Though I found it online and not from the $30K distributed, I have since as a result of being introduced to Effective Altruism there donated much more than $30K to highly effective charities and caused hundreds of other people to get into donating to highly effective charities too. I also started a company inspired by the EA concepts of working on "neglected problems" - https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#definitio...
I might be wrong, but I suspect there's a decent chance there was at least 1 person like me of the people in that $30k distribution.
This is just a creative way to advertise, and I don’t see what’s wrong with charities trying to get their message out there.
I think GGP may have been going for a different point though, which is - is EA getting an overly harmful outward reputation / giving the wrong impression to laypeople and others, in a way that inhibits the overall potential reach of the movement? Is the creative advertising causing more harm than good?
At least, that’s the question I’m asking after reading these three posts.
It seems like it’s a common theme among rationalist groups to take a strongly inside view of the situation, based on all the observable facts and known good being done, and totally ignore the bigger picture outside view.
Let GiveWell direct your donation
GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund
Support GiveWell's top charities
Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention program
Against Malaria Foundation
Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program
SCI Foundation (Schistosomiasis Control Initiative)
Sightsavers' deworming program
New Incentives
Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative
END Fund's deworming program
GiveDirectly
https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund
the largest of which was $7.8 million to "Sightsavers — Deworming in Nigeria and Cameroon (February 2022)"
Please don't let the fact that some people are concerned about AI safety detract from EA's overarching goal of doing the most good per dollar donated.
Like I said in my comment, I'm hoping this blog post is a signal that they're going to start maturing the organization a bit more and hopefully distance themselves from some of the weirdness that tries to ride the coattails of the Effective Altruism movement.
Go ahead and spin up all of the AI think tank and Harry Potter fan fiction distribution under a different name, but forcing it under the Effective Altruism banner only drives away donations from people who go into this expecting an organization focused on doing charitable acts in the real world, not funding additional think tanks.
Not that all organizations need to work on immediate practical problems. But I think all organizations that are named things like "effective altruism" should.
And do they work against any of the actual current problems with applied "AI?" Or is it all just singularitarianist eschatology still?
EA basically splits into extremely hard-nosed short term projects and much riskier, but potentially extremely valuable projects guaranteeing the long term future of humanity. This is a consequence of those extremes being the most neglected.
* Some researchers recently built an AI system to generate low-toxicity molecules as candidates for medicines. They realised if they changed their system to maximise toxicity, it designed thousands of toxic molecule candidates including the VX nerve agent (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9)
* When GitHub released their Copilot AI code completion tool, it could autocomplete things like `API_KEY: `
* AI models used for decision-making in hospitals and courts frequently exhibit extreme racial prejudice (eg https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6)
* and many many, other examples
There's a real sense of utopianism and not much consideration of misuse even on a very short timescale. Even if you don't think AI will become an existential risk in the future, there are enough problems caused by misuse of current systems that it warrants attention.
All of the money I've seen flowing in the AI safety EA space has been put to extremely good use - $30k to a YouTuber making videos on AI safety who introduced me to the field and is my go-to for explaining topics like alignment (what you want vs what you say you want), grants to extremely productive AI safety researchers, grants to fund educational bootcamps and scholarships, etc.
(Disclaimer: I'm an EA aligned person myself so I'm fairly biased!)
In fact, GP is suggesting those factions do continue to raise, under a different banner.
GP’s concern, which I share, is that there’s a greater deal of effectiveness that’s being impacted by outside perceptions.
EA should inherently be concerned with making the top of their altruism dollar funnel as wide as possible, to channel the most good most effectively.
If the potential non-AI-safety money being left on the table is a greater amount than the money raised for AI-safety causes, is that most effective? For whom?
In a world where that potential money enters the funnel, and AI-safety has and grows a separate funnel of its own, how is that not better?
I feel like EAs see global poverty almost as a solved problem when there is a lot of work to be done still.
You may disagree that HPMOR is effective at teaching science, but at least they did it openly. That page has a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of this grant, including the possibility that it could cause "reputational risk" (i.e. people like you making fun of them for it). AFAICT they took that seriously, and decided to do it anyway because they really do believe that it's effective at teaching science.
I think the snark comes from "30000$" being spent to distribute a "free" book. If you think about it in terms of spending 46$ per person to advertise to a very select group of 650 people it might not sound so stupid.
From the very first chapter :
> "Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see.
Chapter 8 introduces how to think about peculiar phenomenons through children games and so on and so forth.
My Fermi estimate is probably off, but it’s a pretty sensible argument to me.
The former sounds like it would be full of reasonable cases for taking it seriously.
AI ethics isn’t neglected because AI ethics doesn’t matter. AI alignment matters. If a self-bootstrapping generally intelligent AI emerges the only important thing about it is “Is this aligned with human values?”. If the answer is no we’re all going to die because we’re made of atoms at the bottom of a gravity well and it’s going to use all the atoms there before getting out. The ethics of AI is completely irrelevant in comparison.
