There's lots of talk about how more EA-aligned funding will attract grifters. The Robin Hanson in me wondered what expensive or hard-to-fake signals exist for (human) alignment.
The first ideas that came to mind:
I don't know whether folks should weight these highly in funding decisions. Probably they all collapse under sufficient pressure.
The kind of grifting that most concerns me within EA would result in a lot of fudging and inflation around reported impact in order to gain money & status. I think the hardest thing is fake, and the main thing we care about protecting, is real, verifiable impact. If there is an influx of money into EA, I would want the first thing to be done is to undertake a lot of new, third-party evaluation with depth. This is not happening today and I have not seen great plans to do so right now.
See also this comment which I also agree with.
One point where I disagree is that I'm more concerned about well-intentioned people genuinely believing their project is extremely valuable, but who lack clear evidence of impact and end up not achieving much. I'm less worried about people deliberately lying/exaggerating to raise money for things they do not themselves believe are impactful.
But of course it's hard to say from the outside, you could always argue that people are secretly doing whatever they're doing just for the money & status, and I've seen people making such claims even when there's tons of evidence to the contrary.
In my view, this one of EA's biggest problem. Even GiveWell rarely bothers to verify numbers if it's boring or manual to do so (e.g. number of people vaccinated, number of bednets delivered). Even when past charity evaluations could be calibrated against third party data sources, nobody bothers. We're allocating billions using tools we've never bother to calibrate.
Without anyone establishing anything resembling ground truth, there is no accurate feedback signal for leaders, grantmakers, donors. When the only signal is what LOOKS impactful, and that's how all money and status is awarded, that's what everyone will clamour after. We're going to learn the wrong lessons, fund the wrong projects, hire the wrong people, and then never find out.
Tons of money. Zero verification. Every fraud's wet dream come true.
Sure, if you can directly measure what you actually want (positive impact), that is of course best :)
Here's another list from Caroline Ellison during the FTX times on valuable signals: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M44i4CiMECP5Xoorz/demandingness-and-time-money-tradeoffs-are-orthogonal (which I'm not sure I agree with, but I found interesting)
I personally think people worry disproportionately about grift on the EA Forum, while implementation challenges and other considerations seem to be bigger risks in practice. (e.g. I don't think the Wytham project or Dispensers for Safe Water would have been more successful if they had been assigned to more vegan or more frugal people)
I agree with all of this. One thing missing is just joining AIS/EA before it was cool/got much more money.
Feels like most of these except the kidney are fairly easily faked or not that relevant. Community engagement and working for your own non-profit are about the first thing anyone seeking to grift will do, as well as people who are sincere (including as others have pointed out, the people who are sincerely wrong)
And Sam Bankman Fried was a vegan who apparently started off with a completely sincere desire to work for animal nonprofits. Treating these as signals and the people complaining about his behaviour and some of the things he said as noise was a bad move.
Earning to give is lonely and requires repeated decisions. This is bad.
If you're earning to give, you are lucky if you have one EtG team-mate. The people you talk to every day do not have moral intuitions similar to yours, and your actions seem weird to them.
If you do direct work, the psychological default every day is to wake up and do work. You are surrounded by people who think the work is important, and whose moral values at least rhyme with your own.
If you earn to give, most days you do not give (you're probably paid bi-weekly, and transaction costs discourage even donating that frequently).
These differences apply continual pressure for EtG folks to become less hard-core than we intended to be. I wish I had more counter-pressure.
[None of these observations are novel]
"If you do direct work, the psychological default every day is to wake up and do work. You are surrounded by people who think the work is important, and whose moral values at least rhyme with your own."
This is true for me, and true for many in richer countries sucha as the awesome AIM crew. In low-income countries though many if not most employees (especially in BINGOS) are there for the money and status in non-profits, rather than the value of the work. I know a number of Ugandans who have found this difficult when they cared about the work while their colleagues were just trying to weasel away as much money on allowances as they could while trying to unnecessarily extend projects to keep their salary going.
I think your major point stands, but direct work doesn't universally come with motivated and encouraging peers.
Very fair, I'm definitely speaking from the perspective of a rich Westerner working with other rich Westerners.
I'm EtG and would love to connect with others. My DMs are open! A bit about me: I'm a SWE based in Europe, and my preferred cause area is animal welfare.
