Looks like Mechanize is choosing to be even more irresponsible than we previously thought. They're going straight for automating software engineering. Would love to hear their explanation for this.

"Software engineering automation isn't going fast enough" ^[1] - oh really?

This seems even less defensible than their previous explanation of how their work would benefit the world.

1. ^{^}

   Not an actual quote

The EA Forum moderation team is going to experiment a bit with how we categorize posts. Currently there is a low bar for a Forum post being categorized as “Frontpage” after it’s approved. In comparison, LessWrong is much more opinionated about the content they allow, especially from new users. We’re considering moving in that direction, in order to maintain a higher percentage of valuable content on our Frontpage.

To start, we’re going to allow moderators to move posts from new users from “Frontpage” to “Personal blog”^[1], at their discretion, but starting conservatively. We’ll keep an eye on this and, depending on how this goes, we may consider taking further steps such as using the “rejected content” feature (we don’t currently have that on the EA Forum).

Feel free to reply here if you have any questions or feedback.

1. ^{^}

   If you’d like to make sure you see “Personal blog” posts in your Frontpage, you can customize your feed.

Having a savings target seems important. (Not financial advice.)

I sometimes hear people in/around EA rule out taking jobs due to low salaries (sometimes implicitly, sometimes a little embarrassedly). Of course, it's perfectly understandable not to want to take a significant drop in your consumption. But in theory, people with high salaries could be saving up so they can take high-impact, low-paying jobs in the future; it just seems like, by default, this doesn't happen. I think it's worth thinking about how to set yourself up to be able to do it if you do find yourself in such a situation; you might find it harder than you expect.

(Personal digression: I also notice my own brain paying a lot more attention to my personal finances than I think is justified. Maybe some of this traces back to some kind of trauma response to being unemployed for a very stressful ~6 months after graduating: I just always could be a little more financially secure. A couple weeks ago, while meditating, it occurred to me that my brain is probably reacting to not knowing how I'm doing relative to my goal, because 1) I didn't actually know what my goal is, and 2) I didn't really have a sense of what I was spending each month. In IFS terms, I think the "social and physical security" part of my brain wasn't trusting that the rest of my brain was competently handling the situation.)

So, I think people in general would benefit from having an explicit target: once I have X in savings, I can feel financially secure. This probably means explicitly tracking your expenses, both now and in a "making some reasonable, not-that-painful cuts" budget, and gaming out the most likely scenarios where you'd need to use a large amount of your savings, beyond the classic 3 or 6 months of expenses in an emergency fund. For people motivated by EA principles, the most likely scenarios might be for impact reasons: maybe you take a public-sector job that pays half your current salary for three years, or maybe you'd need to self-fund a new project for a year; how much would it cost to maintain your current level of spending, or a not-that-painful budget-cut version? Then you could target that amount (in addition to the emergency fund, so you'd still have that at the end of the period); once you have that, you could feel more secure/spend less brain space on money, donate more of your income, and be ready to jump on a high-impact, low-paying opportunity.

Of course, you can more easily hit that target if you can bring down your expenses -- you both lower the required amount in savings and you save more each month. So, maybe some readers would also benefit from cutting back a bit, though I think most EAs are pretty thrifty already.

(This is hardly novel -- Ben Todd was publishing related stuff on 80k in 2015. But I guess I had to rediscover it, so posting here in case anyone else could use the refresher.)

Mini Forum update: Draft comments, and polls in comments

Draft comments

You can now save comments as permanent drafts:

After saving, the draft will appear for you to edit:

1. In-place if it's a reply to another comment (as above)

2. In a "Draft comments" section under the comment box on the post

3. In the drafts section of your profile

The reasons we think this will be useful:

• For writing long, substantive comments (and quick takes!). We think these are the some of the most valuable comments on the forum, and want to encourage more of them
• For starting a comment on mobile and then later continuing on desktop
• To lower the barrier to starting writing a comment, since you know you can always throw it in drafts and then never look at it again

Polls in comments

We recently added the ability to put polls in posts, and this was fairly well received, so we're adding it to comments (... and quick takes!) as well.

