Benevolent_Rain
Founder @ anonymous
— I engineer ambitious ideas until they survive the battlefield of reality —
I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and have also done work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a nacent Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts whether helping to build one wind farm at a time was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
I know this is a tall ask, but it might be super helpful to run the set-up over days, ideally months or years. In E2H scenarios the danger is assumed to be near-permanent and I worry about component lifetimes, learning what is the best way to seal things (tape under pressure might slide over time, etc.), inhabitant comfort (as it was suggested to use vacuum cleaner fans I just put my vacuum cleaner on for the full day next to me - it is pretty loud!). Do you know if there is a forum for sharing experience on E2H protection? I am thinking of publishing a ton of what I learnt building my prototype shelter that I did a lot of testing on, experimented with different fans, measured pressures etc. If no forum, maybe it's on me to set something up? I guess it might be the first steps towards a public DIY protocol (I think a successful future outcome might be to have many such forums and repositories of knowledge and builders sharing experience and asking questions - it is DIY afterall - kind of like a hacker forum).
I might miss context, I just pasted a quote from the article (it's still there). The links leads to this which I guess might be where that calculation comes from (% pledged * expected money from IPO)
From: https://gizmodo.com/the-effective-altruists-reportedly-have-their-mojo-back-thanks-to-ai-2000799030
Metaculus forecasts on amounts and timing of potential future funding:
"They expect only about $25.7B total will actually land in charities within 4 years of shareholders being able to sell after the lockup period ends.
Projected figures for windfall are high but vary widely. Nan Ransohoff says people can expect $37B or more per year from this “third wave” of American philanthropy; George Weiner projects $12-32B will go into donor-advised funds (DAFs) and trickle out through grants; Giving What We Can expects about $15B in donations a year; and Celia Ford claims the 7 Anthropic co-founders alone could contribute $37.9B."
From https://substack.com/inbox/post/218059586
Good point, I love the optimism! So maybe the two effects net out? I'm still a bit worried about the so far low capability gap between frontier and open weight models though. Do you think the frontier lab actions perhaps can drive policy to lower risk that the most dangerous model (open weight) still says relatively safe? Or maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way.
Humanity's inability to coordinate an AI slowdown may itself be early evidence that we are starting to lose control. Especially given all the recent omens around cyber and bio of frontier models, with open weight models just a few months away.
1 - I think it is good to be sceptical about this. I guess you've read about Pascal's mugging and other related topics. I am happy you keep this debate alive as it's not really settled.
2 - Yeah look at mirror bacteria, which is just one example of engineered, environment-to-human threats (air turning toxic)
3 - I think this is a useful intuition, but it also has limits. That said, there are step changes in history, such as powered flight invented only after thousands of years of longing and attempts by humans. This is about step changes in technology. If you believe DNA is the code of life, it is not a large leap to believe we can create really bad stuff. And it has happened before, like the great oxygenation event that ~killed all previous biological life on earth.
But basically, please be skeptical - it is super healthy!
Hi! What do you think about x-risk cause prioritization showing that regardless of whether the chance of a pandemic is 0.1% or 10%, the enormous size of the future makes this worthwhile anyway, especially given tractable solutions? Asking as I think the crux for working on biosec is less about how likely something is to happen, than what might happen. I am really happy with the recent clarification on E2H, but still feel like the low protection needed is under explained, meaning I think the lowest confidence from my point of view is whether current plans builds sufficient protection. That said, I would agree with "we don't know what protection level is required, but let's start building what we can, some protection is better than none".
Halcyon too I realized.
Please list any new funding opportunities you can think of here on the Forum? I feel like we might already be in the early ramp-up to significantly more EA aligned funding. At the same time, the Forum's overview over funding opportunities feels like it is quickly getting outdated. I think as things move quickly, coordination might become looser and new promising interventions are identified, it is helpful for people to have a good overview over available funding sources and their priorities.
I have heard on the grapevine there is already funding on several fronts that might not be very public. I am a little bit uncertain if perhaps it is better these sources remain anonymous. At the same time, I think there might be several promising EA projects that are not sufficiently visible to people influencing funding decisions.
Epistemic note: I am not listing these yet as I have not had time yet to verify how much they qualify as EA funding opportunities.
Here are a few recent developments I am considering listing on the funding opportunities page, but would like someone that knows these funds better to list them:
Would those who disagree or down vote this and Tobias' previous post please provide some more information? I realize you might want to remain anonymous, so perhaps please just agree vote on this comment if you think someone should copy paste the the reasons for disagreement or downvotes from my previous post on biodefense that also received useful criticism.