Early last year Longview Philanthropy invited me to attend an AI safety fundraising dinner they were hosting for Jane Street traders in Hong Kong as an expert guest. In the lead-up, I got on a call with them, and gave my honest opinions about their funding recommendations.
I summarized these opinions in a follow-up email to them at the time as “Overall I’m very excited about three of them ([redacted], [redacted], [redacted]), and moderately excited about most of the rest. But I’m pretty skeptical of some of the policy advocacy (particularly [redacted] and [redacted]).” (Though it’s possible I came across as more pessimistic in the call than I sound in this summary.)
As a result, they rescinded the invitation. It’s not clear to me that they were wrong to do so, because my sense is that it’s normal to prioritize bringing more sympathetic experts to such events. EDIT: Upon reflection, even if this would be normal in most philanthropic contexts, I want to hold organizations associated with AI safety to a much higher standard. I expect that selection effects like this one add up over time to give funders a distorted view of the ecosystem, and IMO a more virtuous fundraising process would find ways to mitigate them—e.g. as the AI Futures Project did by asking me to release a critique of their scenario. I expect this kind of virtue would, if widely adopted, add up to make the AI safety ecosystem much healthier. (To Longview’s credit, they were interested in talking further about my criticisms privately, which I didn’t end up getting around to due to busyness.)
I wanted to share this anecdote primarily to give people a better sense of the kinds of dynamics that block information flows in the AI safety community. As another example of such dynamics, I’ve redacted the names of the charities from my quote above because Longview asked me to treat their recommendations as confidential at the time (and as far as I can tell, they’re still not public). However, I’m pretty skeptical that this kind of secrecy is healthy for a philanthropic organization.
EDIT: since I’ve edited the text above to take a stronger moral stance, I also want to clarify that I didn’t hold my current opinions about the importance of transparency at the time, and called Longview’s decision “very understandable” in an email to them. So I don’t want this post to convey “I was wronged by Longview”, but rather “we both participated in a dynamic that with the benefit of hindsight I consider to be unhealthy and worth describing publicly”. I should have expressed that at the time, and if I had they may well have changed their minds.
Thank you for writing this. I thought I’d chime in with another example of this kind of thing I’d recently seen in (perhaps, contributed to) in our own work at Manifund.
A couple of months back, we were just kicking off our Falcon Fund (rapid grants for animal welfare, esp AI x animals) - see https://manifund.org/projects/falcon-fund. My original draft stated fairly strongly that the existing EA Animal Welfare Fund was dispensing money way too slowly eg couple months behind schedule for reviews; which was part of what we were excited to create Falcon. However, I was asked to remove this kind of internicine criticism from the launch post, on the grounds that (stylized) “everyone already knows that AWF is slow” and “we don’t to want to scare donors and reduce even further the small amount of money AW gets”
Also, one of the animal charity founders who Marcus thought was one of the best examples of donation he’s made also asked to be removed, because they did not want to be associated with EA, even though many of their donations come from EA sources.
I complied on both of these cases on a general heuristic of trying to be polite and play nice and aim to be positive sum with our counterparties, but imo these hurt Falcon’s ability to raise and Manifund’s general mission of increasing transparency in the ecosystem. I’m still not sure what the right call was.
Imagine if early EA orgs had refused to publicly criticize conventional philanthropy because they didn’t want to reduce the amount of money going to those causes. Showing why one donation opportunity is better than another is The Whole Point, and conditioning people’s access to information or opportunities on the basis of their willingness to keep quiet regarding your inefficiencies is one of the patterns upstream of failures in the traditional nonprofit ecosystem. Failures EA’s entire brand is based on criticizing.
I think the choices you and Richard have made are reasonable/locally prosocial, but the people who asked you to make them should change their behavior.
(It‘s also plausible to me that the reasons they gave you are not reflective of their true reasons, in which case they should surface their true reasons.)
Thank you for sharing that this happened, and thanks also to Richard!
Not sure the bar for ‘common’ but I’m aware of maybe half a dozen roving donation funds that don’t disclose more about themselves than is legally required (or maybe have heard a handful of different stories from different people about the same one? Unclear).
AFAIK you have to disclose to the government, so someone at your org always knows the proximal source, and an auditable paper trail usually exists back to the ultimate source (although there are probably ways to thwart this kind of tracing, even by the government, although my guess is most of these are illegal, unethical, or both; maybe there’s some way to do it that’s ~fine).
I think categorically not accepting this money might basically surrender whole cause areas to the CG brain trust, since many of the bets of anonymous donors are uncorrelated w CG grant making, which makes them especially valuable if you’re in a position to receive them (eg have already been rejected by CG, or don’t want to ask them for some other reason). It may also cause less in-community dollars to go to philanthropy, since it’s relatively common to want to bet against yourself via donation, which can create weird optics for people who are otherwise well-known to hold a particular view, but is actually just a totally coherent strategy. (Eg imagine if you’re a grant maker at CG but also independently wealthy and want to make some unrestricted calls with your own money from time to time without it changing perception of CG’s house view or your own personal view to the extent that it’s publicly known; this is an entirely fictional example, but maybe illustrates one use case for anonymous giving).
