I think it would be really useful for there to be more public clarification on the relationship between effective altruism and Open Philanthropy.  My impression is that: 1. OP is the large majority funder of most EA activity.  2. Many EAs assume that OP is a highly EA organization, including the top. 3. OP really tries to explicitly not take responsibility for EA and does not claim to themselves be highly EA. 4. EAs somewhat assume that OP leaders are partially accountable to the EA community, but OP leaders would mostly disagree.  5. From the point of view of many EAs, EA represents something like a community of people with similar goals and motivations. There's some expectations that people will look out for each other. 6. From the point of view of OP, EA is useful insofar as it provides valuable resources (talent, sometimes ideas and money).   My impression is that OP basically treats the OP-EA relationship as a set of transactions, each with positive expected value. Like, they would provide a $20k grant to a certain community, if they expect said community to translate into over $20k of value via certain members who would soon take on jobs at certain companies. Perhaps in-part because there are some overlapping friendships, I think that OP staff often explicitly try to only fund EAs in ways that make the clearest practical sense for specific OP goals, like hiring AI safety researchers.  In comparison, I think a lot of EAs think of EA as some kind of holy-ish venture tied to an extended community of people who will care about each other. To them, EA itself is an incredibly valuable idea and community that itself has the potential to greatly change the world. (I myself is more in this latter camp) So on one side, we have a group that often views EA through reductive lenses, like as a specific recruiting arm. And on the other side, it's more of a critical cultural movement.  I think it's very possible for both sides to live in unison, but I think at the moment

We've set up a Substack mirror for the Forum digest! 😊 1. Please share and help us promote it! The primary reason we've set it up is to help with EA comms work and expand the reach of valuable Forum content. 2. Please give us feedback — I'm not much of a Substack user myself, so any suggestions you have for improving it would be appreciated! 3. We're still running the existing EA Forum Digest newsletter (via Mailchimp) for various reasons, including the fact that it's cleaner to integrate with the Forum itself. You can edit your subscription to that via the account settings page. (For example, if you prefer to read the Substack version, you can unsubscribe to the Mailchimp one.) You can read more about this decision in Will's quick take here.

The Berkeley Genomics Project is fundraising for the next forty days and forty nights at Manifund: https://manifund.org/projects/human-intelligence-amplification--berkeley-genomics-project

Quick idea - I think that “signs of empathy/appreciation/politeness” get undervalued online.  Obviously, LLMs can be good at this. I sort of like the idea of things like: 1. We rank public commenters for how polite / appreciative they are. We show the top ~10, maybe give weekly rewards. Ranking could be done automatically. 2. We formally estimate the value/disvalue that comments provide in terms of [encouragement/discouragement], and reveal/estimate this 3. I’d like to see my metrics improving over time. Like, to show that this year, my comments have made people feel more positive than they did last year. It seems easy enough for commenters to learn to spend more effort here. They could work with LLMs to do better. Arguably, there could be some fairly-cheap wins here. There’s obviously the potential problem of encouraging niceness that’s not genuine, then devaluing all of it. But I think this could also be done well, and such a thing might lead to a more positive community.

The U.S. State Department will reportedly use AI tools to trawl social media accounts, in order to detect pro-Hamas sentiment to be used as grounds for visa revocations (per Axios). Regardless of your views on the matter, regardless of whether you trust the same government that at best had a 40% hit rate on ‘woke science’ to do this: They are clearly charging ahead on this stuff. The kind of thoughtful consideration of the risks that we’d like is clearly not happening here. So why would we expect it to happen when it comes to existential risks, or a capability race with a foreign power?

I made two small donations via Every.org and regret it. By default, your profile and donations are public, and it's not immediately obvious (a privacy issue—especially if you make a potentially controversial donation as an individual), which I find unethical. Additionally, Every.org sends a lot of spam if you miss the opt-out button. These are known as UX dark patterns. Next time, I'll email the charity to ask if I can use conventional payment methods (if the donation is large enough) or simply refrain from donating. Being public about one's donations can be beneficial, but donors should have easy control over what they make public and what they don't. I encourage organizations to think twice before using Every.org. Thankfully, our local effective giving organization and the GWWC platform don't have these issues.

