All of Peter Wildeford's Comments + Replies
I’m confused - elsewhere you identify yourself as the author of this post but here you are commenting as if you have independently reviewed it?
To be clear, I don't think people have turned against earning to give as a concept, as in they think it's no longer good or something.
But I do think people have turned against "donating $5K a year to GiveWell[1] is sufficient to feel like I'm an EA in good standing, that I'm impactful, and that I can feel good about myself and what I'm doing for the world" as a concept. And this seems pretty sad to me.
Moreover, there's been a lot of pressure over the past five more recent years of EA to push people onto concrete "direct good" career paths, especially at th...
The TV show Loot, in Season 2 Episode 1, introduces a SBF-type character named Noah Hope DeVore, who is a billionaire wonderkid who invents "analytic altruism", which uses an algorithm to determine "the most statistically optimal ways" of saving lives and naturally comes up with malaria nets. However, Noah is later arrested by the FBI for wire fraud and various other financial offenses.
It's been lost a bit in all the noise, but I think people should still be very excited and satisfied about "earning to give" and donating.
Anyone who can donate $5000 via GiveWell can save a life.
Possibly you can do even better than that per dollar if you're okay accepting some premises around nonhuman animal welfare / sentience or risks from emerging technologies.
I think this is all very cool.
Moreover, while a $5000 donation is a big commitment, it is also achievable by a rather wide array of people. Many people are wealthy enough to do this donation, but ...
Rather than give a price tag for each (as there's many), maybe you or other donors could flag the ones you're most interested in and I could let you know? (Also this may be helpful for our internal prioritization even if there weren't any money on the line.)
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I do think reasonable people can disagree about this policy and it entails an important trade-off.
To understand a bit about the other side of the trade-off, I would ask that you consider that we at RP are roughly an order of magnitude bigger than Lightcone Infrastructure and we need policies to be able to work well with ~70 people that I agree make no sense with ~7 (relatively independent, relatively senior) people.
Could you say more about the other side of the tradeoff? As in, what's the affirmative case for having this policy? So far in this thread the main reason has been "we don't want people to get the impression that X statement by a junior researcher represents RP's views". I see a very simple alternative as "if individuals make statements that don't represent RP's views they should always make that clear up front". So is there more reason to have this policy?
Fair, but the flip side of that is that it's considerably less likely that a sophisticated donor would somehow misunderstand a junior researcher's clearly-expressed-as-personal views as expressing the institutional view of a 70-person org.
Is it possible to elaborate at all on why they'd be particularly good fits for individual donors? I imagine in many cases the answer is a bit sensitive as to why OP may prefer to fund an org more but the org itself may prefer not to be funded by OP more but instead funded by individual donors. And I certainly can use my own private information to make some of those guesses. But reading this list it's actually pretty hard to tell what is going on.
Thank the heavens my prayers have been answered! My birthday wish came true! I’ve been waiting so long for this moment and it’s finally here! This is the true meaning of the holiday season!
- How will you prioritise amongst the projects listed here with unrestricted funds from small donors? Most of these projects I find very exciting, but some more than others. Do you have a rough priority ordering or a sense of what you would do in different scenarios, like if you ended up with unrestricted funding of $0.25m/$0.5m/$1m/$2m/$4m etc how you would split it between the projects you list?
I think views on this will vary somewhat within RP leadership. Here I am also reporting my own somewhat quick independent impressions which could update upon f...
- Can you assure me that Rethink's researchers are independent?
Yes. Rethink Priorities is devoted to editorial independence. None of our contracts with our clients include editorial veto power (except that we obviously cannot publish confidential information) and we wouldn't accept these sorts of contracts.
I think our reliance on individual large clients is important, but overstated. Our single largest client made up ~47% of our income in 2023 and we're on track for this to land somewhere between 40% and 60% in 2024. This means in the unlikely event tha...
When I was asked to resign from RP, one of the reasons given was that I wrote the sentence “I don't think that EAs should fund many WAW researchers since I don't think that WAW is a very promising cause area” in an email to OpenPhil, after OpenPhil asked for my opinion on a WAW (Wild Animal Welfare) grant. I was told that this is not okay because OpenPhil is one of the main funders of RP’s WAW work. That did not make me feel very independent. Though perhaps that was the only instance in the four years I worked at RP.
Because of this instance, I was also con...
