For contrast, on the same time period, $185k/month could provide for salary, lodging and office space for 50 people in Europe, all who counterfactually would not be doing that work otherwise, for which I claim 50 man months per month of extra x-risk reduction work.
The default outcome of giving people money, is either nothing, noise, or the resources getting captured by existing incentive gradients. In my experience, if you give people free money, they will take it, and they will nominally try to please you with it, so it’s not that surprising if you can find 50 people to take your free money, but causing such people to do specific and hard things is a much higher level of challenge.
I had some hope that “just write good LessWrong posts” is sufficient incentive to get people to do useful stuff, but the SERI MATS scholars have tried this and only a few have produced great LessWrong posts, and otherwise there was a lot of noise. Perhaps it’s worth it in expected value but my guess is that you could do much more selection and save a lot of the money and still get 80% of the value.
I think free office spaces of the sort we offered are only worthwhile inside an ecosystem where there are teams already working on good projects, and already good incentive gradients to climb, such that pouring in resources get invested well even with little discernment from those providing them. In contrast, simply creating free resources and having people come for those with the label of your goal on them, sounds like a way to get all the benefits of goodharting and none of the benefits of the void.
The default outcome of giving people money, is either nothing, noise, or the resources getting captured by existing incentive gradients. In my experience, if you give people free money, they will take it, and they will nominally try to please you with it, so it’s not that surprising if you can find 50 people to take your free money, but causing such people to do specific and hard things is a much higher level of challenge.
I had some hope that “just write good LessWrong posts” is sufficient incentive to get people to do useful stuff, but the SERI MATS scholars have tried this and only a few have produced great LessWrong posts, and otherwise there was a lot of noise. Perhaps it’s worth it in expected value but my guess is that you could do much more selection and save a lot of the money and still get 80% of the value.
I think free office spaces of the sort we offered are only worthwhile inside an ecosystem where there are teams already working on good projects, and already good incentive gradients to climb, such that pouring in resources get invested well even with little discernment from those providing them. In contrast, simply creating free resources and having people come for those with the label of your goal on them, sounds like a way to get all the benefits of goodharting and none of the benefits of the void.