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Tetronian comments on GiveWell.org interviews SIAI - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
I'm surprised that no one has addressed Karnofsky's main point: even if we accept all of the premises on which SIAI was founded, it doesn't look like SIAI is doing anything particularly impressive (from an Outside View). Jasen's reply seemed to consist mostly of "we're working on it." What does the community think about this?
I was also rather disappointed that SIAI doesn't have a definitive plan for what they would do with more money. This might end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy that works against them, because GiveWell may decrease SIAI's rating based on the fact that SIAI apparently haven't planned out how they would scale up their operation. (But I think this is definitely a smaller concern than the previous one.)
Honesty is important, and the truth is that it's about the people. They need to have enough funding to snap up the right people as they come along, but they can't just "scale up" the way you can scale up, say, a health intervention in the third world.
This seems very plausible to me, but they need to verbalize this and make a convincing case that there are people they could hire that would do good work on existential risk reduction. What would a good answer look like? "The visiting fellows program has been quite successful. Visiting fellows (who were not hired) have come up with ideas X,Y,Z and accomplished a, b, c and there are people who we would like to employ but we cannot because we don't have the funding to do so."
That's been one of the reasons I've not donated either (apart from one £10 donation made for odd reasons). Unfortunately, the SIAI seem to have made a decision that they need to keep what work they're doing secret. That's understandable, but it means we have absolutely no idea what the actual effect of donation is.
I don't know how formal this interview was, but quite honestly the interviewee seemed unprepared to give thorough answers for these questions.