I've heard that CFAR is already trying to move in the direction of being self-sustaining by charging higher fees and stuff. I went to a 4-day CFAR workshop and was relatively unimpressed; my feeling about CFAR is that they are providing a service to individuals for money and it's probably not a terrible idea to let the market determine if their services are worth the amount they charge. (In other words, if they're not able to make a sustainable business or at least a university-style alum donor base out of what they're doing, I'm skeptical that propping them up as a non-alum is an optimal use of your funds.)
FHI states that they are interested in using marginal donations to increase the amount of public outreach they do. It seems like FHI would have a comparative advantage over MIRI in doing outreach, given that they are guys with PhDs from Oxford and thus would have a higher level of baseline credibility with the media, etc. So it's kind of disappointing that MIRI seems to be more outreach-focused of the two, but it seems like the fact that FHI gets most of its funding from grants means they're restricted in what they can spend money on. FHI strikes me as more underfunded than MIRI, given that they are having to do a collaboration with an insurance company to stay afloat, whereas MIRI has maxed out all of their fundraisers to date. (Hence my decision to give to FHI this year.)
If you do want to donate to MIRI, it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to email them and tell them that you want to be a matching funds provider for one of their fundraisers, since they're so good at maxing those out. (I think Malo would be the person to contact; you can find his email on this page.)
great matching funds idea!
In a discussion a couple months ago, Luke said, "I think it's hard to tell whether donations do more good at MIRI, FHI, CEA, or CFAR." So I want to have a thread to discuss that.
My own very rudimentary thoughts: I think the research MIRI does is probably valuable, but I don't think it's likely to lead to MIRI itself building FAI. I'm convinced AGI is much more likely to be built by a government or major corporation, which makes me more inclined to think movement-building activities are likely to be valuable, to increase the odds of the people at that government or corporation being conscious of AI safety issues, which MIRI isn't doing.
It seems like FHI is the obvious organization to donate to for that purpose, but Luke seems to think CEA (the Centre for Effective Altruism) and CFAR could also be good for that, and I'm not entirely clear on why. I sometimes get the impression that some of CFAR's work ends up being covert movement-building for AI-risk issues, but I'm not sure to what extent that's true. I know very little about CEA, and a brief check of their website leaves me a little unclear on why Luke recommends them, aside from the fact that they apparently work closely with FHI.
This has some immediate real-world relevance to me: I'm currently in the middle of a coding bootcamp and not making any money, but today my mom offered to make a donation to a charity of my choice for Christmas. So any input on what to tell her would be greatly appreciated, as would more information on CFAR and CEA, which I'm sorely lacking in.