This is a special post for quick takes by Seth Ariel Green 🔸. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I would like for people who are giving away money to tell us where the money comes from.
- BluePerch "is a new animal welfare grantmaker" planning to give away several million dollars. Great! Where does that money come from? Who is the donor or group of donors? Their EA post does not say, and neither does their website.
- Tilt Collective supports "efforts that improve access to nutritious, affordable, sustainable food and build on local agricultural knowledge." Their hiring page says they are a "a philanthropic initiative that advances a balanced food system." Their twitter was last updated in 2024. Their homepage features a report, a TED talk, and nothing else. Every year, they put on a Climate Week event called Food Day, which they're currently promoting on LinkedIn. (The food was very good there last year and the whole thing had signs of being well-funded.) Other than that, there's no mention of programs supported, where the money comes from, or how they make decisions about whom to support.
- Renaissance Philanthropy, same story.
You might think, it's their money, they can do with it what they please, and very wealthy people have good reasons to want privacy. To which I say:
- A core lesson of FTX is to be cautious about whom you take money from and how you relate to them. Like Gus says on The Wire, "Maybe you win a Pulitzer behind this stuff. And maybe you gotta give it back.”
- Obscurity helps insiders navigate and keeps everyone else out. I prefer legibility and egalitarian systems, which I think are more consistent with EA values.
I agree!
I believe Renaissance Philanthropy isn't exactly itself a funder or funded by any one donor, but is instead a collection of Funds, each of which have their own donors (and many of which are multi-donor), while RenPhil provides operational infrastructure. They have more information on the model here. So the question might be better targeted at the specific funds than RenPhil itself, and some of the funds do report their donors (e.g. see the bottom of this page).
Ah, so from this and a now-deleted sister comment I am learning that I don't understand Renaissance very well. (Or rather that I clicked "About" instead of "Our Work")
I also found how they worked / what they were really ambiguous for a long time, so had happened to look into it at some point.
Tilt has received funding from the Ikea Foundation. Not sure about the other two orgs.
I agree with your overall take of funders should be transparent (while also noting I myself have worked with anonymous donors).
Yep, and I knew this because (like you) I am (arguably something of) an insider. but if you don't happen to know this -- well actually I just googled it and indeed Ikea shows up. So I guess a curious person can sometimes get to the bottom of this 😃
Apropos of Maxime's Crunch Time is Now. Drop Everything, I wonder if folks who think AI is reasonably likely to kill us all have a clear set of things that, if they saw them, would lead them to say "I was wrong, AI is not an existential threat" or even "I was right, thank goodness we acted and AI is no longer an existential threat." I don't see AI as likely to kill us all, and so long as I die of natural causes, or if I live longer than a natural lifespan in some kind of post-singularity bliss, I will easily be able to say, AI wasn't so bad after all. Is there a mirror image to that? A set of "I was wrong to be a doomer" conditions?
From a quick scan, many prominent AI critics have conditions that would lead them to say, it's now safe to move forward, but very little in the "I was wrong" category. I suppose it's hard to prove a negative -- "this is no longer a threat" -- but I'm curious how folks think about this.
I have twice recently "gently counseled" people on EA forum norms when they come in, in my opinion, a little too hot for this rather cool medium 😃 is there something official/CEA-endorsed on this subject? If not, should I/someone write it? I could point them to Scout Mindset but that's kind of a high barrier to entry.
Lizka's essentials of forum discussion are the closest I know of to something official on this.
Thank you, I've now hyperlinked to the piece in both of my prior comments where I use the word "norms" (in part so that I remember it next time 😃)
And they call us a cult. A 𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑡!
I skimmed your examples and think neither should meet the bar for a 'little telling off.'
In light of the Netflix doccos coming out later this year, and whatever other scandal might be waiting around the corner, I think we ought to ease up on this level of public language policing. The critics are coming; let's not make their job easy for them (nor convert from within our own community).
- I think it’s ok in most cases to ask someone to be nice on the internet. To quote Juana Molina, "No seas antipática. No seas antipática con tu mamá. La la la." Words to live by.
- I seriously doubt this is going to be the example they focus on when they send the trains
- The first person I lightly flambéed also said “sorry I was used to less nice parts of the internet” so I guess that went down well
- When someone says “be nice” and it gets more upvotes than the post itself that provides a more meaningful signal of how a post went astray than just downvoting the original post
So I am not persuaded and will keep doing my chastise-y hall monitor thing 😤😤😤
Hahaha, alright. I appreciate the self-awareness. :) I, too, have words to live by, even Spanish ones.
I really appreciate this Seth :) The norms that Mo links below are the official answer to this, we use them when we moderate. We're working on a version which is shorter/catchier so it can appear in some form for new users.
So far I've been sending people messages similar to your gentle counselling. Perhaps I should consider doing them as public comments - it looks like yours have gone down well.
👋 I have joined the modern world and am writing a Substack about research on ending factory farming 😃
Here's a post on a strong study about the effects of watching an especially upsetting documentary.
Neat! Consider link posting as a top level post to make this easier to engage with?
I think if I end up writing something that's particularly EA-aligned, e.g. a cost-benefit analysis of some intervention, I'd do that. as is I'm happy to err on the side of not annoying people when promoting my stuff 😃
Thanks for the piece! Was thinking about this potential effect the other day as well, also for literature. Would think repetition could matter as well - one single exposure to one documentary may not be helpful, but multiple different ones may. Additionally, it would probably be more effective if some part of the documentary make the viewer feel connected personally. But these are conjectures and I am not sure.
I was just writing an email to a colleague about the difference between one-offs and repeated exposure. Just speculating here, but documentaries kind of are one-offs -- who in the world is going to watch Dominion a second time -- but op-eds, EA forum posts, etc. are more a a "repeated, spaced exposure" model of behavioral change. And that's going to mean a very different evaluation strategy.
As to personal connection to the material, you might enjoy
| Alblas | 2023 | “Meat” Me in the Middle: The Potential of a Social Norm Feedback Intervention in the Context of Meat Consumption – A Conceptual Replication | 10.1080/17524032.2022.2149587 |
Which basically tells people how much meat they're eating in comparison to a norm, and then gives them a 😃 or a :( depending on whether they're above or below average. So that's kind of an attempt to get people personally connected to the broader mission.
For more on this literature in general, see Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis
I worry that the pro-AI/slow-AI/stop-AI has the salient characteristics of a tribal dividing line that could tear EA apart:
- "I want to accelerate AI" vs "I want to decelerate AI" is a big, clear line in the sand that allows for a lot clearer signaling of one's tribal identity than something more universally agreeable like "malaria is bad"
- Up to the point where AI either kills us or doesn't, there's basically in principle no way to verify that one side or the other is "right", which means everyone can keep arguing about it forever
- The discourse around it is more hostile/less-trust-presuming than the typical EA discussion, which tends to be collegial (to a fault, some might argue)
You might think it's worth having this civl war to clarify what EA is about. I don't. I would like for us to get on a different track.
This thought prompted by discussion around one of Matthew_Barnett's quick takes.
For what it's worth, I really don't think many EAs are in the AI accelerationist camp at least. Matthew Barnett seems fairly unusual to me here.
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
Thanks for sharing Seth. Would you mind DMing me their name? I'll ban the account, and mods will look into this.
I would like for people who are giving away money to tell us where the money comes from.
You might think, it's their money, they can do with it what they please, and very wealthy people have good reasons to want privacy. To which I say:
I also found how they worked / what they were really ambiguous for a long time, so had happened to look into it at some point.