All of rjmk's Comments + Replies

Thank you for this excellent post: I began by pulling out quotes that I wanted to reflect on further, but ended up copying most of the post paragraph by paragraph.

I'm still not sure how to get the most value out of the information that has been shared here.

Three ideas:

  1. Sample some summarised papers to (a) get a better idea of what AI safety work looks like and/or (b) build a model of where I might disagree with the post's evaluation of impact

  2. Generate alternatives to the model discussed in the introduction (for example, general public outreach being posi

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On the thin markets problem, there's been some prior work (on doing some googling I found https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/mktscore.pdf, but I recall reading a paper with a less scary tile).

In the office case, an obvious downside to incentivising the market is that one may divert labour away from normal work, so it may still be that non-market solutions are superior

Thanks for the response. I understand OPP doesn't control the visa process, but do you have a rough sense of how likely a successful applicant would be to get a visa after being sponsored, or is it a complete unknown?

0
lukeprog
6y
Unfortunately the likelihood is still pretty unclear to us at this point, and the available options vary a fair bit by applicant, depending on which country they're from, whether they recently graduated from undergrad or graduate school, and other factors.

Thanks for the work on this. It seems very valuable: I agree that they seem to be an awesome idea and like an individual donor should be able to improve their impact easily with a fund. Unless, that is, issues like the ones you highlight eat all the gain.

I imagine the data wasn't available, but I thought I'd check: was there any more granular information on the funding history than just percentage of total donation that remains unallocated? Because that would seem to make a big difference: the more skewed towards the recent past donations are, the less discount rates would seem to be a problem

Thanks Carl, this looks great. By

just get in touch with CEA if you need a chance at a larger pot

do you mean (a) get in touch with CEA if you need a chance at a larger pot than the current lotteries offer or (b) get in touch with CEA if you need a chance at a larger pot by entering a lottery (as there currently aren't any)?

Thanks Alex! Those sound like useful heuristics, though I'd love to see some experience reports (perhaps I ought to generate them).

I would be interested! I'll reach out via private message

This post is excellent. I find the historical work particularly useful, both as a collation of timelines and for the conclusions you tease out of it.

Considering the high quality and usefulness of this post, it is churlish to ask for more, but I'll do so anyway.

Have you given any thought to how donors might identify funding opportunities in the AI safety space? OpenPhil have written about how they found many more giving opportunities after committing to give, but it may be difficult to shop around a more modest personal giving budget.

A fallback here could be the far future EA fund, but I would be keen to hear other ideas

1
CarlShulman
6y
If you find your opportunities are being constrained by small donation size, you can use donor lotteries to trade your donation for a small chance of a large budget (just get in touch with CEA if you need a chance at a larger pot). You may also be interested in a post I made on this subject.
1
alexflint
6y
Thank you! In terms of finding opportunities, I don't have a complete framework but I do have some rough heuristics: (1) look for opportunities that the large donors can't find, are too small for them to act on, or for some other reason fail to execute on (2) follow the example of angel investors in the tech community by identifying a funding thesis and then reaching out through personal networks to find people to fund at the very early stage of starting projects/organizations. In terms of the historical work, I'm considering organizing a much deeper investigation into the history of these organizations. If you or anyone else is interested in working full time / part time on this, do let me know!

This seems like a really powerful tool to have in one's cognitive toolbox when considering allocating EA resources. I have two questions on evaluating concrete opportunities.

First, if I can state what I take to be the idea (if I have this wrong, then probably both of my questions are based on understanding): we can move resources from lower-need (i.e. the problem continues as default or improves) to higher-need situations (i.e. the problem gets worse) by investing in instruments that will be doing well if the problem is getting worse (which because of eff... (read more)

Not falling prey to sunk cost fallacy, I would switch to the higher impact project and start afresh.

I have often fallen prey to over-negating the sunk cost fallacy. That is, if the sunk cost fallacy is acting as if you get paid costs back by pursuing the purchased option, I might end up acting as if I had to pay the cost again to pursue the option.

That is, if you already bought theatre tickets, but now realise you're not much more excited about going to the play than to the pub, you should still go to the play, because the small increase in expected val... (read more)

Thanks for this post! I think it will make me more comfortable discussing EA in my extended friendship circle.

Which frames work best probably depend on the who you're talking to*, but I think the two on global inequality are likely to be useful for me (and are most similar to how I currently approach it)

I particularly like how they begin with explicitly granting the virtue and importance of the more local action. Firstly, it's true, and secondly, when I've seen people change cause focus it's normally been because of arguments that go "helping this per... (read more)