This is a special post for quick takes by Ryan Greenblatt. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Curated and popular this week
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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TL;DR
Exactly one year after receiving our seed funding upon completion of the Charity Entrepreneurship program, we (Miri and Evan) look back on our first year of operations, discuss our plans for the future, and launch our fundraising for our Year 2 budget.
Family Planning could be one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available. Reducing unintended pregnancies lowers maternal mortality, decreases rates of unsafe abortions, and reduces maternal morbidity. Increasing the interval between births lowers under-five mortality. Allowing women to control their reproductive health leads to improved education and a significant increase in their income. Many excellent organisations have laid out the case for Family Planning, most recently GiveWell.[1]
In many low and middle income countries, many women who want to delay or prevent their next pregnancy can not access contraceptives due to poor supply chains and high costs. Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI) was incubated by Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2024 with the goal of increasing the availability of contraceptives and other essential medicines.[2]
The Problem
Maternal mortality is a serious problem in Nigeria. Globally, almost 28.5% of all maternal deaths occur in Nigeria. This is driven by Nigeria’s staggeringly high maternal mortality rate of 1,047 deaths per 100,000 live births, the third highest in the world. To illustrate the magnitude, for the U.K., this number is 8 deaths per 100,000 live births.
While there are many contributing factors, 29% of pregnancies in Nigeria are unintended. 6 out of 10 women of reproductive age in Nigeria have an unmet need for contraception, and fulfilling these needs would likely prevent almost 11,000 maternal deaths per year.
Additionally, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that every dollar spent on contraceptive services beyond the current level would reduce the cost of pregnancy-related and newborn care by three do
Reducing the probability that AI takeover involves violent conflict seems leveraged for reducing near-term harm
Often in discussions of AI x-safety, people seem to assume that misaligned AI takeover will result in extinction. However, I think AI takeover is reasonably likely to not cause extinction due to the misaligned AI(s) effectively putting a small amount of weight on the preferences of currently alive humans. Some reasons for this are discussed here. Of course, misaligned AI takeover still seems existentially bad and probably eliminates a high fraction of future value from a longtermist perspective.
(In this post when I use the term “misaligned AI takeover”, I mean misaligned AIs acquiring most of the influence and power over the future. This could include “takeover” via entirely legal means, e.g., misaligned AIs being granted some notion of personhood and property rights and then becoming extremely wealthy.)
However, even if AIs effectively put a bit of weight on the preferences of current humans it's possible that large numbers of humans die due to violent conflict between a misaligned AI faction (likely including some humans) and existing human power structures. In particular, it might be that killing large numbers of humans (possibly as collateral damage) makes it easier for the misaligned AI faction to take over. By large numbers of deaths, I mean over hundreds of millions dead, possibly billions.
But, it's somewhat unclear whether violent conflict will be the best route to power for misaligned AIs and this also might be possible to influence. See also here for more discussion.
So while one approach to avoid violent AI takeover is to just avoid AI takeover, it might also be possible to just reduce the probability that AI takeover involves violent conflict. That said, the direct effects of interventions to reduce the probability of violence don't clearly matter from an x-risk/longtermist perspective (which might explain why there hasn't historically been much effort here).
(However, I think trying to establish contracts and deals with AIs could be pretty good from a longtermist perspective in the case where AIs don't have fully linear returns to resources. Also, generally reducing conflict seems maybe slightly good from a longtermist perspective.)
So how could we avoid violent conflict conditional on misaligned AI takeover? There are a few hopes:
I'm pretty unsure about what the approaches here look best or are even at all tractable. (It’s possible that some prior work targeted at reducing conflict from the perspective of S-risk could be somewhat applicable.)
Separately, this requires that the AI puts at least a bit of weight on the preferences of current humans (and isn't spiteful), but this seems like a mostly separate angle and it seems like there aren't many interventions here which aren't covered by current alignment efforts. Also, I think this is reasonably likely by default due to reasons discussed in the linked comment above. (The remaining interventions which aren’t covered by current alignment efforts might relate to decision theory (and acausal trade or simulation considerations), informing the AI about moral uncertainty, and ensuring the misaligned AI faction is importantly dependent on humans.)
Returning back to the topic of reducing violence given a small weight on the preferences of current humans, I'm currently most excited about approaches which involve making negotiation between humans and AIs more likely to happen and more likely to succeed (without sacrificing the long run potential of humanity).
A key difficulty here is that AIs might have a first mover advantage and getting in a powerful first strike without tipping its hand might be extremely useful for the AI. See here for more discussion (also linked above). Thus, negotiation might look relatively bad to the AI from this perspective.
We could try to have a negotiation process which is kept secret from the rest of the world or we could try to have preexisting commitments upon which we'd yield large fractions of control to AIs (effectively proxy conflicts).
More weakly, just making negotiation at all seem like a possibility, might be quite useful.
I’m unlikely to spend much if any time working on this topic, but I think this topic probably deserves further investigation.
After thinking about this somewhat more, I don't really have any good proposals, so this seems less promising than I was expecting.
In the context of a misaligned AI takeover, making negotiations and contracts with a misaligned AI in order to allow it to take over does not seem useful to me at all.
A misaligned AI that is in power could simply decide to walk back any promises and ignore any contracts it agreed to. Humans cannot do anything about it because they lost all the power at that point.
Some objections:
- Building better contract enforcement ability might be doable. (Though pretty tricky on enforcing humans to do things and on forcing AIs to do things.)
- Negotation could involve tit-for-tat arrangements.
- Unconditional surrenders can reduce the need for violence if we ensure there is some process for demonstrating that the AI would have succeeded at takeover with very high probabilty. (Note that I'm assuming the AI puts some small amount of weight on the preferences of currently alive humans as I discuss in the parent.)