calebp
Bio
I currently lead EA funds.
Before that, I worked on improving epistemics in the EA community at CEA (as a contractor), as a research assistant at the Global Priorities Institute, on community building, and Global Health Policy.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer's.
You can give me positive and negative feedback here.
Posts 26
Comments316
Topic contributions6
Fwiw I think that posts and comments on the EA Forum do a lot to create an association. If there wasn't any coverage of Hanania attending Manifest on the forum, I think something like 10x+ fewer EAs would know about the Hanania stuff, and it would be less likely to be picked up by journalists (a bit less relevant as it was already covered by the Guardian). It seems like there's a nearby world where less than 1% of weekly active forum users know that an EAish organisation at a commercial venue run by EAish people invited Hanania to attend an event - which I personally don't think creates much association between EA and Hanania (unlike the current coverage).
Of course, some people here might think that EA should be grappling with racism outside of this incident, in which case opportunities like this are helpful for creating discourse. But insofar as people think that Manifest's actions were ok-ish, it's mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, meaning they personally don't want to attend Manifest; I think debating the topic on the forum is pretty counterproductive. My impression is that the majority of people in the comments are in the latter camp.
If you think that it's important that Manifest knows why you personally aren't attending, emailing them seems like a very reasonable action to me (but of course, this doesn't achieve the goal of letting people who don't organise the event know why you aren't attending).
The Labour Party comes to mind - though I have not verified the claims myself and idk if this is what Richard had in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_British_Labour_Party#2021–present
There are many factual inaccuracies in this post. Oliver Habryka (who runs this Lightcone) wrote a tweet thread explaining some of the most egregious errors.
For example, contrary to the article's claim no FTX funds were used in the purchase of Lighthaven. According to Kelsey Piper (a journalist at Vox) this "is a really, really bad mistake of the kind that should have been caught in even cursory fact checking".
I think that 80k doing strategic marketing like this sounds really interesting. I personally wasn’t excited about entering (despite being excited about the prize) because I’m pretty suspicious of “chance of a trip”, I think text like this is much more common when the chance is actually very low than when it’s high which makes the endeavour less worthwhile. I think if you’d given an explicit best guess probability that would have been helpful for me.
I’d guess that the vast majority of people who donate to give directly (including substantial public sums) would not describe themselves as EA and by their lights aren’t focussed on “doing the most good with impartiality and scope sensitivity in mind” so I wouldn’t describe them as an EA on this donation alone, if they talk about EA explicitly in the video it would be great to add that context above.
Obviously not “being an EA” does not diminish this achievement, I’m excited when anyone donates to help the poor in a cost-effective manner independent of their community affiliation and even more excited when it’s such a large amount of money!
Thanks for posting this here, it’s very exciting and I’m looking forward to watching the video!
I think that the boring answer for us not doing as much grantmaking in this area as in technical areas is just that we don't receive a very high number of applications - but this isn't clearly a bad thing; there are many excellent organisations that do great work in AI policy/governance/advocacy whilst there are only a handful of active organisations on the technical side. I often think that getting a role in an existing org is a better fit for many applicants than doing independent work or starting their own org and I am grateful that the ecosystem for AI policy/governance/advocacy is developed enough to onboard lots of junior people rather than them having to apply for grants to do independent work.
We are trying to do more grantmaking in this space, but unfortunately, the EA brand makes publicising the grants we do make difficult. Many of our grants would count as "fieldbuilding" for AI policy/governance/advocacy, but we could make this clearer in our descriptions. LTFF fund managers, in general, are very excited about work in this area. Even if we can't fund it directly, we often try to refer it to other funders to fund, so I'd definitely encourage people to apply.
Hi Markus,
For context I run EA Funds, which includes the EAIF (though the EAIF is chaired by Max Daniel not me). We are still paying out grants to our grantees — though we have been slower than usual (particularly for large grants). We are also still evaluating applications and giving decisions to applicants (though this is also slower than usual).
We have communicated this to the majority of our grantees, but if you or anyone else reading this urgently needs a funding decision (in the next two weeks), please email caleb [at] effectivealtruismfunds [dot] org with URGENT in the subject line, and I will see what I can do. Please also include:
You can also apply to one of Open Phil’s programs; in particular, Open Philanthropy’s program for grantees affected by the collapse of the FTX Future Fund may be particularly of note to people applying to EA Funds due to the FTX crash.