Apply to >50 AI safety funders in one application with the Nonlinear Network [Round Closed]

Yes, that counts as AI-safety related :)

Good question! So, that's important, but I'm less worried about this because:

1. All these donors were giving anyways. This just gives them more / better options to choose from.
2. Donors are only one step in the chain for the unilaterlist curse. If people fund a bad idea, then it'll get ripped to shreds on the Forum :P 
3. LTFF is also composed of fallible humans who might miss large downside risk projects. 
4. I'm far more worried about the bureaucrat's curse in AI safety. 

In most endeavors, you expect to receive many nos before receiving a yes (eg applying to schools, jobs, publishing papers/books, startups, etc). In EA it's common to receive one no and for people to give up. 

I think this would only make sense if it was in a field where talent / value was easy to spot and evaluate and there were good feedback loops. But AI safety is far more like evaluating startup founders than evaluating bridge-builders. 

Except even more difficult to evaluate, because at least with for-profit founders, you find out years later if they made money or not! With ethics, you can't even tell if you're going in the right direction! 

If that's the case, we should have more evaluators, so that there's less people who slip through the cracks. 

I discuss something similar in another comment thread here.

Good question! Here are a few thoughts on that:

• Evaluating charities is more like evaluating startups than evaluating bridge-builders

You can tell if somebody is a good bridge builder. We have good feedback loops on bridges and we know why bridges work. For bridges, you can have a small number of experts making the decisions and it will work out great.

However, with startups, nobody really knows what works or why. Even with Y Combinator, potentially the best startup evaluator in the world, the vast majority of their bets don’t work out. We don’t know why startups work and the feedback loops are slow and ambiguous. 

Charity startups and projects are more like startups, but they’re actually worse. At least with for-profits you can tell eventually if something is profitable or not. With impact, you can never know for sure. Like, we can still discuss whether Eliezer has been net positive or not because of his potential influence on the launch of OpenAI. And we can even question whether AMF is net positive, because of its flow-through effects on factory farmed animals. Heck, we can even question the whole framework of consequentialism, and maybe it’s better to be a deontologist, etc. 

So, given that Y Combinator misses tons of opportunities in a field with better feedback loops and a better understanding of how things work, we should expect that to be even more the case for large EA funders. 

• People have different values

With YC, at least everybody’s trying to maximize the same goal - money. With nonprofits, you might actually be pursuing different goals. Even if everybody’s a utilitarian, there’s a bunch of different sorts of utilitarians you can be. 

• People can spot different talent

Different people can spot different types of talent or theories of change based on their background. For example, people who’ve spent their entire lives in academia might be better at spotting academic talent but less good at spotting entrepreneurial talent, and vice versa. 

• It allows for more geographical diversity

Right now it’s much harder to get funding if you’re not based in the Bay Area or London. This will help fix that.

• The big funders often only accept certain grant sizes

Big funders usually don’t have the time to process smaller grants, leading to a lot of people missing out.

• Often it’s just one person evaluating a grant, leading to increased odds of missed opportunities

Due to time constraints, big EA funders often only have one person review an application before making a decision. This can lead to all sorts of noise in the assessments, like them making worse decisions because they’re hungry, tired, distracted, feeling emotional, don’t know much about the field, misunderstood the application, had a bias towards the applicant, etc etc. 

I remember reading an article here about grant applications being noisy but can't find it. Kat-points to anybody who finds it and links it in a reply! 

Finally, I’ve definitely seen a lot of people rejected for funding who I think were doing good work or went on to do it anyways. It’s really easy for people to be refused funding for all sorts of reasons

In general, I really want to push back against the meme in our community that if you don’t get funding from one of the big EA funders, that must mean your project isn’t good. 

For most things in this sort of category, even the absolute best have to try many times before they get accepted. Even the best scientists have to apply to a lot of different schools and grants. Even the best authors get rejected from publishing companies. Even the best founders have to ask dozens to hundreds of investors before they get funded. Many people who’ve been rejected by tons of EA orgs for jobs or grants have gone on to do great things. 

There’s room for disagreement on how to do the most good, and that’s what I love about EA. And now, hopefully, with more diverse funders, we can turn that productive disagreement into action, and then impact. 

There are many factors going into that issue, but I think the biggest are the bottlenecks within the pipeline that brings money from OP to individual donation opportunities. Most directly, OP has a limited staff and a lot of large, important grants to manage. They often don't have the spare attention, time, or energy to solicit, vet, and manage funding to the many individuals and small organizations that need funding.

LTFF and other grantmakers have similar issues. The general idea is that just there are many inefficiencies in the grantmaker -> ??? -> grantee market. The market is especially inefficient for funding opportunities that are small (because the fixed costs of granting remain high) and weird (because the downside risk is magnified for large grantmakers).

Worse, I hear that a big issue is that everyone asks this same question "Why aren't you already funded by [funders that are not me]?" of new ventures who lack existing personal connections to the big funders, which leads them to never get off the ground.

Hi, the General Longtermism Team at Rethink Priorities is currently looking to facilitate faster and better creation of entrepreneurial longtermist projects – that is, new organizations, infrastructure, programs, and services that we believe will cost-effectively contribute to reducing existential risk. Some of these projects are likely to be oriented around Ai safety.

I'll DM you our expression of interest form to be a founder/co-founder for one of these projects.

We aim to send it out to funders within the next 48 hours.

I have submitted an application no need to reply!

The final write-up for my project.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pu6D2EdJiz2mmhxfB/archetypal-transfer-learning-a-proposed-alignment-solution

Also using fine-tuning with traditional Jungian archetypes allowed GPT2 to tell stories either of depressing or motivational in nature 100%of the time. Thanks for reading!