I agree that there’s no substitute for thinking about this for yourself, but I think that morally or socially counting “spending thousands of dollars on yourself, an AI researcher” as a donation would be an apalling norm. There are already far too many unmanaged conflicts of interest and trust-me-it’s-good funding arrangements in this space for me, and I think it leads to poor epistemic norms as well as social and organizational dysfunction. I think it’s very easy for donating to people or organizations in your social circle to have substantial negative expected value.
I’m glad that funding for AI safety projects exists, but the >10% of my income I donate will continue going to GiveWell.
I think people who give up large amounts of salary to work in jobs that other people are willing to pay for from an impact perspective should totally consider themselves to have done good comparable to donating the difference between their market salary and their actual salary. This applies to approximately all safety researchers.
They still make a lot less than they would if they optimized for profit (that said, I think most “safety researchers” at big labs are only safety researchers in name and I don’t think anyone would philanthropically pay for their labor, and even if they did, they would still make the world worse according to my model, though others of course disagree with this).
I agree that there’s no substitute for thinking about this for yourself, but I think that morally or socially counting “spending thousands of dollars on yourself, an AI researcher” as a donation would be an apalling norm. There are already far too many unmanaged conflicts of interest and trust-me-it’s-good funding arrangements in this space for me, and I think it leads to poor epistemic norms as well as social and organizational dysfunction. I think it’s very easy for donating to people or organizations in your social circle to have substantial negative expected value.
I’m glad that funding for AI safety projects exists, but the >10% of my income I donate will continue going to GiveWell.
I think people who give up large amounts of salary to work in jobs that other people are willing to pay for from an impact perspective should totally consider themselves to have done good comparable to donating the difference between their market salary and their actual salary. This applies to approximately all safety researchers.
I don’t think it applies to safety researchers at AI Labs though, I am shocked how much those folks can make.
They still make a lot less than they would if they optimized for profit (that said, I think most “safety researchers” at big labs are only safety researchers in name and I don’t think anyone would philanthropically pay for their labor, and even if they did, they would still make the world worse according to my model, though others of course disagree with this).