I'd fund Apart Research significantly less (maybe $50k?) and not fund the debate (also because I've updated away from public outreach as a valuable strategy).
What caused this update? Perhaps I just need to listen to the talk linked below it, but would be interested if you had any more pointed thoughts to share.
I used to not actually believe in heavy-tailed impact. On some level I thought that early rationalists (and to a lesser extent EAs) had "gotten lucky" in being way more right than academic consensus about AI progress. And I thought on some gut level that e.g. Thiel and Musk and so on kept getting lucky, because I didn't want to picture a world in which they were actually just skillful enough to keep succeeding (due to various psychological blockers).
Now, thanks to dealing with a bunch of those blockers, I have internalized to a much greater extent that you can actually be good not just lucky. This means that I'm no longer interested in strategies that involve recruiting a whole bunch of people and hoping something good comes out of it. Instead I am trying to target outreach precisely to the very best people, without compromising much.
Relatedly, I've updated that the very best thinkers in this space are still disproportionately the people who were around very early. The people you need to soften/moderate your message to reach (or who need social proof in order to get involved) are seldom going to be the ones who can think clearly about this stuff. And we are very bottlenecked on high-quality thinking.
(My past self needed a lot of social proof to get involved in AI safety in the first place, but I also "got lucky" in the sense of being exposed to enough world-class people that I was able to update my mental models a lot—e.g. watching the OpenAI board coup close up, various conversations with OpenAI cofounders, etc. This doesn't seem very replicable—though I'm trying to convey a bunch of the models I've gained on my blog, e.g. in this post.)
Still working my way through the talk and post mentioned, so pardon the tardiness, but does that mean you expect the highest quality talent will naturally find it's way to the field?
I suppose I see a tension between "outreach only to the best" and generally walking away from outreach. E.g. do the fellowships seem like a reasonable bet to you now that they're super competitive and raising their bar, or are they still too general in scope and we should instead be doing something like running an exclusive side event at NeurIPS?
Put more succinctly: should we be raising the bar for the quality of talent reached, or working to pivot outreach to those who already show strong signs of success in relevant fields?
Helpful updates though, thanks for taking the time to share them.
Here's a list of my donations so far this year (put together as part of thinking through whether I and others should participate in an OpenAI equity donation round). They are roughly in chronological order (though it's possible I missed one or two). I include some thoughts on what I've learned and what I'm now doing differently at the bottom.
As a meta-level note, I originally posted this content to LessWrong as a shortform, but since donations are a more central topic on the EA forum it seemed appropriate to make it a top-level post here. However, I do want to highlight that I no longer identify as an EA (this post hits many of the key points why) and have very mixed feelings about the EA attitude towards donating. I'm mainly posting this here because I hope that the reasoning and conclusions I've reached below are useful for EAs to see, not because I'm trying to inspire others to copy me. I don't want to encourage people to donate (even to the same places as I did) unless you already have a few million dollars in assets, since I want people who have influence over the EA community (and humanity in general) to be making decisions from an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. That's also a crucial priority on a personal level, and I'm only donating to an extent that's consistent with maintaining that myself.
Total so far: ~$460k (of which $360k was my own money, and $100k Manifund's money).
Note that my personal donations this year are >10x greater than any previous year; this is because I cashed out some of my OpenAI equity for the first time. So this is the first year that I've invested serious time and energy into donating. What have I learned?
My biggest shift is from thinking of myself as donating "on behalf of the AI safety community" to specifically donating to things that I personally am unusually excited about. I have only a very small proportion of the AI safety community's money; also, I have fairly idiosyncratic views that I've put a lot of time into developing. So I now want to donate in a way which "bets on" my research taste, since that's the best way to potentially get outsized returns. More concretely:
Even more recently, I've decided that I can bet on my research taste most effectively by simply hiring research assistants to work for me. I'm uncertain how much this will cost me, but if it goes well it'll be most of my "donation" budget for the next year. I could potentially get funding for this, but at least to start off with, it feels valuable to not be beholden to any external funders.
More generally, I'd be excited if more people who are wealthy from working at AI labs used that money to make more leveraged bets on their own research (e.g. by working independently and hiring collaborators). This seems like a good way to produce the kinds of innovative research that are hard to incentivize under other institutional setups. I'm currently writing a post elaborating on this intuition.
In case you read the comments here: do you have a short form / a blog post on this (even from someone else) that you'd like to link to?
Richard’s ‘Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity’ post and follow-up comment talk about this (though ofc maybe there’s more to Richard’s view than what’s discussed there). Select quotes:
"I don't want to encourage people to donate (even to the same places as I did) unless you already have a few million dollars in assets"
I do see advantages of the abundance mindset, but your threshold is extremely high-it excludes nearly everyone in developed countries, let alone the world. Plenty of people without millions of dollars of assets have an abundance mindset (including myself).