Dušan D. Nešić (Dushan)
Bio
Participation4
Director of Operations in PIBBSS, professor of Finance and Economics, trainer of Confidence and Public Speech, and corporate coach for Team Skills and Leadership. Consultant and Entrepreneur, with experience in Asia and Europe, especially China. I have a long history of working in charity but was always bothered by the ineffectiveness, and EA is exactly what I was looking for all this time. I developed charities in China where this was extremely difficult, growing clubs from 0 to 100 and helping clubs open in new cities and universities, doing community building with 0 funds.
My current meme to spread is that EA needs more outreach to existing Charity organizations.
How others can help me
I am interested in ways in which I can combine as much of my past knowledge into a useful bundle for an EA-aligned organization. My personal interests also lie in EA Infrastructure growth, helping scale EA through partnerships with existing organizations and collecting recruits from them.
How I can help others
If any of my previous experiences sound useful to you, reach out - whether you want to develop them or utilize them. My LinkedIn profile might give a bit more of a glimpse into the more formal experiences I had, but the main skills are presented in the bio here already.
Posts 14
Comments60
Answering on behalf of PIBBSS, as ED of Operations.
We have our Manifund page, which goes in-depth here:
PIBBSS ManifundIn brief, PIBBSS is an AI Safety org that does both field-building and research, mostly focused in non-prosaic directions. We organize (in ascending order of seniority of attendees and cost) reading groups, summer fellowships, horizon scanning, and research affiliate programs.
Marginally, funds that you donate would most likely go to either affiliate salaries or fellowship costs (~20.000 USD per marginal fellow for three months based on last year's costs). This requires us to get funding for our fixed costs, but we are fairly optimistic, although our runway expires in ~6 months. If you are a large funder, please get in touch, as we have the capacity for ~3 million or more in field-building and research over the next 18 months.
Reach out with any questions!
Sorry, was traveling and only saw this now (thanks Gergo)! Generally many places are visa free to us, and if you have Schengen, UK or US visa valid (and have actually traveled to those places at least once on that visa) you can come visa free to Serbia. Visa is also generally good to get, but embassies don't exist in all countries so sometimes you have to ship your passport (from Philippines to Indonesia for example), so do plan accordingly. Happy to help write an invitation letter, but more important for the visa is having booked accommodation, there's cheap hostels walking distance from the office, I'm happy to send links.
Thanks for your thoughts, Caleb! Yes, I come from 10 years in orgs where most retreats are self-funded, and we always had a good time - learning that in EA retreats are funded was a culture shock for me. For bigger conferences, I still think it is important to be able to give free tickets and even food and travel subsidies in part or full because diversity the of thought and inclusion of those who cannot afford it matters a lot. For something this small, where I expect we can recognize such cases, I think self-funded events are quite great.
Thank you for this amazing write up. I had suspected that interventions at the level of charity would not work, compared to interventions at the level of funders. If funders require effectiveness, charities will care - but except some very newly started orgs, I've felt that institutional inertia stops them from caring about the mission and instead they just Goodheart the things funders want or institution has focused on. This makes me update even more away from Local Priorities Research, and towards Contextualisation work even in countries where there must be some cost effective intervention to do. Perhaps a new cause area of "Funder Sophistication" or something is needed to make top-down changes in attitude? Anyhow, thank you for your work and for this write-up!
I am saying something like: If actual risk is reduced by a quantity A, but the perceived reduction is actually B, then it's worth spending time telling people the difference in cases where B>>A, else the effects of the project have been negative (like the effects of green-washing or more relevantly safety-washing). This is not about AI safety in general but for a particular intervention on a case by case basis.
I think I broadly agree. It would also help with attracting actual professionals. The "bar to entry" decision is talking price, but I am generally interested in it. The thing we lose is the ability to say is "Well, that person wasn't REALLY EA" but the thing we gain is the ability to say is "Well, that person was kicked out of EA/never joined" or something like that when talking about a bad actor who has not acted in an EA way but has connections to the community. I don't think that should be our main consideration, but it is worthwhile to know that the lever exists to distance ourselves from bad actors. My main consideration here is that it does look more serious, I've written before about Rotary and AIESEC and their membership, and how being a member has obligations and is a much clearer thing than EA movement as is.
On the other hand, I suppose in universities where EA clubs are university clubs they do have that more formal form, so perhaps we can investigate how things look like there compared to geographical communities, see if anything noticeable is different compared to countries where the clubs are not formal university clubs (I believe many countries do not have the western concept of University club, I think EA Hungary had student clubs not incorporated in universities for example). Probably there's too many other factors also correlated which confounds the study, but maybe we'd have enough data points?
In PIBBSS, we've had a mentor note that for alignment to go well, we need more philosophers working on foundational issues in AI rather than more prosaic researchers. I found that interesting, and I currently believe that this is true. Even in short-timeline worlds, we need to figure out some philosophy FAST.