Matt Putz

Karma: 812

Matt Putz 6 Nov 2024 20:19 UTC
16 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors
I work at Open Philanthropy, and I recently let Gavin know that Open Phil is planning to recommend a grant of $5k to Arb for the second project on your list: Overview of AI Safety in 2024 (they had already raised ~$10k by the time we came across it). Thanks for writing this post Austin — it brought the funding opportunity to our attention.
Like other commenters on Manifund, I believe this kind of overview is a valuable reference for the field, especially for newcomers.
I wanted to flag that this project would have been eligible for our RFP for work that builds capacity to address risks from transformative AI. I worry that not all potential applicants are aware of the RFP or its scope, so I’ll take this opportunity to mention that this RFP’s scope is quite broad, including funding for:
- Training and mentorship programs
- Events
- Groups
- Resources, media, and communications
- Almost any other type of project that builds capacity for advanced AI risks (in the sense of increasing the number of careers devoted to these problems, supporting people doing this work, and sharing knowledge related to this work).
More details at the link above. People might also find this page helpful, which lists all currently open application programs at Open Phil.

Matt Putz 4 Jan 2023 18:29 UTC
11 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Entrepreneurship ETG Might Be Better Than 80k Thought
Can you say more about the 20% per year discount rate for community building?
In particular, is the figure meant to refer to time or money? I.e. does it mean that
1. you would trade at most 0.8 marginal hours spent on community building in 2024 for 1 marginal hour in 2023?
2. you would trade at most 0.8 marginal dollars spent on community building in 2024 for 1 marginal dollar spent on community building in 2023?
3. something else? (possibly not referring to marginal resources?)
(For money a 20% discount rate seems very high to me, barring very short timelines or something similar. It would presumably imply that you think Open Phil should be spending much more on community building until the marginal dollar doesn’t have such high returns anymore?)

Matt Putz 3 Jan 2023 12:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: HaydnBelfield’s comment on: Results from the AI testing hackathon
That’s helpful, thanks!

Matt Putz 2 Jan 2023 22:32 UTC
2 points
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on: Results from the AI testing hackathon
Minor nitpick:

I would’ve found it more helpful to see Haydn’s and Esben’s judgments listed separately.

Matt Putz 5 Dec 2022 11:47 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: What specific changes should we as a community make to the effective altruism community? [Stage 1]
Why?

Matt Putz 5 Dec 2022 11:45 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: What specific changes should we as a community make to the effective altruism community? [Stage 1]
Need is a very strong word so I’m voting no. Might sometimes be marginally advantageous though.

Matt Putz 5 Dec 2022 11:41 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: What specific changes should we as a community make to the effective altruism community? [Stage 1]
Why?

Matt Putz 8 Oct 2022 19:02 UTC
1 point
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on: Consider entering the 2024 US diversity visa lottery by November 8 2022 - it’s free and fast to do
Thanks for writing this up! Was gonna apply anyway, but a post like this might have gotten me to apply last year (which I didn’t, but which would’ve been smart). It also contained some useful sections that I didn’t know about yet!

Matt Putz 1 Jun 2022 5:37 UTC
12 points
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on: Stuff I buy and use: a listicle to boost your consumer surplus and productivity
This is so useful! I love this kind of post and will buy many things from this one in particular.
Probably a very naive question, but why can’t you just take a lot of DHA **and** a lot of EPA to get both supplements’ benefits? Especially if your diet means you’re likely deficient in both (which is true of veganism? vegetarianism?).
Assuming the Reddit folk wisdom about DHA inducing depression was wrong (which it might not be, I don’t want to dismiss it), I don’t understand from the rest of what you wrote why this doesn’t work? Why is there a trade-off?

Matt Putz 30 May 2022 21:24 UTC
8 points
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on: Proposal: Impact List—like the Forbes List except for impact via donations
This seems really exciting!

I skimmed some sections so might have missed it in case you brought it up, but I think one thing that might be tricky about this project is the optics of where your own funding would be coming from. E.g. it might look bad if most (any?) of your funding was coming from OpenPhil and then Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna were very highly ranked (which they probably should be!). In worlds where this project is successful and gathers some public attention, that kind of thing seems quite likely to come up.

So I think conditional on thinking this is a good idea at all, this may be an unusually good funding opportunity for smaller earning-to-givers. Unfortunately, the flip-side is that fundraising for this may be somewhat harder than for other EA projects.

Matt Putz 11 May 2022 19:37 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: sawyer🔸’s comment on: Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now
Thanks for pointing this out, wasn’t aware of that, sorry for the mistake. I have retracted my comment.