The fact that you’re grouping AI alignment with is kind of an indication of the problem; most people have heard so little about AI alignment problems that they assume it’s the same thing as AI ethics.
Completely unrelated? Even you must accept that they are related through AI.
But, I now see that AI ethics and AI alignment are different. Thank you. However, I think my larger point still stands as I was thinking mostly about efforts under the banners of "AI safety" and "AI alignment" when I wrote my comments here. I do not believe these efforts are "neglected" in the sense 80,000 Hours uses.
Let me guess, you work in tech and in a city? I personally believe that if a super intelligent AI were to be created, then it would have the same effect on society as the advent of nuclear weapons. So I respectfully disagree that it's not neglected, I don't think the common American thinks about how close we are to human level intelligence or what that would mean for society.
Also: I'm not a professional programmer, though programming has been one of my job responsibilities in the past, but never all of my job. And I live in a rural area at the moment. Not that any of these are relevant.
This phenomena is not unique to AI safety. It often is driven by management incentives.
I agree that AI safety is not a solved problem in practice, but that doesn't mean it's neglected. AI safety gets a lot of attention, and it is important, but it's not "neglected" in the sense that too few people work on it or that there isn't enough money in it [0]. I think the marginal impact of a new person in AI safety is roughly zero, all else equal. AI safety folks would probably do best to change their priorities away from "ivory tower" sort of issues towards the practical issues you bring up.
[0] EAs typically use people or money to measure neglectedness. https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#how-to-as...
I'm sure there are other areas, but I haven't put an effort into listing them. Global priorities work is pretty hard.
Also, apparently 80,000 Hours now considers AI safety only "somewhat neglected", so perhaps the EAs behind 80,000 Hours agree with me more than I thought. https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/positively-shaping-a...
The only place I know of alignment actually being covered in normal media is Vox’s Future Perfect (and by Matt Yglesias, who used to work there) and that’s because EAs literally pay them to cover it.
You don't get brownie points for how steadfastly you stick to your Overton window. You get brownie points for saving lives.
...by distributing copies of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction?
I agree that charities that save lives are doing good things. That's why I brought up the fact that some of their spending has historically been kind of ludicrously off base.
Derision for fan fiction and/or Harry Potter can't be the beginning and end of your argument for why HPMOR isn't a good book to introduce nerdy school kids to a handful of valuable ideas.
Is this how money is laundered in non profits?
It's also worth noting that this was 28k out of 923k USD, so not a too big part of it (~2%). Of course the money should be used for other things if it's estimated to be more effective though.
The reasoning is in the post you linked which I think gives a pretty good explanation. They're given to 650 math medalists (so ~43 USD/person) which they deemed to have good target audience for this.
EA has done a great job bringing attention and resources to causes that are clear wins - it's just obvious that global poverty interventions like Against Malaria and GiveDirectly are highly beneficial.
But effectiveness doesn't always doing the most obviously effective thing. It means doing the highest expected value thing. Sometimes that means trying things with low expectation of success, but a high potential payoff.
There's a trade off between exploring the space of potential interventions, and exploiting known good ones. EA needs to keep its healthy focus on exploration, or risk getting stuck in a local minimum. Suppose the X-risk people are right - if we get that wrong there won't be any more people left to help. Certainly EA was sounding the alarm about lack of pandemic preparedness ages ago, and while that wasn't existential, it was the right direction to be looking in. Imagine if we'd had a bit better foresight, been a bit better prepared, and been able to prevent 6 million people dying of COVID.
Something sounding "weird" isn't sufficient reason to discard it. There needs to be an actual convincing argument. And let me tell you, the weird ideas have survived some pretty rigorous debate.
Among the "rationalist" crowd, this is commonly done for both AI alignment and longevity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
And they're not because EA is tackling a diverse set of issues, not just AI alignment and longevity, as the top spot of donations is going to malaria nets in Africa.
The poor frequently do not have printers or significant access to consistently functional digital devices.
If a group of people is so poor that they don't have access to digital devices, maybe printing out rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction shouldn't be at the top of the priority list for a charity trying to spend money to improve their lives.
I suppose we could be equally upset that Sesame street uses puppets?
The universe is allowed to decide the Donald Trump will be president in 2016 despite all the reasons to think it was crazy that he would become president. The universe is allowed to decide that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be elected president of Ukraine on the basis of having starring as the president in a comedy.
And I guess the universe is allowed to decide that a piece of fanfic that is desperately in need of an editor will be successful at recruiting talent for the rationalist or AI Safety communities.
I expect you are probably skeptical of AI Safety, but then your criticism would be a criticism of the final objective, not the method (distribution of HPMoR) used to achieve the objective.