You can add a poll from the toolbar, you just need to highlight a bit of text to make the toolbar appear:

And the poll will look like this...

Productive conference meetup format for 5-15 people in 30-60 minutes

I ran an impromptu meetup at a conference this weekend, where 2 of the ~8 attendees told me that they found this an unusually useful/productive format and encouraged me to share it as an EA Forum shortform. So here I am, obliging them:

• Intros… but actually useful
  • Name
  • Brief background or interest in the topic
  • 1 thing you could possibly help others in this group with
  • 1 thing you hope others in this group could help you with
  • NOTE: I will ask you to act on these imminently so you need to pay attention, take notes etc
  • [Facilitator starts and demonstrates by example]
• Round of any quick wins: anything you heard where someone asked for some help and you think you can help quickly, e.g. a resource, idea, offer? Say so now!
• Round of quick requests: Anything where anyone would like to arrange a 1:1 later with someone else here, or request anything else?
• If 15+ minutes remaining:
  • Brainstorm whole-group discussion topics for the remaining time. Quickly gather in 1-5 topic ideas in less than 5 minutes.
  • Show of hands voting for each of the proposed topics.
  • Discuss most popular topics for 8-15 minutes each. (It might just be one topic)
• If less than 15 minutes remaining:
  • Quickly pick one topic for group discussion yourself.
  • Or just finish early? People can stay and chat if they like.

Note: the facilitator needs to actually facilitate, including cutting off lengthy intros or any discussions that get started during the ‘quick wins’ and ‘quick requests’ rounds. If you have a group over 10 you might need to divide into subgroups for the discussion part.

I think we had around 3 quick wins, 3 quick requests, and briefly discussed 2 topics in our 45 minute session.

A week ago, Anthropic quietly weakened their ASL-3 security requirements. Yesterday, they announced ASL-3 protections.

I appreciate the mitigations, but quietly lowering the bar at the last minute so you can meet requirements isn't how safety policies are supposed to work.

(This was originally a tweet thread (https://x.com/RyanPGreenblatt/status/1925992236648464774) which I've converted into a quick take. I also posted it on LessWrong.)

What is the change and how does it affect security?

9 days ago, Anthropic changed their RSP so that ASL-3 no longer requires being robust to employees trying to steal model weights if the employee has any access to "systems that process model weights".

Anthropic claims this change is minor (and calls insiders with this access "sophisticated insiders").

But, I'm not so sure it's a small change: we don't know what fraction of employees could get this access and "systems that process model weights" isn't explained.

Naively, I'd guess that access to "systems that process model weights" includes employees being able to operate on the model weights in any way other than through a trusted API (a restricted API that we're very confident is secure). If that's right, it could be a high fraction! So, this might be a large reduction in the required level of security.

If this does actually apply to a large fraction of technical employees, then I'm also somewhat skeptical that Anthropic can actually be "highly protected" from (e.g.) organized cybercrime groups without meeting the original bar: hacking an insider and using their access is typical!

Also, one of the easiest ways for security-aware employees to evaluate security is to think about how easily they could steal the weights. So, if you don't aim to be robust to employees, it might be much harder for employees to evaluate the level of security and then complain about not meeting requirements^[1].

Anthropic's justification and why I disagree

Anthropic justified the change by saying that model theft isn't much of the risk from amateur CBRN uplift (CBRN-3) and that the risks from AIs being able to "fully automate the work of an entry-level, remote-only Researcher at Anthropic" (AI R&D-4) don't depend on model theft.

I disagree.

On CBRN: If other actors are incentivized to steal the model for other reasons (e.g. models become increasingly valuable), it could end up broadly proliferating which might greatly increase risk, especially as elicitation techniques improve.

