Quick takes

Someone on the plane complimented my EAG NYC shirt and I mentioned it was from a conference. She took a closer look and said “oh effective altruism!” I just stared her blankly for a bit, eventually I ask “have you heard about it?” She replies “yeah it’s everywhere now, I don’t know what it means but it’s everywhere” How times have changed.

For my SPAR project of "Hiring resources for new AI Safety orgs", this past week I've been scheduling meetings with hiring managers, and have spoken to some fantastic recruiters on the issues they are experiencing in AI Safety hiring. Here's a couple of interesting things I've learned this week: - Screening call questions are not consistant, and feedback from canditates is that it's more a test about their alignment (and understanding) of AI Safety vs. using a common set of questions every time that screen someone that asks instead about their career goals, what they are good at, what they are not interested in doing, and what their previous peers/managers/co-workers would rate their work performance.  - There also seems to a disconnect on how hiring managers are determining work tests for non-researcher or technical roles. This is an uncertainity that I want to explore more, as I'm unsure who is creating these work tests and who is grading them? - A theme that keeps on coming up is the need for a "shared database" of canditates between AI Safety organizations. I heard this today from a recruiter, as a best practice from an outside field, and have a central theme on this forum for the need.  - Most AI Safety orgs are ramping up hiring right now and include "HR" type roles (generally called generalist) that mention that they want to scale 2x in headcount this year. I had an interesting conversation with a recruiter that there is a difference in company culture, skill set, etc. for a canditate who can scale a business or team of 1-15 people vs. scaling from 20+people. When you're a smaller org, everyone is "all hands on deck", but when your organization grows, that tactic becomes unmanagable and unaligned with both what the individual contributors are focusing on, and what your organization needs. It's the understanding that it's two very different types of leaders who run those orgs.  - I continue to build out my contact list of hiring managers and companies in

“We want lab employees to show up” Can someone explain to me the over-blown importance of lab employees? That we need them to show up to our events or community or snag a conversation with them at an EAG = some sort of impact. (I.e I speculate lab employees showing up to EA SF would mean we get more funding or something)  My understanding is that many employees who would show up are already AIS-pilled and doing their best. What more do you want from them? To leave, to unionize, to influence them in some way?  I’m sure I’m missing something here 🤷‍♀️ 

Three big unaddressed problems in EA 2.0: * corruption (i.e., the quid pro quo between FTX and Manifund, in which Austin Chen traded Caroline Ellison a job out of prison for cash obtained in the course of stealing customer funds) * cults (e.g., Leverage Research and Dragon Army Barracks, whose former members/leaders such as Tyler Alterman and Duncan Sabien still post on the EA Forum) * misinformation (e.g., METR's use of fabricated data in the famous time horizons graph) EA sadly seems sunk to me because dire problems keep mounting and most people seem to think doing nothing is the best solution. There is also a disturbingly loud chorus of voices saying no, no, corruption is actually good (it's what having principles looks like), cults are actually good (it's part of what makes the community unique), misinformation is actually good (we're smarter than everyone else and need to save the world), which makes EA seem doomed. The force of immorality in EA is too strong and there is no equally strong force to stand against it. EA today is at best morally ambiguous, if not more evil than good. Things have gotten really rotten. No one is doing enough to clean it up. And there's apparently no floor to how much worse it can get. One of my fears is that there will be an EA mass shooting or terrorist attack because this almost already happened with Stop AI, an EA-funded and EA-supported organization. Sam Kirchner, the Stop AI activist who threatened to do a mass shooting at OpenAI, is still missing. There is a warrant out for his arrest. Besides that, a disturbing number of people in the EA community seem sympathetic to far-right, illiberal, racist views (e.g., the Manifest afterparties hosted by Curtis Yarvin, who holds authoritarian and white nationalist views). So, really, that's five big unaddressed problems in EA 2.0, including violent extremism and authoritarian, racist, far-right political views. People who want to focus on global poverty and global health and

Developing Thoughts on the Animal Advocacy Community in Africa African animal advocacy movement may be under-exploring its potential and is NOT talent-constrained. Instead, the movement is currently held back by the following: Lack of strategy R&D: This stems from two sources: limited exploratory, outside-the-box thinking, and funding habits that do not reward thorough research and the development of relevant interventions. Lack of space for innovation: Few, if any, African animal advocacy organizations have a dedicated special or new projects team, because most are scrambling to keep running into the next year. Most do not dedicate enough staff and resources to developing stealth projects that could one day spin off or open a new area of work for the organization. High risk aversion? This may be an underlying reason for the constraints above and their knock-on effects. What level of risk-taking is reasonable? Who leads or guides the norm- and behavior-setting conversations that reduce in-fighting? Cost of recruiting and training people from outside the movement: Africa has an abundant talent pool, so African groups are not talent-constrained. Rather, groups are unable to absorb this talent for several reasons, which used to be reduced to "funding". Some may say funding is being unlocked, with the dollar amounts going to African groups growing year on year, and that the barrier now surfacing is the cost of bringing in people from this large talent pool and training them. However, this growth starts from a very low base, and much of it is short-term and restricted to specific projects rather than covering core costs such as recruiting and training staff. Program support and MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning): Several groups lack dedicated, experienced operational, administrative and program staff. A single person may be responsible for all three of these functions and more. As a result, proper monitoring, designated learning opportunities and communicati

I think most AI safety bootcamps could be improved significantly by shifting focus off from coding. None of the researchers I know code, and I think the counterfactual activity of reading / thinking high-level about concepts is better for building context and conceptual thinking. As well as this, the technical AI safety pipeline serves more than just technical research roles (people transition into startups, grantmaking, other non-technical roles), and I think context building serves all of these roles better than coding. I think a default for a lot of bootcamps is to follow the ARENA curriculum, which is in parts outdated or marginally bad (eg I think learning about the specifics of how SAEs work, instead of the huggingface incident is clearly not optimal).

I think the sex stuff (can't believe it's still being discussed on X) is a large part of the appeal for many active in EA. I don't mean that many encounter it primarily for sex (anecdotally, don't know the data on this, it seems to be 80k hours events at universities that attract people), yet it's a signal of a community willing to question the merits of dogma. Much of the appeal of EA, and utilitarian frameworks more broadly, is precisely in resisting socially dominant superstitions that are not backed by reason. I feel more comfortable in a community that accepts polycules than shuns it. I think many of us think the same too.

There should be more ongoing debate about whether it's good or not to call oneself an EA; I haven't seen many posts myself. We should try to think through all the pros and cons.  It probably depends on who you are and the career you want to have, but for some reason it feels like most people think it's bad in most cases. Even if you disagree with some subgroups or like to have a small identity, it could be bad for the world that most EA-adjacents don't call themselves EAs.  Over time, it could make some of them less effective or altruistic. It could also allow crazy people to give bad first impressions and misrepresent the movement. SBF, of course, is the prime example of this; maybe it would be better if people were autistic about EA like he was. In this state, we may be a ticking bomb just waiting for more crazy EA-adjacents to join and worsen the brand even more. And it's just a matter of cases like those until it's left in an irrecoverable state. Another reason may be that identifying with a label has to do with feelings that we cannot control and we should value honesty. But then, can we fix that from within the movement if we realize it would be better for people to identify as an EA? It could be because it sounds cringe too, but maybe it's worth enduring it.  Idk, these are just some pros and cons I just thought about.