Risto is a Policy Researcher at FLI and is focused primarily on researching policy-making on AI to maximize the societal benefits of increasingly powerful AI systems. Previously, Risto worked for the World Economic Forum on a project about positive AI economic futures, did research for the European Commission on trustworthy AI, and provided research support at Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative on European AI policy. He completed a master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has a bachelor’s degree from Tallinn University in Estonia.
Risto Uuk
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So here are some of the main takeaways from this for me:
Involve the main volunteers/group members in the strategy development process.
Use the strategy template made available by CEA.
Share EA Denmark’s list of project ideas with other community builders.
We recently had a several-hour strategy meeting. I can attest to that when community members participate in the task of developing a strategy they understand better what’s going on and they feel more motivated as they are actually responsible for the vision now. And they can come up with wonderful ideas that you hadn’t thought of!
We have also used a simple three-dimension thinking tool for deciding what projects/activities to focus on. Every participant scores activities on some scale according to how many resources the activity requires, what’s the best outcome that it can result in, and how high is the personal fit of the leader for a particular activity.
Great overview as always. I think Open Philanthropy Project’s Funding for Study and Training Related to AI Policy Careers should be up here as well:
This program aims to provide flexible support for individuals who want to pursue or explore careers in AI policy1 (in industry, government, think tanks, or academia) for the purpose of positively impacting eventual societal outcomes from “transformative AI,” by which we mean potential future AI that precipitates a transition at least as significant as the industrial revolution …
I think this accusation is uncalled for. There is more statistics in the report and I linked to it, including things like citation impact. But a comprehensive overview of European AI research is, of course, very welcome.
For what it’s worth, according to Artificial Intelligence Index published in 2018:
Europe has consistently been the largest publisher of AI papers — 28% of AI papers on Scopus in 2017 originated in Europe. Meanwhile, the number of papers published in China increased 150% between 2007 and 2017. This is despite the spike and drop in Chinese papers around 2008.
(I’d post the graphs here, but I don’t think images can be inserted into comments.)
Here’s an article by 80,000 Hours literally titled “Advice for undergraduates”. It does not answer all of your questions, but hopefully it helps a little bit.
William MacAskill says the following in a chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy:
As defined by the leaders of the movement, effective altruism is the use of evidence and reason to work out how to benefit others as much as possible and the taking action on that basis. So defined, effective altruism is a project rather than a set of normative commitments. It is both a research project—to figure out how to do the most good—and a practical project, of implementing the best guesses we have about how to do the most good.
But then he continues to highlight various normative commitments, which indicate that it is, in addition to being a question, an ideology:
The project is: • Maximizing. The point of the project is to try to do as much good as possible. • Science-aligned. The best means to figuring out how to do the most good is the scientific method, broadly construed to include reliance on both empirical observation and careful rigorous argument or theoretical models. • Tentatively welfarist. As a tentative hypothesis or a first approximation, goodness is about improving the welfare of individuals. • Impartial. Everyone’s welfare is to count equally.
Open Philanthropy Project’s link doesn’t work.
Thank you for writing this! This is a useful overview of active groups for me, because I intend to move to London in September to study at LSE and now need to think about ways to engage with the community there.
In addition, what do you think should be updated in Doing Good Better?
Your link referring to bdixon and climate change leads to Joey’s post “Problems with EA representativeness and how to solve it”. Can you share the post that discusses how Doing Good Better appears to underrate the degree of warming of climate change?
I found the part about philosophers being well-suited to many aspects of EA research especially interesting. You said this:
Contrary to popular stereotypes, philosophers often excel at quantitative thinking. Many philosophy PhDs have an undergraduate background in math or science. For subfields of philosophy like formal epistemology, population ethics, experimental philosophy, decision theory, philosophy of science, and, of course, logic, a strong command of quantitative skills is essential. Even beyond these subfields, quantitative acumen is prized. In analytic philosophy in particular, papers with a lot of math and formalism are more likely to be taken seriously than comparable papers explained informally.
Do you have any data about philosophy PhDs often having an undergraduate background in math or science? I, for example, have chosen a lot of courses in mathematical economics, data analysis, and social science research methodology to support my philosophy degree, but this is very uncommon in my experience. However, this depends a lot on the region and surely USA and UK are different than continental Europe on this matter.
Can you expand on 3a and 3b? I guess 3b justifies 3a, but is that all? Watching and discussing a video with your local group appears to me to be more valuable than asking one question at a talk, but I may be missing some important benefits that you are aware. I would also add that these are not mutually exclusive. I have heard that some people struggle to set time to watch talks on their own, that is also something to consider.
You received almost 100 applications as far as I’m aware, but were able to fund only 23 of them. Some other projects were promising according to you, but you didn’t have time to vet them all. What other reasons did you have for rejecting applications?
Realising that attendance and events are just part of a community, and potentially not the most important part
Agreed. Research and study groups, for example, seem to be a lot more useful than events. First and foremost, participants commit to longer term attendance in advance so you don’t need to try to persuade them to participate every time. I dislike having to personally invite people to come to events. I assume that they don’t care about EA enough if they don’t come at a mere FB invitation.
Regarding attendance, we just recently organized a public AI safety event which was attended by roughly 80 people. When an ex community-builder heard that, he congratulated us on that as it sounded big success to him. Of course, it was nice to have that many people come to the event but compared to some more in-depth projects we had going on I didn’t feel as accomplished.
That said, how do you get feedback from your community with respect to online-based content? Your newsletter, for example, could easily be much more valuable than events and even other in-person activities, but as far as I’m aware very few people actually communicate how much value they receive to authors and content creators. For instance, you probably didn’t know this but I find useful content for EA Estonia’s newsletter every month from EA London’s newsletter.
If you’re a thoughtful American interested in developing expertise and technical abilities in the domain of AI policy, then this may be one of your highest impact options, particularly if you have been to or can get into a top grad school in law, policy, international relations or machine learning. (If you’re not American, working on AI policy may also be a good option, but some of the best long-term positions in the US won’t be open to you.)
What do you think about similar type of work within the European Union? Could it potentially be a high-impact career path for those who are not Americans?
This post increased my interest in visiting the Boston area. Unfortunately, I cannot come to the EAGx this year, but perhaps another time. I’m quite surprised that you’d have the issue of brain drain as the area seems to be a very impressive place with top universities, lots of people interested in EA, and even a few great EA-aligned organizations. Do you have other ideas besides a full-time paid community builder to improve that?
Nice idea. I wrote my bio in third-person like you did even though on my website I have it in first-person: https://ristouuk.com. Usually, I feel weird about the third-person narrative when I’m the one who is talking about me, but it feels right for the forum.
As an application of this model, the Global Priorities Project estimatesthat research into the neglected tropical diseases with the highest global DALY burden (diarrheal diseases) could be 6x more cost-effective, in terms of DALYs per dollar, than the 80,000 Hours recommended top charities.
What are 80,000 Hours’ recommended top charities? I think you mean some other organization here.
It would be nice if someone updated it regularly and had a note about when it was last updated on the top of the page. For example, according to Julia Wise there were 3855 Giving What We Can members at the beginning of 2019, whereas the number here is outdated with 1800+ members.
You can decide it by asking who wants to be the leader of a particular activity (the way that your group did) as well as inquire what resources and capital people have available to successfully lead that activity. Sometimes people have the motivation to lead activities, but they don’t actually have the necessary resources to do it successfully yet.
Agreed on the failure-mode thinking. I guess if you only take the best-case scenario into consideration, then you forget to assess the risks involved. On the other hand, I’m not sure it should be included in this initial brainstorming session or later when a possible activity is selected as a top candidate.