I’m really hoping we can get some better data on resource allocation and estimated effectiveness to make it clearer when funders or individuals should return to focusing on global poverty etc.
There’s a few projects in the works for “ea epistemic infrastructure”
This doesn’t address the elephant which is “quality” of talent. EA has a funding overhang with respect to some implicit “quality line” at which people will be hired. Getting more people who can demonstrate talent over that line (where the placement of each specific line is very dependent on context) lowers the funding overhang, but only getting more people under the line doesn’t change anything.
A tag is probably enough, but you could also maybe ask people to put some copy about the contest at the top of each submission?
Why hide stuff from newbies? They are here to see the forum, and this is a cool EA thing happening on the forum.
Likewise, I have a post from January suggesting that crypto assets are over-represented in the EA funding portfolio.
Thanks for this post. I have some disagreements but I want to say that this part in particular is pretty common and is a big problem I have with the EA “big wigs” culture.
I’ve applied for a few jobs in EA over the years. I didn’t get them. This was painful. In one case I was doing 25+ hours a week freelance work for an org for several months, it went really well, they put up a job posting with precisely my current duties and invited me to apply, then hired someone else. This was very painful, and strongly discouraged me from applying to full time EA roles in the future.
This seems to be really common and it’s totally understandable to feel hurt. One of the things that drives us to EA is the desire to contribute, and naturally our self-worth can get very tied up in that. I really hope that orgs can do a lot better on this, because I think this and similar things are pretty harmful.
I disagree and agree with various parts of your post.
But if you’re worrying about alienating people in the periphery, and you’re in the center, it’s worth considering that people in the periphery probably just aren’t paying much attention to how much status you are assigning them.
I agree, this summarizes a vibe I’ve felt before. I think their concern shouldn’t be worrying about “alienating” the edge of EA, but more on positively framing it—making it easy for us to contribute as much as possible.
However, I think some of how you are phrasing this is a bit odd
I will maintain my pledge with a similar level of pride and joy no matter what the official recommendation to current Yale students in EA student groups is (not to undermine them—they are very important, just approximately irrelevant to my life). I am in Florida. Most of my friends work at restaurants or for the state government. Sure, it feels nice when people across the country want to include me or rank me well, [...]
Recommending actions in EA are about making an impact, not about status! Why will you maintain your pledge no matter what?? Are you certain you are having the biggest impact you can?
Now, if you don’t want to change your life very much, that’s totally fine, but I just think it isn’t about status.
There is plenty of status though. Obviously EAs do get caught up in pursuing status, consciously or not, and also we do tend to think of highly impactful people as high status. However, that’s a bad thing, not a good thing. Status assignment and signalling can only make our reasoning worse, not better.
Anyway I think your post is pretty good for making people think, so thanks.
Strong messaging to the effect of “we need talent” gives the impression that there are enough jobs that if you are reasonably skilled, you can get a job.
Strong messaging to the effect of “we need founders”, or “just apply for funding” gives the impression that you will get funding.
In both cases, people can be repeatedly rejected and get extremely disheartened.
Some things that can be done:
Communicate (with real examples?) the level of competence required for success in a job / funding application. Unfortunately “apply but don’t get sad at rejection” is an unrealistic message to send. Go the other way, and try to make people’s self-screening more accurate.
Provide better feedback for rejected applicants.
Provide more opportunities for up-skilling.
Try really, really hard not to filter based on unchangeable parts of people’s background such as their education (esp. fanciness of school) and location. (and of course ethnicity, gender etc.)
I’ve been meaning to write a post but it’s a big ball of thoughts and I don’t have the right structure for it.
Rob puts it well in his comment as “social coordination”. If someone tries “buying time” interventions and fails, I think that because of largely social effects, poorly done “buying time” interventions have potential to both fail at buying time and preclude further coordination with mainstream ML. So net negative effect.
On the other hand, technical alignment does not have this risk.
I agree that technical alignment has the risk of accelerating timelines though.
But if someone tries technical alignment and fails to produce results, that has no impact compared to a counterfactual where they just did web dev or something.
My reference point here is the anecdotal disdain (from Twitter, YouTube, can dm if you want) some in the ML community have for anyone who they perceive to be slowing them down.
Hi!
I have to say I strongly disagree with this idea, for one particular reason. If we successfully establish a new hub with cheap living costs and beautiful nature, it MUST be outside the USA. The USA is notoriously hard to immigrate into from most countries!
It is unfortunate that we already have one hub (SF Bay Area / Berkeley) in the USA, although I definitely am OK with D.C. becoming a hub. However, I’d ask any Americans who want to be in an EA hub, but don’t want to be in those two places, to go to someone else’s hub (Mexico City, Cape Town), or if still wanting to set one up, to do so in a jurisdiction with permissive immigration.
Here’s a list of links and people I have found on this topic:
Paal Kvarberg has scoped this idea and got feedback in this document, but I think didn’t pursue the idea.
Ozzie Gooen got funding from LTFF in 2019 and is now involved in foretold.io, an open-source prediction market. This looks similar, but less ambitious than what I’m trying to do. The notebooks part in particular doesn’t look like it has adoption. He also started guesstimate, a probabilistic spreadsheet app which can do stuff like do drake’s equation with probability distributions. He also has a lesswrong collection of posts on “Prediction-driven collaborative reasoning systems”
These people from Manifold Market are building “charity prediction markets” which allow the use of real money in a prediction market, if the money will be donated to charity.
The Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI, pronounced “query”), which have a variety of projects (which you can see on their public AirTable), including foretold.io (mentioned before), and a probabilistic programming language called Squiggle.
QURI’s current active project is Metaforecast, a site that collects and links to predictions and estimates from other platforms such as Metaculus.
Probably the number of people actually pushing the frontier of alignment is more like 30, and for capabilities maybe 3000. If the 270 remaining alignment people can influence those 3000 (biiiig if, but) then the odds aren’t that bad
I’ve had quite a few people ask me “What’s altruism?” when running university clubs fair stalls for EA Wellington.
I’ve been very keen to run “deep dives” where we do independent research on some topic, with the aim that the group as a whole ends up with significantly more expertise than at the start.
I’ve proposed doing this with my group, but people are disappointingly unreceptive to it, mainly because of the time commitment and “boringness”.
Ok—this is a good critique of my comment.
I was kind of off-topic and responding to something a bit more general. Since writing my comment I have found someone on the forum summarizing my perspective better.
and relatedly re. funding
Yeah, that’s satisfying to me. I think it’s honest and clear. I thought it was worth asking though, in case the framing wasn’t deliberate, or you hadn’t thought about it.
I can see you put a lot of effort into this reply—thanks!
Soaking screams food poisoning to me; especially with unclean water. Perhaps this is not a risk if done right, but this could be why it’s not done.
Thinking about
My take: There’s two things we mean by EA:
EA the social group / movement. (EA the people)
EA the project of improving the world.
It’s always ok to leave 1., and it is ok most of the time, but not always, to leave 2.
If you are leaving 2., you should try to figure out why. If it’s because you don’t really want to improve the world (like most people), I’d prefer you don’t leave—but I’m fine with it as long as you’re honest about it.
IMO though, people are more likely to leave 2. because:
They are burned out or otherwise having a rough time. Take some time off and get back on track :)
They stopped enjoying “EA the social group”. Great, you don’t need us to keep improving the world!
They have other things that are personally more important to them than improving the world (like kids, family, or ideology about open source software). This is totally fine! People need to have good lives of their own!