Bandwidth Rules Everything Around Me: Oliver Habryka on OpenPhil and GoodVentures
30orthonormal
29romeostevensit
7Zach Stein-Perlman
11habryka
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17Raymond Douglas
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9Raymond Douglas
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11Raymond Douglas
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3Mateusz Bagiński
2Elizabeth
-31Evan Hockings
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To be fair, I also think it was a correct decision to focus on the Democratic Party when advocating for sane AI notkilleveryoneism policy before the 2024 election, because that was playing to our outs. Trump will do on AI whatever he is personally paid to do, and the accelerationists have more money; anyone sane but unable/unwilling to bribe Trump has no influence whatsoever with him in this administration.
(I went around saying the above before the election, by the way.)
(Sorry for the mindkilling, it's relevant on the object level.)
Reading between the lines on the responses, it sounds like op doesn't have the ability to evaluate grants effectively and has attribute substituted itself to doing things that superficially look like evaluation and selecting internally for people who are unable to distinguish between appearance and actuality. This sounds like a founder effect, downstream of Dustin and Cari being unable to evaluate. This seems like it rhymes with the VC world having a similar dynamic where people on the outside assume it's about funding cutting edge highly uncertain projects but, after lots of wasted effort, those interested in such high variance projects eventually conclude that VC mostly selects for low variance with a bias towards insiders.
That is to say: investors recognize that they don't have expertise in selecting unusual projects, so they hire people to ostensibly specialize in evaluating unusual projects, but their own taste in selecting the evaluators means that the evaluators eventually select/are selected for pleasing the investors.
To be specific: some combination of op/gv acts like its opportunity cost for capital is quite high, and it's unclear why. One hypothesis is 'since we're unable to evaluate grants, if we're profligate with money we will be resource pumped even more than we already are.'
My impression for several years has been that the effort people trying to do interesting work put into trying to engage with ea was wasted, and led to big emotional let downs that impacted their productivity.
There continue to be almost no weirdness dollars available. Temporary availability of weirdness dollars seem to get eaten by those who are conventionally attractive but put on quirky glasses and muss up their hair to appear weird. Like geek protagonists in movies. There's no escaping the taste of the founder in the long run.
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1What, no, Oli says OP would do a fine job and make grants in rationality community-building, AI welfare, right-wing policy stuff, invertebrate welfare, etc. but it's constrained by GV.
[Disagreeing since this is currently the top comment and people might read it rather than listen to the podcast.]
I don't currently believe this, and don't think I said so. I do think the GV constraints are big, but also my overall assessment of the net-effect of Open Phil actions is net bad, even if you control for GV, though the calculus gets a lot messier and I am much less confident. Some of that is because of the evidential update from how they handled the GV situation, but also IMO Open Phil has made many other quite grievous mistakes.
My guess is an Open Phil that was continued to be run by Holden would probably be good for the world. I have many disagreements with Holden, and it's definitely still a high variance situation, but I've historically been impressed with his judgement on many issues that I've seen OP mess up in recent years.
1Last year I read through the past ~4 years of OpenPhil grants, was briefly reassured by seeing a bunch of good grants, then noticed that almost all of the ones which went to places which seemed to be doing work which might plausibly help with superintelligence were before Holden left. Then I was much less reassured.
Interesting stuff! For the sake of multi-sidedness, I'd note that this description of the shift being because of Dustin caring about his reputation is something Dustin himself repeatedly pushed back on in the original GV update comment thread, for being an oversimplification. I might also recommend Dustin's big Medium essay on philanthropy to anyone curious about how he conceives of what he does.
2I would not characterize Dustin as straightforwardly "pushing back" in the relevant comment thread, more "expressing frustration with specific misinterprations but confirming the broad strokes". I do think he would likely take offense to some of this framing, but a lot of it is really quite close to what Dustin said himself (and my model is more that Dustin is uncomfortable owning all the implications of the things he said, though this kind of thing is hard).
Yeah, I meant that he was pushing back on the framing as an oversimplification, not that he was pushing back on the claim that reputation was part of the calculation -- this I feel he did straightforwardly and consistently do, with actual substantive reasons, e.g.
"reputational risks" [..] narrows the mind too much on what is going on here
I can't know all our grantees, and my estimation is I can't divorce myself from responsibility for them, reputationally or otherwise. [emphasis original]
“PR risk” is an unnecessarily narrow mental frame for why we’re focusing [...] there are other bandwidth issues: energy, attention, stress, political influence. Those are more finite than capital.
Framing the costs as "PR" limits the way people think about mitigating costs. It's not just "lower risk" but more shared responsibility and energy to engage with decision making, persuading, defending, etc.
Again, really leaning into trying to give the opposite side here, I think that rounding things off to "Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his reputation" is actually losing a lot of important nuance mostly in a way that makes Dustin look bad, and in a way that he correctly identified and objected to. Which is not to say there hasn't been a cursed miasma causing who knows how much harm, but I think the differences in implication here are subtle and important.
Isn't Dustin basically saying "We don't care about reputation per say but the things that good reputation provides." ? We don't want to spend energy and attention costs that come from having a to deal with a bad reputation. We want to have a good reputation because that allows us to have more political influence.
I am extremely not Dustin, and I do not want to veer into psychologising, but I very tentatively interpret him as also conveying some mix of:
- legitimately feeling that there are some things it might be bad to fund, and feeling morally responsible for making sure the money doesn't go to such bad things, and neither trusting OP to make those judgment, nor trusting that the good and bad will essentially balance out somehow
- finding it somewhat stressful and draining to be responsible (not just reputationally) for things you don't have time to scrutinise, where those are in fact finite resources that need to be spent carefully
- hoping that if other people do fill in the funding gaps, they'll also share the load on the other tacit resources (which, to be fair, is complicated by the general problems with donor funging that do seem to have been handled suboptimally)
I reiterate that all the comments are just there on the other post for anyone to scrutinise, rather than taking my word for it. I make no claim as to whether these are cruxes. But in my estimation these are some of the implications.
I would also offer this quote, because I think the meta-dynamic here is an important piece of the puzzle:
I'm not detailing specific decisions for the same reason I want to invest in fewer focus areas: additional information is used as additional attack surface area. The attitude in EA communities is "give an inch, fight a mile". So I'll choose to be less legible instead.
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