On AI R&D: AIs which are over the capability level needed to automate the work of an entry-level researcher could seriously accelerate AI R&D (via fast speed, low cost, and narrow superhumanness). If other less safe (or adversarial) actors got access, risk might increase a bunch.^[2]

More strongly, ASL-3 security must suffice up until the ASL-4 threshold: it has to cover the entire range from ASL-3 to ASL-4. ASL-4 security itself is still not robust to high-effort attacks from state actors which could easily be motivated by large AI R&D acceleration.

As of the current RSP, it must suffice until just before AIs can "substantially uplift CBRN [at] state programs" or "cause dramatic acceleration in [overall AI progress]". These seem like extremely high bars indicating very powerful systems, especially the AI R&D threshold.^[3]

As it currently stands, Anthropic might not require ASL-4 security (which still isn't sufficient for high effort state actor attacks) until we see something like 5x AI R&D acceleration (and there might be serious issues with measurement lag).

I'm somewhat sympathetic to security not being very important for ASL-3 CBRN, but it seems very important as of the ASL-3 AI R&D and seems crucial before the AI R&D ASL-4 threshold! I think the ASL-3 AI R&D threshold should probably instead trigger the ASL-4 security!

Overall, Anthropic's justification for this last minute change seems dubious and the security requirements they've currently committed to seem dramatically insufficient for AI R&D threat models. To be clear, other companies have worse security commitments.

Concerns about potential noncompliance and lack of visibility

Another concern is that this last minute change is quite suggestive of Anthropic being out of compliance with their RSP before they weakened the security requirements.

We have to trust Anthropic quite a bit to rule out noncompliance. This isn't a good state of affairs.

To explain this concern, I'll need to cover some background on how the RSP works.

The RSP requires ASL-3 security as soon as it's determined that ASL-3 can't be ruled out (as Anthropic says is the case for Opus 4).

Here's how it's supposed to go:

• They ideally have ASL-3 security mitigations ready, including the required auditing.
• Once they find the model is ASL-3, they apply the mitigations immediately (if not already applied).

If they aren't ready, they need temporary restrictions.

My concern is that the security mitigations they had ready when they found the model was ASL-3 didn't suffice for the old ASL-3 bar but do suffice for the new bar (otherwise why did they change the bar?). So, prior to the RSP change they might have been out of compliance.

It's certainly possible they remained compliant:

• Maybe they had measures which temporarily sufficed for the old higher bar but which were too costly longer term. Also, they could have deleted the weights outside of secure storage until the RSP was updated to lower the bar.
• Maybe an additional last minute security assessment (which wasn't required to meet the standard?) indicated inadequate security and they deployed temporary measures until they changed the RSP. It would be bad to depend on last minute security assessment for compliance.

(It's also technically possible that the ASL-3 capability decision was made after the RSP was updated. This would imply the decision was only made 8 days before release, so hopefully this isn't right. Delaying evals until an RSP change lowers the bar would be especially bad.)

Conclusion

Overall, this incident demonstrates our limited visibility into AI companies. How many employees are covered by the new bar? What triggered this change? Why does Anthropic believe it remained in compliance? Why does Anthropic think that security isn't important for ASL-3 AI R&D?

I think a higher level of external visibility, auditing, and public risk assessment would be needed (as a bare minimum) before placing any trust in policies like RSPs to keep the public safe from AI companies, especially as they develop existentially dangerous AIs.

To be clear, I appreciate Anthropic's RSP update tracker and that it explains changes. Other AI companies have mostly worse safety policies: as far as I can tell, o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro are about as likely to cross the ASL-3 bar as Opus 4 and they have much worse mitigations!

Appendix and asides

I don't think current risks are existentially high (if current models were fully unmitigated, I'd guess this would cause around 50,000 expected fatalities per year) and temporarily being at a lower level of security for Opus 4 doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Also, given that security is only triggered after a capability decision, the ASL-3 CBRN bar is supposed to include some conservativeness anyway. But, my broader points around visibility stand and potential noncompliance (especially unreported noncompliance) should be worrying even while the stakes are relatively low.

You can view the page showing the RSP updates including the diff of the latest change here: https://www.anthropic.com/rsp-updates. Again, I appreciate that Anthropic has this page and makes it easy to see the changes they make to the RSP.

