The GiveWiki’s Top Picks in AI Safety for the Giving Season of 2023
post by Dawn Drescher (Telofy) · 2023-12-07T09:23:05.018Z · LW · GW · 10 commentsThis is a link post for https://impactmarkets.substack.com/p/the-givewikis-top-picks-in-ai-safety
10 comments
Comments sorted by top scores.
comment by William the Kiwi · 2023-12-08T12:01:31.740Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
We see a massive drop in score from the 22nd to the 23rd project. Can you explain why this is occurring?
Replies from: Telofy↑ comment by Dawn Drescher (Telofy) · 2023-12-08T12:25:59.041Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
TL;DR: Great question! I think it mostly means that we don't have enough data to say much about these projects. So donors who've made early donations to them, can register them and boost their project score.
- The donor score relies on the size of the donations and their earliness in the history of the project (plus the retroactive evaluation). So the top donors in particular have made many early, big, and sometimes public grants to projects that panned out well – hence why they are top donors.
- What influences the support score is not the donor score itself but the inverse rank of the donor in the ranking that is ordered by the donor score. (This corrects the outsized influence that rich donors would otherwise have, since I assume that wealth is Pareto distributed but expertise is maybe not, and is probably not correlated at quite that extreme level.)
- But if a single donor has more than 90% influence on the score of a project, they are ignored, because that typically means that we don't have enough data to score the project. We don't want a single donor to wield so much power.
Taken together, our top donors have (by design) the greatest influence over project scores, but they are also at a greater risk of ending up with > 90% influence over the project score, especially if the project has so far not found many other donors who've been ready to register their donations. So the contributions of top donors are also at greater risk of being ignored until more donors confirm the top donors' donation decisions.
Replies from: William the Kiwi↑ comment by William the Kiwi · 2023-12-08T13:10:25.017Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ok so the support score is influenced non-linearly by donor score. Is there a particular donor that has donated to the highest ranked 22 projects, that did not donate to the 23 or lower ranked projects?
I have graphed donor score vs rank for the top GiveWiki donors. Does this include all donors in the calculation or are there hidden donors?
↑ comment by Dawn Drescher (Telofy) · 2023-12-08T13:22:36.645Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Does this include all donors in the calculation or are there hidden donors?
Donors have a switch in their profiles where they can determine whether they want to be listed or not. The top three in the private, complete listing are Jaan Tallinn, Open Phil, and the late Future Fund, whose public grants I've imported. The total ranking lists 92 users.
But I don't think that's core to understanding the step down. I've gone through the projects around the threshold before I posted my last comment, and I think it's really the 90% cutoff that causes it. Not a big donor who has donated to the first 22 but not to the rest.
There are plenty of projects in the tail that have also received donations from a single donor with a high score – but more or less only that so that said donor has > 90% influence over the project and will be ignored until more donors register donations to it.
Ok so the support score is influenced non-linearly by donor score.
By the inverse rank in the ranking that is sorted by the score. So the difference between the top top donor and the 2nd top donor is 1 in terms of the influence they have.
↑ comment by William the Kiwi · 2023-12-08T13:10:54.761Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Meta question: is the above picture too big?
Replies from: Telofy↑ comment by Dawn Drescher (Telofy) · 2023-12-08T13:12:44.610Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It displays well for me!
comment by Dagon · 2023-12-07T17:53:59.078Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's worth specifying "AI GiveWiki" in the title. This seems to be recommendations GIVEN a decision that AI safety is the target.
Replies from: Telofy↑ comment by Dawn Drescher (Telofy) · 2023-12-07T19:05:22.500Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It says “AI Safety” later in the title. Do you think I should mention it earlier, like “The AI Safety GiveWiki's Top Picks for the Giving Season of 2023”?
Replies from: Dagon↑ comment by Dagon · 2023-12-07T23:27:56.205Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Unsure. It's probably reasonable to assume around here that it's all AI safety all the time. "GiveWiki" as the authority for the picker, to me, implied that this was from a broader universe of giving, and this was the AI Safety subset. No biggie, but I'm sad there isn't more discussion about donations to AI safety research vs more prosaic suffering-reduction in the short term.
Replies from: Telofy↑ comment by Dawn Drescher (Telofy) · 2023-12-08T09:21:36.090Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"GiveWiki" as the authority for the picker, to me, implied that this was from a broader universe of giving, and this was the AI Safety subset.
Could be… That's not so wrong either. We rather artificially limited it to AI safety for the moment to have a smaller, more sharply defined target audience. It also had the advantage that we could recruit our evaluators from our own networks. But ideally I'd like to find owners for other cause areas too and then widen the focus of GiveWiki accordingly. The other cause area where I have a relevant network is animal rights, but we already have ACE there, so GiveWiki wouldn't add so much on the margin. One person is interested in potentially either finding someone or themselves taken responsibility for an global coordination/peace-building branch, but they probably won't have the time. That would be excellent though!
No biggie, but I'm sad there isn't more discussion about donations to AI safety research vs more prosaic suffering-reduction in the short term.
Indeed! Rethink Priorities [EA · GW] has made some progress on that. I need to dig into the specifics more to see whether I need to update on it. The particular parameters that they discuss in the article have not been so relevant to my reasoning on these parameters, but it's well possible that animal rights wins out even more clearly on the basis of the parameters that I've been using.