Holden Karnofsky: belief

Transcript context

…Gotcha. How do you think about the risk that some of your giving might have negative impacts? People have brought this up in the context of your 30 million dollar investment in OpenAI, but in all sorts of context, especially when you're talking about political advocacy, people might think that the thing you do has negative side effects that counteract the positive effects. Is it just a straight calculation? How do you think about this? I think in theory, what we want is to make grants that have more upside than downside or have expected net positive effects. I think we tend to be, in a common sense way, a little bit conservative with the negative effects. What we don't want to do is enter some field on a theory that's just totally messed up and wrong in a way that we could have known if we had just done a little bit more homework. I think that there's just something irresponsible and uncooperative about that. So in general, when we are making big decisions like big dollar decisions or going into a new cause, we’ll often try really hard to do everything we can to understand the downsides. If after we've done roughly everything we can up to some reasonable diminishing returns, we still believe that the upsides outweigh the downsides, then we're generally going to go for it. Our goal is not to avoid harm at all costs. Our goal is to operate in a cooperative, high-integrity way–– always doing our best, always trying to anticipate the downsides, but recognizing that we're going to have unintended side effects sometimes. That's life–– anything you do has unintended side effects. I don't agree with the specific example you gave as an example of something that was net negative, but I don't know. Are you talking about OpenAI? Yeah. Many people on Twitter might have asked if you were investing in OpenAI.…

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