I find myself quite skeptical that Anthropic actually could rule out that Sonnet 4 and other models weaker than Opus 4 cross the ASL-3 CBRN threshold. How sure is Anthropic that it wouldn't substantially assist amateurs even after the "possible performance increase from using resources that a realistic attacker would have access to"? I feel like our current evidence and understanding is so weak, and models already substantially exceed virology experts at some of our best proxy tasks.

The skepticism applies similarly or more to other AI companies (and Anthropic's reasoning is more transparent).

But, this just serves to further drive home ways in which the current regime is unacceptable once models become so capable that the stakes are existential.

One response is that systems this powerful will be open sourced or trained by less secure AI companies anyway. Sure, but the intention of the RSP is (or was) to outline what would "keep risks below acceptable levels" if all actors follow a similar policy.

(I don't know if I ever bought that the RSP would succeed at this. It's also worth noting there is an explicit exit clause Anthropic could invoke if they thought proceeding outweighed the risks despite the risks being above an acceptable level.)

This sort of criticism is quite time consuming and costly for me. For this reason there are specific concerns I have about AI companies which I haven't discussed publicly. This is likely true for other people as well. You should keep this in mind when assessing AI companies and their practices.

1. ^{^}

   It also makes it harder for these complaints to be legible to other employees while other employees might be able to more easily interpret arguments about what they could do.

2. ^{^}

   It looks like AI 2027 would estimate around a ~2x AI R&D acceleration for a system which was just over this ASL-3 AI R&D bar (as it seems somewhat more capable than the "Reliable agent" bar). I'd guess more like 1.5x at this point, but either way this is a big deal!

3. ^{^}

   Anthropic says they'll likely require a higher level of security for this "dramatic acceleration" AI R&D threshold, but they haven't yet committed to this nor have they defined a lower AI R&D bar which results in an ASL-4 security requirement.

There is going to be a Netflix series on SBF titled The Altruists, so EA will be back in the media. I don't know how EA will be portrayed in the show, but regardless, now is a great time to improve EA communications. More specifically, being a lot more loud about historical and current EA wins — we just don't talk about them enough!

A snippet from Netflix's official announcement post:

Are you ready to learn about crypto?

Julia Garner (Ozark, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Inventing Anna) and Anthony Boyle (House of Guinness, Say Nothing, Masters of the Air) are set to star in The Altruists, a new eight-episode limited series about Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison.

Graham Moore (The Imitation Game, The Outfit) and Jacqueline Hoyt (The Underground Railroad, Dietland, Leftovers) will co-showrun and executive produce the series, which tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists who tried to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye — and then seduced, coaxed, and teased each other into stealing $8 billion.

I was extremely disappointed to see this tweet from Liron Shapira revealing that the Centre for AI Safety fired a recent hire, John Sherman, for stating that members of the public would attempt to destroy AI labs if they understood the magnitude of AI risk. Capitulating to this sort of pressure campaign is not the right path for EA, which should have a focus on seeking the truth rather than playing along with social-status games, and is not even the right path for PR (it makes you look like you think the campaigners have valid points, which in this case is not true). This makes me think less of CAIS' decision-makers.

I'm a 36 year old iOS Engineer/Software Engineer who switched to working on Image classification systems via Tensorflow a year ago. Last month I was made redundant with a fairly generous severance package and good buffer of savings to get me by while unemployed.

The risky step I had long considered of quitting my non-impactful job was taken for me. I'm hoping to capitalize on my free time by determining what career path to take that best fits my goals. I'm pretty excited about it. 

I created a weighted factor model to figure out what projects or learning to take on first. I welcome feedback on it. There's also a schedule tab for how I'm planning to spend my time this year and a template if anyone wishes to use this spreadsheet their selves.

I got feedback from my 80K hour advisor to get involved in EA communities more often. I'm also want to learn more publicly be it via forums or by blogging. This somewhat unstructured dumping of my thoughts is a first step towards that.

