I’m a theoretical CS grad student at Columbia specializing in mechanism design. I write a blog called Unexpected Values which you can find here: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/. My academic website can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/ericneyman/.
Eric Neyman
Karma: 2,111
No, just that, contra your title, most EAs would have been abolitionists, the way that I understand the word “abolitionist” to be used.
In my vocabulary, “abolitionist” means “person who is opposed to slavery” (e.g. “would vote to abolish slavery”). My sense is that this is the common meaning of the term, but let me know if you disagree.
It seems, then, that the analogy would be “person who is opposed to factory farming” (e.g. “would vote to outlaw factory farms”), instead of “vegetarian” and “animal donor”. The latter two are much higher standards, as they require personal sacrifice (in the same way that “not consuming products made with slave labor” was a much higher standard—one that very few people held themselves to).
The vast majority of EAs oppose factory farming, and I think they would have also supported the abolition of slavery.
In October, I wrote a post encouraging AI safety donors to donate to the Alex Bores campaign. Since then, I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about the best donations for making the long-term future go well, and I still think that the Alex Bores campaign is the best donation opportunity for U.S. citizens/permanent residents. Under my views, donations to his campaign made this month are about 25x better than donations to standard AI safety 501(c)(3) organizations like LTFF.[1] I also think that donations made after December 31st are substantially almost 2 times less effective than donations made this month, because a lot of the value of donations to Bores comes from the value of signaling campaign strength and consolidating support, rather than from spending money on ads, and donations made in January won’t become public until April. (See more discussion in my post.)
Some things has happened since then. The RAISE Act, Bores’ AI safety legislation, was signed by the governor![2] Also, the big tech super PAC announced that Alex Bores would be their first target. I’ve been really impressed with how Bores has handled the situation—see here for an interview with him about that. Bores also just went on Bloomberg’s odd lots podcast; I haven’t listened to it myself, but I heard that it was a good episode. I have generally been consistently impressed with Bores since the launch of his campaign.
If you’re thinking about end-of-year donations, I strongly encourage you to consider donating to Bores. Here’s a link to donate, though I recommend thinking about career considerations of political donations before deciding to donate. The maximum legal donation is $7,000.
(I think the second best donation opportunity is the Scott Wiener campaign—here’s a link to donate. Make sure to use this link rather than going to his website, because that’ll let his team know that you’re donating for AI safety reasons.)
- ^
In part, this is because of my bullishness on making the future go well conditioned on no AI takeover. I think Bores is particularly good from this perspective because he came across as particularly competent and high-integrity in a way that I expect to be important beyond AI takeover risk. For donors who only care about mitigating AI takeover, my guess is that donating to Bores is only around 10x better than e.g. LTFF.
- ^
Admittedly, in a weakened form, but I’m excited nonetheless.
- ^
What’s the Great AI Timelines Scare of 2017?
Thanks for the correction!
[Not tax/financial advice]
I agree, especially for donors who want to give to 501(c)(3)’s, since a lot of Anthropic equity is pledged to c3’s.
Another consideration for high-income donors that points in the same direction: if I’m not mistaken, 2025 is the last tax year where donors in the top tax bracket (AGI > $600k) can deduct up to 60% of their AGI; the One Big Beautiful Bill Act lowers this number to 35%. (Someone should check this, though, because it’s possible that I’m misinterpreting the rule.)
As one of Zach’s collaborators, I endorse these recommendations. If I had to choose among the 501c3s listed above, I’d choose Forethought first and the Midas Project second, but these are quite weakly held opinions.
I do recommend reaching out about nonpublic recommendations if you’re likely to give over $20k!
Speaking (with confidence) for Zach: yes.
My working group on the best donation opportunities
Nancy Pelosi is retiring; consider donating to Scott Wiener.
[Link to donate; or consider a bank transfer option to avoid fees, see below.]
Nancy Pelosi has just announced that she is retiring. Previously I wrote up a case for donating to Scott Wiener, who is running for her seat, in which I estimated a 60% chance that she would retire. While I recommended donating on the day that he announced his campaign launch, I noted that donations would look much better ex post in worlds where Pelosi retires, and that my recommendation to donate on launch day was sensitive to my assessment of the probability that she would retire.
