Comments
47
...
Curated and popular this week
99
Edit: The match seems to now be over - the funds were expended in around 35 minutes. But many of these charities are great and should be supported regardless!
***
On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each el...
56
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall nature of its contents based on my strong impression from the subset of work that I’ve read. I’ve recently spent maybe 2–300 hours lear...
Recent opportunities to take action
Charitable giving epistemology or doing your due diligence
I was just reading the 80,000 Hours email on how they could have seen the warning signs with FTX and whether EA has made any mistakes taking his money. I think it is a worthwhile question, but the answer will seem like a Gordian knot unless you separate two distinct issues.
The only way to avoid something any future SBFs is to look at the books. It's the only way that EA could have really known about SBF's problems beforehand too. This is obviously a good way to kill off a lot of charitable giving. 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth' is a good rule of thumb, and it isn't feasible to look through everyone's finances.
Quite frankly, EA doesn't need to worry about most of their givers' finances. SBF isn't notable just for the amount of his giving, but because he purposefully used EA as his own branding. And that's really where EA's crisis is coming from. They willingly let SBF drape himself in the EA flag and now EA is suffering the reputational fallout as well.
EA needs to develop some clear principles on who to publicly associate with. You need to have requirements for looking through their books and seeing if there are any skeletons in their closet. Otherwise, anyone can donate anything they want to, but it will be anonymous and EA will explicitly disavow knowledge of anyone's giving. "All giving to our organization is anonymous, so we can neither confirm nor deny the charitable giving of SBF wannabe 2."