Abby Babby
Posts 3
Comments152
I appreciate the effort you’ve put into this, and your analysis makes sense based on publicly available data and your worldview. However, many policy organizations are working on initiatives that haven’t been/can't be publicly discussed, which might lead you to make some incorrect conclusions. For example, I'm glad Malo clarified MIRI does indeed work with policymakers in this comment thread.
Tone is difficult to convey online, so I want to clarify I'm saying the next statement gently: I think if you do this kind of report--that a ton of people are reading and taking seriously--you have some responsibility to send your notes to the mentioned organizations for fact checking before you post.
I also want to note: the EA community does not have good intuitions around how politics works or what kind of information is net productive for policy organizations to share. The solution is not to blindly defer to people who say they understand politics, but I am worried that our community norms actively work against us in this space. Consider checking some of your criticisms of policy orgs with a person who has worked for the US Government; getting an insider's perspective on what makes sense/seems suspicious could be useful.
This course sounds cool! Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be too much relevant material out there.
This is a stretch, but I think there's probably some cool computational modeling to be done with human value datasets (e.g., 70,000 responses to variations on the trolley problem). What kinds of universal human values can we uncover? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911517117
For digestible content on technical AI safety, Robert Miles makes good videos. https://www.youtube.com/c/robertmilesai
From what I understand, the MacArthur foundation was one of the main funders of nuclear security research, including at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but they massively reduced their funding of nuclear projects and no large funder has replaced them. https://www.macfound.org/grantee/carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace-2457/
(I've edited this comment, I got confused between the MacArthur foundation and the various Carnegie philanthropic efforts.)
Thanks for being thoughtful about this! Could you clarify what your cost benefit analysis was here? I'm quite curious!