GCR capacity-building grantmaking and projects at Open Phil.
Eli Rose
Karma: 2,134
FWIW several people I spoke to just weren’t aware subforums existed, during the time they were being piloted.
This refers to the amount you were promised from FTXF.
This refers to the amount that was promised, but hasn’t been paid out.
(I work at Open Phil assisting with this effort.)
Thanks for pointing this out; it looks like there was a technical error which excluded these from the email receipt, which we’ve now fixed. The information was still received on our end, so you don’t need to take any extra actions.
(I work at Open Phil assisting with this effort.)
-
Any grantee who is affected by the collapse of FTXFF and whose work falls within our focus areas (biosecurity, AI risk, and community-building) should feel free to apply, even if they have significant runway.
-
For various reasons, we don’t anticipate offering any kind of program like this, and are taking the approach laid out in the post instead. Edit: We’re still working out a number of the details, and as the comment below states, people who are worried about this should still apply.
-
(I work at Open Phil assisting with this effort.)
We think that people in this situation should apply. The language was intended to include this case, but it may not have been clear.
Exactly when does the program begin? I couldn’t find this info above.
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reading Richard Ngo’s AGI Safety From First Principles, which I think is an unusually rigorous treatment of the issue.
We’ve been paying people based on time spent, rather than by word. The amounts are based on our assessment of market rates for high-quality freelance translators for the language in question online, though my guess is this will be a more attractive than being a freelance translator because it’s a source of steady work for a long period of time (e.g. 6 months).
Have you considered writing a letter to the editor? I think actual worked examples of naive consequentialism failing are kind of rare and cool for people to see .
Hmm yeah, I went East Coast --> Bay and I somewhat miss the irony.
-
We’re interested in increasing the diversity of the longtermist community along many different axes. It’s hard to give a unified ‘strategy’ at this abstract level, but one thing we’ve been particularly excited about recently is outreach in non-Western and non-English-speaking countries.
-
Yes, you can apply for a grant under these circumstances. It’s possible that we’ll ask you to come back once more aspects of the plan are figured out, but we have no hard rules about that. And yes, it’s possible to apply for funding conditional on some event and later return the money/adjust the amount you want downwards if the event doesn’t happen.
-
I’ll stand by the title here. I think a bilingual person without specific training in translation can have good taste in determining whether or not a given translation is high-quality. These seem like distinct skills, e.g. in English I’m able to recognize a work badly translated from French even if I don’t speak French and couldn’t produce a better one. And having good taste seems like the most important skill for someone who is vetting and contracting with professional translators.
Separately, I also think that many (but not all) bilingual people without specific training in translation can themselves do good translation work. The results of our pilot project moved me towards this view (from a prior position that put a decent amount of weight on it).
As a high-level note, I see the goal here as enabling people to engage with EA ideas where they couldn’t before. It’s important that quality be high enough that the ideas are transmitted with good fidelity. But I don’t think we need to adhere to an extremely high and rigorous standard of the type one might have when translating a literary work, e.g. I don’t think we need translations to read so fluently that one forgets the material was originally written in English. I think this work is urgent and important, and I think the opportunity costs of imposing that kind of standard would be significant.
Hi Zakariyau. This seems like it definitely meets the criteria of a language with >5m speakers — I don’t have the context, but I don’t think English being the official language would be a barrier of any kind.
Unfortunately I think this kind of experimental approach is a bad fit here; opportunity costs seem really high, there’s a small number of data points, and there’s a ton of noise from other factors that language communities vary along.
Fortunately I think we’ll have additional context that will help us assess the impacts of these grants beyond a black-box “did this input lead to this output” analysis.
Hi Nathan — I think that probably wouldn’t make sense in this case, as I think it’s important for the person leading a given translation project to understand EA and related ideas well, even if translators they hire do not.
Yep, this list isn’t intended to rule anything out. We’d certainly be interested in getting applications from people who want to get content translated into Hindi or other Indian languages.
Ah, that’s my bad — thanks, fixed.
Thanks, really appreciate the concrete suggestion! This seems like a good lead for anyone who wants to supervise Polish translation.
Cool, looking forward to talking about these.
This is an amazing thing to learn.