I was encouraged to read this Economist article, "The demise of foreign aid offers an opportunity Donors should focus on what works. Much aid currently does not" which I would say has at least some EA adjacent ideas. They mention health spending, which by the nature of all 4 of GiveWell's top charities can often be more cost effective than other options, plus pandemic prevention. "What should they do? One answer is to stop spending on programmes that do not work, and to focus on the things that might, such as health spending. Even here, however, governments must be vigilant that they are putting their money to its best use. Three principles should guide them. The first is to act in areas where governments (or the UN agencies they fund) have special co-ordinating power, say because they have the security apparatus to reach disaster or conflict zones. Another is to get involved if they have information the public will struggle to assess, about adapting to climate change, say, or a new pandemic. Last, are they funding causes that generate positive spillovers, such as preventing the global spread of infectious diseases?" Not exactly ITN, but not a bad take either!  

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is a book about the psychology of mass movements. I think there are important cautions for EAs thinking about their own relationship to the movement. I wanted to write a draft amnesty post about this, but I couldn't write anything better than this Lou Keep essay about the book, so I'll just recommend you read that.

Has anyone done a effectiveness comparison between GiveDirectly vs Community oriented giving, such as Sparks Microgrants? 

Fortunately, GiveWell has agreed for me to post their response to my post on Independent Evaluation for Reputation; you can find it at the end of the post.

If you've ever written or interacted with Squiggle code before, we at QURI would really appreciate it if you could fill out our Squiggle Survey! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfSnuKoUUQm4j3HEoqPmTYiWby9To8XXN5pDLlr95AiKa2srg/viewform We don't have many ways to gauge or evaluate how people interact with our tools. Responses here will go a long way to deciding on our future plans. Also, if we get enough responses, we'd like to make a public post about ways that people are (and aren't) using Squiggle. 

For the tax nerds, cool event next week from the OECD: Tax Inspectors Without Borders: A decade of niche assistance to developing countries 12 March 2024 | 13:45 - 14:45 CET https://www.tiwb.org/resources/events/oecd-tax-and-development-days-2025-tiwb-a-decade-of-niche-assistance-to-developing-countries.htm 

There have been numerous scandals within the EA community about how working for top AGI labs might be harmful. So, when are we going to have this conversation: contributing in any way to the current US admin getting (especially exclusive) access to AGI might be (very) harmful? [cross-posted from X and LessWrong]

For the record, I see the new field of "economics of transformative AI" as overrated. Economics has some useful frames, but it also tilts people towards being too "normy" on the impacts of AI and it doesn't have a very good track record on advanced AI so far. I'd much rather see multidisciplinary programs/conferences/research projects, including economics as just one of the perspectives represented, then economics of transformative AI qua economics of transformative AI. (I'd be more enthusiastic about building economics of transformative AI as a field if we were starting five years ago, but these things take time and it's pretty late in the game now, so I'm less enthusiastic about investing field-building effort here and more enthusiastic about pragmatic projects combining a variety of frames).

On AI alarmists: A fair-sized stream seems vast to one who until then Has never seen a greater; so with trees, with men. In every field each man regards as vast in size The greatest objects that have come before his eyes  (Lucretius)