Rethink's cost per published research report that is not majority funded by "institutional support"
Our AI work, XST work, and our GHD work were entirely funded by institutions. Our animal welfare work was mostly funded by institutions. However, our survey work and WIT work were >90% covered by individual donors, so let's zoom in on that.
The survey department and WIT department produced 31 outputs in 2023 against a spending of $2,055,048.78 across both departments including all relevant management and operations. This is $66,291.90 per report.
Notably ...
Rethink's cost per published research report (again total org cost not amount spent on a specific projects, divided by the number of published reports where a research heavy EA Forum post of typical Rethink quality would count as a published report).
Collectively, RP's AI work, global health + development work, animal work, worldview investigations work, and survey work lead to the generation of 90 reports in 2023.
The budget for these six departments was $7,838,001.20, including all relevant management and operations.
This results in $87,088.90 per report...
Hi Sam,
Thanks for the detailed engagement! I am going to respond to each with a separate reply.
Rethink's cost per researcher year on average, (i.e. the total org cost divided by total researcher years, not salary).
I think the best way to look at this is marginal cost. A new researcher hire costs us ~$87K USD in salary (this is a median, there is of course variation by title level here) and ~$28K in other costs (e.g., taxes, employment fees, benefits, equipment, employee travel). We then need to spend ~$31K in marginal spending on operations and ~$28K i...
I'm very excited to see this. To be honest when I first heard of the "evaluate the evaluators" project I was very skeptical and thought it would just be a rubber stamp on the EA ecosystem in a way that would play well for social media and attract donations.
I definitely was wrong!
It's good to see that there actually was substantive meta-evaluation here and that the GWWC meta-evaluators did not pull punches!
I agree with this and I'd also be curious to hear more details about where GWWC's current funding does come from, to help evaluate the extent to which GWWC is impartial (though to be clear I do think GWWC is impartial).
I'm really happy to see the “Add 10% to support our work” button and I check this every time it comes up!
FWIW I would've expected the Content Manager manages the Content Specialist, not the other way around.
Just to be clear, Lizka isn't being replaced and you're a new, additional content manager? Or does Lizka have a new role now?
I assume in the renormalization step there will still be exhausted ballots (e.g., they voted for three orgs and none of the orgs made it). I assume then the plan would be that those ballots just won't continue to matter in the election? I know this sounds bad the way I'm writing it, but this is how ranked choice voting works and seems totally fine + normal to me, just wanted to make sure you've thought about it because I didn't see it mentioned.
I also assume that the way the renormalization step works is that if everyone gets 10pts and someone voted A - 6p...
I definitely had roles I've hired for this year where the top candidate was significantly better than the second place candidate by a large margin
I think it's worth considering. My guess is that doing so would not necessarily be very time consuming. Could also be interested for them to pool donations to limit the number of people who need to do it, form a giving circle, or donate to a fund (e.g., EA Funds).
Why not both? I assume OP is fixing their capacity issues as fast as they can, but there still will be capacity issues remaining. IMO Neel still would add something here that is worth his marginal time, especially given Neel's significant involvement, expertise, and networks.
OP doesn't have the capacity to evaluate everything, so there are things they don't fund that are still quite good.
Also OP seems to prefer to evaluate things that have a track record, so taking bets on people to be able to get more of a track record to then apply to OP would be pretty helpful.
I also think orgs generally should have donor diversity and more independence, so giving more funding to the orgs that OP funds is sometimes good.
OP doesn't have the capacity to evaluate everything, so there are things they don't fund that are still quite good.
Maybe there should be some way for OP to publicize what they don't evaluate, so others can avoid the adverse selection.
I’m guessing stopping scaling by US POTUS executive order is not even legally possible though? So I don’t think we’d have to worry about that.
Do you have examples of ideas that would fall into each category? I think that would help me better understand your idea.
Why is Boston favored over DC? I'd expect DC would have more EAs in general than Boston, plus would open up valuable policy-focused angles of engagement.
Except that RSPs don't concern with long-term economic, social, and political implications. The ethos of AGI labs is to assume, for the most part, that these things will sort out themselves, and they only need to check technical and momentary implications, i.e., do "evals".
The public should push for "long-term evals", or even mandatory innovation in political and economic systems coupled with the progress in AI models.