Matt Putz 11 May 2022 19:37 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Joel Burget’s comment on: Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now
Thanks for pointing this out, wasn’t aware of that, sorry for the mistake. I have retracted my comment.

Matt Putz 11 May 2022 6:30 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: _pk’s comment on: Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now
Hey, interesting to hear your reaction, thanks.

I can’t respond to all of it now, but do want to point out one thing.

And, of course, if elected he will very visibly owe his win to a single ultra-wealthy individual who is almost guaranteed to have business before the next congress in financial and crypto regulation.

I think this isn’t accurate.

Donations from individuals are capped at $5,800, so whatever money Carrick is getting is not one giant gift from Sam Bankman-Fried, but rather many small ones from individual Americans. Some of them may work for organizations that get a lot of funding from big EA donors, but it’s still their own salary which they are free to spend however they like. As an aside, probably in most cases the funding of these orgs will currently still come from OpenPhil (who give away Dustin Moskovitz’s and Cari Tuna’s wealth), rather than FTX Future Fund (who give away SBF’s wealth among others).

I think it’s important that for the most part, this is money that not-crazy-rich Americans could have spent on themselves, but chose to donate to this campaign instead.

Matt Putz 10 May 2022 11:03 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Matthew Yglesias’s comment on: Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now
If you’re wondering who you might know in Oregon, you can search your Facebook friends by location:
Search for Oregon (or Salem) in the normal FB search bar, then go to People. You can also select to see “Friends of Friends”.
I assume that will miss a few, so it’s probably worth also actively thinking about your network, but this is probably a good low-effort first start.
Edit: Actually they need to live in district 6. The biggest city in that district is Salem as far as I can tell. Here’s a map.

Matt Putz 9 May 2022 10:39 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Sam Bankman-Fried’s comment on: An update in favor of trying to make tens of billions of dollars
Very glad to hear this, thanks!!

Matt Putz 8 May 2022 15:03 UTC
1 point
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on: Why those who care about catastrophic and existential risk should care about autonomous weapons
Thanks for writing this!

I believe there’s a small typo here:

The expected deaths are N+P_nM in the human-combatant case and P_yM in the autonomous combatant case, with a difference in fatalities of (P_y−P_n)(M−N). Given how much larger M (~1-7 Bn) is than N (tens of thousands at most) it only takes a small difference (Py−Pn) for this to be a very poor exchange.

Shouldn’t the difference be (P_y−P_n)M−N ?

Matt Putz 4 May 2022 15:58 UTC
5 points
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on: New forum feature: Map of Community Members
This is *so* cool, thanks! Might be nice to have a feature where people can add a second location. E.g. I used to study in Munich, but spend ~2 months per year in Luxembourg. Many friends stayed much longer in Luxembourg. According to the EA survey, there are Luxembourgish EAs other than me, but I have so far failed to find them—I’d expect many of them to be in a similar situation.

Matt Putz 1 May 2022 20:33 UTC
3 points
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on: Using TikTok to indoctrinate the masses to EA
Congrats on your success!

Matt Putz 30 Apr 2022 22:16 UTC
2 points
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on: Decomposing Biological Risks: Harm, Potential, and Strategies
I thought this was a great article raising a bunch of points which I hadn’t previously come across, thanks for writing it!
Regarding the risk from non-state actors with extensive resources, one key question is how competent we expect such groups to be. Gwern suggests that terrorists are currently not very effective at killing people or inducing terror—with similar resources, it should be possible to induce far more damage than they actually do. This has somewhat lowered my concern about bioterrorist attacks, especially when considering that successfully causing a global pandemic worse than natural ones is not easy. (Lowered my concern in relative terms that is—I still think this risk is unacceptably high and prevention measures should be taken. I don’t want to rely on terrorists being incompetent.) This suggests both that terrorist groups may not pursue bioterrorism even if it were the best way to achieve their goals and that they may not be able to execute well on such a difficult task. Hence, without having thought about it too much, I think I might rate the risks from non-state actors somewhat lower than you do (though I’m not sure, especially since you don’t give numerical estimates—which is totally reasonable). For instance, I’m not sure whether we should expect risks of GCBRs caused by non-state actors to be higher than risks of GCBRs caused by state actors (as you suggest).

Matt Putz 11 Apr 2022 19:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: Effectiveness is a Conjunction of Multipliers
Fair, that makes sense! I agree that if it’s purely about solving a research problem with long timelines, then linear or decreasing returns seem very reasonable.

I would just note that speed-sensitive considerations, in the broad sense you use it, will be relevant to many (most?) people’s careers, including researchers to some extent (reputation helps doing research: more funding, better opportunities for collaboration etc). But I definitely agree there are exceptions and well-established AI safety researchers with long timelines may be in that class.