"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.)"
It's true that due to a grant ending and a failure to secure a followon grant we were heavily dependent on success with the insurance collaboration in order to hold onto key researchers and core staff needed to run the FHI. However, I would add that this is not my/our only motivation for heavily pursuing this area.
Wherever possible, I think there is a high value in FHI (and CSER) pursuing large pots of funding that are not available to other Xrisk/EA organisations (i.e. not diverting funds from other worthy organisations), and I think this type of funding is a prime example of this. If the current collaboration goes well, I believe there's the possibility of substantial further funding in this area.
It is true that some staff time is being diverted towards systemic risk research, but it still represents a substantial increase in FHI's overall Xrisk research output (and depending on availability of unconstrained funds and the development of the project, we may be in a position to "sub out" people as the project goes on, in favour of their doing 100% Xrisk research).
Lastly, I believe there is a value to us producing high-quality research on a more "mainstream" risk topic that gains us additional academic prestige and credibility, and thus lends credibility to the more speculative existential risk work we do. It also introduces new, potentially influential, audiences to our existential risk work.
Thanks for the clarification! I'm glad to hear about these side benefits from the insurance project.
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.