Last nontrivial update: 2024-02-01.
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I’m interested in ways to increase the EV of the EA community by mitigating downside risks from EA related activities. Without claiming originality, I think that:
Complex cluelessness is a common phenomenon in the domains of anthropogenic x-risks and meta-EA (due to an abundance of crucial considerations). It is often very hard to judge whether a given intervention is net-positive or net-negative.
The EA community is made out of humans. Humans’ judgement tends to be influenced by biases and self-deception. That is a serious source of risk, considering the previous point.
Some potential mitigations involve improving some aspects of how EA funding works, e.g. with respect to conflicts of interest. Please don’t interpret my interest in such mitigations as accusations of corruption etc.
Feel free to reach out by sending me a PM. I’ve turned off email notifications for private messages, so if you send me a time sensitive PM consider also pinging me about it via the anonymous feedback link above.
Thanks!
Follow up questions to anyone who may know:
Is METR (formerly ARC Evals) meant to be the “independent, external organization” that is allowed to evaluate the capabilities and safety of Anthropic’s models? As of 2023-12-04 METR was spinning off from the Alignment Research Center (ARC) into their own standalone nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, according to their website. Who is on METR’s board of directors?
Note: OpenPhil seemingly recommended a total of $1,515,000 to ARC in 2022. Holden Karnofsky (co-founder and co-CEO of OpenPhil at the time, and currently a board member) is married to Daniela Amodei (co-founder of Anthropic and sibling of the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei) according to Wikipedia.