Formerly Executive Director at BERI; now Secretary and board member. Current board member at SecureBio and FAR.AI, where Iâm also the Treasurer.
sawyerđ¸
Karma: 1,403
I agree with your last sentence, and I think in some versions of this itâs the vast majority of people. A lot of charity advertising seems to encourage a false sense of confidence, e.g. âFeed this child for $1,â or âadopt this manateeâ. I think this makes use of a near-universal human bias which probably has a name but which I am not recalling at the moment. For a less deceptive version of this, note how much effort AMF and GiveDirectly seem to have put in into tracking the concrete impact of your specific donation.
Building off of Jasonâs comment: Another way to express this is that comparing directly to the $5,500 Givewell bar is only fair for risk-neutral donors (I think?). Most potential donors are not really risk neutral, and would rather spend $5,001 to definitely save one life than $5,000 to have a 10% chance of saving 10 lives. Risk neutrality is a totally defensible position, but so is non-neutrality. Itâs good to have the option of paying a âpremiumâ for a higher confidence (but lower risk-neutral EV).
Leaving math mode...I love this post. It made me emotional and also made me think, and it feels like a really central example of what EA should be about. Iâm very impressed by your resolve here in following through with this plan, and Iâm really glad to have people like you in this community.
ďBERI ReÂturns All FTX Funds
ďBERIâs 2024 Goals and Predictions
BERI is seekÂing new trial collaborators
Very nice post. âAnarchists have no idolsâ strikes me as very similar to the popular anarchist slogan, âNo gods, no masters.â Perhaps the person who said it to you was riffing on that?
I think a simpler explanation for his bizarre actions is that he is probably the most stressed-out person on the face of the earth right now. Or heâs not seeing the situation clearly, or some combination of the two. Also probably sleep-deprived, struggling to get good advice from people around him, etc.
(This is not meant to excuse any of his actions or words, I think heâs 100% responsible for everything he says and does.)
This sort of falls under the second category, âGrantees who received funds, but want to set them aside to return to creditors or depositors.â At least thatâs how I read it, though the more I think about it the more this category is kind of confusing and your wording seems more direct.
Thanks for the clarification. I agree that the FTX problems are clearly related to crypto being such a new unregulated area, and I was wrong to try to downplay that causal link.
I donât think anonymized donations would help mitigate conflicts of interest. In fact I think it would encourage COIs, since donors could directly buy influence without anyone knowing they were doing so. Currently one of our only tools for identifying otherwise-undisclosed COIs is looking at flows of money. If billionaire A donates to org B, we have a norm that org B shouldnât do stuff that directly helps billionaire A. If that donation was anonymous, we wouldnât know that that was a situation in which the norm applied.
There are some benefits of some level of anonymity in donations. For example, I dislike the practice of universities putting a donorâs name on a building in exchange for a large donation. Seems like an impressive level of hubris. I have more respect for donors who donât aggressively publicize their name in this way. However, I do think that these donations should still be available in public records. Donation anonymousness ranges from âput my name on the buildingâ at one extreme to âactively obscure the source of the donationâ at the other.
I have more thoughts on donor transparency but Iâll leave it there for now.
Downvoted because I think this is too harsh and accusatory:
I cannot believe that some of you delete your posts simply because it ends up being downvoted.
Also because I disagree in the following ways:
Donating anonymously seems precisely opposed to transparency. At the very least, I donât think itâs obvious that donor anonymity works towards the values youâre expressing in your post. Personally I think being transparent about who is donating to what organizations is pretty important for transparency, and I think this is a common view.
I donât think FTXâs mistakes are particularly unique to crypto, but rather just normal financial chicanery.
âif the only way we aggregate how âgoodâ red-teaming is is by up-votes, that is flawedâ
IIRC the red-teaming contest did not explicitly consider up-votes in their process for granting awards, and the correlation between upvotes and prize-winners was weak.
âWhat makes EA, EA, what makes EA antifragile, is its ruthless transparency.â
For better or for worse, I donât think ruthless transparency is a focus or a strength of EA. I agree with your sentence right after that, but I donât think thatâs much related to transparency.
Yep this is a great point and overlaps with Vardevâs comment. If I thought that the money was gained immorally, it would be pretty bad to just return it to the people who did the immoral thing!
Yeah this seems super relevant, great point! To be honest Iâm skeptical of how separate âFTX Foundation, Inc.â is/âwas from the rest of the FTX conglomerate. Would be useful to see the Foundationâs finances after this all shakes out.
Put very vaguely: If it turned out that the money BERI received was made through means which I consider to be immoral, then I think I would return the money, even if that meant cancelling the projects it funded.
But of course I donât know how where my bar for âimmoralâ is in this case. Also itâs probably not the case that all of FTXâs profits were immoral. So how do I determine (even in theory) if the money BERI received was part of the âgood profitsâ or the âbad profitsâ?
[Question] UnÂder what conÂdiÂtions should FTX grantees volÂunÂtarÂily reÂturn their grants?
What if there were a norm in EA of not accepting large amounts of funding unless a third-party auditor of some sort has done a thorough review of the funderâs finances and found them to above-board? Obviously lots of variables in this proposal, but I think something like this is plausibly good and would be interested to hear pushback.
What are the specific things youâd want to see on a transparency page? I think transparency is important, and I try to maintain BERIâs transparency page, but Iâm wondering if it meets your standards.
EA OperÂaÂtions Slack
Iâd guess the reason this was done for comments first is that posts are much longer and more complicated, such that itâs often not clear what âagreeingâ with the post even means. I think itâs plausibly a good feature for posts, but I think it makes a lot more sense for comments.
It might be tough to implement this in a way that doesnât boost linkposts (which I think would be counter to your purpose).
Within EA, work on x-risk is very siloed by type of threat: There are the AI people, the bio people, etc. Is this bad, or good?
Which of these is the correct analogy?
âBiology is to science as AI safety is to x-risk,â or
âImmunology is to biology as AI safety is to x-riskâ
EAs seem to implicitly think analogy 1 is correct: some interdisciplinary work is nice (biophysics) but most biologists can just be biologists (i.e. most AI x-risk people can just do AI).
The âexistential risk studiesâ model (popular with CSER, SERI, and lots of other non-EA academics) seems to think that analogy 2 is correct, and that interdisciplinary work is totally criticalâimmunologists alone cannot achieve a useful understanding of the entire system theyâre trying to study, and they need to exchange ideas with other subfields of medicine/âbiology in order to have an impact, i.e. AI x-risk workers are missing critical pieces of the puzzle when they neglect broader x-risk studies.