I sometimes say, in a provocative/hyperbolic sense, that the concept of "neglectedness" has been a disaster for EA. I do think the concept is significantly over-used (ironically, it's not neglected!), and people should just look directly at the importance and tractability of a cause at current margins. Maybe neglectedness useful as a heuristic for scanning thousands of potential cause areas. But ultimately, it's just a heuristic for tractability: how many resources are going towards something is evidence about whether additional resources are likely to be impactful at the margin, because more resources mean its more likely that the most cost-effective solutions have already been tried or implemented. But these resources are often deployed ineffectively, such that it's often easier to just directly assess the impact of resources at the margin than to do what the formal ITN framework suggests, which is to break this hard question into two hard ones: you have to assess something like the abstract overall solvability of a cause (namely, "percent of the problem solved for each percent increase in resources," as if this is likely to be a constant!) and the neglectedness of the cause. That brings me to another problem: assessing neglectedness might sound easier than abstract tractability, but how do you weigh up the resources in question, especially if many of them are going to inefficient solutions? I think EAs have indeed found lots of surprisingly neglected (and important, and tractable) sub-areas within extremely crowded overall fields when they've gone looking. Open Phil has an entire program area for scientific research, on which the world spends >$2 trillion, and that program has supported Nobel Prize-winning work on computational design of proteins. US politics is a frequently cited example of a non-neglected cause area, and yet EAs have been able to start or fund work in polling and message-testing that has outcompeted incumbent orgs by looking for the highest-v

If you've liked my writing in the past, I wanted to share that I've started a Substack: https://peterwildeford.substack.com/ Ever wanted a top forecaster to help you navigate the news? Want to know the latest in AI? I'm doing all that in my Substack -- forecast-driven analysis about AI, national security, innovation, and emerging technology!

(x-posted from LW) Single examples almost never provides overwhelming evidence. They can provide strong evidence, but not overwhelming. Imagine someone arguing the following:   1. You make a superficially compelling argument for invading Iraq 2. A similar argument, if you squint, can be used to support invading Vietnam 3. It was wrong to invade Vietnam 4. Therefore, your argument can be ignored, and it provides ~0 evidence for the invasion of Iraq. In my opinion, 1-4 is not reasonable. I think it's just not a good line of reasoning. Regardless of whether you're for or against the Iraq invasion, and regardless of how bad you think the original argument 1 alluded to is, 4 just does not follow from 1-3. ___ Well, I don't know how Counting Arguments Provide No Evidence for AI Doom is different. In many ways the situation is worse: a. invading Iraq is more similar to invading Vietnam than overfitting is to scheming.  b. As I understand it, the actual ML history was mixed. It wasn't just counting arguments, many people also believed in the bias-variance tradeoff as an argument for overfitting. And in many NN models, the actual resolution was double-descent, which is a very interesting and confusing interaction where as the ratio of parameters to data points increases, the test error first falls, then rises, then falls again! So the appropriate analogy to scheming, if you take it very literally, is to imagine first you have goal generalization, than goal misgeneralization, than goal generalization again. But if you don't know which end of the curve you're on, it's scarce comfort.  Should you take the analogy very literally and directly? Probably not. But the less exact you make the analogy, the less bits you should be able to draw from it.  --- I'm surprised that nobody else pointed out my critique in the full year since the post was published. Given that it was both popular and had critical engagement, I'm surprised that nobody else mentioned my criticism, whi

Anyone else get a pig butchering scam attempt lately via DM on the forun?  I just got the following message  > Happy day to you, I am [X] i saw your profile today and i like it very much,which makes me to write to you to let you know that i am interested in you,therefore i will like you to write me back so that i will tell you further about myself and send you also my picture for you to know me physically.  [EMAIL] I reported the user on their profile and opened a support request but just FYI  

Instead of "Goodharting", I like the potential names "Positive Alignment" and "Negative Alignment." "Positive Alignment" means that the motivated party changes their actions in ways the incentive creator likes. "Negative Alignment" means the opposite. Whenever there are incentives offered to certain people/agents, there are likely to be cases of both Positive Alignment and Negative Alignment. The net effect will likely be either positive or negative.  "Goodharting" is fairly vague and typically just refers to just the "Negative Alignment" portion.  I'd expect this to make some discussion clearer. "Will this new incentive be goodharted?" -> "Will this incentive lead to Net-Negative Alignment?"  Other Name Options Claude 3.7 recommended other naming ideas like: * Intentional vs Perverse Responses * Convergent vs Divergent Optimization * True-Goal vs Proxy-Goal Alignment * Productive vs Counterproductive Compliance