I'd donate to 3 organisations I expect to influence government decision making positively:
(1) Happier Lives Institute. When governments try to decide what projects to prioritize, they normally consider financial/health benefits. Being able to compare the wider benefits to people's wellbeing would be a powerful new tool.
(2) Centre for Women's Justice. I don't know of any country that competently prosecutes domestic violence and sex crimes. The Centre for Women's Justice is strategically prosecuting specific government decisions in order to set new precedents for women seeking justice.
(3) The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance. This is a very new charity without many results yet. However, their website, working papers and trustees give them credibility and their plan for how to have an impact is sound. I would like to see them funded for 2-5 years, without needing to think about fundraising.
Dear Khorton, I just wanted to say thank you for this vote of confidence - it is very motivating to see civil servants who think we're on to something.
I call this "fantasy philanthropy." How would you spend a large amount of money? What organizations would you donate to? Would you spend or save most of it?
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
I'd donate to 3 organisations I expect to influence government decision making positively:
(1) Happier Lives Institute. When governments try to decide what projects to prioritize, they normally consider financial/health benefits. Being able to compare the wider benefits to people's wellbeing would be a powerful new tool.
(2) Centre for Women's Justice. I don't know of any country that competently prosecutes domestic violence and sex crimes. The Centre for Women's Justice is strategically prosecuting specific government decisions in order to set new precedents for women seeking justice.
(3) The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance. This is a very new charity without many results yet. However, their website, working papers and trustees give them credibility and their plan for how to have an impact is sound. I would like to see them funded for 2-5 years, without needing to think about fundraising.
Dear Khorton, I just wanted to say thank you for this vote of confidence - it is very motivating to see civil servants who think we're on to something.