CEA and CFAR don’t do anything, to my knowledge, that would increase these odds, except in exceedingly indirect ways.
People from CEA, in collaboration with FHI, have been meeting with people in the UK government, and are producing policy briefs on unprecedented risks from new technologies, including AI (the first brief will go on the FHI website in the near future). These meetings arose as a result of GWWC media attention. CEA’s most recent hire, Owen Cotton-Barratt, will be helping with this work.
Hi Jonathan,
First off, thanks for putting so much time into writing this extensive list of questions and doubts you have about CEA. Unlike for-profit activities, we don’t have immediate feedback effects telling us when we’re doing well and when we’re doing badly, so criticism is an important countermeasure to make sure we do things as well as possible. We therefore really welcome people taking a critical eye to our activities.
As the person who wrote the original CEA material here on LessWrong, and the person who you mention above, I feel I should be the one to collate a response to your questions. However, because of other commitments (managing; fundraising; writing my first piece for a magazine column), it will be a few days before I can get this to you in a form I’d feel happy with. I hope that’s ok.
Before then I’ll just mention a few things in order to make things a bit clearer to the audience.
In what you wrote a couple of comments made it sound as if you’d had an in-depth conversation with me on these issues; whereas really the context of the only exchange we’ve had is my giving a short talk to a group of about 15 people, of very varied backgrounds. You asked a few questions and there was discussion afterwards, but this must have only taken up about 10-15 minutes of time. Though I would very much like to, I haven’t ever spoken with you or Alexey one-on-one.
Similarly, in your response to Luke you say that Adam works full-time at CEA. I think there’s some disagreement between the two of you on the extent to which he had signed off on the content. But, at any rate, it’s worth noting that Adam is an intern at CEA. This means he does contribute a full working week for CEA, but he is not an employee. He’s therefore not the person to go when it comes to high-level evaluation of CEA.
You mention an internal estimate of £1700 for the value of a new pledge. None of us are familiar with this figure, and we’re confused about where it could have come from.
You suggest that CEA has ~4000 people on its mailing lists. The correct figure is less than half that (unless you include TLYCS, which you might have been thinking of, which does have in excess of 4000 on its mailing list).
You estimate GWWC’s research capacity at 6 staff for last year. This is actually more than an order of magnitude higher than the true figure. In fact, the average number of paid employees (full-time equivalent) we have had working on all aspects of 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can over the last six months is only 3.7.
As a more general point, I think we should also be careful to distinguish whether CEA has acted optimally in terms of utility-maximization (to which the answer is certainly not), and whether it gets a return on investment which is better than 1:1.
In my follow-up comment, I’ll talk about some of the many concerns you’ve raised that we share, and the issues over which we might be making big mistakes. I’ll also be able to give a bit more background about our activities, and I’ll be able to answer your questions. Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Best Wishes,
Will