I have a bunch of disagreements with Good Ventures and how they are allocating their funds, but also Dustin and Cari are plausibly the best people who ever lived. 

I've now spoken to  ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there's a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it's doing a short reflection exercise about one's current situation. 

Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I'm often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this -- noticing one's own motivations, weighing one's personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.

A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call

1. Your context:
   1. What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…)
      1. The role
      2. The tasks and activities
      3. Does it involve management?
      4. What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning?
      5. Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like?
   2. Default plan and tactics
      1. What is your default plan?
      2. How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job?
      3. Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles?
      4. Have you been networking? How? What is your current network?
      5. Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it?
      6. How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week?
      7. What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by?
   3. What are your preferences and/or constraints?
      1. Money
      2. Location
      3. What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.)
      4. What skills do you want to develop?
      5. Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution?
      6. Do you want to shoot for impact? How important is it compared to your other preferences?
         1. How much certainty do you want to have wrt your impact?
      7. If you could picture your perfect job – the perfect combination of the above – which ones would you relax first in order to consider a role?
2. Reflecting more on your values:
   1. What is your moral circle?
   2. Do future people matter?
   3. How do you compare problems?
   4. Do you buy this x-risk stuff?
   5. How do you feel about expected impact vs certain impact?
3. For any domain of research you're interested in:
   1. What’s your answer to the Hamming question? Why?

If possible, I'd recommend trying to answer these questions out loud with another person listening (just like in an advising call!); they might be able to notice confusions, tensions, and places worth exploring further. Some follow up prompts that might be applicable to many of the questions above:

1. How do you feel about that?
2. Why is that? Why do you believe that?
3. What would make you change your mind about that?
4. What assumptions is that built on? What would change if you changed those assumptions?
5. Have you tried to work on that? What have you tried? What went well, what went poorly, and what did you learn?
6. Is there anyone you can ask about that? Is there someone you could cold-email about that?

Good luck!

why do i find myself less involved in EA?

epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it's been bubbling for a while, but i haven't spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it'd be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don't expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it's probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i'm not very keen on arguing about any of the points below, but if you think you could be useful toward my reflecting processes (or if you think i could be useful toward yours!), i'd prefer that you book a call to chat more over replying in the comments. i do not give you consent to quote my writing in this short-form without also including the entirety of this epistemic status.

