People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). People are starting to discuss what this might mean for their own personal donations and for the ecosystem, and this is encouraging to see.
It also has me thinking about 2022. Immediately before the FTX collapse, we were just starting to reckon, as a community, with the pretty significant vibe shift in EA that came from having a lot more money to throw around.
CitizenTen, in "The Vultures Are Circling" (April 2022), puts it this way:
The message is out. There’s easy money to be had. And the vultures are coming. On many internet circles, there’s been a worrying tone. “You should apply for [insert EA grant], all I had to do was pretend to care about x, and I got $$!” Or, “I’m not even an EA, but I can pretend, as getting a 10k grant is a good instrumental goal towards [insert-poor-life-goals-here]” Or, “Did you hear that a 16 year old got x amount of money? That’s ridiculous! I thought EA’s were supposed to be effective!” Or, “All you have to do is mouth the words community building and you get thrown bags of money.”
Basically, the sharp increase in rewards has led the number of people who are optimizing for the wrong thing to go up. Hello Goodhart. Instead of the intrinsically motivated EA, we’re beginning to get the resume padders, the career optimizers, and the type of person that cheats on the entry test for preschool in the hopes of getting their child into a better college. I’ve already heard of discord servers springing up centered around gaming the admission process for grants. And it’s not without reason. The Atlas Fellowship is offering a 50k, no strings attached scholarship. If you want people to throw out any hesitation around cheating the system, having a carrot that’s larger than most adult’s yearly income will do that.
Other highly upvoted posts from that era:
I wish FTX hadn't done fraud and collapsed for many reasons, but one feels especially salient currently: we never finished processing how abundant funding impacts a high-trust altruistic community. The conversation had barely started.
I would say that I'm worried about these dynamics emerging again, but there's something a little more complicated here. Ozy actually calls out a similar strand of dysfunction in (parts of) EA in early 2024:
Effective altruist culture ought to be about spending resources in the most efficient way possible to do good. Sure, sometimes the most efficient way to spend resources to do good doesn’t look frugal. I’ve long advocated for effective altruist charities paying their workers well more than average for nonprofits. And a wise investor might make 99 bets that don’t pay off to get one that pays big. But effective altruist culture should have a laser focus on getting the most we can out of every single dollar, because dollars are denominated in lives.
...
It’s cool and high-status to travel the world. It’s cool and high-status to go on adventures. It’s cool and high-status to spend time with famous and influential people. And, God help us, it’s cool and high-status to save the world.I think something like this is the root of a lot of discomfort with showy effective altruist spending. It’s not that yachting is expensive. It’s that if your idea of what effective altruists should be doing is yachting, a reasonable person might worry that you’ve lost the plot.
So these dynamics are not "emerging again". They haven't left. And I'm worried that they might get turbocharged when money comes knocking again.