I know some people who read my post and decided (quite reasonably) to wait to see whether Pelosi retired. If that was you, consider donating today!
How to donate
You can donate through ActBlue here (please use this link rather than going directly to his website, because the URL lets his team know that these are donations from people who care about AI safety).
Note that ActBlue charges a 4% fee. I think that’s not a huge deal; however, if you want to make a large contribution and are already comfortable making bank transfers, shoot be a DM and I’ll give you instructions for making the bank transfer!
Yup! Copying over from a LessWrong comment I made:
Roughly speaking, I’m interested in interventions that cause the people making the most important decisions about how advanced AI is used once it’s built to be smart, sane, and selfless. (Huh, that was some convenient alliteration.)
Smart: you need to be able to make really important judgment calls quickly. There will be a bunch of actors lobbying for all sorts of things, and you need to be smart enough to figure out what’s most important.
Sane: smart is not enough. For example, I wouldn’t trust Elon Musk with these decisions, because I think that he’d make rash decisions even though he’s smart, and even if he had humanity’s best interests at heart.
Selfless: even a smart and sane actor could curtail the future if they were selfish and opted to e.g. become world dictator.
And so I’m pretty keen on interventions that make it more likely that smart, sane, and selfless people are in a position to make the most important decisions. This includes things like:
Doing research to figure out the best way to govern advanced AI once it’s developed, and then disseminating those ideas.
Helping to positively shape internal governance at the big AI companies (I don’t have concrete suggestions in this bucket, but like, whatever led to Anthropic having a Long Term Benefit Trust, and whatever could have led to OpenAI’s non-profit board having actual power to fire the CEO).
Helping to staff governments with competent people.
Helping elect smart, sane, and selfless people to elected positions in governments (see 1, 2).
People are underrating making the future go well conditioned on no AI takeover.
This deserves a full post, but for now a quick take: in my opinion, P(no AI takeover) = 75%, P(future goes extremely well | no AI takeover) = 20%, and most of the value of the future is in worlds where it goes extremely well (and comparatively little value comes from locking in a world that’s good-but-not-great).
Under this view, an intervention is good insofar as it affects P(no AI takeover) * P(things go really well | no AI takeover). Suppose that a given intervention can change P(no AI takeover) and/or P(future goes extremely well | no AI takeover). Then the overall effect of the intervention is proportional to ΔP(no AI takeover) * P(things go really well | no AI takeover) + P(no AI takeover) * ΔP(things go really well | no AI takeover).
Plugging in my numbers, this gives us 0.2 * ΔP(no AI takeover) + 0.75 * ΔP(things go really well | no AI takeover).
And yet, I think that very little AI safety work focuses on affecting P(things go really well | no AI takeover). Probably Forethought is doing the best work in this space.
(And I don’t think it’s a tractability issue: I think affecting P(things go really well | no AI takeover) is pretty tractable!)
(Of course, if you think P(AI takeover) is 90%, that would probably be a crux.)
Consider donating to AI safety champion Scott Wiener
California state senator Scott Wiener, author of AI safety bills SB 1047 and SB 53, just announced that he is running for Congress! I’m very excited about this.
It’s an uncanny, weird coincidence that the two biggest legislative champions for AI safety in the entire country announced their bids for Congress just two days apart. But here we are.*
In my opinion, Scott Wiener has done really amazing work on AI safety. SB 1047 is my absolute favorite AI safety bill, and SB 53 is the best AI safety bill that has passed anywhere in the country. He’s been a dedicated AI safety champion who has spent a huge amount of political capital in his efforts to make us safer from advanced AI.
On Monday, I made the case that donating to Alex Bores—author of the New York RAISE Act—calling it a “once in every couple of years opportunity”, but flagging that I was also really excited about Scott Wiener.
I plan to have a more detailed analysis posted soon, but my bottom line is that donating to Wiener today is about 75% as good as donating to Bores was on Monday, and that this is also an excellent opportunity that will come up very rarely. (The main reason that it looks less good than donating to Bores is that he’s running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat, and Pelosi hasn’t decided whether she’ll retire. If not for that, the two donation opportunities would look almost exactly equally good, by my estimates.)