• 1-3 years ago, i was a decently involved with EA (helping organize my university EA program, attending EA events, contracting with EA orgs, reading EA content, thinking through EA frames, etc).
• i am now a lot less involved in EA.
  • e.g. i currently attend uc berkeley, and am ~uninvolved in uc berkeley EA
  • e.g. i haven't attended a casual EA social in a long time, and i notice myself ughing in response to invites to explicitly-EA socials
  • e.g. i think through impact-maximization frames with a lot more care & wariness, and have plenty of other frames in my toolbox that i use to a greater relative degree than the EA ones
  • e.g. the orgs i find myself interested in working for seem to do effectively altruistic things by my lights, but seem (at closest) to be EA-community-adjacent and (at furthest) actively antagonistic to the EA community
• (to be clear, i still find myself wanting to be altruistic, and wanting to be effective in that process. but i think describing my shift as merely moving a bit away from the community would be underselling the extent to which i've also moved a bit away from EA's frames of thinking.)
• why?
  • a lot of EA seems fake
    • the stuff — the orientations — the orgs — i'm finding it hard to straightforwardly point at, but it feels kinda easy for me to notice ex-post
  • there's been an odd mix of orientations toward [ aiming at a character of transparent/open/clear/etc ] alongside [ taking actions that are strategic/instrumentally useful/best at accomplishing narrow goals... that also happen to be mildly deceptive, or lying by omission, or otherwise somewhat slimy/untrustworthy/etc ]
    • the thing that really gets me is the combination of an implicit (and sometimes explicit!) request for deep trust alongside a level of trust that doesn't live up to that expectation.
      • it's fine to be in a low-trust environment, and also fine to be in a high-trust environment; it's not fine to signal one and be the other. my experience of EA has been that people have generally behaved extremely well/with high integrity and with high trust... but not quite as well & as high as what was written on the tin.
    • for a concrete ex (& note that i totally might be screwing up some of the details here, please don't index too hard on the specific people/orgs involved): when i was participating in — and then organizing for — brandeis EA, it seemed like our goal was (very roughly speaking) to increase awareness of EA ideas/principles, both via increasing depth & quantity of conversation and via increasing membership. i noticed a lack of action/doing-things-in-the-world, which felt kinda annoying to me... until i became aware that the action was "organizing the group," and that some of the organizers (and higher up the chain, people at CEA/on the Groups team/at UGAP/etc) believed that most of the impact of university groups comes from recruiting/training organizers — that the "action" i felt was missing wasn't missing at all, it was just happening to me, not from me. i doubt there was some point where anyone said "oh, and make sure not to tell the people in the club that their value is to be a training ground for the organizers!" — but that's sorta how it felt, both on the object-level and on the deception-level.
    • this sort of orientation feels decently reprensentative of the 25th percentile end of what i'm talking about.
  • also some confusion around ethics/how i should behave given my confusion/etc
    • importantly, some confusions around how i value things. it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i'm blinding myself. i think it's taken me awhile to know what that feels like, and i've grown to find that blinding & meta-blinding extremely distasteful, and a signal that something's wrong.
      • some of this might merely be confusion about orientation, and not ethics — e.g. it might be that in some sense the right doxastic attitude is "EA," but that the right conative attitude is somewhere closer to (e.g.) "embody your character — be kind, warm, clear-thinking, goofy, loving, wise, [insert more virtues i want to be here]. oh and do some EA on the side, timeboxed & contained, like when you're donating your yearly pledge money."
• where now?
  • i'm not sure! i could imagine the pendulum swinging more in either direction, and want to avoid doing any further prediction about where it will swing for fear of that prediction interacting harmfully with a sincere process of reflection.
  • i did find writing this out useful, though!

As a group organiser I was wildly miscalibrated about the acceptance rate for EAGs! I spoke to the EAG team, and here are the actual figures:
 

• The overall acceptance rate for undergraduate student is about ¾! (2024)
• For undergraduate first timers, it’s about ½ (Bay Area 2025)

If that’s peaked your interest, EAG London 2025 applications close soon - apply here!
Jemima

I wonder what can be done to make people more comfortable praising powerful people in EA without feeling like sycophants.

A while ago I saw Dustin Moskovitz commenting on the EA Forum. I thought about expressing my positive impressions of his presence and how incredible it was that he even engaged. I didn't do that because it felt like sycophancy. The next day he deleted his account. I don't think my comment would have changed anything in that instance, but I still regretted not commenting.

In general, writing criticism feels more virtuous than writing praise. I used to avoid praising people who had power over me, but now that attitude seems misguided to me. While I'm glad that EA provided an environment where I could feel comfortable criticising the leadership, I'm unhappy about ending up in a situation where occupying leadership positions in EA feels like a curse to potential candidates.

Many community members agree that there is a leadership vacuum in EA. That should lead us to believe people in leadership positions should be rewarded more than they currently are. Part of that reward could be encouragement and I am personally committing to comment on things I like about EA more often.

This is a post with praise for Good Ventures.[1] I don’t expect anything I’ve written here to be novel, but I think it’s worth saying all the same. [2] (The draft of this was prompted by Dustin M leaving the Forum.)

Over time, I’ve done a lot of outreach to high-net-worth individuals. Almost none of those conversations have led anywhere, even when they say they’re very excited to give, and use words like “impact” and “maximising” a lot. 

Instead, people almost always do some combination of:

• Not giving at all, or giving only a tiny fraction of their net worth
  • (I remember in the early days of 80,000 Hours, we spent a whole day hosting an UHNW. He ultimately gave £5000. The week afterwards, a one-hour call with Julia Wise - a social worker at the time - resulted in a larger donation.)
• Give to less important causes, often because they have quite quickly decided on some set of causes, with very little in the way of deep reflection or investigation into that choice.
• Give in lower-value ways, because they value their own hot takes rather than giving expert grantmakers enough freedom to make the best grants within causes.

