All of Neel Nanda's Comments + Replies

As far as I'm aware, coefficient giving may slightly adjust which global health causes they support based on how neglected those are, but it's less than a 1:1 effect, and the size of the global health funding pool at CG is fairly fixed. And there are a bunch of people dying each year, especially given the foreign aid cuts, who would not die if there was more money given to global health stuff, including GiveWell top charities (if nothing else, GiveDirectly seems super hard to saturated). So I don't really see much cause for despondency here, your donations... (read more)

Note that Dominic Cummings, one of the then most powerful men in the UK, [credits the rationality community] (https://x.com/dominic2306/status/1373333437319372804) for convincing him that the UK needed to change its coronavirus policy (which I personally am very grateful for!). So it seems unlikely to have been that obvious

ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic

Google's donation match is $10k per person, and I would guess a bunch of donations from Googlers are unmatched

What do you mean by giving to Manifund's regranting program? It's not one place to donate to. It's a bunch of different people who get regranting budgets. You can give to one of those people, but how the money gets used depends a ton on who, which seems important

If you're looking for something x risk related then I think something like the Longview emerging challenges fund is better https://www.longview.org/fund/emerging-challenges-fund/

Seems reasonable, thanks! I feel generally more aligned with Coefficient/OP's judgement than Good Ventures', so seems fine by me

Thanks a lot for this post! I was not planning on going to EAGx India for unrelated reasons, but if I had been, this would probably have been enough to convince me to cancel

Are you able to share why you've been endorsed by OP/Coefficient, to the point that they are recommending you to other donors, but they haven't been able to fill your funding gap via Good Ventures?

I was surprised to see that you are US tax deductible (via every) but not UK tax deductible, given that you are a uk-based charity. I assume this is downstream of different levels of non-profit bureaucracy in the different countries? I would recommend explicitly flagging this early in the post as this is a deal breaking factor for many medium sized donors and if this was a constraint for me, I would have filtered exactly incorrectly

Are you happy to receive donations from AGI company employees?

Thanks for writing this! I strongly agree re work trials, unstructured interviews, informal references, and info being useful despite conflicts of interest

Your poll seems to exclude non US citizen, US residents, who are the most interesting category imo

I would be pretty shocked if paid ads reach equivalently good people, given that these are not people who have chosen to watch the video, and may have very little interest

I struggle to imagine Qf 0.9 being reasonable for anything on TikTok. My understanding of TikTok is that most viewers will be idly scrolling through their feed, watch your thing for a bit as part of this endless stream, then continue, and even if they decide to stop for a while and get interested, they still would take long enough to switch out of the endless scrolling mode to not properly engage with large chunks of the video. Is that a correct model, or do you think that eg most of your viewer minutes come from people who stop and engage properly?

Innocent until proven guilty is a fine principle for the legal system, but I do not think it is obviously reasonable to apply it to evaluating content made by strangers on the internet. It is not robust to people quickly and cheaply generating new identities, and new questionably true content. Further, the whole point of the principle is that it's really bad to unjustly convict people, along with other factors like wanting to be robust to governments persecuting civilians. Incorrectly dismissing a decent post is really not that bad.

Feel free to call discri... (read more)

I empathise but strongly disagree. AI has lowered the costs of making superficially plausible but bad content. The internet is full of things that are not worth reading and people need to prioritise.

Human written writing has various cues that people are practiced at identifying that indicate bad writing, and this can often be detected quickly, eg seeming locally incoherent, bad spelling, bad flow, etc. These are obviously not perfect heuristics, but convey real signal. AI has made it much easier to avoid all these basic heuristics, without making it much e... (read more)

Your points seem pretty fair to me. In particular, I agree that putting your videos at 0.2 seems pretty unreasonable and out of line with the other channels - I would have guessed that you're sufficiently niche that a lot of your viewers are already interested in AI Safety! TikTok I expect is pretty awful, so 0.1 might be reasonable there

Seems better with the edit, it didn't flag as self promotional at all to me, since it was a natural and appropriate thing to include

My null hypothesis is that any research field is not particularly useful until proven otherwise. I am certainly not claiming that all economics research is high quality, but I've seen some examples that seemed pretty legit to me. For example, RCTs on direct cash transfers seem pretty useful and relevant to EA goals. And I think tools like RCTs are a pretty powerful way to find true insights into complex questions.

