Okay, to be fair, they also suggest expanding their team to "help policymakers" but the only examples they give of that is a few public talks and papers. Not even lobbying or something.
Also, I guess if helps pay Yudkowsky's $600,000 base compensation (per 2024 financials), which presumably doesn't include any personal revenue streams MIRI contributes to (e.g., whatever royalties he gets on book sales, or (Edit: MIRI's CEO pointed out that per their statements, revenue from the book goes to MIRI)
A bargain, if you ask me. Anything to "improve the conversation about superintelligence."
/s
Clearly, making a weirdo in San Francisco rich and famous is the most effective way to spend charitable funds.
Why give your money to save a few dozen African kids from malaria, or help prevent some children out in India from dying due to vitamin A deficiency, when for just a few hundred times the cost you could help pay for more advertisements to Save Humanitytm.
Those kids probably haven't even read about the latest Rationalist mentaltech SMHing my head
Yea, why are we spending so much sending vaccines over seas when we could just be sending Yud's latest book for the kids instead, smh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianetics:_The_Modern_Science_of_Mental_Health
Lol it sounds pretty absurd when they spell it out like that...
"After 20 years, of promoting 'friendly AI,' we have decided that AI is inherently an existential threat and must be stopped."
Yeah.... its very reasonable to say "this thing is going to kill us lets try to find a way prevent that". And then, after failing to find a way to prevent it from killing everyone, shifting to spending your time trying to convince people to not do the thing that you think will kill everyone
"This thing that doesn't exist and is poorly defined will kill you if you don't help us find a cure."
20 years later
"The thing still doesn't exist, and we still don't have a clear definition of it, but we are now convinced there is no cure for it. So you need to support us to stop it from existing."
Whoa, what an interesting coincidence that the fate of the future of humanity aligns with whether I make more money or not.
did you hear about that tech reporter who was banned from the yudkowsky convention because her reporting on silicon valley was too critical? that's because ai safetyists and ai doomers and lesswrong and yudkowskyites pump these doom narratives to increase the value of their finance securities. no one actually believes the stuff they write; it's all for the paycheck
Was it Ed Zitron? That sounds like Ed Zitron.
taylor lorenz
600k base compensation? I thought he said he was getting paid a frugal amount? He was too at one point.
Yes, per their 990s that's his current compensation.
The earliest filing since MIRI became MIRI (rather than the SAI), they paid him a base compensation of $90k, in 2013, which was upped to $100k in 2014, was just shy of $150k in 2020, $190k in 2022, and then jumped to $570k in 2023, with his base compensation most recently being listed as $599,970 for 2024.
By frugal amount you have to count for Bay Area Cost of living… and how much senior tenured professors (of which Eliezer consider himself of a similar category but obviously much much more valuable) get paid.
for comparison, the ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, also Bay Area, is around $500k. It's not an outrageous nonprofit CEO salary, particularly in that area. I'd consider WMF about 100% more useful than MIRI, but then I would.
The highest paid person at wikimedia is Maryana Iskander, and she earns just shy of $500k. She also had a much better case to argue--if she worked in a for profit she could easily command the same salary or higher. She has a JD from Yale and a pretty impressive resume, with decades of non-profit experience.
Usually, to my understanding, reasonable compensation for nonprofits is judged based on what a comparable role in industry would be likely to pay.
yeah, basically
so as a charity paying mid six figures to a sufficiently important figure is not prima facie unreasonable
that MIRI is insane nonsense is a different question
Yea, I agree. That high of a figure can be justified. It is the context around it that I find off--I don't think Yud is really comparable, he has done nothing to my knowledge that would give him a resume to justify that high of a compensation. He doesn't have the background or experience that usually justifies those salaries, nor does he seem particularly adapt at management or public relations (e.g., his 40k word essay in which he says he didn't sleep with any minors, to his knowledge, but if he knew anyone who was sleeping with minors he would keep his mouth shut).
if you think of it as a religion and this is their prophet, it also makes more sense
though i don't have comparative figures for cults with 501(c)3 status
Religious groups are excempt from filing 990s, so unfortunately those comparisons are not public.
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Fair enough, I appreciate the response. Most nonprofits i know of doing policy work are a bit more explicit in what it entails, even if they cannot give details. Of course, for most lobbying there isn't anything stopping people from saying what kinda of politicians offices they met with or even like naming them out if they really wanted.
I also noticed per your 2024 990, that before 2023 MIRI did not have any lobbying.
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I would have emphasized those activities then. You don't have to give the names to talk about how you've been building relationships with congress people/senators/whoever and using the money to arrange audiences with their offices and whatnot.
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Thank you for the clarification! I hadn't seen that. I do think it is a bit dishonest to say they aren't getting a dime when they are among the staff MIRI is paying (with Yud getting a very large share).
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I was assuming the book was part of their work, is that incorrect? IF they weren't doing the book, my assumption would be they would have to be doing other things to justify their employment.
Dishonest may have been too strong of a phrasing, though. By way of a very imperfect analogy, a lawyer acting as general counsel for a firm cannot reasonably claim they are doing their work pro-bono just because some specific legal issue they investigated didn't require them to investigate it. They are being paid to provide counsel to the firm, if they weren't looking at one issue they would have to be looking at another.
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Yes, that was a mistaken assumption on my part. I updated my post to include your correction on that and link your comment.
Oh, yeah, that made sense as a sentence, not now. I meant it like 'anything else that might get support and stuff directed his way from MIRI' but that got lost a bit, I'll clean that up, since it's already covered anyways.
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I would need to know all his revenue streams to be sure, but it is very likely his position at MIRI gives him a lot more credibility, and certainly advertising, which helps him do related work. Like, speaking fees for talks (a head researcher at a nonprofit is a much more attractive speaker than just a blogger), if he gets compensation from any of the workshops at adjacent institutions, etc.
Edit: to be clear, this isn't necessarily revenue I would expect to be disclosed with MIRI's filings and I wouldn't expect it to have to be reported as other compensation.