There are a couple of things that are making me really nervous about the idea of donating:
“AI safety” is TTBOMK a broad term and encompasses prosaic alignment as well as governance. I am of the strong opinion that prosaic alignment is a blind alley that’s mostly either wasted effort or actively harmful due to producing fake alignment that makes people not abandon neural nets. ~97% of my P(not doom) routes through Butlerian Jihad against neural nets (with or without a nuclear war buying us more time) that lasts long enough to build GOFAI. And frankly, I don’t spend that much time on LW, so I’ve little idea which of these efforts (or others!) gets most of the benefit you claim from the site.
As noted above, I think a substantial chunk of useful futures (though not a vast majority) route through nuclear war destroying the neural-net sector for a substantial amount of time (via blast wiping out factories, EMP destroying much of existing chip stocks, destruction of power and communication infrastructure reducing the profitability of AI, economic collapse more broadly, and possibly soft errors). As such, I’ve been rather concerned for years about the fact that the Ratsphere’s main IRL presence is in the Bay Area and thus nuke-bait; we want to disproportionately survive that, not die in it. Insofar as Lighthaven is in the Bay Area, I am thus questioning whether its retention is +EV.
There are a couple of things that are making me really nervous about the idea of donating:
“AI safety” is TTBOMK a broad term and encompasses prosaic alignment as well as governance. I am of the strong opinion that prosaic alignment is a blind alley that’s mostly either wasted effort or actively harmful due to producing fake alignment that makes people not abandon neural nets. ~97% of my P(not doom) routes through Butlerian Jihad against neural nets (with or without a nuclear war buying us more time) that lasts long enough to build GOFAI. And frankly, I don’t spend that much time on LW, so I’ve little idea which of these efforts (or others!) gets most of the benefit you claim from the site.
As noted above, I think a substantial chunk of useful futures (though not a vast majority) route through nuclear war destroying the neural-net sector for a substantial amount of time (via blast wiping out factories, EMP destroying much of existing chip stocks, destruction of power and communication infrastructure reducing the profitability of AI, economic collapse more broadly, and possibly soft errors). As such, I’ve been rather concerned for years about the fact that the Ratsphere’s main IRL presence is in the Bay Area and thus nuke-bait; we want to disproportionately survive that, not die in it. Insofar as Lighthaven is in the Bay Area, I am thus questioning whether its retention is +EV.