I largely haven't come across insights from other social sciences that seem useful for EA interests. I haven't investigated this much, and I woul... (read more)

This post is too meta, in my opinion. The key reason EA discusses economics a lot more is that if you want to have true beliefs about how to improve the world, economics can provide a bunch more useful insights than other parts of the social sciences. If you want to critique this, you need to engage with the actual object level claims of how useful the fields are, how good their scientific standards are and how much value there actually is. And I didn't feel like your post spent much time arguing for this

Overrelying on simple economic models might mislead us about which policies will actually help people, while a more holistic look at the social sciences as a whole may counter that.

The papers you cite about how the minimum wage doesn't lead to a negative impact on jobs all seem like economics papers to me. What are the social science papers you have in mind that provide useful evidence that the minimum wage doesn't harm employment?

Your examples seem disanalogous to me. The key thing here is the claim that people have a lifelong obligation to their parents. Some kind of transactional "you received a bunch of upfront benefits and now have a lifelong debt", and worse, often a debt that's considered impossible to discharge

This is very different from an instantaneous obligation that applies to them at a specific time, or a universal moral obligation to not do harm to an entity regardless of your relationship with them, or an ongoing obligation that is contingent on having a certain statu... (read more)

Interesting. Does anyone do group brainstorming because they actually expect it to make meaningful progress towards solving a problem? At least when you're at a large event with people who are not high context on the problem, that seems pretty doomed. I assumed the main reason for doing something like that is to get people engaged and actually thinking about ideas and participating in a way that you can't in a very extremely large group. If any good ideas happen, that's a fun bonus

If I wanted to actually generate good ideas, I would do a meeting of people ... (read more)

When you say you doubt that claim holds generally, is that because you think that the weight of AI isn't actually that high, or because you think that AI may make the other thing substantially more important too?

I'm generally pretty sceptical about the latter - something which looked like a great idea not accounting for AI will generally not look substantially better after accounting for AI. By default I would assume that's false unless given strong arguments to the contrary.

I agree with the broad critique that " Even if you buy the empirical claims of short-ish AI timelines and a major upcoming transition, even if we solve technical alignment, there is a way more diverse set of important work to be done than just technical safety and AI governance"

But I'm concerned that reasoning like this can easily implicitly lead to people justifying incremental adaptions to what they were already doing and answering the question of, is what I'm doing useless in the light of AI, rather than the question that actually matters of, given my v... (read more)

Empirically, I think they were right

I'd argue that you also need some assumptions around is-ought, whether to be a consequentialist or not, what else (if at all) you value and how this trades off against suffering, etc. And you also need to decide on some boundaries for which entities are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, which there's wide spread disagreement on (in a way that imo goes beyond being empirical)

It's enough to get you something like "if suffering can be averted costlessly then this is a good thing" but that's pretty rarely practically relevant. Everything has a cost

I agree that you need ridiculously fundamental assumptions like "I am not a Boltzmann brain that ephemerally emerged from the aether and is about to vanish" and "we are not in a simulation". But if you have that kind of thing, I think you can reasonably discuss objective reality

Less controversial is a very long way from objective - why do you think that "caring about the flourishing of society" is objectively ethical?

Re the idea of an attractor, idk, history has sure had lot of popular beliefs I find abhorrent. How do we know there even is convergence at all rather than cycles? And why does being convergent imply objective? If you told me that the supermajority of civilization concluded that torturing criminals was morally good, that would not make me think it was ethical.

My overall take is that objective is just an incredibly st... (read more)

Idk, I would just downvote posts with unproductively bad titles, and not downvote posts with strong but justified titles. Further posts that seem superficially justified but actually don't justify the title properly are also things I dislike and downvote. I don't think we need a slippery slope argument here when the naive strategy works fine

What do you say to someone who doesn't share your goals? Eg thinks that happiness is only justified if it's earned, and that most people do not deserve it, as they do "bad thing X", and being against promoting happiness to them

Morality is Objective

What would this even mean? If I assert that X is wrong, and someone else asserts that it's fine, how do we resolve this? We can appeal to common values that derive this conclusion, but that's pretty arbitrary and largely just feels like my opinion. Claiming that morality is objective just feels groundless. 

