Thanks for writing this, Jeff!

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Thanks for writing this. As someone who has at times steered people toward political donations, I wanted to chime in and say: I'm scared, too.

I feel like the original story, together with your comment, form a really beautiful encapsulation of what EA is.

Yeah -- I have instructions that I'm happy to send to people privately. (That said, I've stopped recommending that people do bank transfers, because my sense is that the process is annoying enough that way fewer than 96% of intentions-to-do-bank-transfers end in actual bank transfers.)

No, just that, contra your title, most EAs would have been abolitionists, the way that I understand the word "abolitionist" to be used.

In my vocabulary, "abolitionist" means "person who is opposed to slavery" (e.g. "would vote to abolish slavery"). My sense is that this is the common meaning of the term, but let me know if you disagree.

It seems, then, that the analogy would be "person who is opposed to factory farming" (e.g. "would vote to outlaw factory farms"), instead of "vegetarian" and "animal donor". The latter two are much higher standards, as they require personal sacrifice (in the same way that "not consuming products made with slave labor" was a much higher standard -- one that very few people held themselves to).

The vast majority of EAs oppose factory farming, and I think they would have also supported the abolition of slavery.

In October, I wrote a post encouraging AI safety donors to donate to the Alex Bores campaign. Since then, I've spent a bunch of time thinking about the best donations for making the long-term future go well, and I still think that the Alex Bores campaign is the best donation opportunity for U.S. citizens/permanent residents. Under my views, donations to his campaign made this month are about 25x better than donations to standard AI safety 501(c)(3) organizations like LTFF.^[1] I also think that donations made after December 31st are substantially almost 2 times less effective than donations made this month, because a lot of the value of donations to Bores comes from the value of signaling campaign strength and consolidating support, rather than from spending money on ads, and donations made in January won't become public until April. (See more discussion in my post.)

Some things has happened since then. The RAISE Act, Bores' AI safety legislation, was signed by the governor!^[2] Also, the big tech super PAC announced that Alex Bores would be their first target. I've been really impressed with how Bores has handled the situation -- see here for an interview with him about that. Bores also just went on Bloomberg's odd lots podcast; I haven't listened to it myself, but I heard that it was a good episode. I have generally been consistently impressed with Bores since the launch of his campaign.

If you're thinking about end-of-year donations, I strongly encourage you to consider donating to Bores. Here's a link to donate, though I recommend thinking about career considerations of political donations before deciding to donate. The maximum legal donation is $7,000.

(I think the second best donation opportunity is the Scott Wiener campaign -- here's a link to donate. Make sure to use this link rather than going to his website, because that'll let his team know that you're donating for AI safety reasons.)

1. ^{^}

   In part, this is because of my bullishness on making the future go well conditioned on no AI takeover. I think Bores is particularly good from this perspective because he came across as particularly competent and high-integrity in a way that I expect to be important beyond AI takeover risk. For donors who only care about mitigating AI takeover, my guess is that donating to Bores is only around 10x better than e.g. LTFF.

2. ^{^}

   Admittedly, in a weakened form, but I'm excited nonetheless.

What's the Great AI Timelines Scare of 2017?

Thanks for the correction!