For the avoidance of doubt/admitting a COI on my part: MIRI received a sizable anonymous donation a few years ago, and another (smaller one) a few months ago. This doesn’t bother me, because MIRI has refused funding from certain sources in the past (eg Epstein), and I’ve generally seen a lot of costly high-integrity moves behind the scenes. I don’t now and probably will never know where that money came from, but Malo does and that’s good enough for me.
[importantly these are reasons it doesn’t bother ME; I’m not confident I could convince someone who doesn’t already trust Eliezer and Malo that it shouldn’t bother THEM]
@Elizabeth Disclosing funding sources enables the public to identify conflicts of interest. On the balance, I think it’s better to prevent conflicts of interest than it is to provide grantmakers with optical cover for bet-hedging (re: yams post, perhaps I don’t understand the pressures on grantmakers here).
One mechanism that could solve this without causing interpersonal grief is some sort of third party exit poll platform for funding applications, basically a “Glassdoor for Philanthropy” which would make it common knowledge which funds do fast turnarounds and other desiderata.
For the anonymous grantee thing, maybe you say something like “no more than 10% of falcon donations will be to anonymous parties”. I think it’s principled to be boundedly transparent, it’s like principled lessetarianism
That might solve the issue of applicants choosing where to apply, but I don’t think glassdoor-style data would make AWF any happier about Austin bringing up the unfavorable comparison in his marketing copy.
Totally agree—but Austin could sidestep that by just pointing to “our Gd4Phil score is really good” and not feel any need to point out anything about anyone else’s score
Thank you for sharing. Giving good criticism is really difficult in general, I’ve found that the expected norms when communicating with a grantmaking/fundraising audience can feel much more reserved than the register I’d use with technical or executive staff. I’ve settled into a pattern where I write very candid feedback, post it, then filter/translate the original through an LLM and link to the sanitised/”professional” version, which doesn’t seem ideal at all.
I try to be sharp and sincere but the directness of the language which comes natively to me can in some contexts come across as caustic. That said, I don’t have the full picture, but from what you’ve described I think Longview was wrong to rescind the invitation. Your dialect is very clear from your public writing, and if that was a problem for them then they shouldn’t have invited you in the first place.
Early last year Longview Philanthropy invited me to attend an AI safety fundraising dinner they were hosting for Jane Street traders in Hong Kong as an expert guest. In the lead-up, I got on a call with them, and gave my honest opinions about their funding recommendations.
I summarized these opinions in a follow-up email to them at the time as “Overall I’m very excited about three of them ([redacted], [redacted], [redacted]), and moderately excited about most of the rest. But I’m pretty skeptical of some of the policy advocacy (particularly [redacted] and [redacted]).” (Though it’s possible I came across as more pessimistic in the call than I sound in this summary.)
As a result, they rescinded the invitation.
It’s not clear to me that they were wrong to do so, because my sense is that it’s normal to prioritize bringing more sympathetic experts to such events.EDIT: Upon reflection, even if this would be normal in most philanthropic contexts, I want to hold organizations associated with AI safety to a much higher standard. I expect that selection effects like this one add up over time to give funders a distorted view of the ecosystem, and IMO a more virtuous fundraising process would find ways to mitigate them—e.g. as the AI Futures Project did by asking me to release a critique of their scenario. I expect this kind of virtue would, if widely adopted, add up to make the AI safety ecosystem much healthier. (To Longview’s credit, they were interested in talking further about my criticisms privately, which I didn’t end up getting around to due to busyness.)I wanted to share this anecdote primarily to give people a better sense of the kinds of dynamics that block information flows in the AI safety community. As another example of such dynamics, I’ve redacted the names of the charities from my quote above because Longview asked me to treat their recommendations as confidential at the time (and as far as I can tell, they’re still not public). However, I’m pretty skeptical that this kind of secrecy is healthy for a philanthropic organization.
EDIT: since I’ve edited the text above to take a stronger moral stance, I also want to clarify that I didn’t hold my current opinions about the importance of transparency at the time, and called Longview’s decision “very understandable” in an email to them. So I don’t want this post to convey “I was wronged by Longview”, but rather “we both participated in a dynamic that with the benefit of hindsight I consider to be unhealthy and worth describing publicly”. I should have expressed that at the time, and if I had they may well have changed their minds.
Thank you for writing this. I thought I’d chime in with another example of this kind of thing I’d recently seen in (perhaps, contributed to) in our own work at Manifund.
