I lead the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team
Neel Nanda
Karma: 6,649
If you’re a high-context AI safety person deciding between, say, working as a researcher at a think tank or becoming a grantmaker, I think the grantmaker path deserves more weight than I sense many people give it. This seems especially true if you’re someone with technical AI safety chops who is mostly considering technical research roles.
Seems true to me. I’d love to see more talented grant makers out there!
I’m sympathetic to the argument that it would be hard to operationalise a salary sacrifice pledge in ways that are hard to game, but true to the spirit of it.
But I feel annoyed that the tone of the FAQ and Luke’s comment is not “this is a meaningful flaw in the pledge, we don’t see a good way to fix it, but acknowledge it creates bad incentivises”. Eg it seems terrible that the FAQ frames this as “resigning from your pledge”, which I consider to have strong connotations of giving up or failing.
In many cases, the above conclusion is based on misunderstandings about the 10% Pledge which are resulting in opportunities for impact being missed by people like yourself not pledging.
For example, this part of Luke’s comment rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt like it was saying that actually people are misunderstanding the pledge, and it’s totally consistent with taking a massive pay cut to pursue direct altruistic work. But it is clearly, by design, not, and his comment felt like it was missing the point. Eg someone who leaves a job in finance or tech to take a job at half the salary to do direct work, and intends to remain in that new role for the rest of their career, is making far more of a sacrifice than if they just donated 10%, and I consider them to have no obligation to donate further. But I don’t see the conditions of Luke’s comment applying, as the salary sacrifice comes from switching industries not an arrangement with their employer. And they may never be able to donate later, if they just postpone their pledge. So they would need to resign. Which is a terrible incentive!
If your non profit will eventually be extremely cost effective, and donations now help it reach that point, then that would make donations now highly cost effective. Of course, you’re likely positively biased in favour of your non profit, so could easily be wrong in this assessment, but I am generally pro people making high conviction altruistic bets with their donations
More importantly, you are, in fact, choosing to take a lower salary in order to spend your labour on your non profit. This means you are choosing actions that lead to you not donating to other charities. If you think this is the correct thing to do, altruistically speaking, then you think this achieves more good than taking a higher paying job and donating that money. I think it would be perverse if the GWWC pledge obliged people to make ineffective decisions that did less good by their lights
Wow, that’s a terrible policy IMO, and the linked forum comment feels like it totally misses the point—I personally think Quinn should go ahead and use the diamond emoji if he’s confident he would be earning far more if he wasn’t making altruistic career choices.
GWWC shouldn’t try to attach a sense of status and altruism to the diamond emoji and then tell people they need to do less good if they want to keep it, that seems deeply against the principles of EA to me, and the incentives we should create as a functional community of altruists
EDIT: Do the people disagree voting disagree that GWWC’s rules incentivise pledgers to do less good, or think this is an acceptable sacrifice on a difficult to solve problem, or some other disagreement with my comment?
As far as I’m aware, coefficient giving may slightly adjust which global health causes they support based on how neglected those are, but it’s less than a 1:1 effect, and the size of the global health funding pool at CG is fairly fixed. And there are a bunch of people dying each year, especially given the foreign aid cuts, who would not die if there was more money given to global health stuff, including GiveWell top charities (if nothing else, GiveDirectly seems super hard to saturated). So I don’t really see much cause for despondency here, your donations can do a lot of good! (other than the fact that the world is like this being terrible). I think it would be accurate to say that GiveWell top charities are not obviously the most impactful thing to fund on the margin, but that is very different from not being impactful or not being neglected.
Concretely, I recommend funding the GiveWell all grants fund, which they can allocate to wherever it would do the most good in global health, including higher risk things. Given the foreign aid cuts there’s likely a bunch of important but smaller and time sensitive opportunities, and as a non expert in global health, I’m happy to defer to GiveWell’s recommendations here, in the same way that I used to be happy to give to their top charities, or am happy to invest my savings in index funds.
