Yes, I do recall meeting at EAG two years ago and yes, I wasn't giving any money to AI safety back then. I don't have any criticism because I don't know better about what policies to support and didn't want to add noise.

I don't want to be too critical of CAIP here and my original comment might have come off as too harsh. I'm not a big fan of the current funding ecosystem being so private with info and reasoning being so secretive. It's caused us harm before and I expect will cause us harm again and I expect even greater it is causing passive harm where organizations don't improve.

I really wish donors would write up their reasons for/against funding things like Manifund does. It really doesn't take long, so I don't buy the usual "time constraints" argument, but I think the people at CAIP would waste a lot LESS time if they were told "we don't think your work is good/meets the funding bar. These other orgs are better at it for the cost and would rather scale them up than fund your organization." It'd waste a lot LESS grantee time. They can just add a disclaimer that this isn't any way an abdication of their character or something.

That said, I looked at CAIP, and while you say here what you've accomplished, it seems hard to verify that. I searched the EA forum and the internet, and only 2 people you list in your staff have posted on the forum here, and one more has an account. I didn't do the same for LW or AF, but I expect similar there, maybe a bit more. It's going to be very hard to get 7 figures per year for your non-profit if you aren't very public about what you are doing. I know that takes time, but if you aren't advertising the work you do, people won't know about it.

Here, in this post, you sort of just make a new account and say, "If we don't get $1.6M soon, we are shutting down". That's... a lot of money. It's hard to overstate how hard it is to make and then donate that amount of money per year. But more importantly, it'd be very weird if this worked. There needs to be a lot more constant communication and updates from organizations if they want to continue to receive funding. It begs the question, what does the "Communications Team" do? I know they are probably primarily responsible for communicating with congresspeople, but at least some of that needs to be communicating with the EA/AIS community.

How soon would you expect to see extremely fast economic growth? Say >20%/year GDP growth.

Another great post. I highly recommend this newsletter

Shartsis Friese was my law firm for something similar. They were pretty competent.

This is a great post. Way too many people in EA want to be able to do remote work behind a computer and not get into the thick of things that actually change things. I agree with your marathons and smores analogy; I don't think I agree specifically with what you called the Levels for AI work but I digress since I like the main message. 

Too often, I think people make the mistake that if they are working up the stack, they are getting a lot of leverage but we need 10x the amount of people at the lower trophic levels and without those, you don't have any leverage at all. There are few exceptions to this of course, like MATS who produce a bunch of AI safety researchers but that's directly increasing the number of "level 0" people.

I won't say who it was (though they can out themselves) but someone convinced me that they do a donation strategy that I approve of. They donate to both sides to be able to lobby their congressperson on AI issues. I think this makes a lot of sense.

#changedmymind

First, sorry for the late reply. I thought I had sent it but it was still in autosave.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659#bibr25-21582440241279659

I had chatgpt analyze this paper on US House of Representatives. It finds that doubling spending for incumbents actually has ~no effect and in general you get about 4.5% increased win probability from doubling spending. You get the biggest gains for challengers with little name recognition. It also turns out that incumbents spend about $3M on a race and challengers spend about the same as well. So we're talking about $3M to gain 4.5% extra chance of winning a house seat. 

The paper goes on to explain that increases in spending faces increasingly diminishing returns.

To answer the question bluntly. I'll just define past a certain point as 50% more than average spending. About 5% of races are "close" based on my crude metric of a margin of victory of less than 3 points.

Also, my criticism basically don't apply (and in fact, I think we should be spending more money on) things like ballot initiatives and specific campaigns. I'm also much happier about things like primaries than general elections. If you are donating to just a generic race, even if it's close, I don't think there is actually enough evidence that one party is much better than the other. 

A lot of money is spent on politics already. Unless there is very very specific issues of EA concern, I don't think it's worth donating to. There are tremendously good donation opportunities out there and political ads or Beyonce concerts aren't among them IMO.