Seth Ariel Green 's Quick takes

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:

1. 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.”
2. Obscurity helps insiders navigate and keeps everyone else out. I prefer legibility and egalitarian systems, which I think are more consistent with EA values. 

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. 

👋 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.

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.

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