And yeah funding your own direct work seems totally fine to me
Note that Dominic Cummings, one of the then most powerful men in the UK, [credits the rationality community] (https://x.com/dominic2306/status/1373333437319372804) for convincing him that the UK needed to change its coronavirus policy (which I personally am very grateful for!). So it seems unlikely to have been that obvious
ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic
Google’s donation match is $10k per person, and I would guess a bunch of donations from Googlers are unmatched
What do you mean by giving to Manifund’s regranting program? It’s not one place to donate to. It’s a bunch of different people who get regranting budgets. You can give to one of those people, but how the money gets used depends a ton on who, which seems important
If you’re looking for something x risk related then I think something like the Longview emerging challenges fund is better https://www.longview.org/fund/emerging-challenges-fund/
Seems reasonable, thanks! I feel generally more aligned with Coefficient/OP’s judgement than Good Ventures’, so seems fine by me
Thanks a lot for this post! I was not planning on going to EAGx India for unrelated reasons, but if I had been, this would probably have been enough to convince me to cancel
Are you able to share why you’ve been endorsed by OP/Coefficient, to the point that they are recommending you to other donors, but they haven’t been able to fill your funding gap via Good Ventures?
I was surprised to see that you are US tax deductible (via every) but not UK tax deductible, given that you are a uk-based charity. I assume this is downstream of different levels of non-profit bureaucracy in the different countries? I would recommend explicitly flagging this early in the post as this is a deal breaking factor for many medium sized donors and if this was a constraint for me, I would have filtered exactly incorrectly
Are you happy to receive donations from AGI company employees?
Thanks for writing this! I strongly agree re work trials, unstructured interviews, informal references, and info being useful despite conflicts of interest
Your poll seems to exclude non US citizen, US residents, who are the most interesting category imo
I would be pretty shocked if paid ads reach equivalently good people, given that these are not people who have chosen to watch the video, and may have very little interest
I struggle to imagine Qf 0.9 being reasonable for anything on TikTok. My understanding of TikTok is that most viewers will be idly scrolling through their feed, watch your thing for a bit as part of this endless stream, then continue, and even if they decide to stop for a while and get interested, they still would take long enough to switch out of the endless scrolling mode to not properly engage with large chunks of the video. Is that a correct model, or do you think that eg most of your viewer minutes come from people who stop and engage properly?
Innocent until proven guilty is a fine principle for the legal system, but I do not think it is obviously reasonable to apply it to evaluating content made by strangers on the internet. It is not robust to people quickly and cheaply generating new identities, and new questionably true content. Further, the whole point of the principle is that it’s really bad to unjustly convict people, along with other factors like wanting to be robust to governments persecuting civilians. Incorrectly dismissing a decent post is really not that bad.
Feel free to call discriminating against AI content prejudice if you want, but I think this is a rational and reasonable form of prejudice and disagree with the moral analogy you’re trying to draw by using that word and example
I empathise but strongly disagree. AI has lowered the costs of making superficially plausible but bad content. The internet is full of things that are not worth reading and people need to prioritise.
Human written writing has various cues that people are practiced at identifying that indicate bad writing, and this can often be detected quickly, eg seeming locally incoherent, bad spelling, bad flow, etc. These are obviously not perfect heuristics, but convey real signal. AI has made it much easier to avoid all these basic heuristics, without making it much easier to have good content and ideas. Therefore, if AI wrote a text, it will be more costly to identify bad quality than if a human wrote it—AI text often looks good at first glance but is BS when you look into it deeply
People are rationally responding to the information environment they find themselves in. If cheap tests are less effective, conditional on the text being AI written, then you should be more willing to judge it or ditch it entirely if you conclude it was AI written. Having higher standards of rigour is just rational
Anthropic employees + founders represent tens of billions of dollars, and a decent fraction are animal pilled (at a rate a bit less than the typical EA I would guess), so I think you should expect significant increases in funding. Digital minds seem like something Anthropic employees are likely to be more into than the typical EA, though probably won’t know where to give to