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...
If there's so much EA-ish money coming, how does one "put out buckets" to collect it?
I am very concerned about relative cause prioritization among the alleged wave of philanthropy. (Personally, I expect it to me smaller than many do.) How does one shape this? For example, I really want efforts of the shape "raise the salience of AI pause as a political issue among the US public, particularly the religious mainstream." How do I influence the amount of funding that goes to that, if there's a big anticipated wave?
Write convincingly about it then get it featured prominently somewhere the donors, or people they trust, already read.
Such as, for example, the Effective Altruism Forum :)