Austin's Quick takes

Some reflections on the Manifest 2024 discourse:

1. I’m annoyed (with “the community”, but mostly with human nature & myself) that this kind of drama gets so much more attention than eg typical reviews of the Manifest experience, or our retrospectives of work on Manifund, which I wish got even 10% of this engagement. It's fun to be self-righteous on the internet, fun to converse with many people who I respect, fun especially when they come to your defense (thanks!), but I feel guilty at the amount of attention this has sucked up for everyone involved.
   
   This bit from Paul Graham makes a lot more sense to me now:
   
   > When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life.
   
   Kudos to all y'all who are practicing the virtue of silence and avoiding engaging with this.
2. While it could have been much, much better written, on net I’m glad the Guardian article exists. And not just in a "all PR is good PR" sense, or even a “weak opponents are superweapons” sense; I think there's a legitimate concern there that's worthy of reporting. I like the idea of inviting the journalists to come to Manifest in the future.
3. That said, I am quite annoyed that now many people who didn’t attend Manifest, may think of it as "Edgelordcon". I once again encourage people who weren't there to look at our actual schedule, or to skim over some of the many many post-Manifest reports, to get a more representative sense of what Manifest is like or about.
4. If Edgelordcon is what you really wanted, consider going to something like Hereticon instead of Manifest, thanks.
5. Not sure how many people already know this but I formally left Manifold a couple months ago. I'm the most comfortable writing publicly out of the 3 founders, but while I'm still on the company board, I expect Manifold vs my own views to diverge more over time.
6. Also, Rachel and Saul were much more instrumental in making Manifest 2024 happen than me. Their roles were approximately co-directors, while I'm more like a producer of the event. So most of the credit for a well-run event goes to them; I wish more people engaged with their considerations, rather than mine. (Blame for the invites, as I mentioned, falls on me.)
7. EA Forum is actually pretty good for having nuanced discussion: the threading and upvote vs agreevote and reactions all help compared to other online discourse. Kudos to the team! (Online text-based discourse does remain intrinsically more divisive than offline, though, which I don't love. I wish more people eg took up Saul on his offer to call with folks.)
8. Overall my impression of the state of the EA community has ticked upwards as a result of this all this. I’m glad to be here!
9. Some of my favorite notes amidst all this: Isa, huw, TracingWoodgrains, and Nathan Young on their experiences, Richard Ngo against deplatforming, Jacob and Oli on their thoughts, Bentham's Bulldog and Theo Jaffee on their defenses of the event, and Saul and Rachel on their perspectives as organizers.

Anthropic's donation program seems to have been recently pared down? I recalled it as 3:1, see eg this comment on Feb 2023. But right now on https://www.anthropic.com/careers:
> Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant

Curious if anyone knows the rationale for this -- I'm thinking through how to structure Manifund's own compensation program to tax-efficiently encourage donations, and was looking at the Anthropic program for inspiration.

I'm also wondering if existing Anthropic employees still get the 3:1 terms, or the program has been changed for everyone going forward. Given the rumored $60b raise, Anthropic equity donations are set to be a substantial share of EA giving going forward, so the precise mechanics of the giving program could change funding considerations by a lot.

One (conservative imo) ballpark:

• If founders + employees broadly own 30% of outstanding equity
• 50% of that has been assigned and vested
• 20% of employees will donate
• 20% of their equity within the next 4 years

then $60b x 0.3 x 0.5 x 0.2 x 0.2 / 4 = $90m/y. And the difference between 1:1 and 3:1 match is the difference between $180m/y of giving and $360m/y.

Habryka @ 2025-01-25T01:58 (+5)

It's been confirmed that the donation matching still applies to early employees: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HE3Styo9vpk7m8zi4/evhub-s-shortform?commentId=oeXHdxZixbc7wwqna 

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2025-01-25T00:33 (+2)

I would be surprised if the 3:1 match applied to founders as well. Also, I think 20% of employees donating 20% of their equity within the next 4 years is very optimistic.

My guess is that donations from Antrhopic/OpenAI will depend largely on what the founders decide to do with their money. Forbes estimates Altman and Daniela Amodei at ~$1B each, and Altman signed the Giving Pledge.

See also this article from Jan 8: 

At Anthropic’s new valuation, each of its seven founders — [...] — are set to become billionaires. Forbes estimates that each cofounder will continue to hold more than 2% of Anthropic’s equity each, meaning their net worths are at least $1.2 billion.

I don't think Forbes numbers are particularly reliable, and I think that there's a significant chance that Anthropic and/or OpenAI equity goes to 0; but in general, I expect founders to both have much more money than employees and be more inclined to donate significant parts of it (partly because of diminishing marginal returns of wealth)

Austin @ 2025-01-25T02:08 (+2)

It's a good point about how it applies to founders specifically - under the old terms (3:1 match up to 50% of stock grant) it would imply a maximum extra cost from Anthropic of 1.5x whatever the founders currently hold. That's a lot! 

Those bottom line figures doesn't seem crazy optimistic to me, though - like, my guess is a bunch of folks at Anthropic expect AGI on the inside of 4 years, and Anthropic is the go to example of "founded by EAs". I would take an even-odds bet that the total amount donated to charity out of Anthropic equity, excluding matches, is >$400m in 4 years time. 

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2025-01-25T14:26 (+4)

I would take an even-odds bet that the total amount donated to charity out of Anthropic equity, excluding matches, is >$400m in 4 years time. 

If Anthropic doesn't lose >85% of its valuation (which can definitely happen) I would expect way more.

As mentioned above, each of its seven cofounders is likely to become worth >$500m, and I would expect many of them to donate significantly.

 

Anthropic is the go to example of "founded by EAs"

I find these kind of statements a bit weird. My sense is that it used to be true, but they don't necessarily identify themselves with the EA movement anymore: it's never mentioned in interviews, and when asked by journalists they explicitly deny it.

Missing-but-wanted children now substantially outnumber unwanted births. Missing kids are a global phenomenon, not just a rich-world problem. Multiplying out each country’s fertility gap by its population of reproductive age women reveals that, for women entering their reproductive years in 2010 in the countries in my sample, there are likely to be a net 270 million missing births—if fertility ideals and birth rates hold stable. Put another way, over the 30 to 40 years these women would potentially be having children, that’s about 6 to 10 million missing babies per year thanks to the global undershooting of fertility.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-global-fertility-gap