Yep, this seems extremely reasonable - I am in practice far more annoyed if a piece makes attacks and does not deliver

I agree in general, but think that titotal's specific use was fine. In my opinion, the main goal of that post was not to engage the AI 2037, which had already be done extensively in private but rather to communicate their views to the broader community. Titles in particular are extremely limited, many people only read the title, and titles are a key way people decide whether to eat on, and efficiency of communication is extremely important. The point they were trying to convey was these models that are treated as high status and prestigious should not be a... (read more)

I think A>B, eg I often find people who don't know each other in London who it is valuable to introduce. People are not as on the ball as you think, the market is very far from efficient

Though many of the useful intros I make are very international, and I would guess that it's most useful to have a broad network across the world. So maybe C is best, though I expect that regular conference and business trips are enough

I think this is reasonable as a way for the community to reflexively react to things, to be honest. The question I'm trying to answer when I see someone making a post with an argument that seems worth engaging with is: what's the probability that I'll learn something new or change my mind as a result of engaging with this?

When there's a foundational assumption disagreement, it's quite difficult to have productive conversations. The conversation kind of needs to be about the disagreement about that assumption, which is a fairly specific kind of discussion. ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! I'm broadly sympathetic to Thom's critique, but thought this was impressively well written and good at engagingly/non-annoyingly conveying a different perspective, so kudos. I would love to see more posts in that genre.

Have people recognize you right away. You don't need to tell your name to everyone

This is a VERY huge use case for me. It's so useful!

If someone is in this situation they can just take off their name tag. Security sometimes ask to see it, but you can just take it out of a pocket to show them and put it back

Fair enough, I guess my take from all this is that you mainly just want the all grants fund to have a different philosophy than the one GiveWell is following in practice? Or do you also think they're making a mistake by their own lights?

Agreed. GiveWell also takes outside donors and OpenPhil doesn't. I've donated to the all grants fund because I wanted to help with risk tolerant and fast giving after the aid cuts, and am glad the opportunity exists

When I read that description I infer "make the best decision we can under uncertainty", not "only make decisions with a decent standard of evidence or to gather more evidence". It's a reasonable position to think that the TSUs grant is a bad idea or that it would be unreasonable to expect it to be a good idea without further evidence, but I feel like GiveWell are pretty clear that they're fine with making high risk grants, and in this case they seem to think this TSUs will be high expected value

What’s unique about these grants?: These grants are a good illustration of how GiveWell is applying increased flexibility, speed, and risk tolerance to respond to urgent needs caused by recent cuts to US foreign assistance. Funded by our All Grants Fund, the grants also demonstrate how GiveWell has broadened its research scope beyond its Top Charities while maintaining its disciplined approach—comparing each new opportunity to established interventions, like malaria prevention or vitamin A supplementation, as part of its grantmaking decisions.

The grants... (read more)

Your maths needs a term for the conversion between money and labour for the company. I think your current equation assumes 1 to 1 which seems patently false

I think there's some speaking past each other due to differing word choices. Holly is prominent, evidenced by the fact that we are currently discussing her. She has been part of the EA community for a long time and appears to be trying to do the most good according to her own principles. So it's reasonable to call her a member of the EA community. And therefore "prominent member" is accurate in some sense.

However, "prominent member" can also imply that she represents the movement, is endorsed by it, or that her actions should influence what EA as a whole i... (read more)

Some takes:

• I think Holly's tweet was pretty unreasonable and judge her for that not you. But I also disagree with a lot of other things she says and do not at all consider her to speak for the movement
• To the best of my ability to tell (both from your comments and private conversations with others), you and the other Mechanize founders are not getting undue benefit from Epoch funders apart from less tangible things like skills, reputation, etc. I totally agree with your comment below that this does not seem a betrayal of their trust. To me, it seems more

That's not my understanding of what happened with CAIP, there's various funders who are very happy to disagree with OpenPhil who I know have considered giving to CAIP and decided against. My understanding is that it's based on actual reasons, not just an information cascade from OpenPhil

No idea about Apart though

Strong agree - cause neutrality should not at all imply an even spread of investment. I just in fact do think AI is the most pressing cause according to my values and empirical beliefs

Really glad to hear it! (And that writing several thousand words of very in depth examples was useful!) I'd love to hear if it proves to be useful longer term

Agreed with all of the above. I'll also add that a bunch of orgs do work that is basically useless, and it should not be assumed that just because an org seems "part of the community" that working there will be an effective way to do good - public callouts are costly, and community dynamics and knowledge can be hard to judge from the outside.

Thank you for the post. I was a bit surprised by the bulletin board one. What goes wrong with just positioning the forum exactly as it is now, but saying you're not going to do any maintenance or moderation. but without trying to reposition it as a bulletin board? At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while. Is the issue that you think you do a lot of active moderation work that sustains healthy discussion norms which matters a lot for the current forum but would matter less for a bulletin board?