Astral Codex Ten

Open Philanthropy Project

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Open Philanthropy Project

Article

Open Philanthropy Project is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 12 times across 12 issues between January 29, 2021 and November 27, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “EA flagship group Open Philanthropy Project spending almost $50 million”; “[update: also Open Philanthropy Project]”; “CEO of the Open Philanthropy Project”. It most often appears alongside ACX, effective altruism, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 12
  • Issue count: 12
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: November 27, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
Weyl wrote this essay a few months before COVID, so his pooh-poohing of the idea that there might be a biological catastrophe is an unfortunate anachronism. But I think it's important to note that we got this right (and he got it wrong) precisely because we "privilege rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making". People like Toby Ord tried to calculate the risk of every kind of disaster and how bad it would be - and at the same time Weyl was making fun of us for caring about biological catastrophes, Ord was writing about how the numbers suggested zoonotic diseases from bats could cause catastrophic pandemics. This kind of work ultimately led to EA flagship group Open Philanthropy Project spending almost $50 million on its Biosecurity And Pandemic Preparedness Program between 2014 and 2019; if other people had taken a few minutes to read our arguments instead of chiding us for how naive it is to prioritize things based on rational methods, maybe the world would have been more prepared.
Inline links: like Toby Ord, Biosecurity And Pandemic Preparedness Program
Open Thread 174
May 30, 2021 · Original source
2: The Centre for Effective Altruism has lots of career openings right now. If you’re interested in effective altruism, take a look at their page, or their AMA about working there. Warning 1 - sometimes these positions can be really competitive, but they appreciate extra applicants anyway. Warning 2 - I dropped the ball on this and the deadline for some of these is Tuesday, so you might want to act fast. [update: also Open Philanthropy Project]
Inline links: lots of career openings, AMA about working there, Open Philanthropy Project
Links For July
July 23, 2021 · Original source
19: Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and CEO of the Open Philanthropy Project, now has a blog, Cold Takes, on “futurism, macrohistory, applied epistemology and ethics, [and] sometimes sports”. Getting to hear from Holden is always a privilege, usually one reserved for people at effective altruism organizations or conferences, and it’s exciting to see he’ll be sharing his thoughts more widely.
Inline links: Cold Takes
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
Right now AI alignment has lots of cash. If there’s a really good AI alignment charity, Open Philanthropy Project and Founders Fund and Elon Musk and Jaan Tallinn will all fight each other to throw money at it. So if a seemingly really good AI alignment charity asked me for money, I would wonder - why haven’t they gotten money from a big experienced foundation?
What’s your story for why you need a microgrants program? Why not just donate to GiveWell or OpenPhil or some other charity or foundation you respect?
(technically OpenPhil doesn’t accept individual donations, but if you break into their office and leave $1.5 million on a desk, what are they going to do?)
Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundation interested in funding AI safety. It's got $20 billion, probably the majority of money in the field, so its decisions matter a lot and it’s very invested in getting things right. In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report on when human-level AI would arrive. It says the resulting document is "informal" - but it’s 169 pages long and likely to affect millions of dollars in funding, which some might describe as making it kind of formal. The report finds a 10% chance of “transformative AI” by 2031, a 50% chance by 2052, and an almost 80% chance by 2100.
Inline links: Open Philanthropy Project, https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/15ArhEPZSTYU8f012bs6ehPS6-xmhtBPP
There's a small cottage industry of summarizing the report already, eg OpenPhil CEO Holden Karnofsky's article and Alignment Newsletter editor Rohin Shah's comment. I've drawn from both for my much-inferior attempt.
Inline links: article, comment
Ajeya Cotra is a senior research analyst at OpenPhil. She's assisted by her fiancee Paul Christiano (compsci PhD, OpenAI veteran, runs an AI alignment nonprofit) and to a lesser degree by other leading lights. Although not everyone involved has formal ML training, if you care a lot about whether efforts are “establishment” or “contrarian”, this one is probably more establishment.