A couple of months back, we were just kicking off our Falcon Fund (rapid grants for animal welfare, esp AI x animals) - see https://manifund.org/projects/falcon-fund. My original draft stated fairly strongly that the existing EA Animal Welfare Fund was dispensing money way too slowly eg couple months behind schedule for reviews; which was part of what we were excited to create Falcon. However, I was asked to remove this kind of internicine criticism from the launch post, on the grounds that (stylized) “everyone already knows that AWF is slow” and “we don’t to want to scare donors and reduce even further the small amount of money AW gets”
Also, one of the animal charity founders who Marcus thought was one of the best examples of donation he’s made also asked to be removed, because they did not want to be associated with EA, even though many of their donations come from EA sources.
I complied on both of these cases on a general heuristic of trying to be polite and play nice and aim to be positive sum with our counterparties, but imo these hurt Falcon’s ability to raise and Manifund’s general mission of increasing transparency in the ecosystem. I’m still not sure what the right call was.
Imagine if early EA orgs had refused to publicly criticize conventional philanthropy because they didn’t want to reduce the amount of money going to those causes. Showing why one donation opportunity is better than another is The Whole Point, and conditioning people’s access to information or opportunities on the basis of their willingness to keep quiet regarding your inefficiencies is one of the patterns upstream of failures in the traditional nonprofit ecosystem. Failures EA’s entire brand is based on criticizing.
I think the choices you and Richard have made are reasonable/locally prosocial, but the people who asked you to make them should change their behavior.
(It‘s also plausible to me that the reasons they gave you are not reflective of their true reasons, in which case they should surface their true reasons.)
Thank you for sharing that this happened, and thanks also to Richard!
Is it a common thing in the EA philanthropy sphere for grantees to take funding without disclosing its source? This strikes me as very bad.
Not sure the bar for ‘common’ but I’m aware of maybe half a dozen roving donation funds that don’t disclose more about themselves than is legally required (or maybe have heard a handful of different stories from different people about the same one? Unclear).
AFAIK you have to disclose to the government, so someone at your org always knows the proximal source, and an auditable paper trail usually exists back to the ultimate source (although there are probably ways to thwart this kind of tracing, even by the government, although my guess is most of these are illegal, unethical, or both; maybe there’s some way to do it that’s ~fine).
I think categorically not accepting this money might basically surrender whole cause areas to the CG brain trust, since many of the bets of anonymous donors are uncorrelated w CG grant making, which makes them especially valuable if you’re in a position to receive them (eg have already been rejected by CG, or don’t want to ask them for some other reason). It may also cause less in-community dollars to go to philanthropy, since it’s relatively common to want to bet against yourself via donation, which can create weird optics for people who are otherwise well-known to hold a particular view, but is actually just a totally coherent strategy. (Eg imagine if you’re a grant maker at CG but also independently wealthy and want to make some unrestricted calls with your own money from time to time without it changing perception of CG’s house view or your own personal view to the extent that it’s publicly known; this is an entirely fictional example, but maybe illustrates one use case for anonymous giving).
For the avoidance of doubt/admitting a COI on my part: MIRI received a sizable anonymous donation a few years ago, and another (smaller one) a few months ago. This doesn’t bother me, because MIRI has refused funding from certain sources in the past (eg Epstein), and I’ve generally seen a lot of costly high-integrity moves behind the scenes. I don’t now and probably will never know where that money came from, but Malo does and that’s good enough for me.
[importantly these are reasons it doesn’t bother ME; I’m not confident I could convince someone who doesn’t already trust Eliezer and Malo that it shouldn’t bother THEM]
@Elizabeth Disclosing funding sources enables the public to identify conflicts of interest. On the balance, I think it’s better to prevent conflicts of interest than it is to provide grantmakers with optical cover for bet-hedging (re: yams post, perhaps I don’t understand the pressures on grantmakers here).
One mechanism that could solve this without causing interpersonal grief is some sort of third party exit poll platform for funding applications, basically a “Glassdoor for Philanthropy” which would make it common knowledge which funds do fast turnarounds and other desiderata.
For the anonymous grantee thing, maybe you say something like “no more than 10% of falcon donations will be to anonymous parties”. I think it’s principled to be boundedly transparent, it’s like principled lessetarianism
That might solve the issue of applicants choosing where to apply, but I don’t think glassdoor-style data would make AWF any happier about Austin bringing up the unfavorable comparison in his marketing copy.
Totally agree—but Austin could sidestep that by just pointing to “our Gd4Phil score is really good” and not feel any need to point out anything about anyone else’s score
Thank you for sharing. Giving good criticism is really difficult in general, I’ve found that the expected norms when communicating with a grantmaking/fundraising audience can feel much more reserved than the register I’d use with technical or executive staff. I’ve settled into a pattern where I write very candid feedback, post it, then filter/translate the original through an LLM and link to the sanitised/”professional” version, which doesn’t seem ideal at all.
I try to be sharp and sincere but the directness of the language which comes natively to me can in some contexts come across as caustic. That said, I don’t have the full picture, but from what you’ve described I think Longview was wrong to rescind the invitation. Your dialect is very clear from your public writing, and if that was a problem for them then they shouldn’t have invited you in the first place.