You might be interested in looking into the work ControlAI is doing in the UK. They'd probably disagree with your point that the message is "not getting through", given they claim that 100+ Parliamentarians support their campaign. There also have been various debates in parliament, in particular in the Lords in AI safety, where lots of people spoke in support (e.g. this one)
Forethought are not a UK charity, they are a UK-based non-profit company (according to the footer of their website). But I agree that flagging that donations from the UK are not gift-aid eligible/tax deductible (and that US donations are) would be good as it might be surprising to many people.
Maybe I'm just unable to find this information, but it seems the website doesn't give any information on what and who Antrhopoda actually is: No information on what kind of legal entity they are if any, no information on who works there or who is responsible for making grants. This wouldn't make me comfortable at all to make donation.
Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!
A few comments:
I think many organisations do use their network and things like the HIP database to find candidates. People are still often hired directly without public hiring rounds, and semi-private hiring rounds (reaching out directly to people identified in these ways and only inviting those to apply) are also quite common, but still can be very elaborate (significant lower number of applicants so lower effort for the hiring organisation, but still a similar effort for applicants.)
Many organisations believe that hiring the right people is extremely important, and that it is worth the effort to conduct elaborate public hiring rounds, particularly for senior roles, presumably because they think there is a chance of finding a better candidate this way. (Sometimes, even if they have an internal candidate they could promote to the job, they still prefer to do a public hiring round to see if there is someone better out there.) Also, EA orgs have often very high expectations for their roles and sometimes have to readvertise roles even if the first round received lots of applications - so it seems they still feel they are talent-constrained (at least for the level of talent they are looking for).
If was very confused by the sentence "Once someone has beaten the substantial odds and passed the rigorous testing to get in to the movement..." (as their is really not a very high bar to get 'into the movement), but based on the example you mention, I think you more mean something like "once someone has been hired for a permanent full-time role at a top EA organisation" in which case I agree with the problem you are describing. I don't really see a good solution for this, though. Organisations want to hire the best people they can, whether they are already in the movement or not. However, I think people who are attracted to the movement should be made aware of these cases and that there is no employment guarantee in EA.
I don't really understand the question here: If an organisation contracts someone to do work for them, they usually agree on a specific amount, either a fixed price or an hourly/daily rate. What are the specifics of your scenario here? Should the amount be conditional on how much funding the organisation receives for that specific work? That seems a quite strange approach to me. Or are you expecting that the contractor commits to doing the work but might not get paid if a grant application is unsuccessful? I don't really think anyone would or should agree to that. The right approach should be to wait with actually hiring the contractor until the organisation has the money to pay for them.
I'm not sure whether it's good or not, but the main reason that it should be allowed is that it is impossible to detect. How will you know what someone's real preferences are?
I don't think you can post 'anonymously' in the sense that there is no account related to your post, you'll always have to create an account, but you can of course use a one-off username and even email address if you want to. However, you can delete your account and then apparently all 'your' posts appear as "[anonymous]" whether you intended this or not. (And in this case, it seems the original poster just created this post with their usual, non-anonymous account, but then deleted their account.)
Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it's fine to take the donation.
The answer to 1) is very likely yes as this was the case at previous EAG events in the UK. Whatever rules there are for newbuilds obviously a) don't apply to existing buildings (and the venue is not a new built) b) don't have any influence on how you use or label bathrooms at private events (unless you are discriminating or something which I assume CEA isn't planning to do).
While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn't really $20mn expenditure as they'll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).
You might be interested in looking into the work ControlAI is doing in the UK. They'd probably disagree with your point that the message is "not getting through", given they claim that 100+ Parliamentarians support their campaign. There also have been various debates in parliament, in particular in the Lords in AI safety, where lots of people spoke in support (e.g. this one)
Forethought are not a UK charity, they are a UK-based non-profit company (according to the footer of their website). But I agree that flagging that donations from the UK are not gift-aid eligible/tax deductible (and that US donations are) would be good as it might be surprising to many people.
Maybe I'm just unable to find this information, but it seems the website doesn't give any information on what and who Antrhopoda actually is: No information on what kind of legal entity they are if any, no information on who works there or who is responsible for making grants. This wouldn't make me comfortable at all to make donation.
Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!
A few comments:
I don't really understand the question here: If an organisation contracts someone to do work for them, they usually agree on a specific amount, either a fixed price or an hourly/daily rate. What are the specifics of your scenario here? Should the amount be conditional on how much funding the organisation receives for that specific work? That seems a quite strange approach to me. Or are you expecting that the contractor commits to doing the work but might not get paid if a grant application is unsuccessful? I don't really think anyone would or should agree to that. The right approach should be to wait with actually hiring the contractor until the organisation has the money to pay for them.
I'm not sure whether it's good or not, but the main reason that it should be allowed is that it is impossible to detect. How will you know what someone's real preferences are?
I don't think you can post 'anonymously' in the sense that there is no account related to your post, you'll always have to create an account, but you can of course use a one-off username and even email address if you want to. However, you can delete your account and then apparently all 'your' posts appear as "[anonymous]" whether you intended this or not. (And in this case, it seems the original poster just created this post with their usual, non-anonymous account, but then deleted their account.)
Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it's fine to take the donation.
The answer to 1) is very likely yes as this was the case at previous EAG events in the UK. Whatever rules there are for newbuilds obviously a) don't apply to existing buildings (and the venue is not a new built) b) don't have any influence on how you use or label bathrooms at private events (unless you are discriminating or something which I assume CEA isn't planning to do).
While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn't really $20mn expenditure as they'll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).