2025, 2:01 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Seek­ing an ex­cel­lent pre-IPO tax law advisor

  Shartsis Friese was my law firm for something similar. They were pretty competent.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 23, 2025, 9:31 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: We’re Not Ad­ver­tis­ing Enough (Post 3 of 6 on AI Gover­nance)

  This is a great post. Way too many people in EA want to be able to do remote work behind a computer and not get into the thick of things that actually change things. I agree with your marathons and smores analogy; I don’t think I agree specifically with what you called the Levels for AI work but I digress since I like the main message.

  Too often, I think people make the mistake that if they are working up the stack, they are getting a lot of leverage but we need 10x the amount of people at the lower trophic levels and without those, you don’t have any leverage at all. There are few exceptions to this of course, like MATS who produce a bunch of AI safety researchers but that’s directly increasing the number of “level 0” people.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 15, 2025, 8:42 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Con­sider not donat­ing un­der $100 to poli­ti­cal candidates

  I won’t say who it was (though they can out themselves) but someone convinced me that they do a donation strategy that I approve of. They donate to both sides to be able to lobby their congressperson on AI issues. I think this makes a lot of sense.

  #changedmymind

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 15, 2025, 8:41 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Con­sider not donat­ing un­der $100 to poli­ti­cal candidates

  First, sorry for the late reply. I thought I had sent it but it was still in autosave.

  https://​​journals.sagepub.com/​​doi/​​10.1177/​​21582440241279659#bibr25-21582440241279659

  I had chatgpt analyze this paper on US House of Representatives. It finds that doubling spending for incumbents actually has ~no effect and in general you get about 4.5% increased win probability from doubling spending. You get the biggest gains for challengers with little name recognition. It also turns out that incumbents spend about $3M on a race and challengers spend about the same as well. So we’re talking about $3M to gain 4.5% extra chance of winning a house seat.

  The paper goes on to explain that increases in spending faces increasingly diminishing returns.

  To answer the question bluntly. I’ll just define past a certain point as 50% more than average spending. About 5% of races are “close” based on my crude metric of a margin of victory of less than 3 points.

  Also, my criticism basically don’t apply (and in fact, I think we should be spending more money on) things like ballot initiatives and specific campaigns. I’m also much happier about things like primaries than general elections. If you are donating to just a generic race, even if it’s close, I don’t think there is actually enough evidence that one party is much better than the other.

  A lot of money is spent on politics already. Unless there is very very specific issues of EA concern, I don’t think it’s worth donating to. There are tremendously good donation opportunities out there and political ads or Beyonce concerts aren’t among them IMO.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 11, 2025, 4:51 AM

  6 points

  5 ∶ 16

  on: Con­sider not donat­ing un­der $100 to poli­ti­cal candidates

  One thing I’ve been saying since the FTX days is that we absolutely shouldn’t be donating to politics in general (with exceptions of course but in broad strokes and definitely don’t donate to the Presidential race or a national party). The evidence that donations to political parties past a certain point do much is unclear (people only can see so many ads) and there are just much much larger problems in the world that EAs should be spending their money on, at worst you can just donate to AMF and this would do way better than most money spent on politics.

  The exceptions would be that a very high integrity person was running who was a committed EA. In these cases, I think the math checks out but rarely will it for just some generic candidate.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 8, 2025, 9:03 PM

  13 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Our bet on whether the AI mar­ket will crash

  Small bets allow you to get cheap signaling. Larger amounts force people to be at least a little more serious. FWIW, I offered Remmelt to do more.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 8, 2025, 8:07 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: Our bet on whether the AI mar­ket will crash

  It was difficult to come up with operationalizations for investment metrics. Remmelt wanted things like AI & ML VC deal activity being <30% and Anthropic valuation <$30B. I wanted things like % of YC startups being AI-related and didn’t want some large investment round in SpaceX or Stripe dominate funds raised.

Our bet on whether the AI mar­ket will crash

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 1, 2025, 2:16 AM

  1 point

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Pri­ori­tiz­ing Work

  Thanks for writing this. I’ve told other people this in the past.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 1, 2025, 2:12 AM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: De­bate: should EA avoid us­ing AI art out­side of re­search?

  Should EA avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?

  To the contrary, you probably cost the AI labs a bunch of compute and this is the overwhelming effect.

  Also, the environmental costs are tiny. If you are doing it for the environment, nearly all your environmental footprint is your diet and transportation, not electricity usage.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 30, 2025, 11:27 PM

  20 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: Sin­er­gia (ACE Top Char­ity) is Com­mit­ting Fraud

  Sometimes rationalist-y people and lawyers really like to use/​insist on maximally precise/​literal language or legalese. I have a word for lawyers who do this in my business interactions with them; shitty lawyers.

  I’m somewhat sympathetic to these people since it allows for exact communication and for some, it makes truthful information sharing easier. However, this just isn’t how the world works. What you point to simply isn’t fraud by the commonplace usage of the word. What you mean is that by your interpretation, they should advertise 285 piglets/​dollar and not 354 and that you don’t think their reason for stating 354 isn’t well supported.

  Again, this over-the-top and inflammatory language is hurting rather than helping you and the animal welfare movement.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 28, 2025, 9:31 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Poll: Should peo­ple with more fo­rum karma have more pow­er­ful votes?

  Vote power should scale with karma

  To a point, maybe a bit less than it does currently but in general it seems to work well.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 28, 2025, 4:45 PM

  49 points

  22 ∶ 0

  on: Reflec­tions on the $5 Min­i­mum Dona­tion Bar­rier on the Giv­ing What We Can Plat­form — A Stu­dent Per­spec­tive from a Lower-In­come Coun­try.

  A great number of EAs in America/​Europe could learn a lot from you.