Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

• 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

  8 points

  4 ∶ 15

  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

  6 points

  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

  48 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.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 26, 2025, 3:28 AM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Who wants to bet me $25k at 1:7 odds that there won’t be an AI mar­ket crash in the next year?

  Remmelt, if you wish, I’m happy to operationalize a bet. I think you’re wrong.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 25, 2025, 8:16 PM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Epoch AI alumni launch Mech­a­nize to “au­to­mate the whole econ­omy”

  I think people are, generally speaking, being too simplistic between “capabilities” and “alignment”. I assume most people on the forum use ChatGPT/​Claude or other LLM apps and don’t think they pose, in their current form, much of a safety concern.

  I am far more concerned of “geniuses in a data center” which Dario/​Sam seem to be pushing for, than I am of more economically useful AI.

  I furthermore think that Matthew and to a lesser extent, Tamay and Ege have engaged significantly with AI risk arguments than most people.

  Disclosure: I’m one of the investors in Mechanize

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 13, 2025, 5:41 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: tylermjohn’s comment on: tyler­mjohn’s Quick takes

  can you spell out the clear plan? feel free to DM me also

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 12, 2025, 7:02 PM

  5 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: GWWC is re­tiring 10 ini­ti­a­tives

  Happy to see this. Seeing how much was cut, I agree that GWWC was trying to do too many things. The one I at first questioned was “translations” but I think you guys have a good point regarding Google Translate and other organizations who should take over non-English languages.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 12, 2025, 6:57 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  I understand this. Good analogy.

  I suppose what it comes down to is that I actually DO think it is morally better for the person earning $10m/​year to donate $9.9m/​year than $9m/​year, about $900k/​year better.

  I want to achieve two things (which I expect you will agree with).

  1. I want to “capture” the good done by anyone and everyone willing to contribute and I want them welcomed, accepted and appreciated by the EA community. This means that if a person who could earn $10m/​year in finance and is “only” willing to contribute $1m/​year (10%) to effective causes, I don’t want them turned away.

  2. I want to encourage, inspire, motivate and push people to do better than they currently are (insofar as it’s possible). I think that includes an Anthropic employee earning $500k/​year doing mech interp, a quant trader earning $10m/​year, a new grad deciding what to do with their career and a 65-year old who just heard of EA.

  I think it’s also reasonable for people to set limits for how much they are willing to do.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 10, 2025, 8:56 AM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Enough about AI timelines— we already know what we need to know.

  Upvoted. I think this is a great argument. Timelines are a way overrated thing to be incessantly talking about and are often a distraction on what can be done.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 9, 2025, 10:48 PM

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  Sure. But the average person working in AI is not at Jane St level like you and yes, OpenAI/​Anthropic comp is extremely high.

  I would also say that people still have a moral obligation. People don’t choose to be smart enough to do ML work.

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 9, 2025, 2:23 AM

  16 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  I don’t want to argue in anyone’s specific case, but I don’t think it’s universally true at all or even true the majority of the time that people that those working in AI could make more elsewhere. It sounds nice to say, but I think often people are earning more in AI jobs than they would elsewhere .

• Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 8, 2025, 9:27 AM

  6 points

  1 ∶ 5

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Sie­beRozen­dal’s Shortform

  I think this statement is highly misleading. First, I think compared to most other fora and groups, this Forum is decidedly not catastrophizing Trump.

  On a relative basis to other left-wing places, the forum is not catastrophizing Trump. I should have said that this post is catastrophizing Trump and is only getting the upvotes (at the time I posted, it was all upvotes and “agree” reacts), because of the forum’s political bias.

  Second, if you don’t see “any evidence of an authoritarian takeover” then you are clearly not paying very much attention.

  Again, I should be more precise but this is a misinterpretation I think. There is always evidence of authoritarian takeover by any President. Every President does things that are supposed to be done through Congress (for example, most military action). I agree that Trump has more authoritarian impulses than most but this is not nearly clearing the bar for, as the author says, “The current US administration is attempting an authoritarian takeover.”. That’s a very strong statement and the evidence doesn’t back that up. It’s hyperbolic.