(I think that donating now looks better than waiting for Pelosi to decide whether to retire; if you feel skeptical of this claim, I’ll have more soon.)
I have donated $7,000 (the legal maximum) and encourage others to as well. If you’re interested in donating, here’s a link.
Caveats:
If you haven’t already donated to Bores, please read about the career implications of political donations before deciding to donate.
If you are currently working on federal policy, or think that you might be in the near future, you should consider whether it makes sense to wait to donate to Wiener until Pelosi announces retirement, because backing a challenger to a powerful incumbent may hurt your career.
*So, just to be clear, I think it’s unlikely (20%?) that there will be a political donation opportunity at least this good in the next few months.
In the past, I’ve had:
One instance of the campaign emailing me to set up a bank transfer. This… seems to have happened 9 months after the candidate lost the primary, actually? Which is honestly absurdly long; I don’t know if it’s typical.
One time, I think the campaign just sent a check to the address I used when I donated? But I don’t remember for sure. My guess is that they would have tried to reach me if I didn’t cash the check, but I’m not sure. I vaguely recall that the check was sent within a few months of the candidate losing the primary, but I’m not confident.
My suggestion: set a reminder for, like, September 2026 (I’m guessing that the primary will be in June 2026). Reach out to the campaign if you haven’t gotten anything by then.
Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act
I just did a BOTEC, and if I’m not mistaken, 0.0000099999999999999999999999999999999999999999988% is incorrect, and instead should be 0.0000099999999999999999999999999999999999999999998%. This is a crux, as it would mean that the SWWM pledge is actually 2x less effective than the GWWC pledge.
I tried to write out the calculations in this comment; in the process of doing so, I discovered that there’s a length limit to EA Forum comments, so unfortunately I’m not able to share my calculations. Maybe you could share yours and we could double-crux?
Hi Karthik,
Your comment inspired me to write my own quick take, which is here. Quoting the first paragraph as a preview:
I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo’s recent post arguing that some of GiveWell’s grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I’ll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.
I decided to spin off a quick take rather than replying here, because I think it would be interesting to have a discussion about non-dogmatism in a context that’s somewhat separated from this particular context, but I wanted to mention the quick take as a reply to your comment, since it’s relevant.
I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo’s recent post arguing that some of GiveWell’s grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I’ll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.[1]
Let’s say that a moral decision process is dogmatic if it’s completely insensitive to the numbers on either side of the trade-off. Non-dogmatism rejects dogmatic moral decision processes.
A central example of a dogmatic belief is: “Making a single human happy is more morally valuable than making any number of chickens happy.” The corresponding moral decision process would be, given a choice to spend money on making a human happy or making chickens happy, spending the money on the human no matter what the number of chickens made happy is. Non-dogmatism rejects this decision-making process on the basis that it is dogmatic.
(Caveat: this seems fine for entities that are totally outside one’s moral circle of concern. For instance, I’m intuitively fine with a decision-making process that spends money on making a human happy instead of spending money on making sure that a pile of rocks doesn’t get trampled on, no matter the size of the pile of rocks. So maybe non-dogmatism says that so long as two entities are in your moral circle of concern—so long as you assign nonzero weight to them—there ought to exist numbers, at least in theory, for which either side of a moral trade-off could be better.)
And so when I see comments saying things like “I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative”, I’m like… really? There’s no empirical facts that could possibly cause the trade-off to go the other way?
Rejecting dogmatic beliefs requires more work. Rather than deciding that one side of a trade-off is better than the other no matter the underlying facts, you actually have to examine the facts and do the math. But, like, the real world is messy and complicated, and sometimes you just have to do the math if you want to figure out the right answer.
- ^
Per the Wikipedia article on scope neglect, scope sensitivity would mean actually doing multiplication: making 100 people happy is 100 times better than making 1 person happy. I’m not fully sold on scope sensitivity; I feel much more strongly about non-dogmatism, which means that the numbers have to at least enter the picture, even if not multiplicatively.
- ^
Yeah—I have instructions that I’m happy to send to people privately. (That said, I’ve stopped recommending that people do bank transfers, because my sense is that the process is annoying enough that way fewer than 96% of intentions-to-do-bank-transfers end in actual bank transfers.)