Open Thread 214
March 07, 2022 · Original source
2: Related: the Open Philanthropy Project’s long-termist effective altruist movement-building team is hiring. They work to direct donations, spread the word about effective altruism, and make the movement more capable. Pay is low six-figures, living in SF is recommended but not absolutely required. See here for more info.
Inline links: See here
Open Thread 233
July 18, 2022 · Original source
1: Instead of asking me “Why isn’t effective altruism spending its money on X?” all the time, consider entering Open Philanthropy Project’s Cause Exploration contest, where they will give you up to $25,000 for thinking of Xs they should be spending their money on.
Inline links: Cause Exploration
Open Thread 234
July 25, 2022 · Original source
4: More EA jobs: Open Philanthropy Project wants a Grants Associate to help process and organize grants relating to long-termism (eg AI, xrisk, forecasting, etc). See more EA jobs related resources here.
Inline links: wants a Grants Associate, here
Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions
August 24, 2022 · Original source
There’s a lot of commentary. Effective altruism is now a semi-organized movement, with leaders like Will MacAskill and Toby Ord and institutions like the Open Philanthropy Project. It’s produced a vast literature on effective charities, ranging from how to best prevent malaria to how to promote animal welfare to speculative scenarios about AI apocalypse. These aren’t above criticism, and lots of people have criticized them. But if you criticize them successfully, and feel like they’re discredited, then you’re back at the basic tenets of the movement again.
Think that 10% is the wrong number, and you should be helping people closer to home? Fine, then go even lower on the tower, and donate . . . some amount of your time, money, something, to poor people in your home country, in some kind of systematic considered way beyond “I saw an ad for March of Dimes at the supermarket so I guess I’ll give them my spare change”. If you’re not doing this, your beef with effective altruism isn’t “the culture around Open Philanthropy Project devalues such and such a form of change”, your beef is whatever’s preventing you from doing that. You may additionally have an interesting intellectual point about the culture around Open Phil, much as you might have an interesting intellectual point about which Bible translations you’d prefer if you were Christian. But don’t mistake it for a real crux.
Open Thread 299
October 23, 2023 · Original source
1: Open Philanthropy Project (multi-billion-dollar EA-ish grantmaker) asks me to mention that they're looking to hire more people for "grantmaking, research, and operations" roles, especially in AI policy, technical AI alignment, and biosecurity/pandemic preparedness. Location varies between SF, DC, and remote, pay is mostly between $100K and $150K, and jobs require some combination of good reasoning skills, research skills, organizedness, and domain knowledge (not all jobs require all four of those things). I can't say enough good things about current Open Phil employees - you would be working with some of the brightest and most interesting people in the world. Q&A with some Open Phil employees about the new hiring round here; if you’re interested, apply before November 9.
Inline links: they're looking to hire more people for "grantmaking, research, and operations" roles, Q&A with some Open Phil employees about the new hiring round here, apply
24
March 12, 2024 · Original source
Did they pick defective concerned experts? Tentatively no. The IRB says it’s “important” “for” “privacy” “reasons” not to reveal who the experts were, but the paper says they were selected by Open Philanthropy Project, a big AI safety funder who I trust a lot and who I would expect to choose good people (Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is less sanguine about OpenPhil than I am, does sort of blame this one).
Inline links: sort of blame this one
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Roodman 2017. Written by a researcher at the effective altruist nonprofit Open Philanthropy Project, which was trying to determine whether to continue to advocate decarceration. They (Roodman’s bosses) had already started some advocacy, so Roodman admits he is at risk of a soft-on crime bias. This was extraordinarily well-written, and is one of the most careful meta-analyses I have seen on any topic - Roodman tried to get data from every study and replicate it himself and test all of the assumptions - but I am still interpreting it as the anti-incarceration faction presenting their side of the case.
Inline links: Roodman 2017, whether to continue to advocate