(The story here doesn’t surprise me.)

From this perspective, EA is incredibly lucky that Cari and Dustin came along in the early days. In the seriousness of their giving, and their willingness to follow the recommendations of domain experts, even in unusual areas, they are way out on the tail of the distribution.

I say this even though they’ve narrowed their cause area focus, even though I probably disagree with that decision (although I feel humble about my ability, as an outsider, to know what trade-offs I’d think would be best if I were in their position), and even though because of that narrowing of focus my own work (and Forethought more generally) is unlikely to receive Good Ventures funding, at least for the time being. 

My attitude to someone who is giving a lot, but giving fairly ineffectively, is, “Wow, that’s so awesome you’re giving! Do you know how you could do even more good!?...” When I disagree with Good Ventures, my attitude feels the same.

***

[1] Disclaimer: Good Ventures is the major funder of projects I’ve cofounded (80k, CEA, GWWC, GPI). They haven’t funded Forethought. I don’t know Dustin or Cari well at all. 

[2] I feel like the just ratio of praise to criticism for Good Ventures should be something like 99:1. In reality - given the nature of highly online communities in general, and the nature of EA and EA-adjacent communities in particular - that ratio is probably inverted. So this post is trying to correct that, at least a bit; to fill in a missing mood.

In light of recent discourse on EA adjacency, this seems like a good time to publicly note that I still identify as an effective altruist, not EA adjacent.

I am extremely against embezzling people out of billions of dollars of money, and FTX was a good reminder of the importance of "don't do evil things for galaxy brained altruistic reasons". But this has nothing to do with whether or not I endorse the philosophy that "it is correct to try to think about the most effective and leveraged ways to do good and then actually act on them". And there are many people in or influenced by the EA community who I respect and think do good and important work.

Anthropic has been getting flak from some EAs for distancing itself from EA. I think some of the critique is fair, but overall, I think that the distancing is a pretty safe move. 

Compare this to FTX. SBF wouldn't shut up about EA. He made it a key part of his self-promotion. I think he broadly did this for reasons of self-interest for FTX, as it arguably helped the brand at that time. 

I know that at that point several EAs were privately upset about this. They saw him as using EA for PR, and thus creating a key liability that could come back and bite EA.

And come back and bite EA it did, about as poorly as one could have imagined.

So back to Anthropic. They're taking the opposite approach. Maintaining about as much distance from EA as they semi-honestly can. I expect that this is good for Anthropic, especially given EA's reputation post-FTX.

And I think it's probably also safe for EA. 

I'd be a lot more nervous if Anthropic were trying to tie its reputation to EA. I could easily see Anthropic having a scandal in the future, and it's also pretty awkward to tie EA's reputation to an AI developer.

To be clear, I'm not saying that people from Anthropic should actively lie or deceive. So I have mixed feelings about their recent quotes for Wired. But big-picture, I feel decent about their general stance to keep distance. To me, this seems likely in the interest of both parties. 

Per Bloomberg, the Trump administration is considering restricting the equivalency determination for 501(c)3s as early as Tuesday. The equivalency determination allows for 501(c)3s to regrant money to foreign, non-tax-exempt organisations while maintaining tax-exempt status, so long as an attorney or tax practitioner claims the organisation is equivalent to a local tax-exempt one.

I’m not an expert on this, but it sounds really bad. I guess it remains to be seen if they go through with it.

Regardless, the administration is allegedly also preparing to directly strip environmental and political (i.e. groups he doesn’t like, not necessarily just any policy org) non-profits of their tax exempt status. In the past week, he’s also floated trying to rescind the tax exempt status of Harvard. From what I understand, such an Executive Order is illegal under U.S. law (to whatever extent that matters anymore), unless Trump instructs the State Department to designate them foreign terrorist organisations, at which point all their funds are frozen too.

These are dark times. Stay safe 🖤