We have a regular EtG meetup in London. You might be interested in setting up something similar where you live, perhaps branching off a preexisting Effective Giving/Giving What We Can group?
Besides my more cold-hearted response below: I agree that EtG is lonely. You are lucky if you have one other EtG'er in the same city. EtG is rare. EtG and feeling committed to it, is even rarer.
Oh totally. I'm lucky to be in the Bay Area where EA is a thing at all.
You don't need to make a donation decision biweekly. That sounds incredibly tiring. You can also set up a recurring donation to the same charity or fund. Or save up and donate once or twice a year. That has the advantage that you can plan some time to think well about your decision.
True, but as a matter of fact don't you continuously reassess your donation decisions? I know I do (I have the impression you do too).
And every time do I that, it really helps to have people around me who I can talk to about it.
Do you reassess more frequently than annually or biannually, which is my impression of the Schelling point frequency for most folks?
Just annually, unless something exceptional changes how I think about these things
Over 40% of my lifetime donations happened this month. I expect to never be able to make that statement again. These are weird times.
For context on why it is extra weird, I've been donating since 2015 and have always donated 10% of my salary each year (or more).
Would you be comfortable sharing what opportunities you gave to, broadly speaking?
In very broad strokes, 20% GiveWell & 80% AI Safety. About half of the AI Safety funds are to 501c4s.
Prior years were about 95% GiveWell or GiveWell top charities.
Feel free to DM me and I can share a CSV of my donations (sharing it publicly still feels kinda weird).
You should judge others on a curve, and probably yourself as well.
Judging others on a curve means that folks see reward for doing more than what is typical. This is just good reinforcement-learning theory, since it is easy to get both feedback on rewarded & not-rewarded actions.
I started writing this thinking that you should NOT judge yourself on a curve, in contrast. IE, you know much more about your own circumstances, and so pretending you are average throws away info. For example, if I only gave 5% of my income to charity, that would be above average for the US. But my opportunities are amazing, and so 5% would in reality show low effort.
But actually, I was just using the wrong comparison group! I shouldn't compare myself to a big group of other people. I have a near perfect comparison group in my past self. If I did a better job this week than last week at work, that's a great sign! If my one-rep max for benchpress has gone down over the last month, that's a bad sign!
This all feels obvious in retrospect.
SMBC by Zach Weinersmith is doing a great job of conveying AI Safety memes more widely.
Relevant comics: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/speech https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/safe https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-17 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-15
I would love to see his take on an illustrated AI Safety book, like 'Open Borders' meets 'If anyone builds it, everyone dies'.
For EA folks in tech, I'm still giving mock interviews. I'm bumping this into quick takes because my post is several years old, and I don't advertise it well.
I'm pledging[1] to stop[2] saving[3] additional[4] money[5] & donate instead.
Fine print:
[1] This pledge is only good until 2030 unless renewed, and becomes invalid if I start working at a nonprofit.
[2] I'm still allowed to max out my 401k, partially since I have a 50% match there.
[3] Spending money is fine. I only spend 5% my gross, so that isn't the problem.
[4] I'm allowed to keep up with inflation, should the stock market not already do so.
[5] I'm allowed to keep saving illiquid equity, although I am encouraged to liquidate to the extent feasible to align with the spirit of the pledge.
[6] If strange situations result in me saving money having more net-expect-impact this year than donating, I'm allowed to do so. Didn't expect this to come up. Less than a 1% increase in savings, I won't beat myself up about it.
I think this is so awesome, and I hope I can make a similar pledge someday, if I achieve enough financial security.
I'm kinda curious how frugally you live with 5%. A concern I have is that as I get older, the lifestyles of those around me improve (since they have more money) and so it's quite hard not to raise my standards as well.
Also I guess you have no concerns about potentially having to support family?
The explanation is IMO less about frugality and more about getting lucky with my career choice. I spend about 45k a year, which is kinda frugal for my peers but globally I'm a spendthrift. I spend about 1.8k a month on rent, a few hundred on food, and take a vacation once or twice a year. My main hobbies are cheap (video games, board games, birding, pickleball).
It is often much easier to make more money than it is to save more. I would personally focus more on that side of the equation.
My wife & I don't want kids. If we did, I probably would want to save more (just for college). But even if we did, we were very lucky to have software engineering jobs over the last 10 years. We'd basically be fine.