The current form of capitalism is simply unprepared for autonomous agents, no amount of RLHF and "evals" will fix this.
concludes that human extinction would be a big welfare improvement
I don't think he concludes that either, nor do I know if he agrees with that. Maybe he implies that? Maybe he concludes that if our current trajectory is maintained / locked-in then human extinction would be a big welfare improvement? Though Kyle is also clear to emphasize the uncertainty and tentativeness of his analysis.
Two nitpicks:
Here's a selection from their bottom-line point estimates for how many animals of a given species are morally equivalent to one human:
The chart is actually estimates for how many animal life years of a given species are morally equivalent to one human life year. Though you do get the comparison correct in the paragraph after the table.
~
The post weighs the increasing welfare of humanity over time against the increasing suffering of livestock, and concludes that human extinction would be a very good thing.
You'd have to ask Kyle Fish but ...
I want to add that personally before this RP "capacity for welfare" project I started with an intuition that a human year was worth about 100-1000 times more than a chicken year (mean ~300x) conditional on chickens being sentient. But after reading the RP "capacity for welfare" reports thoroughly I have now switched roughly to the RP moral weights valuing a human year at about 3x a chicken year conditional on chickens being sentient (which I think is highly likely but handled in a different calculation). This report conclusion did come at a large surprise ...
I am happy to see that Nick and Will have resigned from the EV Board. I still respect them as individuals but I think this was a really good call for the EV Board, given their conflicts of interests arising from the FTX situation. I am excited to see what happens next with the Board as well as governance for EV as a whole. Thanks to all those who have worked hard on this.
I agree that these decisions are going in the right direction. I think their resignations should have been given earlier given the severity of the conflicts of interest with FTX and the problem of their judgments over the situations.
(I still appreciate Nick and Will as individuals and value immensely their contribution to the fields)
Will - of course I have some lingering reservations but I do want to acknowledge how much you've changed and improved my life.
You definitely changed my life by co-creating Centre for Effective Altruism, which played a large role in organizations like Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, which is what drew me into EA. I was also very inspired by "Doing Good Better".
To get more personal -- you also changed my life when you told me in 2013 pretty frankly that my original plan to pursue a Political Science PhD wasn't very impactful and that I should consider 8...
I agree - I think the financial uncertainty created by having to renew funding each year is very significantly costly and stressful and makes it hard to commit to longer-term plans.
Hi Elizabeth,
I represent Rethink Priorities but the incubator Charlie is referencing was/is run by Charity Entrepreneurship, which is a different and fully separate org. So you would have to ask them.
If there are any of your questions you'd want me to answer with reference to Rethink Priorities, let me know!
Hi Charlie,
Peter Wildeford from Rethink Priorities here. I think about this sort of thing a lot. I'm disappointed in your cheating but appreciate your honesty and feedback.
We've considered many times about using a time verification system and even tried it once. But it was a pretty stressful experience for applicants since the timer then required the entire task to be done in one sitting. The system we used also introduced some logistical difficulty on our end.
We'd like to try to make things as easy for our applicants as possible since it's already such a ...
Hi Peter thanks for the response - I am/was disappointed in myself also.
I assumed RP had thought about this. and I hear what you are saying about the trade-off. I don't have kids or anything like that and I can't really relate to struggling to sit down for a few hours straight but I totally believe this is an issue for some applicants and I respect that.
What I am more familiar with is doing school during COVID. My experience left me with a strong impression that even relatively high-integrity people will cheat in this version of the prisoner's ...
Yes. I think animal welfare remains incredibly understudied and thus it is easier to have a novel insight, but also there is less literature to draw from and you can end up more fundamentally clueless. Whereas in global health and development work there is much more research to draw from, which makes it nicer to be able to do literature reviews to turn existing studies and evidence into grant recommendations, but also means that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been done already.
Similarly, there is a lot more money available to chase top global health in...
I think it varies a lot by cause area but I think you would be unsurprised to hear me recommend more marginal thinking/research. I think we’re still pretty far from understanding how to best allocate a doing/action portfolio and there’d still be sizable returns from thinking more.
-
I like pop music, like Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodriguo, though Taylor Swift is the Greatest of All Time. I went to the Eras Tour and loved it.
-
I have strong opinions about the multiple types of pizza.
-
I'm nowhere near as good at coming up with takes and opinions off-the-cuff in verbal conversations as I am in writing. I'm 10x smarter when I have access to the internet.
Oh ok, thanks! Sorry for my confusion.