However, if you believe that AGI will be created, then you have to admit that societal impacts will be tremendous, the same level as the advent of nukes.
People are pointing out the problems in discrimination that we face with current sub human AI. Imagine AI systems smarter than 90% of humans or smarter than all humans. Wouldn't that make all current problems in AI minuscule if we couldn't control such a program?
Yes, and it's heavily funded by EA givers (yours truly included). People like to harp on the weird edge-cases, but Givewell.org is directing hundreds of millions of dollars per year[0], and it's pretty much entirely things deworming, malaria prevention, etc.[1]
If you visit effectivealtruism.org you'll see it's not a bunch of articles about AI research. It's about convincing people to donate in ways that have the most positive impact, and includes a big "What has the effective altruism community done?" section that's mostly the standard "ensure everyone has food, water, basic healthcare, etc." The key is that there's an emphasis on making sure you're actually improving those metrics as much as possible, rather than whatever has the flashiest marketing.
There are a bunch of people talking about AI safety and other weirder things, but we mostly just look at research to figure out what improves lives and do that.
If that's the most effective way of helping people, why would they not do that? They do more than that though, they fund projects of many different kinds. They also coach people to go into fields where they can have a positive impact for example.
> wasn't one of their initial proposals that deworming medications should be sent to rural Africa, for its disproportionate impact it could have?
They have different funds:
- Global Health and Development Fund [0]
- Animal Welfare Fund [1]
- Long-Term Future Fund[2]
- Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund[3]
Deworming would go under "Global health and development" (if it's estimated to be the most effective) and AI under "Long-term future fund".
---
0. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development
1. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare
I’d be very shocked if AI research got more than 5% of EA funding.
(I should note, I donate a decent sum to GiveWell each year, though only to the Global Development fund, and it deeply irks me that they don't put some of their effort into innovative ideas to combat climate change)
This is really the kind of comment I'd like not to see on HN.
"Neckbeard concern" implies that... what, people worrying about AI risk are worrying for fun? Because they're socially awkward nerds disconnected from reality?
This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/743/
Worrying about the future consequences of incoming technological developments always looks like "neckbeard concerns" until it's too late to do anything about it.
And thus he we are, worrying about climate change and supply chain sovereignty and corporate control of information and wondering why nobody took sensible measures 20 years ago.
> And there's no mention of anything this org has actually done to help anyone, other than getting people to donate
Note that this is an internal post from an individual suggesting organizational changes, not an official public-facing communication.
As sibling comments pointed out, they do have posts listing success stories.
I'm sure just because of the nature of the movement there's been lots of thinking about the likelihood of various future scenarios and accounting for this in less flippant terms than I've just described it, but it seems to me that this is a group of people who are skewed to think AI is more likely, more potentially dangerous, and more interesting to work on and fund.
Putting aside the likelihood of AGI materializing at all, it's not really clear to me that paying for a bunch of research on this necessarily affects the actual AI that would be produced anyway, as that's being done by different people with different interests and incentives. You see people discuss the numbers of people affected by something like malaria prevention versus eventual extinction at the hands of AI as a justification for the need for AI work, but less talk about how we actually know what kinds of things we can do to do malaria prevention and really not so much the AI stuff. Obviously you have to start somewhere but...
From an outsider's perspective, the whole area just kind of feels like a pit you can throw money into while pretending you're being rigorous about spending.
But this is a criticism about effectiveness made within an EA framework. It assumes the thing we want to do is maximize the amount of good we do with our resources, and provides rational arguments for why AI won’t do that.
The AI folks think their cause is the one that does the most good, and they have rational arguments for that position. That’s why they’re considered part of the EA movement (despite not fitting in with the original vision).
That also means we have to listen and provide counterarguments before we reject their position. What we definitely shouldn’t do is write them off as “neckbeards” just because they’re working in tech and have unusual concerns. That’s how you end up writing off some 1930s physicist worried about the existential risk of nuclear fission weapons as some “Weird neckbeard nerd.”
There are hotfixes people add on for edge cases like "don't label people as gorillas" or "don't say certain words that Nazis say", but for problems like "don't ever initiate a conversation likely to cause someone to commit suicide"... there's no foundational work (that's not super vague) that compels an AI to optimize for human success and life.
That's not great IMO, and we should probably dedicate as much money to it as we dedicate to, I dunno, potato chips ($65 billion a year in the US IIRC).
I love the idea of Effective Altruism and what they're trying to accomplish, but in practice it frequently turns into funding for intellectuals to sit around and pontificate about AI risk and other things, as opposed to actually going out into the world and doing altruistic acts.
Some of their previous grants are downright laughable, like spending $30K to distribute copies of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) despite the fact that it's freely available online. (Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... Ctrl+F "Harry Potter")
The EA movement has become a bit of a joke in many circles after making too many moves like this, so hopefully this serves as a wake-up call for them to start getting more practical.